June 14, 2003

This book was recommended to me by Danius Maximus as the quintessential history of American hubris and self-delusion.  The Best and the Brightest has two major themes - the socio-political history of the American policy failures in Asia and the personal histories of the Americans who blundered, step-by-step into the quagmire of Vietnam. 

Halberstam's fundamental history lesson is that the emergence of post-colonial nationalism in Asia was an issue of nationalism, not ideology:  the fact that the nationalists in Vietnam were communists was an accident of history, not a Moscow-driven conspiracy.  Likewise, the fact the nationalists in China were communist was due mostly to Chiang Kai-shek being a failed nationalist, actually no nationalist at all, but rather a reactionary feudalist warlord rather than someone who could unify and lead a nation.  Having backed the wrong trend in China, America in Vietnam repeated precisely the same mistakes with the same flawed reasons and the same ideological blinders to reality. 

So Halberstam reduces the questions of "Who lost China?" and "Who lost Vietnam?" to the bedrock realism that neither country was "ours" to lose and anyone who thought so was at best a fool and at worst a demagogue.

=====================

The larger part of the book is not history, but rather biography.  The Best and the Brightest contains biographies and analyses of the decisions, justifications and personalities of every major player who participated in the chain of decisions leading from WWII to the commitment of U.S. military forces in 1961; the failure and self-deception of the "military advisor" policies; the move to extricate ourselves from the quagmire that was cut short by Kennedy's assassination; and the final collapse of any rational policy but military force under first Johnson and then Nixon.  This history of personalities is what makes The Best and the Brightest applicable to our current situation.

The parallels between Vietnam and Iraq are to be found in the character of the "intellectuals" who guided both policies.  In the Kennedy administration, these were people like McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara etc.  Most of whom were deeply frightened by the excesses of the McCarthy era, as indeed the entire foreign policy establishment was.  They had to be "tough" -- because they were afraid of the political right.  And that toughness expressed itself in their embrace of the delusions of an ideological struggle with a monolithic international communist conspiracy.  Having swallowed that poison, all attempts at rational policy were doomed.

In the Bush administration, the "intellectuals" were provided from the neo-conservatives, the second-string players who were too young, too inexperienced and too shabbily lower-class to make onto Kennedy's "establishment" team.  So they had to bide their time in government until Ronald Reagan had destroyed the last tattered shreds of pluralism in the federal government and the bureaucracy became safe for shape-shifting ideologues and policy saboteurs like Pearle, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Ledeen, et al ad nauseum. 

The distinction to be drawn between the neocons of today and the anti-communist liberals of the Kennedy era is the nature and style of the ideological hemlock each group consumed.  Among the anti-communist liberals, the poison was forced on them by their political opponents and it tainted their view of reality unto disaster.  The neocons, however, have spent twenty years cooking up the most virulent toxins imaginable and forcing them down their rivals throats.  In the process, they succumbed to the delusion that it was not really poison but medicine and perhaps they should take some, too.  The end result is the same in both cases -- delusion and hubris leading to disaster.

=====================

The big difference between Vietnam and Iraq is how we got our foot stuck in the respective buckets.  In Vietnam we slowly backed into the war, deluded ourselves about the nature of the nationalist unification under the communists and constructed puppet regimes which we propped up as "the real nationalists."  Much like we dubbed the feudalist reactionaries in China as the "Nationalist" party.

Actually, the musical-chairs governments from Diem through the Thieu/Ky regime were all throwbacks to feudalism and colonial rule.  And that was the real problem. In Vietnam we backed a series of governments that lacked legitimacy.  And no amount of military power could correct that fundamentally political problem.

Iraq is quite different.  The causus belli was fabricated as a sop to domestic political opinion because the Bush regime gave way to panic and cowardice in the days immediately after 9/11.  Instead of considering the American centrality in world affairs and how to assume world leadership in strengthening civil society and confronting terrorism, the shabby  hacks and second-rate ideologues of neoconservatism decided this was their opportunity to extinguish the "Vietnam syndrome" by charging headlong into the quagmire instead of slowly backing into it.  So they decided a terrorist crime was an "act of war" and proceeded to provide the war -- modeled on the "war on drugs" no less. 

=====================

The villain of Halberstam's piece is Walt Whitman Rostow, a character who shared many characteristics (but not the calculated deceit, cowardice and penchant for bureaucratic back-stabbing) of the present crop of neocon hawks.  Halberstam sums up Rostow's flaws in a telling passage:

"But there was a sense of unease about Walt, part of it personal, part of it professional, a feeling that for all Walt's talent, wit, brilliance, something was missing… That feeling would deepen as Rostow went from virtual fellow traveler to militant anti-Communist ideologue, an uneasiness at the facility with which he adapted to fashion, without perhaps even knowing that he was doing it.  This sense would heighten among some of his colleagues when they noticed, in the days of the Kennedy Administration, that Rostow sounded a little too much like the President, and grew even stronger when during the subsequent Administration he began to sound like Lyndon B. Johnson, employing the rough, tough language of the Ranch.  It was, finally, a sense that behind all that bounciness and enthusiasm, perhaps Rostow did not know who he was, that in the eagerness of the poor Jewish immigrant's son to make it, in the big leagues and with the Establishment, he had lost sight of what was Rostow and what was the Establishment, or perhaps knowing what was Rostow, he wanted to forget it."

