Can a Free Society Fight a Limited War?
ROCHE, JOHN P.
THINKING ALOUD Can a Free Society Fight War? By John P. Roche In the spring of 1966, the President asked me to go to Vietnam to get the "feel" of the place and some sense of the possibilities...
...Johnson can look with confidence to the judgment of future historians, but the immediate problem remains...
...This is no place to investigate the internal affairs of the Saigon government...
...At root, the theory asserted that instead of relying on apocalyptic nuclear power to deter aggression, the United States would be capable of a flexible, measured response to the forces deployed on the other side of the hill—enough force, and no more, than was necessary to frustrate aggression...
...But try to find out what this means...
...So when I came upon McCarthy's nomination of India as a possible substitute for Vietnam, I was, to say the least, startled...
...There was a kind of antiseptic quality permeating the atmosphere...
...Thus, instead of Laos returning to its status as a kingdom with a thousand years on lsd, the Pathet Lao guerrillas, aided as in South Vietnam by pavn regulars, took over the task of protecting the Zone of Communication: the Ho Chi Minh trail...
...Can one conceive the magnitude of the troop commitment that would be necessary to bolster India's feeble defenses...
...North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong had announced the scenario as far back as 1962 when he told the late Bernard Fall: "Americans do not like long inconclusive wars—and this is going to be a long inconclusive war...
...I may be wrong—I have never been able to attain the witless certainty of the True Believer, and have lost a lot of sleep as a result...
...The worst of it is that what I believe to be the real "lessons of Vietnam" have been largely ignored on the political circuit this fall...
...The crux of the matter is that while any two-bit demagogue can make the eagle scream in a nice, neat "us or them" confrontration, explaining the rationale of limited war is incredibly difficult...
...Education in these matters always costs money...
...This shortcut had two admirable arguments in its favor: First, we could effectively ignore the condition of the Saigon government...
...These are the things we never thought of when, with all the zeal of innocence, we liberals advanced our doctrine of limited war...
...What we tend to forget is that in the years of the Kennedy Administration, Vietnam was not center-stage—the real crises were in Berlin, Cuba, and, of all places, Laos...
...True, we denied him military sanctuary by bombing the North, but he obviously wrote off bombing as a painful harassment and countered at our weakest point: ground control in the South...
...If one changed a few words in Kennedy's major address on the subject and travelled back 30 years in time, his speech becomes a devastating case against anti-Franco intervention in the Spanish Civil War...
...If the latter is the case, McCarthy's "No More Vietnams" formula involves the abandonment of limited war and a rejuvenation of the nuclear strike...
...Which is another way of saying that Vietnam really has been an adult's war and a young man's fight...
...What this often amounted to was simply "hunkering up like a mule in a hailstorm" as the apocalyptics of the Left-and Right-wing spokesmen for national frustration raged throughout the land...
...It would be tragic if a united front of Nixonites and followers of Eugene McCarthy, playing up to the understandable frustrations of the American people, undermined our commitment to limited war and returned us to the Age of Dulles...
...The historical irony of this is that by prohibiting a return to the old reactionary McCarthyism, he generated the new liberal McCarthyism, which has loosed more hate in the United States than "old Joe" could ever have dreamed of...
...Why did Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Secretary McNamara consistently neglect arvn...
...Even weak ones, for he specifically mentioned India...
...While one can argue that fewer Americans have died there in the last six years than die annually in the United States from drunken driving, that one mirv would destroy more people than have been killed in all of Vietnam in 20 years, he can expect no sympathetic response...
...Or, as some notable liberals today seem to think, can we build affluence in one country and somehow escape the broils of the outside world...
...I, for example, had supported it vigorously at various conventions of Americans for Democratic Action, and liberal spokesmen had been unsparing in their attacks on Kennedy, and Eisenhower before him, for supporting a Right-wing military junta in Laos...
...Yet military necessity, while an explanation for what has occurred over the past three years, is not an excuse...
...Airpower provides mobile artillery, but nobody ever pacified a province with an F-4...
...One can suggest a number of partial answers: The American officers in the field obviously felt that nothing short of a drastic purge of the officer corps would do any good—and such a purge was politically impossible in Saigon...
...The Soviet willingness to make a Laotian deal, which appeared to be completely ignored by Hanoi, suggested that perhaps the big powers could bilaterally close down Indochina as a source of instability by simply getting the children out of the game...
...the Pentagon's budget experts, faced with the need to cut, would patently give higher priority to the needs of an American service than to arvn...
...This is shorthand for the proposition that the Republicans know how to deal with Communists, that President Eisenhower ended the Korean War by threatening to use nuclear weapons on the sanctuary, that limited war is a "no win" policy and a gross misuse of our incredible national power...
