Grinding Old Axes II : This Time It’s Personal
So there wasn’t the groundswell of interest in my old axes in comments, so all continued grinding after the jump. Just to recall I stopped after 3 on a list which continued
4) John Kerry is much too stubborn. He won’t admit it when he is wrong. He should be more willing flip flop
5) Al Gore is a bearer of inconvenient truths who deserves much of the credit (or blame) for the existence of the internet
6) Bill Clinton is an ultra wonk who is relatively honest.
7) Walter Mondale was sharp as a knife and had charisma
8) Jimmy Carter is a visionary.
9) George McGovern was the only US politician willing to try to prevent horrible Communist crimes.
4) Here I think that Kerry has displayed heroic stubborness. His investigation of the BCCI was very thorough, his diplomacy was tireless even ruthless. I honestly think one reason for the Paris accords and the Iran accord was that everyone else realized they would have to listen to Kerry drone on unless they got to yes.
The stubborness was a problem regarding Iraq, exactly the point where he is alleged to have flip flopped. He stuck to a very nuanced utterly stupid position for decades. It was Saddam has WMD, this is unacceptable, if we exhaust all other options, this justifies an invasion, and we haven’t exhausted all other options yet. This was his position under Clinton and Bush Jr. It makes no sense. But he had chosen that hill to die on and he died on it.
http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2004/08/i-think-john-kerry-trims-his-sails-to.html
5) I think this is no longer controversial. It is recognized that the war against Gore was a disgraceful episode of US journalism (similar to the Whitewater blood sports, the coverage of the 2000 Florida recount, the run up to the Iraq war, the obsession with Clinton’s e-mail surver and the dismissal of evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia “FBI sees no clear link” etc.
Gore is now notoriously honest. He once was notoriously dishonest, because he said things were true, but exaggerated paraphrases of what he said were exaggerated.
Importantly, no one paid any price for the catastrophic journalistic misconduct.
6) here I think of (IIRC) Jon Chait’s thoughts on characteristic White House dishonestly. For the Bush administration it was lies about classified intelligence which were so blatant one could tell they were lies without seeing the intelligence. We can see that they also told more normal lies. The characteristic lies were their extraordinarily obvious lies. But he went on to say the typical Clinton lies were complicated statement which seemed to be designed to mislead but which turned out to be true. In other words, not lies. The characteristic of coverage of Clinton’s alleged dishonesty is that reporters asserted he was dishonest even when he was being honest. It tells us something about what misconduct in that White House, but in the briefing room not the oval office.
So how did Clinton lie ? OK he lied about infidelity as almost all cheating spouses do. Aside from that ? He said a lot. He wrote a lot. What was false ? There is certainly no comparison with Trump’s lies. But also no comparison with Bush Jrs lies.
I think everyone knows he worked incredibly hard. Also Larry Katz (who tends to mention how this or that Harvard colleague isn’t very bright) worked with Clinton and said “Bill Clinton is REAL smart”. That places him in a set containing roughly 10 human beings last I counted.
7) I went to a Mondale rally. I thought he had charisma. On the smartness, this was the conventional view for a few days after each debate. Most especially when Reagain said “there you go again” again. Reagain had been spcifically warned not to do that.
Mondale smiled and said that this reminded him of the time Reagan said that in a debate in 1980. It was when Carter was saying Reagan would try to cut Medicare. Then Mondale noted that Reagan did indeed try to cut Mecicare. This was described the next day as “hitting it out of the park”
But decades later Reagan’s 1980 “There you go again” line was described as brilliant politics. It was not noted that, in 1980, he accused Carter of disonesty for saying something which was later proven (beyond all doubt) to be true. . It was not noted that Reagan ignored the warning to avoid the line and brought up his dishonestly 4 years later. It was not noted that Mondale hit Reagan’s hanging curve ball out of the park.
The relevant facts were forgotten. The only thing that matters, to US journalists, is winning.
Anyway, after the debates it was, very briefly, agreed that Mondale was very smart. But he lost 49 states, so the only narrative which includes that agreed fact involves saying US voters are idiots. And we just can’t say that, can we ?
8) Jimmy Carter is currently perceived to be a saint and a visionary. When he was in office, he was described as a pathological nerd. When the narrative was no longer useful to the GOP, the allegedly liberal establishment MSM abandoned it.
