Tag: Vietnam War

Insurgencies and America’s Defeat in Vietnam

An Old Paper from 1993

BILL ASTORE

JAN 29, 2026

Scrolling through old files today, I came across this paper that I prepared for a “Strategic Studies Seminar” at Oxford that I presented on 28 January 1993. Back then, I was a captain in the Air Force, and in the room were other serving and retired military officers. Anyhow, here’s what I read to my peers (and the two professors hosting the seminar) about the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Again, this presentation is 33 years old, but I hope it’s still useful despite its age. 

Insurgencies and America’s Defeat in Vietnam (1993)

A revolutionary war is a war within a state; the ultimate aim of the insurgents is political control of the state. Nowhere is Clausewitz’s dictum of war as a continuation of politics more true than in a revolutionary war. It typically takes the form of a protracted struggle, conducted patiently and inexorably, a variant of Chinese water torture. Educating or, more accurately, indoctrinating, the people – gaining their sympathy, cooperation, and assistance – is paramount. And all people have a role to play: men and women, young and old. After World War II, insurgencies have been guided by Mao Zedong’s concept of People’s War, and inspired by a complex combination of nationalism, anti-colonialism, and communism. They have bedeviled France, Great Britain, and the United States. This paper addresses the strategy of People’s War in terms of means, ends, and will, and details some of the reasons why the United States lost the Vietnam War.

The strategic end of People’s War is simple in its boldness: the overthrow of the existing government and its replacement with an insurgent-led government. The means are incredibly complex, encompassing social, economic, psychological, military, and political dimensions, but it must be remembered that all means are directed towards the political end. Strength of will usually favors the insurgents, partly because a major goal of People’s War is to mold the minds of its followers to convince them of the righteousness of their cause.

People’s War passes through three stages. At first the insurgents get to know the people as they spread propaganda and build a political infrastructure.

Every insurgent is an ambassador for the cause. They create safe havens while intimidating opponents and neutrals, and they commit terrorist acts to undermine the legitimacy of the government. They build their safe havens on the periphery of the state, usually in rural or impoverished areas where they can feed on the misery of the people. The more difficult the terrain, the better, whether it be the mountains of Spain and Afghanistan or the jungles of Malaya and Vietnam. They extend their control over the countryside and into the urban areas during the second stage of People’s War. They use guerrilla tactics and terrorism to further undermine the political legitimacy of the government. The main target is not the government’s troops but the will of its leaders. As they extend their physical control over the countryside, they install their own political structure to control the people. With the government’s will fatally weakened, the insurgents move to the final stage: a conventional military offensive to overthrow the government.

The three stages are not rigidly sequential, however. For example, while conducting guerrilla operations against the government, the insurgents continue to build their infrastructure, conduct terrorist acts, and spread propaganda. Even during the last stage — the general offensive — the insurgents continue stages one and two. This aspect of People’s War was well expressed by John M. Gates in the Journal of Military History in July 1990:

American conventional war doctrine does not anticipate reliance upon population within the enemy’s territory for logistical and combat support. It does not rely upon guerrilla units to fix the enemy, establish clear lines of communication, and maintain security in the rear. And it certainly does not expect enemy morale to be undermined by political cadres within the very heart of the enemy’s territory, cadres who will assume positions of political power as the offensive progresses. Yet all of these things happened in South Vietnam in 1975….

Flexibility, judgement, and comprehensiveness of methods are the keys to success. If the insurgents overestimate the weakness of the government and lose large-scale battles, they slip back into the earlier two phases and continue to work towards weakening the government for the next general offensive.

It bears repeating the primary goal of insurgents is political control. Military actions are only one tool for obtaining this control. As Mao cautions, guerrilla operations are just “one aspect of the revolutionary struggle.” The insurgent appeals to the hearts and minds of the people. He is, after all, one of them. Too much can be made of Mao’s “fish and sea” analogy. The insurgent is not just a fish that swims in the sea of the people: his purpose is to convert the sea to his purpose. He wants to walk on water. He employs any method to command the sea to his will. He would prefer ideological converts, true believers, but converts through terror are acceptable. Those who can’t be converted he ruthlessly kills. That his methods produce squeamishness among some in the West only accentuates their value to him.

As a strategy, People’s War is difficult but not impossible to counter. The United States defeated the Philippine insurrection in the first two decades of this century, and after World War II Great Britain put down a communist insurgency in Malaya. More famous, however, have been the stunning successes of People’s War: Mao’s victory over Japan and the Nationalists in the 1930s and ‘40s, and Ho Chi Minh’s victories over France and the United States in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Perhaps most unsettling was America’s defeat in Vietnam. How could the world’s foremost superpower lose to, in the words of General Richard G. Stilwell in 1980, a “fourth-rate half-country?”

