Dialogue for the Future

...Huntington begins by asserting the uniqueness of Vietnam, describing it as "a relatively limited and undestructive conflict" in comparison with Korea...

...He explains how dissent is domesticated, on the one hand, by the dissenter's desire to remain in the inner circle, and on the other, by the conscience of the nondissenters...

...the techniques of antiguerrilla warfare have not been applied correctly...

...Hoffmann invites us to recognize the limits on the effective application of our national power...

...In a concluding exchange on the possibilities and dangers of neoiso-lationism, Thomson offers the observation that many of those now sounding the warnings reached adulthood in the 1930s...

...The mit professor asserts that in Vietnam we have an "example of the vital importance of applied social science for making the actions of our government in foreign areas more rational and humane than they have been...

...But Pool's facile assumption regarding democracies appears about as valid as the belief that Communist states enjoy eternally peaceful mutual relations...

...Fifth, give economic and technical aid in such a way as to avoid becoming politically committed to specific regimes...

...The revolutions in communications, transportation and nuclear weapons alone rule out a return to simple isolationism...

...The conference transcript has been crisply edited to produce No More Viet-nams...

...attitudes toward international involvement...

...occupied a militarily defeated country and was not beset with continuing resistance...

...Theoretically, social science does of course have much of offer, but in practice the tendency has been for administrations to seek the advice of social scientists whose views are likely to reinforce existing government policies...

...Pool's justification of Vietnam, and his overall view of world politics, rests on a simple assumption: "We can live in safety only in a world in which the political systems of all states are democratic and pacifically oriented . . . ."By assuming peace will come to the world when all nations adopt a preferred form of government, Pool seems to be speaking in the language of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson...

...The Vietnam counterinsurgency effort, they feel, has failed for technical reasons...

...The trouble with this formulation (aside from the gross disbelief it would elicit in much of the underdeveloped world), declares Ellsberg, is that "progressive" involvement has only occurred in such places as Korea, Japan and Germany, where the U.S...

...At the current rate, "the Vietnamese war could thus go on for twenty years before the total civilian casualties (killed and wounded) in South Vietnam equaled the minimum estimate of civilians killed in Korea...

...Our worst mistake in Vietnam was to bomb the North...

...But the most instructive lessons are drawn on a broader conceptual level by Henry Kissinger, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Stanley Hoffmann and, in the finest contribution of all, James C. Thomson Jr...

...Daniel Ellsberg of Rand quickly dismisses this argument...

...In Thomson's words: "The most ruinous complaint that can be whispered of a bureaucrat is: 'I'm afraid Charlie is beginning to lose his effectiveness.' " Thomson warns, too, of a new breed of Ameican ideologue embodying an updated version of the missionary impulse in U.S...

...Specifically, he is reacting to Huntington's theory that the more extensive America's involvement in a country, the more progressive the impact upon it...

...Still Reischauer has performed a considerable service by defining for us what isolationism is and is not at the present time...

...The only thoughtful presentation to date—at this conference or anywhere else—of what a "new isolationism" might really entail is offered by Edwin Reischauer...

...foreign relations...

...Among our shortcomings are the intensity of dissent, the lack of public understanding of our national policy, and the calling into question of the American people's basic commitment to paying the costs of national goals...

...Thus he relates how the doubts of former Undersecretary of State George Ball became "warmly institutionalized...

...At each stage of the Vietnam escalation, Ball was invited to say his piece, which presumably left him feeling good, since he had spoken out for righteousness...

...Far better is the realpolitik of a Henry Kissinger, who eschews crusades for moral ends and thereby spares us the temptation of catastrophic means...

...Yet it is worth recalling that social scientists have been involved from the start in Vietnam, from Walt Rostow (the Johnson Administration's leading hard-liner) to Huntington to Pool himself...

...as a democracy could not stand the moral protest that would arise if we rained death from the skies upon an area where there was no war...

...United States presence, this theory maintains, facilitates the collapse of traditional order, while promoting economic and social equality...

...In this context, he resurrects an argument of Frank L. Klingberg that traces alternate national periods of introversion, averaging 21 years, and extroversion, averaging 27 years...

...Pool confidently affirms the fundamental correctness of our course: "The basic conception that the American national interest was at stake in Vietnam, that the people of South Vietnam oppose the Viet-cong, and that we should not allow a forced Communist takeover was sound and remains sound...

...Any other situation imperils our community cohesion...

...Our military might, technology and invincible benevolence, they believe, give us the opportunity and obligation to guide the world to modernization and stability, "a full-fledged Pax Americana techno-cratica...

...But the experiences of nonintervention in Manchuria, Ethiopia and Hitler's Europe, as well as the earlier rejection of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, are not appropriate to this era...

...In a relatively small number of pages, the contending viewpoints are expressed with finesse and clarity...

...These guidelines are admittedly limited...

...The trouble has not been in Vietnam but at home, where there has been "a failure of our own political system...

...Without his philosopher kings, we are warned, we can expect repeated drastic mistakes...

...The hazard he sees is that we will become basically unconcerned with the fate of the Third World, dismantling our capacity to intervene and refusing to extend aid or developmental assistance...

...Sir Robert Thompson, leader of Britain's successful antiguerrilla campaign in Malaya, Chester Cooper, former member of the National Security Council staff with responsibility for Asian affairs, and Professor Albert Wohlstetter, a government consultant previously at Rand and now at the University of Chicago, direct their criticism along essentially instrumental lines...