9)
Scholars, activists, and politicians on the left in the U.S. had a variety of reactions to the tyrannical rule of the Khmer Rouge. Few shared the suggestion of former presidential candidate South Dakota Democratic Sen. George McGovern that international intervention was required to stop the genocide. By 1978 McGovern, long one of the leading anti-war voices in the mainstream of American politics, was calling for a military force to oust the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Few American politicians of either major had any desire to intervene in Cambodia just years after the wars there ended in defeat for the United States, and McGovern’s suggestion was never seriously considered by government officials.
George McGovern was a war hero (awarded the flying cross) and a principled advocate of the use of military force to counter communist tyranny. Both are forgotten, because he lost 49 states. The idea that overwhelmingly voting for Nixon over McGovern is disgraceful is just not acceptable, because the American people can never fail but can only be failed.
As someone said in your previous post, propaganda is effective. One type is pointing to fog and saying where the is smoke there is fire. I have learned that people I work with, who are good at data driven decisions, don’t take the time to look at the data before voting.
Did Walter Cronkite do a better job of presenting the data?
Mondale having charisma? I respect him, but do not think of him as very charismatic, not compared to Reagan.
HRC sis lie about some things here and there, but nowhere near Trump levels. Her problem has been wanting money, including those idiotic speechees on Wall Street shortly before she ran for prez, not to mention she and Bill removing slilverware from the WH when they left and claiming poverty to justify it (they did return the stuff after getting caughtt). Funny thing is she was super popular for awhile there before she ran, with that pic of her with a phone in shades viral and pop with young women, who then went for Bernie and then sat at home over Trump when she actually ran.
Kerry had a problem with looking too rich, but “stubborn”? Over what? Getting a nuclear deal with Iran?
What commie atrocities did McGovern want to block that other politicians did not? Do not remember any of that.
Arne,
Walter Cronkite did not do a better job of presenting the data.
In guerrilla or asymmetric warfare, the modern organized military force prays for standing battles. During the Tet offensive in 1968 the North Vietnamese Army and the VietCong decided to stand and fight. Within less than 3 months they were defeated and they scurried back into the countryside or Cambodia.
But at the closing of a CBS Special Report in March 1968 Walter Cronkite stated: “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
See: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite
North Vietnam launched phase II on 29 April 1968, the Paris peace talks began on 13 May 1968 and North Vietnam launched phase III on 17 August 1968
North Vietnam understood exactly what had happened during 1968. “In line with the revamped strategy of Hanoi, on April 5, 1969, COSVN issued Directive 55 to all of its subordinate units: “Never again and under no circumstances are we going to risk our entire military force for just such an offensive. On the contrary, we should endeavor to preserve our military potential for future campaigns.”
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet_Offensive
But with his brief statement in March 1968 Walter Cronkite had reinforced the will of those who were refusing to be drafted and the will of the North Vietnamese to fight to the bitter end. He had turned a North Vietnamese battlefield defeat into a propaganda victory in the United States. North Vietnam would not seriously negotiate an end to the war until January 1973.
Propaganda spewed by the US television networks continuously reinforced North Vietnam’s negotiating position.
@JimH, Pretty hard to believe that if the media had treated the Vietnam news differently, the results would have changed. The North was not going to give up.
@Barkley Rosser, Kerry said right before the election that if he ad known at the time what he knew “right now”, he would have voted the same on the Iraq invasion. That’s pretty stubborn.
JackD,
I agree that North Vietnam was not going to give up.
But neither were they committed to attacks which resulted in the deaths of huge numbers of their own military.
Eventually North Vietnam was going to negotiate to get the US out.
North Vietnam’s phase II and phase III operations in 1968 were surely designed to motivate the anti war demonstrators in the US during the negotiations in Paris. But they came at a cost.
“The horrendous casualties and suffering endured by communist units during these sustained operations were beginning to tell. The fact that there were no apparent military gains made that could possibly justify all the blood and effort just exacerbated the situation. During the first half of 1969, more than 20,000 communist troops rallied to allied forces, a threefold increase over the 1968 figure.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet_Offensive
But the propaganda spewed by the US television networks continuously reinforced North Vietnam’s negotiating position for years.
Fair and balanced coverage should have required the US news media to go out and count the dead North Vietnamese soldiers themselves before rendering their opinions. And then perhaps they could have counted the South Vietnamese civilians who were killed during those short occupations by the communists.
Let’s remember that it was the South Vietnamese people who paid the price for our news media applying the whip to US politicians.
Jim, I don’t think you’re saying that the north wouldn’t have ended up in control of the country.