There are no simple answers to America’s defeat, although Hollywood tells us otherwise. A theory still believed by some in the US military is a variation of the German “stab-in-the-back” legend of the Great War. Our hands were tied by meddling civilians who didn’t let the military fight and win the war. One American soldier is the equal of hundreds of pajama-clad midgets, or so it appears in the Rambo flicks. A wretched, dishonorable government also abandoned our POWs to the godless communists, now rescued several times over by Stallone, Chuck Norris, and other martial arts experts. That such films make money is an affront to the genuine sacrifices of Americans represented so tragically by the Vietnam War memorial in Washington.

Perhaps such sentiments seem out of place in a paper devoted to a dispassionate strategic analysis of America’s role in Vietnam. Yet my feelings are perhaps typical of the emotionalism that still surrounds this topic among Americans. A dispassionate critique from an American, let alone an American service member, may still be impossible; nevertheless, I’ll give it a shot.

The United States lost the war for several related reasons. First, we fought the wrong kind of war. As the Navy and especially the Air Force built up their nuclear forces, the army chaffed against its “New Look” and diminished role in the 1950s. Under Kennedy and Johnson, the Army had a new doctrine – Flexible Response – and an opportunity – the Vietnam War – to prove its worth. Vietnam was to be the proving ground for a revitalized Army.

The opposite proved to be the case because the Army pursued the wrong strategy. From 1965-68, when we sent more than half a million troops to Vietnam, the US Army tried to fight a conventional war against the Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA). As LTG Harry Kinnard, commander of the Army’s elite 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), put it, “I wanted to make them fight our kind of war. I wanted to turn it into a conventional war – boundaries – and here we go, and what are you going to do to stop us?” Obeying Mao’s teachings, the VC and NVA wisely avoided stand up fights. The Army responded with search-and-destroy operations to find, fix and kill the enemy. The goal was attrition through decisive battles, reflected by high body counts. Nothing illustrates the bankruptcy of American strategy better than the idea of body counts. In theory, a high body count means you’re killing the fish in the sea, without hurting the sea. In practice, a high body count is a measure of the success of the insurgents: they’re recruiting many fish to their cause. And in killing the fish, Americans poisoned the sea with defoliants, bomb craters, unexploded artillery shells, the list goes on. Americans were stuck in Catch-22 dilemmas: they had to destroy villages to save them, they had to destroy villagers’ crops while pursuing guerrilla bands. Such an approach flies in the face of Mao’s “Three Rules and Eight Remarks,” which exhibit a profound respect for the people and their property.

The Vietnam War Memorial in DC

After killing, or perhaps more often not killing, the guerrillas, the Army left, and the guerrillas regained control of the area. This did not disturb LTG Stanley Larson, who observed that if guerrillas returned, “we’ll go back in and kill more of the sons of bitches.” But the VC and NVA retained the initiative, had plenty of manpower, and time was on their side.

Why did the Army pursue such a faulty strategy? In part due to the legacy of World War II, particularly American experience in the Pacific. In island-hopping to Japan, Americans gained faith in massive firepower and lost interest in controlling land. The islands were a means to an end, not the end itself, and success could be measured in some sense by the number of Japanese casualties. Such was not the case in Vietnam, where control of the land was essential to winning the support of the people. Part of the Army’s problem was its lack of experience in counterinsurgency (or COIN) operations. Ronald Spector reports that in the 1950s, COIN operations were limited to four hours in most infantry training courses. What little was taught focused on preventing a conventional enemy from holding raids or infiltrating rear areas. But in the end, the Army fought the war it was trained to fight: a conventional war of maneuver and massive firepower. This worked well in Desert Storm, but failed in Vietnam.

In contrast to the Army, the Marines were far more aware of the nature of the war they were fighting, reports Andrew Krepinevich. They combined 15 marines and 34 Popular Force territorial troops (who lived in and provided security for a village or hamlet) into combat action platoons (CAPs). These CAPs sought to destroy insurgent infrastructure, protect the people and the government infrastructure, organize local intelligence networks, and train local paramilitary troops. In other words, they adopted traditional COIN tactics. But the Army ran the show in Vietnam, and its leaders rejected the Marines’ approach.