...foreign policy and rejects the notion of the war as a momentary aberration...

...Even then, says Hoffmann, it is difficult to see how we can successfully prevent these changes...

...His arguments demand our attention because they give us a true understanding of how we have become so entangled in Vietnam, even though our policy-makers were neither evil nor stupid...

...According to Pool, the lesson to be drawn is that "a democracy in the present era cannot deliberately choose war as an instrument of national policy...

...He advises us to avoid this reaction to our past involvements and adopt the following policies for the future: First, maintain our capacity to intervene but minimize our commitments to do so...

...The majority of conference participants were strongly, although politely, critical of our Vietnam involvement...

...Men refrain from resigning or from expressing themselves clearly for fear of losing the special influence that comes from a "mysterious combination of training, style and connections...

...For once, a Vietnam debate offers us originality and insight which transcend the banality and sloganeering characteristic of most such discussions...

...Sensing that the U.S...

...Third, attempt to insure that any intervention against aggression is international in character...

...The related "effectiveness trap" also helps to muffle any real dissent within the government...

...In contrast, Yarmolinsky finds a more accidental web of circumstances leading to American involvement in the Vietnam morass...

...Those skeptical of our rationality among the press ("ignorant wisecracking") or elsewhere ("anti-intellectuals—and Senator Fulbright, astonishingly enough with them") are trying to deny policy-makers the capability of learning what they need to know...

...A former East Asian specialist at the State Department and the White House, Thomson is especially incisive in his discussion of the "closed politics" of American decision-making...

...the others could then feel self-satisfied for having given a hearing to dovish views...

...He further assures us that the shift of opinion on foreign policy in the mid-'60s is simply "the latest manifestation of a regular alternation of American attitudes toward foreign affairs between introversion and extroversion...

...stands at the end of an era in foreign policy, in June 1968 the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs convoked a meeting of prominent scholars, journalists and government officials...

...Stanley Hoffmann, in an illuminating section on the subject of intervention and the future of American foreign policy, cautions that general guidelines are of little help and gives us some sage advice: "No policy is ethical, however generous its ends, if success is ruled out...

...Since 1940, he says, the government has been organized for war, producing military resources that cry out to be used and a callous bureaucratic mentality conducive to the thoughtless employment of nuclear weapons, as in 1945...

...More carefully argued, more firmly held and more remarkable are the views of Professor Pool...

...Several of their basic divergences are worth citing...

...On the whole, the 26 participants are critical of the Vietnam involvement, with two outstanding exceptions: Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the Department of Government at Harvard University, chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group, and consultant to the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State: and Ithiel de Sola Pool, chairman of the Department of Political Science at mit and researcher for the Defense Department in Vietnam during 1966-67...

...For them, "technocracy's own Maoists," Vietnam has been our crucial test...

...In a burst of hubris, Pool touts the values of social science expertise at the highest governmental levels...

...And, Ellsberg continues, whether our Vietnam policy is progressive or not, the lesson the rest of the world has drawn is that, "to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, bombing is as American as cherry pie...

...American public outrage, he feels, is less a reflection of the war than the impact of television and a basic cyclical change in U.S...

...Their importance is greatly disproportionate to their number, though, for they typify the thinking that was so instrumental in precipitating and then maintaining the present American involvement in Vietnam...

...And no policy is ethical if the means corrupt or destroy the ends, if the means are mutually out of proportion with the ends, if they entail costs of value greater than the costs of not resorting to them—three precepts violated by our conduct in Vietnam...

...The deification of social science is still another of Pool's enterprises...

...What is more, even if a world of democracies were certain to be peaceful, present turbulent international conditions and the existence of nuclear weapons make the pursuit of this end a mortal peril...

...If you invite us in to do your hard fighting for you, then you get bombing along with our troops...

...This includes the Dulles legacy, fear of China, a series of setbacks (Vienna, Laos and Cuba), and the abandonmerit of massive retaliation, permitting lesser degrees of force to become acceptable...

...Richard Barnet, codirector of the Institute for Policy Studies, and Adam Yarmolinsky concentrate on the shortcomings of governmental bureaucracy, but from widely divergent perspectives...

...He contends that public revulsion was largely a response to this war...

...Because "the U.S...

...Reviewed by ROBERT J. LIEBER Assistant Professor of Political Science, the University of California in Davis Premature or not, a post-Vietnam dialogue is under way and has already produced a fascinating and highly readable book...

...Lacking full responsibility for long-term political and economic development in Vietnam, America has in no sense been an effective force for reform...

...We must be willing to tolerate violent change abroad, since "unless the consequence of those upheavals would be to put into power regimes hostile to us in important countries, such changes would not seriously endanger our position in the international competition...

...In an ill-received indictment of the entire national security bureaucracy, Barnet castigates the Vietnam intervention as continuing a pattern of "overmili-tarization" of U.S...

...War is only feasible for us if we are severely provoked, or if it succeeds quickly...

...Second, as a general rule, avoid intervention in unstable internal affairs...

...Fourth, avoid open-ended commitments...

...that our involvement in Vietnam in 1954 instead of 1965 would have aroused the same reaction in the middle of an "extroversion" phase...

...Huntington's statements on the purposes and methods of investigation, says Eqbal Ahmad of Cornell, suggest a "technocratic evangelism" and "a mixed bag of welfare imperialism and relentless optimism...