JackD,
President Johnson made the worst kind of mistake when he allowed the US to be drawn into a war which he did not believe could be won. And he compounded that mistake with others. He feared that China would enter the war so he ordered US armed forces not to cross the DMZ. He also ordered US armed forces to stay out of Cambodia which was China’s ally. (Cambodia claimed neutrality but allowed the North Vietnamese army to occupy their territory along its eastern border.) Thus President Johnson left sanctuaries on South Vietnam’s northern and western borders. And he and Secretary McNamara were choosing bombing targets in North Vietnam instead of allowing US Air Force commanders to do their job.
Given those restrictions it is difficult to see why the North Vietnamese would have ever quit fighting. When their army units were strong they could be moved into South Vietnam, when they had been weakened they could retire to their sanctuaries.
I believe that President Johnson and Secretary McNamara set up these ground rules because they wanted to negotiate a quick peace and they did not want to widen the conflict.
Rolling Thunder bombing missions began 2 March 1965 and the first pause was on 13 May 1965. The President was telegraphing his intentions. He meant to negotiate his way out of South Vietnam.
The President sent in the first US combat troops in March 1965. In October 1965 I was home on leave and was shocked by the song “Eve of Distruction”. That 19 year old could not understand what the music industry trying to do? And there were 40 antiwar demonstrations that month. The only thing that had really happened was that the number of young men being drafted was increasing after 1964.
How could President Johnson ever negotiate a peace with the US news media and antiwar protest movements feeding off each other?
The US news media should have taken a victory lap when the Paris Peace Accords were completed.
In November, 1965, I was on staff duty in my artillery battalion in Germany listening with my NCO to the AFN broadcast of the battle of the Ia Drang Valley and neither I nor my army peers could imagine, at that point, that the U.S. could lose. We, like the rest of the country, were disabused of that notion over a relatively short period of time. While I appreciate your points about the limitations on the American forces, I still doubt that the North Vietnamese were going to be defeated under any circumstances. The people of the south were understandably reluctant to be in “fight to the end mode,” particularly given the corruption of their government. It really was, ultimately, the result of Eisenhower’s school yard bravado-like belief that we could do what the French could not that sucked our country into that ugliness.
We hoped it was the end of American naivete but then, of course, came Afghanistan and Iraq.
JackD,
I had 2 cousins and a brother who served on the ground in Vietnam. (My brother during Tet and one of my cousins was sent into Cambodia.) None of us understood the magnitude of the problems with guerrilla warfare. (Now called ASYMMETRICAL warfare.)
There are many reasons to be pessimistic about what the ultimate outcome would be in South Vietnam (SVN). Corruption in the government probably should top the list. There was a huge black market and military commanders were selected based on political connections. Nothing can overcome the problems caused by incompetent generals except a huge population.
But if we had not kept the US military on the DMZ in South Korea, then it would have fallen too. And we still have 25 to 30 thousand US military personnel there.
During 1968 the Viet Cong’s numbers were drastically reduced and no long term goal had been achieved. That shattered their morale and apparently 20,000 of them joined the SVN army in 1969.
So after 1968 the North Vietnamese army was the major problem. If they had not had those SANCTUARIES, they would have been pinned down by US and SVN regular army forces. Then North Vietnam would have negotiated.
But President Johnson was not a war time President, he wanted to negotiate immediately. Three years into the war, the US new media were applying the whip any time he began to use more force. Without more force, North Vietnam was not going to negotiate.
I never believed that the Iraq War was necessary.
And because of the Iraq War, the US military could not put enough troops along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. So al-Qaida members retreated into Pakistan and again there was ASYMMETRICAL warfare. This long war in Afghaistan has also been about SANTUARIES.
The US government doesn’t seem to learn. Presidents should select retired generals for their Secretary of Defense. At least the US military has institutional memory.
JimH:
Jack is being god awful nice to you and patient also. He served early on in that era and I came on board in 68. I do not talk much about this time as it was such a short part of my life. I asked my kids not to involve the military in my funeral. My one cousin was a Master Gunnery Sergeant, another flew F4 Phantoms, I was a lowly Sergeant at the end and chasing prisoners, and another cousin went into the Army. There were others too. Even today my nephews have been involved. If you read some sites they will disagree with your not getting entangled:
Fact: The domino theory was accurate. The ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand stayed free of Communism because of the U.S. commitment to Vietnam. The Indonesians threw the Soviets out in 1966 because of America’s commitment in Vietnam. Without that commitment, Communism would have swept all the way to the Malacca Straits that is south of Singapore and of great strategic importance to the free world. If you ask people who live in these countries that won the war in Vietnam, they have a different opinion from the American news media. The Vietnam War was the turning point for Communism. https://www.uswings.com/about-us-wings/vietnam-war-facts/
If I could have my friends back, I would be quite happy. Bobbie O’Million I grew up with, Paul Placek and I paled around, and Tim Gilson and I were friends in boot camp.