The Marines were not alone in their appreciation of the multidimensional aspects of COIN. Robert Komer’s Phoenix program also targeted the Viet Cong infrastructure, but the efforts of the CIA were not well coordinated with those of the military or the State Department, let alone the South Vietnamese. In fact Westmoreland refused to create a combined command to coordinate American actions with those of the South Vietnamese. The latter were an especially neglected resource. Admittedly, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was corrupt and at times incompetent, but part of the problem was caused by American mistraining and the Army’s contempt. In the 1950s, American military advisors trained ARVN to repel a conventional invasion from the north, using North Korea as a model. From 1965-68, the US Army gave ARVN the static security mission, judged to be of low importance by the Army. US advisors assigned to help ARVN recognized their careers were endangered: they would advance far quicker if they had “true” combat assignments. After years of neglect, ARVN was built up with billions of US dollars during Nixon’s Vietnamization policy (and that’s exactly what it was – a policy, not a strategy), but by 1969 the rot had gone too far. ARVN lacked a unifying national spirit, VC agents had penetrated the ranks, and the officers were thoroughly politicized. Our ally always thought we’d be there if they ran into trouble, but they didn’t understand how American government worked. As Ambassador Bui Diem explained in 1990, “Our faith in America was total, and our ignorance was equally total.” South Vietnam paid the price in 1975.

Could the United States have won the Vietnam War if we had followed a proper strategy? This question may be unanswerable and ultimately moot, but it’s worth discussing. First, one must admit the war may not have been worth winning. Hannah Arendt has stated the Vietnam War was a case of excess means applied for minor aims in a region of marginal interest. In retrospect this seems irrefutable, but in the climate of the Cold War and Containment Vietnam seemed a critical theater in which communist aggression had to be stopped. Second, one must admit the United States was not protecting a viable government in South Vietnam: we were trying to create one. But we were creating one in our image. We ignored the Vietnamese culture and destroyed their economy with our hard currency. Rear area troops with money to spend spread prostitution and drugs in the streets of Saigon. In short, we alienated the people instead of winning them over to our cause. The few people we did win over were terrorized and often killed by the Viet Cong. Even following a proper COIN strategy, victory would have taken 5-10 more years at least. With weak support from the American people, (the “Silent Majority” was silent due to its ignorance and ambivalence), which waned dramatically after Tet, we never had a chance in Vietnam.

The one strategy that would have succeeded for the United States, I believe, is Mao’s People’s War. We must not deceive ourselves: if free elections had been held as promised in 1956, Ho Chi Minh would have won and unified the country. His was the legitimate government; we were trying to overthrow that government and replace it with almost any non-communist regime. In that effort, we should have formed an alliance of military, state department, intelligence, and academic resources to educate Americans in Vietnamese language and culture. These experts, with a suitable, politically-indoctrinated military force to protect them, would win the hearts of the people. Our main weapons would be our ideas and the ideological fervor of our troops, whether civilian or military. Diplomacy and military strikes would be used to cut-off the flow of arms to the VC and NVA from the Soviet Union. The political infrastructure of the enemy would be targeted, including Ho Chi Minh himself.

But this is ridiculous. Our very arrogance blinded us to the war’s complexities. We attacked the symptoms of the disease – the guerrillas and NVA – without examining what caused the disease in the body politic. Our can-do attitude was reinforced by our military traditions and our pride in our nation as being more moral than the rest of the world. We became our own worst enemy as we tried to manage the war. The commitment was there (at least among the soldiers), the energy was there, the money was there, the technology was there -the strategy, intelligence, and leadership wasn’t. People’s War proved superior to search-and-destroy, the VC and NVA intelligence proved superior to ARVN and ignorant Americans, the brilliant Giap out-thought the dedicated but shortsighted Westmoreland. The Vietnam War was ultimately unwinnable.

In the aftermath of the American-led victory over Iraq in Desert Storm, many Americans predicted the stigma of our defeat in Vietnam had finally been exorcised from our minds. Such was not the case, nor is such a result even desirable. The “dreaded V-word,” as the London Times recently described it, is being whispered again in the endless corridors of the Pentagon. If this breeds an aversion to the use of military force, harm may result; but if it leads to more thought and a more subtle study of the efficacy of military force as applied under different conditions, the dreaded V-word will have served a useful purpose, and those names engraved on the Wall in Washington will not have died in vain.

War and Rumors of War

Dick Cheney Is Dead

BILL ASTORE

NOV 04, 2025

War and rumors of war dominate the headlines. Venezuela. Nigeria. Iran. Somalia. A “new Cold War” involving Russia and China. What are we to believe?