...But what is one to make of Senator Eugene McCarthy's gloss on "No More Vietnams...
...I think the real key to arvn's neglect was the Pentagon game-theorists' belief in their own press releases...
...When I was in Danang last year, a Marine major put it to me...
...Now the authentic, 24-karat "neutralist" Souvanna Phouma was brought back to Vientiane and given our blessing to opt his nation out of the Asian cold war...
...Now ever since I took seriously President Kennedy's statement that we are "the watchmen on the walls of world freedom"—only to learn later from reading Arthur Schlesinger's Bitter Heritage that Kennedy did not really mean it—I have been reading the small print rather carefully...
...What, in short, has happened to the concept of "the enemy...
...Who has been hurt...
...they believed that pressure on Hanoi, "turning the screw," would lead Ho to make the logical calculation that he had more to lose than gain by continuing the conflict...
...or, 2) he was silently and surreptitiously returning to the Dulles strategy of nuclear containment...
...They were determined to prevent the United States from fighting a cut-rate war...
...So, writing Laos off as tactically hopeless, Kennedy turned his attention to Vietnam where the situation was very different, particularly in terms of accessibility...
...This commitment of pavn (Hanoi's regulars) was a death blow to the concept of the invisible war...
...This had been a liberal demand in the United States for years...
...Suffice it to say that the Diem regime, after a seemingly amazing start in the 1950s, was in deep trouble in 1962-63...
...Vietnam is war—nuclear holocaust is a remote fantasy...
...Once they achieved their usually limited objectives, a treaty was forthcoming and the troops pulled out...
...But right or wrong, this is what I believe...
...Thus militant "liberals" are in the odd position of embracing the H-bomb as the key instrument of American policy...
...Not only was the AK-47 incomparably superior to the Garands and M-ls of arvn, but no American rifle before the M-16 could match it...
...Confronted by the chaos in Saigon, which became much worse after the fall of the Diem government in November 1963, the Americans gradually made—without really recognizing its import—a critical decision: to fight the war independently...
...The Republican position is quite simple...
...There have been a number of accounts by associates of the late President Kennedy to the effect that he wanted out of Vietnam too...
...The significance of this double-cross cannot be underestimated...
...Despite our experience in Korea, where in 1950-51 American divisions had scouts out on their flanks to make sure the roks were still there—although five years later South Korea had probably the finest army in Asia—arvn had remained a stepchild...
...The unfortunate consequence was that the South Vietnamese Armed Forces (arvn) were treated as orphans and given essentially a spectator role in the U.S.-Hanoi competition...
...If you wait for all the precincts to report, you do not make history—you write it...
...The Johnson Administration, hit by ground war on a scale never anticipated and by the accompanying casualty lists, tried to maintain the ground-rules of limited war...
...The Laotian agreement was a horse dead at the post, however, a complete non-starter...
...But bitterness destroys the analytical capacity —and the hard fact in my judgment is that (whatever the distortions of the media and the critics may have been) Vietnam has poisoned our political atmosphere for a far more fundamental reason than a failure of communication between the Johnson Administration and the people...
...Indeed, communications with the Viet-cong were being developed to the point where, in the remarkably short period of six months, the guerrillas were rearmed with the 7.62 weapons family, most notably the AK-47 automatic rifle...
...Once Ho and his chief strategist, General Giap, knew what they were up against, they would agree "mate in 12 moves" and give up the game...
...In my judgment, their efforts were simply spiked by Hanoi's intransigence...
...could transport 100,000 men 12,000 miles in 47 hours and 32 minutes (or some such logistical triumph) would itself act as a deterrent...
...Paradoxically, the marginal character of the war in Vietnam has contributed to its political liabilities...
...The difficulty was that the Soviets either could not, or did not choose to, go through with their end of the bargain...
...I confess that, battered as I am, I still believe that flexible response is not only a sound but a liberal alternative to the only other strategies I see on the horizon...
...The late Senator Robert Kennedy was relatively clear...
...The basic premise, which I do not believe I have ever seen clearly articulated, was that the United States, with its massive technological assets, would directly force the Hanoi leaders to pull back their troops...
...Since that time (despite rumors in the New York Times that I was playing therapist to disaffected intellectuals), I have lived day in, day out, week in, week out, with the problems of Vietnam...
...We assumed, naively as it turned out, that the knowledge that the U.S...
...they found a poorly trained, miserably equipped, dispirited arvn...
...Vietnam was a kind of low-level infection which they hoped would go away...