Dien Bein Phu should have been the warning. Maybe the French shoulda taken the two nukes Dulles offered them. Pick it up. It was written by Bernard Fall.
Jack’s right, the South Vietnamese were not into this war. They lost to the north in 75 after we pulled out in 73.
The South Korea point is interesting. Using modern standards, the Korean War was successful. As you point out,South Korea did not fall despite the existence of a huge sanctuary, China. The DMZ gave South Korea the time to develop and become successful. Perhaps something similar could have happened in Vietnam but I seriously doubt it. The nationalism represented by the North and Ho Chi Minh was quite different from the looming hegemon of China in Korea. Bottom line for me is that we have been seriously overextended by virtue of getting involved in conflicts that really did not involve our national interests. You can make arguments for specific conflicts perhaps but not the totality of them.
As far as the sanctuaries in Vietnam go, we shouldn’t pretend that they were free of military challenge inside their borders by our forces. Beyond all that, as I’ve stated, the nationalism represented by North Vietnam was powerful.
JackD,
“Bottom line for me is that we have been seriously overextended by virtue of getting involved in conflicts that really did not involve our national interests. ”
I agree.
We had no immediate clear-cut national interest in Libya. The Europeans could have bombed Gaddafi if that was what they wanted. In the long term, all we achieved was to make a few more enemies.
Our only interest in Afghanistan was collecting the leadership of Al-Qaeda and closing down their training camp. After Osama bin Laden was killed, US military forces should have been removed from Afghanistan.The longer we stay there the more enemies we make. I have no faith that our State Department is capable of negotiating a stable peace there.
Iraq could have been held in check by bombing and completely destroying the military base that fired missiles at our aircraft. What we clearly achieved in Iraq was to put a Shiite government in place. Which did not make us any friends within the neighboring Sunni countries.
Perhaps our worst mistake recently was to impose economic sanctions on Russia after they took over the Crimea.
Now Europe wants to trade with Russia and we are left looking like chumps. What was our national interest in Crimea or the Ukraine? Europe may have had an interest in Ukraine but not the US. Do the do-gooders want a return to the cold war? Or are they naive enough to believe that Russia would return Crimea to Ukraine?
Kerry was stubborn negotiating with Iran. He was also stubborn negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement. He was stubborn when investigating BCCI. Finally his line on invading Iraq didn’t change at all over a decade — always maybe some day but not today. The man is stubborn, pathologically stubborn. He is a flip-flopper to the same extent his service in Vietnam was less honorable than Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. Karl Rove said it clearly — you don’t attack their weaknesses, you attack their strengths.
Wow. I wanted to grind some old axes, but 1968 vintage axes are really old. For what it’s worth, I think it is clear that Cronkite blew it. He did not understand what had just happened during the Tet offensive.
On the other hand, I think the outcome would have been the same no matter what. I do contest the claim that N Vietnam wouldn’t seriously discuss peace after 1968. They would have accepted an agreement such that Vietnam was united under their rule. In the event, they accepted an agreement such that, after 2 years, Vietnam was united under their rule.
I’m quite sure that if Cronkite had declared the Tet offensive a huge defeat for the North Vietnamese army and a catastrophic defeat for the Viet Cong, that Vietnam would have ended up united under communist rule. Maybe in 1976 or 1977 not 1975, but soon and for the rest of our lives. Vietnamese communists were willing to fight on in spite of massive losses, neither we nor Vietnamese anticommunists were willing to do that. So even when armies were still in the field, the outcome was determined. I do note that about 200,000 South Vietnamese anticommunist ARVN soldiers died, that is roughly 4 times US losses. They fought, but the communists fought longer.
It wasn’t about strategic or jounalistic errors. Victory would have cost tens of millions of lives not mere millions. It wouldn’t have been worth it.
On the other hand, the USA should not have allowed the Khmer Rouge to massacre Cambodians as was argued by George McGovern and roughly no one else.
Robert, I really don’t know what you mean about Kerry and Iraq. He voted for it and while running for President said he’d do it again.