The events of the 62 years of my short life (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, peace dividends that never arrive, military budgets that keep soaring, U.S. domination of the world’s weapons trade, the National Security State as America’s fourth and arguably most powerful branch of government, and on and on) make me highly suspect of official narratives about any war, especially as those same Pentagon budgets soar and those same arms exports keep flooding the world in the (false) name of democracy.

Nevertheless, warmongers in our country continue to shout and bray for more war. Those who make the most noise are typically the furthest from the fighting. Typically, the closer you are to the fighting, the more you want it to stop. Especially if you’re doing the fighting. Consider Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front.” When the main character, Paul, a frontline grunt, goes home on leave, he realizes the blood-thirstiness of the REMFs is far different from the war he’s seeing at the front. (REMF, rear-echelon mother-fucker, is a colorful and meaningful military acronym.)

Often those who talk about war use the most bloodless expressions. So, for example, I’ve read that Ukrainians must “prosecute their war of defense,” helped by generous supplies of American-made weaponry. When I think of war, I think of the concrete. Blasted bodies, a poisoned environment, disease, dead animals, PTSD and TBI, moral injury, atrocities and war crimes (because wars always produce atrocity), and so on. Phrases like “help Ukraine prosecute their war of defense” strike me as Orwellian in the sense of his classic essay on politics and the English language. It sounds good and noble, but how ready are those who support Ukraine to join the cause in the trenches?

An American president now speaks of “the enemy within” and city streets as a training ground for U.S. military action. When everything is war, nothing is safe as the worst crimes and atrocities become possible.

As a young man, Cheney had “other priorities” than serving in the U.S. military. Later, the further he was from battle, the more hawkish he became.

Postscript: As I was writing this, I learned that Dick Cheney has died at the age of 84. NBC News described him as the “Iraq war architect,” as if he was a highly skilled and creative builder instead of a war criminal. A reader sent along a BBC headline that suggests there was “faulty” intelligence leading up to the Iraq war in 2003, as if Cheney had no hand in manufacturing a malicious and mendacious narrative of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Even warmongers like Cheney, proud of their mailed fists, get treated and fitted with kid gloves by a fawning media. Of course, Cheney, when he had an opportunity to serve in Vietnam, famously said he had other priorities.

Maybe the American people, collectively, need to say we have other priorities than waging war around the globe.

Should Senior Military Officers Consider Resigning?

Several Coordinated Resignations Based on Principle Could Make a Difference

BILL ASTORE

OCT 07, 2025

Should senior military officers consider resigning?

The short answer is yes—if they believe the orders they are given violate their oath to the U.S. Constitution.

In practice, however, resigning for cause is exceedingly rare. The military is a culture of conformity and hierarchy, where resignation is often seen as an act of rebellion—a threat to cohesion and discipline. Officers are taught to work quietly within the system, to suppress doubts, and to remain “loyal” to superiors and to the institution itself. Few are willing to resign openly on moral or legal grounds.

For senior officers, the decision to resign in protest is especially difficult. Colonel David Hackworth, one of the most decorated soldiers of the Vietnam era, resigned after concluding the war was unwinnable—not because he viewed it as unconstitutional. Earlier, General Harold K. Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff under President Lyndon Johnson, considered resigning in protest of the administration’s Vietnam policies but ultimately stayed, hoping to influence policy from within. He later regretted that decision, admitting he had lacked the moral courage to resign.

Both Hackworth and Johnson objected to how the war was fought, not to whether it was lawful. That distinction is crucial.

Senior officers today may likewise convince themselves that remaining in uniform allows them to do the most good—to temper reckless orders from within the system. Resignation, after all, feels like quitting. And there’s an unspoken incentive to stay: the lucrative post-retirement opportunities awaiting those who keep faith with the military-industrial complex.

Given the recent clownish and dangerous behavior of Trump and his defense war secretary, Pete Hegseth, one hopes that senior military leaders are at least preparing for the possibility of resignation—keeping their powder dry until a clear line is crossed. Arguably, that line may already have been crossed.

One resignation might not change much. But several coordinated resignations—anchored in principle—could. The question is whether today’s generals and admirals have the moral courage to do so when the moment arrives.

Trump and Hegseth appear to have neutralized much of the brass by flooding the Pentagon with money. But will those same leaders, drunk on budgets and contracts, have the courage to resist illegal orders and yet another series of wars launched on dubious grounds?