...The answer is that nobody except the young men directly at war—and indirectly their families—has been hurt...
...one either pushed the button or capitulated...
...That is, a strategic war, a war without hate, a war without massive popular involvement...
...In fact, I have seen Marines up in I Corps who carry the AK-47 in preference to the M-16...
...Since I take McCarthy's intelligence for granted, his statement could only make sense if 1) he had an ironclad promise from Peking that India will not again be invaded...
...So far, we have been cutting across time and history with a certain amount of recklessness in the interest of exploring the various consequences of our commitment to limited war in Indochina...
...As he went on to election in his own right in 1964, Vietnam was still on the back pages—but there was great stirring in Hanoi and pavn engineers and support troops were busy building base camps in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam...
...Perhaps the figure of speech could have been improved upon, but what American commander-in-chief could address his troops in the field and urge them to die, if necessary, for a stalemate...
...Over the dmz, and in from Laos and Cambodia, came the regulars of the North Vietnamese Army to buttress the guerrillas already on the ground...
...The economy roars along, the Dow-Jones creeps up, unemployment is down, incomes are at a record high, corporate profits are pushing the roof...
...Individual families would mourn a sergeant killed in the Sixth River War, or a sepoy butchered at Kabul, but except for disasters these wars were fought outside the forum of British public opinion...
...If the "lesson of Vietnam" is that a free, democratic society cannot fight a limited war, what strategic options are still open...
...Normally the opponent, if he is worth playing with, concedes and starts a new game...
...So American soldiers and Marines, instead of providing a steel frame for the training of arvn, had to take the field themselves...
...second, we could employ our air power assets with a relatively slight loss of American lives...
...In 1965 and 1966—for reasons we will explore subsequently—there was suddenly an acute shortage of riflemen in the Republic of Vietnam...
...It was the liberal answer to John Foster Dulles that was to find classic formulation in the speeches of President John F. Kennedy and in Robert McNamara's spectacular reorganization of the Department of Defense...
...In existential terms, the young have been left alone with the war...
...Franco did, after all, become the very model of a polycentric fascist, a nationalist "Tito" in Hitler's New Order...
...Down the Ho Chi Minh trail came the trained regiments of the pavn with the mission, not of defeating the United States on the ground, but of forcing the Americans to fight a ground war in full, costly visibility...
...But these are partial answers...
...Kennedy and McNamara realized that the very character of nuclear war made any other response an all or nothing proposition...
...Lyndon Johnson, then, inherited from Kennedy a strategy, a Cabinet, and a seemingly trivial conflict in Vietnam...
...Unfortunately, too, Ho and Giap were never programmed by the Pentagon's game-theorists...
...What the Laos agreement of 1962 represented was a willingness by the United States and the Soviets to respect a genuine neutralization of that country, to achieve a "political solution...
...I believe today—as I believed in 1956—that this nuclear strategy would in the long run be disastrous for the United States...
...Couldn't Johnson at least ration tires so they would know there is a war on...
...In international relations it costs more than money—human lives are involved...
...Adding to the burden was the disaffection of the young, notably the college elite who compensated for their deferment—with the noxious psychic compound of safety and guilt it provided—by a torrent of abuse of the President and the Administration worthy of a 16th century lunatic sectarian...
...On occasion, I have reacted bitterly to criticism and have been particularly hard on the communications media...
...And I have watched, impotent and heartsick, while the War has eroded the position of the Johnson Administration...
...The atmosphere made those of us who come from the harsh training of poker decidedly uneasy...
...And I would suggest that those who are busy leaping up and down about Vietnam take a brief pause in their exercise to inform us precisely how they plan to employ American power in the interest of international stability and world order...
...Can't the Administration get the people to take this war seriously...
...But it has the enormous political advantage of being abstract...
...on the other, for our capability to cope with (and in the future deter) such liberators...
...The basic issue in Vietnam is this: Can a free society fight a limited war...
...And all the evidence that I have seen indicates that President Kennedy, who had a cold eye, realized this—and realized that Laos was, with the possible exception of Bhutan, the worst place in the world to try to match Communist military pressure...
...And had the President endorsed such a program, the organized liberal community in the United States—with me in the forefront in my capacity as National Chairman of Americans for Democratic Action—would have denounced him to the rafters for supporting the "reactionary, unrepresentative Diem clique...
...To be specific, the United States had foresworn any direct attacks upon the legitimacy of the Hanoi government, had barred the use of nuclear weapons, had—in short—recognized Ho's political sanctuary...
...President Kennedy presided over the transformation of American strategic theory from massive retaliation to flexible response, but at the time of his murder (less than a month after Diem fell) the United States had only put this doctrine into action in the Cuban missile crisis...