Already, Trump and Hegseth have issued extrajudicial orders—such as the recent killings of suspected smugglers on three speedboats in the Caribbean, ostensibly part of the “war on drugs.” They have deployed active-duty troops to U.S. cities under partisan pretexts that appear to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. And more attacks on Iran—without any declaration of war—may be imminent.

Given all this, there is ample reason for senior officers to consider coordinated resignations in protest. The question is whether they will summon the moral courage to do what is right—to uphold their oath by walking away.

Perhaps they could call it Operation Just Cause—an operation without bombs or killing, requiring that rarest of things: moral courage.

Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Vietnam War

My Interview with Dick Price at the LA Progressive

BILL ASTORE

MAY 16, 2025

Yesterday, I talked to Dick Price, a Vietnam War veteran, at the LA Progressive about the U.S. military, the Vietnam War, the all-volunteer military, media coverage, and why America just can’t stop making war.

When no one is held accountable for failure, when lies are used as the basis for killing, when war produces colossal profits for a select few, when Congress refuses to take responsibility for oversight, when war budgets keep climbing to the trillion dollar mark, it isn’t all that surprising that wars prove essentially endless as democracy withers.

U.S. Elites Learned Much from the Vietnam Defeat

W.J. Astore

To them, the right lessons; to everyone else, the wrong ones

We just marked the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Did American officials learn anything from the disastrous Vietnam War?

Saigon, April 1975

Of course they did. Just not the lessons you’d have wished they’d learned.

So, what did they learn?

  • They learned that wars can indeed last forever, but that Vietnam wasn’t the best “forever war” for the military-industrial complex because it became deeply unpopular and was disrupting cohesion within the military itself. The best forever wars are open-ended “wars” like the global war on terror. And perhaps a “new Cold War” with Russia and/or China. Wars that don’t involve the deployment of over half a million men (unless that “new” Cold War turns hot).
  • They learned to control the narrative. No more journalists traveling freely in war zones as in the 1960s in Vietnam. Journalists are now most often embedded in U.S. military units. Embedded reporters, dependent on the military for access and protection, know what they can and can’t say, even as they tend to sympathize with the troops they’re with.
  • They learned that forced conscription via a draft doesn’t work well for unpopular wars. So they transformed the military into an “all-volunteer” force. Draftees may well be resentful, rightly so, but volunteers? Too bad—they volunteered for this.
  • Along with “volunteers,” they learned to indoctrinate U.S. troops to be “warriors” and “warfighters” rather than citizen-soldiers. Warriors exist to fight wars, so shut up and blast away.
  • They learned to keep the American people isolated from war and its deadly effects. Recall that under Bush/Cheney, Americans weren’t even allowed to see flag-draped caskets. During Vietnam, war was in America’s living rooms during dinner, complete with body counts. Coverage of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere was sanitized, almost bloodlessly so.
  • They learned never to talk of sacrifice (except by those volunteer warriors) by the American people. Taxes aren’t raised in the name of war. There are no war bond drives. America’s leaders tell the rest of us to enjoy life, to visit Disney and to go shopping, while “our” warriors fight overseas.

Together with those “lessons,” they continue to preach “peace through strength,” attacking those who truly seek peace as misguided (at best) and treasonous (at worst). As ever, they tend to attack those who’d dare criticize the U.S. military as ungrateful backstabbers. And of course they consistently obscure the truth of how poorly wars like Iraq and Afghanistan were going while holding no one in the upper echelons responsible and accountable for rampant corruption and disastrous endings.

All these “lessons” ensured that Vietnam wouldn’t be the last example of hubris, folly, and atrocity, and indeed it hasn’t been. Until the right lessons are learned, expect future repeats, tragic variations on a theme of Vietnam.

Wars As Money-Laundering Operations

W.J. Astore

Even in Losing Wars, Somebody Always Wins …

“Fighting a war to fix something works about as good as going to a whorehouse to get rid of a clap.” — Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

I read Norman Mailer’s fine book about World War II, “The Naked and the Dead,” several years ago, though I’d forgotten the quote above until I ran across it again in an article by Andrew Bacevich at Harper’s in 2009.

Bacevich’s article was titled “The War We Can’t Win,” in which he critiqued and rejected President Barack Obama’s decision to “surge” in Afghanistan. As Bacevich wrote back in 2009:

What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing, that the United States requires, that justified such lavish attention? In Washington, this question goes not only unanswered but unasked. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. Today, as then, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Bacevich was right, of course. And once America pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, we were encouraged to forget about it, just as we were encouraged to forget about Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

If it doesn’t matter much to the U.S. when we lose wars, doesn’t that suggest the wars meant little to begin with? That there never truly were vital matters of national interest at stake?

The same was true of the Iraq War, as Bacevich describes it in the same article for Harper’s. This war, Bacevich writes, was “utterly needless” as “no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction [were] found, no ties between Saddam Hussein and the [9/11] jihadists established, no democratic transformation of the Islamic world set into motion, no road to peace in Jerusalem discovered in downtown Baghdad,” yet the U.S. was nevertheless hyping the success of the “surge” there from 2007 and how it should be applied to Afghanistan, an example of obtuseness and self-delusion that Bacevich said “is nothing short of obscene.”

He was right, of course, as both surges proved as fragile and reversible as weasel-worded General David Petraeus hinted they would be. Petraeus might be America’s best example of Grima Wormtongue from “The Lord of the Rings,” though of course there’s a lot of competition for that honor.

Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, political scientist, and Vietnam War veteran, criticizes U.S. leaders for their “failure of imagination,” for their crusading zeal, for their hubris, and for their tendency to substitute technique for sound strategy. He is right about all this, but someone always profits from war. Somebody always wins. And so perhaps the best way to understand these wars is to focus on the winners.

So, who won these wars? Certainly, the military-industrial complex won them. Every war, winning or losing, wise or unwise, strengthens the MIC by expanding its budgetary authority and scope of action. Military contractors, the merchants of death, especially profit from war, notably long “stalemated” ones like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. 

In a short video clip, Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange explained the purpose of the Afghan War which, as Bacevich mentions above, is inexplicable in terms of U.S. national interest:

A vast money-laundering operation that enriches oligarchs who profit from war, death, and mayhem: it makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Note too how Assange explains that the ultimate purpose here is to make war permanent, to make it normal, to make it unremarkable, even to make it the height of sanity.

This has happened and is happening. Today, Iraq and Afghanistan are largely forgotten in the U.S. and Europe. New fears are focused on bigger fish: Russia and/or China, even as the U.S. pummels Yemen. Few Western leaders are talking about peace; Europe is fixated on Russia even as America is more concerned with pivoting to Asia and doing the bidding of Israel in the Middle East.

And so the money-laundering continues.

A lesson here is to follow the money, especially when wars seem strategically stupid, because the people and forces in charge aren’t stupid—their priorities are just far different from our priorities.

And this is something Bacevich catches in a different context as he explains that the costs of war are not borne “by the people who inhabit the leafy neighborhoods of northwest Washington, who lunch at the Palm or the Metropolitan Club and school their kids at Sidwell Friends.” Indeed not. The costs are borne by the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and so on, as well as those U.S. troops who get caught waging these wars, and who likely come from small towns in Alabama and Texas and similar rural areas.

I’m Already Against the Next War

W.J. Astore

Reflections on Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan

I’ve been reading John Ketwig’s memoir “…and a hard rain fell: A GI’s true story of the War in Vietnam,” and it’s reminding me just how plain dumb, destructive, and duplicitous America’s wars have been since World War II.

America’s wars are always dressed up with a necessary, even allegedly noble, cause. In Vietnam, we had to stop communism and all those dominoes from falling. In Iraq, it was about WMD and stopping Saddam Hussein, “the next Hitler.” In Afghanistan, it was about vengeance for 9/11, then creating democracy and even helping women. (How about helping women in America? Never mind.)

Vietnam is nominally communist today—and a big trading partner of the U.S. and an ally of sorts against China. No dominoes fell. Iraq didn’t have WMD and Saddam wasn’t the next Hitler; he was merely a regional strongman and a former U.S. ally who got a little too big for his britches, especially for Israel. Afghanistan was a war in search of a clear mission and attainable goals. After twenty years of effort and roughly $2 trillion in expenditures, the U.S. replaced the Taliban with—the Taliban. (I heard Norman Finkelstein say this first.)

We’re always told versions of the same lie: We need to fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here. Communism had to be rolled back in Vietnam else commies would be landing in Manhattan. Iraq had to be pummeled and Saddam overthrown before WMD landed in Boston. Afghanistan had to be pacified and modernized before the Taliban enforced conservative Sharia law in Biloxi. 

None of this was true. The United States would have been perfectly safe without committing any troops to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In fact, the U.S. would have been far better off if those wars had never been fought. Certainly Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan would have been far better off if they’d never become free-fire zones for American munitions (including the poisonous Agent Orange in Vietnam and, more recently, depleted uranium and other poisons in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Now we’re hearing about a possible U.S. war with Iran, allegedly to stop that country from acquiring an atomic bomb. It’s OK for the U.S. to have more than 5000 nuclear warheads and for Israel to have 200 or so, but it’s not OK for Iran to have even one, because reasons.