...Oddly enough in the light of all the agitation," he said, "I have never seen Marines with such good political morale...
...The "Americanization" of the ground war was thus a consequence of military necessity...
...But Lyndon Johnson flatly refused to whoop up yahoo chauvinism...
...The rhetoric of limited war is in itself a major problem...
...Unfortunately, this was based on a complete misreading of the mind and character of a dedicated and ruthless Leninist?one who, in Koestler's phrase, is prepared to sacrifice one generation in the interest of its successor...
...The President could have drummed up support by hitting the traditional chord of messianic anti-Communism, by engaging in old-style McCarthyism...
...Indeed, in November 1962, the New Republic editorially took an unblinking view of the possibilities of a land war in Asia—and chose it as preferable to another nuclear confrontation on the Cuban model...
...Regrettably, these lack empirical foundation—and quoting the dead is an ancient form of historical fraud, immune to either proof or disproof...
...Assuming the winner is identifiable from the outset, this advice can be helpful...
...In sum, just to get the record clear at the outset, I take for granted the vital role that the United States must play in helping to achieve a stable world, and I believe that South and Southeast Asia present a major challenge to stability in our generation...
...The hustings are full of politicians solemnly intoning "No More Vietnams...
...The fundamental evidence—notably his support of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McNamara—suggests that he was unhappy about the situation in Vietnam (as who with any knowledge of the place was not...
...President Johnson, who was only alerted to the full gravity of the Vietnamese crisis in the fall and winter of 1964-65, has been savagely assaulted for deserting the Kennedy doctrine for a "military solution...
...To put it differently, the war in Vietnam is being fought for an abstraction: American national interest in a non-totalitarian Asian future...
...Air-power enthusiasts to the contrary, there is only one way to fight infantry—with other infantry...
...Objectively viewed, Diem was in an impossible enfilade: The Americans would not let him run an efficient dictatorship (like the one in Hanoi), and he was incapable of building effective representative government...
...The record is perfectly clear: Limited war was conceived of by liberals as the liberal alternative to massive retaliation and/or isolationism...
...We knew that nobody has ever folded a full-house because he suspected another player of holding four of a kind...
...If Ho Chi Minh had permitted the war in Vietnam to remain invisible—with only professional soldiers involved—the pattern of the 19th century might have been retained...
...and Congress in 1962-63—the key years—would clearly have taken a dim view of a massive and expensive rearmament and training program...
...To a considerable extent these soldiers were on a suicide mission, but when one appreciates that their goals were political rather than military the "kill-ratio" loses much of its impact...
...This, in part, was the source of many later problems...
...In 1964-65, the Americans began looking for trained Vietnamese soldiers to meet Ho Chi Minh's challenge on the ground in the South...
...Nothing could be further from the truth: Johnson committed American air power and then, in the summer of 1965, ground forces to frustrate a "military solution," a Hanoi victory...
...In October 1962, we lived through the most perilous week in the history of mankind, but there was no blood on the tv screens...
...As one of the early advocates of flexible response and limited war, I have watched the defection of the liberal intellectuals with somber anguish...
...Never in our history has a war been fought with so little involvement by the society as a whole...
...They stand appalled, too, by the fact that a great President, Lyndon Johnson, has gone into political limbo because of his indomitable commitment to a sound but unpopular policy, flexible response and limited war...
...By John P. Roche In the spring of 1966, the President asked me to go to Vietnam to get the "feel" of the place and some sense of the possibilities for the development of representative institutions...
...On this basis Kennedy made the quantum jump: Disregarding the Geneva Accord of 1954 (which we had unofficially respected but never signed), he increased the number of American "advisors" from roughly 750 (as authorized at Geneva) to over 16,000...
...While we may be fighting a limited war against him, he has declared total war against us?and he has played his hand brilliantly...
...There were some in Washington, in fact, who advised him three years ago that he could not fight an invisible war, that unless he provided the American people with a vivid "enemy," he would face massive defections...
...one often had the feeling he was attending a chess match...
...Khrushchev overestimated his influence on the Viet Minh hardliners and was probably later incensed by their effrontery in disregarding the Geneva Agreement of 1962...
...Lincoln did not want a "military solution" to the Secession Crisis of 1861, but despite his wishes half a million Americans died...
...The small country of South Vietnam has swallowed up half a million American troops...
...It is very difficult to tell a young soldier, "Go out there and fight, perhaps die, for a good bargaining position...
...it is not, comparatively speaking, costing much?-4 per cent of the Gross National Product compared with roughly 11 per cent for Korea —but it has no built-in support in the electorate...