The U.S. military, vast as it is, with a vision of global dominance, always needs enemies. Of course, it’s not simply the military but the whole military-industrial complex, the MICIMATT,* which needs war and conflict to sustain itself. 

I recently read “American War,” a powerful novel by Omar El Akkad. It imagines a second U.S. civil war starting roughly 50 years from now. It’s a fascinating book, well worth reading because it captures the horror of war, with all its atrocities, its massacres, its war crimes, and the deep wounds war leaves behind even among the most resolute survivors. John Ketwig’s book does the same as he recounts the fears and horrors of his year in Vietnam and the personal struggles he endured in coming to terms with what he’d seen and endured.

So, count me among those who are already against the next war, whether against Iran, China, or for that matter any other country. Sure, I think America needs to defend itself; I don’t think peace is going to break out spontaneously around the world; but I know for a fact that fighting constant wars is not a way toward greater peace and prosperity. Quite the opposite.

If you want to know what desperate and profoundly wounded war survivors are capable of, read “American War.” If you want to know what desperate and profoundly confused troops are capable of, read “…and a hard rain fell.” And ponder the continued propaganda here of the “good war,” the wonders of warriors and warfighters, and the repetition of slogans like “peace through strength,” a specific form of strength measured in kilotons and megatons of explosives, in massive body counts and military production figures.

Ask yourself: Is that “strength”? Are constant wars truly the path toward peace? How can we possibly be so dumb as to believe this?

MICIMATT: military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academe-think-tank complex. It employs millions of people and spends more than a trillion dollars a year. It’s not easily confronted. Nor is it easily contained, let alone curtailed.

Declaring Our Independence from War

W.J. Astore

“War is a madhouse”

It’s Independence Day in America, so it seems like a good day to declare our independence from the insanity of war.

Sadly, since the presidency of George W. Bush if not before, it’s become routine for U.S. commanders-in-chief to boast of having the world’s finest military in all of history. Obama did it routinely, and Biden recently said the same during his disastrous debate with Trump. Few Americans stop to think about the implications of boasting about having the world’s greatest military—is such a boast truly consistent with democracy, liberty, and freedom?

Certainly, empires rely on strong militaries. Think of the Roman Empire or the Mongol Empire, or the Third Reich (Empire) of Nazi Germany. Do we want to be like them?

Those empires lived by the sword (quite literally so with the Roman Empire) and died by it as well. Their militaries, I would argue, were also more effective than the U.S. one, which hasn’t won a major war since 1945, the latter with a lot of help from our “friends” like the Soviet Union. The Roman, Mongol, and German empires are no more, worn down in part through the constant costs and demands of war. We need to learn more from history than the “fact” that America’s military is supposedly the world’s best since forever and a day ago.

I’ve been reading Oriana Fallaci’s “Nothing, and So Be It,” in which she recounted her time reporting on the Vietnam War. Two conversations with U.S. troops in Vietnam caught my attention. On pages 22-23, she recounts a conversation with Army Captain Scher, during which Scher confesses his disgust with war: 

God, how disgusting war is. Let me say it—I’m a soldier. People who enjoy making war, who find it glorious and exciting, must have twisted minds. There’s nothing glorious, nothing exciting; it’s just a filthy tragedy you can only cry over. You cry for the man you refused a cigarette to and who didn’t come back with the patrol. You cry for the man you bawled out and who is blown to pieces in front of you. You cry for the man who killed your friends …

Later in the book, she interviews a Marine Lieutenant whose surname is Teanek (pages 174-75). Here’s what he had to say:

Teanek: “Men have been saying that [we should abolish war] for thousands of years, and with the justification that they’re abolishing war, they’ve soaked the greatest periods of their civilization in blood.”

Fallaci: “That’s no good reason to keep on doing it.”

Teanek: “Theoretically, you’re right, but in practice what you’re saying is very silly. It’s like convincing yourself—as I bet you do—that when you describe people dying in war you’re helping to abolish war. On the contrary. The more you see people who’ve been killed in war, the more you want to go on fighting wars: it’s a mystery of the human soul.”

It is indeed “a mystery of the human soul” why we humans persist in killing each other in such vast numbers through war. Of course, it’s partly because we glorify it, when we should recognize, as Fallaci does on page 187, that “War is a madhouse.”

I am sane!

One of my favorite scenes in any war film came in “The Big Red One,” a World War II movie by Samuel Fuller starring Lee Marvin as a grizzled Army sergeant of the 1st Infantry Division. It’s a scene in which U.S. troops liberate an insane asylum.

The unforgettable part of this scene for me is when one of the madhouse residents picks up a submachine gun and starts blasting away, crying “I am one of you. I am sane!”

We need to declare our independence from that.

“Fighting a war they did not believe in, a war they were ashamed of”

W.J. Astore

A 52-Year-Old Letter Says Much About America’s Failed Wars

A friend sent along an old Time magazine from May 8th, 1972, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed perusing. Back in the 1970s, I had a subscription to Time, but my old copies were long ago consigned to the trash. Anyhow, in reading the “Letters” section, I came across a stunning missive written by Oriana Fallaci, an Italian war correspondent who wrote for Europeo Magazine.

Fallaci in 1960, showing some serious attitude (Wiki)

Here’s what Ms. Fallaci had to say about the U.S. war effort in Vietnam:

As an Italian, as a longtime war correspondent in Viet Nam, as the author of a book on the Viet Nam War, I have to answer the sort of judgment made by the unnamed Rand Corp. analyst who said that the South could hold out against the North Vietnamese “unless the North Vietnamese are all Prussians and the South Vietnamese are all Italians.”

I assume that he refers to the fact that the Italian soldiers fought with total lack of enthusiasm during the second World War and particularly in its last phase. Yes, indeed they did. They showed the same lack of enthusiasm that the American soldiers have shown in Viet Nam. Many times, while following your GIs in combat, I have had the impression that I was seeing Italians and not Americans. Do you know why? Because both those Italians and those Americans were fighting a war they did not believe in, a war they were ashamed of.

She nails it. When you realize the war you’re fighting is a dishonest one, an unnecessary one, even one that is shameful, you generally don’t fight well. It doesn’t matter what nationality you are.

Ms. Fallaci’s book on the Vietnam War

When and what was the last war U.S. troops truly believed in, one that they weren’t entirely ashamed of? I think you’d have to go back to World War II, and of course even then more than a few U.S. troops had their doubts, as citizen-soldiers of a democracy are wont to have, because there’s no such thing as a “good” war.

Anyhow, note as well how the prediction of that Rand Corporation “expert” proved wrong. Instead of South Vietnam holding out against the north, it folded fairly quickly three years later in 1975. I guess its soldiers all fought like Italians and those of North Vietnam all fought like Prussians.

Waging war is a horrible thing—especially when the war one is called on to wage is false and shameful. Ms. Fallaci knew that.

Peace Hero Martin Luther King Jr.

W.J. Astore

MLK recognized the evils of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism

Martin Luther King, Jr., hero for peace.

It’s sad that the word “hero” is so often modified by or married to “war” in history. He’s a war hero, we say, without giving it too much thought. As if wars are somehow ennobling and sublime.

Waging peace is far more noble than waging war. MLK Jr. recognized this in his famous speech against the Vietnam War on April 4, 1967. Back in 2015, I posted this article on MLK and his warning that America was close to suffering a spiritual death in its constant warmongering. Today, we see America enabling genocide by Israel in Gaza with nary a complaint from those in power. Spiritual death, indeed.

*****

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a powerful speech (“Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence”) that condemned America’s war in Vietnam. Exactly one year later, he was assassinated in Memphis.

What follows are excerpts from MLK’s speech. I urge you to read it in its entirety, but I’d like to highlight this line:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

MLK called for a revolution of values in America. In his address, he noted that:

There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

MLK didn’t just have a dream of racial equality. He had a dream for justice around the world, a dream of a world committed to peace, a world in which America would lead a reordering of values in the direction of universal brotherhood.

Both of MLK’s dreams remain elusive. Racial inequalities and biases remain, though America is better now than it was in the 1960s in regards to racial equity. And what of a commitment to peace? Sadly, America remains dedicated to war, spending nearly a trillion dollars yearly on defense, Homeland Security, nuclear weapons, and “overseas contingency operations,” i.e. wars.

America has failed to dream the dreams of Martin Luther King, Jr., and we are the worse for it. (Bolded passages below are my emphasis.)

Excerpts from MLK’s Speech on Vietnam, April 4, 1967

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the — for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours…

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war…

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin…we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

Perhaps it seemed in 1967, even to MLK Jr., with all his experience to the contrary, that America could lead the world in a revolution of values, a pursuit of peace. MLK’s dream of such a revolution is dead, drowned in the vast profits of the merchants of death.