...Though this in aggregate probably influenced relatively few young people—who are as leery of religious extremism as the rest of us—the cold fact is that American youth has a genuine grievance...
...We would, in other words, "punish" the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (drv...
...Discussions of military strategy began to sound more and more like seminars in game theory...
...In his lexicon it merely meant "Don't support losers...
...His reply to Hanoi's repudiation of the Laotian settlement was to reinforce the defenses of the Republic of Vietnam...
...There is no need to recapitulate in detail the events of the next few years...
...What Ho Chi Minh has done, to return to the main theme, is to hit the doctrine of limited war at its weakest point: domestic opinion...
...What sense, moreover, can the average American make of our offer of future economic assistance to a non-aggressive Hanoi...
...But Ho Chi Minh has always been a problem...
...Put differently, he would not permit Johnson to fight an invisible war and —knowing the major tenets of the doctrine of limited war—he proceeded in 1965-68 to utilize his assets to the maximum...
...but felt the line had to be drawn and enforced in that nation...
...Johnson was carved up by his critics for telling the troops at Camranh Bay to "bring home that coonskin...
...There simply was no time for the necessary training (the lead time in Korea had been a good year and a half...
...At least half a dozen times, I have heard him say that he remembered the anti-German hysteria of World War I and the consequences of Joe McCarthy in the '50s...
...Let us now proceed in a more orderly historical fashion...
...Perhaps we should recall that while limited war is nasty, for most of us resurrection would be a precondition for appreciating the strategic virtue of nuclear retaliation...
...An expert chess player can at a certain point confidently tell his opponent "mate in 12 moves...
...Like Ho and Giap, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were most uncooperative...
...Or of the bill for the military hardware that would come due if the Indian Army were to be equipped properly...
...Had he been successful, we hoped to follow the same pattern in all Indochina...
...As an old fashioned liberal cold warrior, I have seen and still see nothing immoral about fighting to contain aggressive totalitarianism...
...It is not a big war...
...There is nothing wicked or un-American about being an isolationist, but it is a doctrine that American liberals outgrew a quarter of a century ago...
...Except for the pacifists (and those who are pro-Hanoi), I have yet to find a critic who—when pushed back on his premises—did not end up embracing some variety of isolationism...
...Richard Nixon will, of course, submit that the Democrats get the country into wars they cannot end—citing Korea...
...It was a bit murky, but the gist of his admonition seemed to be that we should only help good nations...
...Must we revert to the balance of terror...
...Now in 1968 those who have stayed the course, who have had the courage of their consequences, stand appalled by the revival of isolationism—and its identical twin, nuclear deterrence...
...John Foster Dulles managed to combine verbal brinkmanship with de facto isolationism (the Siamese twins of Republican defense policy to this day), but to many of us liberals it seemed that American power under Eisenhower and Dulles was undergoing the death of a thousand cuts...
...The unfortunate thing about this world is that one always has to make a 100 per cent action commitment on the basis of inadequate evidence...
...His central goal (learned from his experience with the French and from the lessons of Algeria) was to escalate the war in Vietnam to the point where it became politically unjustifiable in the United States...
...The "dirty little war" in Vietnam, on the other hand, is infinitely and, with tv, intimately bloody...
...Not even in World War II, and certainly not in Korea...
...It is almost impossible to explain to Congressmen that Vietnam is a crucial testing ground—on one side for a brilliantly mounted "war of liberation...
...The infiltration began well before the decision to bomb the North and—with a great deal of coming and going across unmarked frontiers?has probably exposed over 200,000 North Vietnamese troops to combat in the South...
...Vietnam has provided an agonizing education on the limitations of our theory of limited war...
...The British in the 19th century could play strategic chess with their regulars and mercenaries—invading such unlikely places as Tibet, Ethiopia, Zululand, and Afghanistan?with no repercussions at home unless (as in the First Afghan War) they lost...
...In addition, "Green Berets" were bootlegged into Vietnam under covert auspices...
...And it is being fought by a new set of rules, rules which began to emerge during the Korean War but were forgotten in the subsequent years...
...Suppressing my human fears, I was prepared to go to the brink with John Kennedy over Berlin and Cuba, and last year I was equally prepared to support the Israelis to the hilt had the Soviets intervened to rescue their incompetent Arab clients...
...So we assailed Dulles, called for an active foreign policy, and beat the drums for flexible response: the defense posture that did not leave the United States with the two crisis options of nuclear weapons or appeasement...
...that he was not going to be the President "who got Americans hating...
Vol. 51 • October 1968 • No. 20