This is exactly the sort of shape-shifting self-delusion that predominates among the current neocons.  Having repeatedly abandoned their past -- as Trotskyites, as "liberals," as anything other than what is expedient for their momentary self-advancement -- they lack the ability to examine ideas critically.  Instead, the world becomes a mere rhetorical device and reality is something to be avoided as long as glibness and bullying suffice. God save us from these phony wannabe tough guys.

And so, we journey relentlessly into quagmires of wars past...

=====================

But the historical parallel for Iraq is not Vietnam.  There are sharp similarities with Vietnam in the arrogant self-delusion of presidential advisors and cabinet members, but the political realities of Vietnam's emergence as a modern nation tell us nothing about what Rumsfeld so triumphantly called the "Battle of Iraq."  So the lefties and peaceniks are a little deluded themselves as they dust off the Vietnam rhetoric of their salad days.  Iraq is not Vietnam.  Would to God that it was.  At least there was an exit strategy in Vietnam. 

No, the historical parallel with the most to tell us about our current predicament is not Vietnam -- it is the First World War.  And the United States of America is committing the same blunders as scuttled the Austro-Hungarian empire and drove the Kaiser in disgrace and defeat to Holland.  But that is another tale and requires another book.

So read Halberstam to understand the delusions of policymakers and how they become captives of the internal logic of a war.  He tells a powerful tale of how once the military becomes engaged in a shooting war, the civilian leadership can do little but hang on for the ride:

"At the very least, it turned out that [McNamara] had controlled the military only as long as we were not in a real war and that the best way for civilians to harness generals was to stay out of wars.  That wisdom would come later."

How long will we wait for wisdom in the present circumstance, Secretary Rumsfeld?

=====================

Published in 1972, when the Vietnam war was clearly lost but before the U.S. was fully committed to withdrawal, The Best and the Brightest casts an important light on one aspect of current history.  It details the systematic self-destruction of the "Eastern Establishment" as a player in national and foreign policy.  The emergence of the U.S. as a superpower occurred under the guidance and direction of a political class, now defunct and extinct, known as the Eastern Establishment or more usually simply "the establishment."  Bi-partisan, elitist, patrician and the offspring of the commercial aristocracy that emerged in the latter half of the 19th century, the establishment provided the people like Averill Harriman, the Dulles brothers, Nelson Rockefeller, Arthur Slessinger (Sr. and Jr.), John Kenneth Galbraith, Dean Acheson, Henry L. Stimson and others who shaped and guided American policy from the aftermath of the First World War into the late 1960's.  By the end of the Vietnam era, they had all been dragged off to the knacking yard, never to grace the halls of government again.

The Kennedy administration began with the selection of a bipartisan collection of the next generation of the establishment.  Dean Rusk being perhaps the best example.  Honorable, upright, principled, dedicated to service.  Many from Groton, the cream of the Eastern prep schools.  Rhodes scholars.  Later, as things got stickier, Kennedy reached back to the first generation of the establishment and promoted Averill Harriman from "roving ambassador" (really a sop) to Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs -- a sign that Vietnam had moved from the back burner to the front.  These are the people Carl Oglesby would later dub the "Yankees" in his analysis of "The Yankee and Cowboy War."

Nowadays, the Cowboys, the Western and Southern interests promoted by Nixon's Southern Strategy, dominate -- totally.  The Bush administration (like every administration since Reagan, the quintessential Cowboy) makes not even the slightest nod to bipartisanship. The very concept of acknowledging other political interests is anathema.

Which is curious when you think about it.  Kennedy's election was not a mandate.  He was, for all practical purposes, marginally a minority president.  As such, he opened his administration to a bipartisan cross-section of the establishment, admittedly the anti-communist liberal portion, but bipartisan nevertheless.

The disaster of Vietnam (in Halberstam's view, entirely the result of the lingering effects of McCarthyism and the delusions which enabled the Cold War) destroyed the Eastern Establishment as a political force in American politics.  Instead, Nixon's Southern Strategy laid the groundwork for absorbing the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party into the Republican fold -- the Cowboy alliance.  Jimmy Carter's election was the last gasp of the establishment at selecting a president and he went down under the repeated blows of the heirs of McCarthy:  the right-wing hawks operating through the Committee On The Present Danger, recently renamed as The Project for a New American Century.

This reactionary revival of all that was wrong about the Cold War carried the day in the late seventies, destroyed the last vestiges of establishment power and created the intellectual and ideological vacuum now known as neo-conservatism.  So here we go again, relentlessly into the past.  Instead of the boogeyman of an International Communist Conspiracy directed from Moscow Central by demonic Marxist-Leninists, we have the boogeyman of International Islamist Terrorism directed from Mecca by shadowy and elusive enemies like Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. 

But this time we won't make the mistake of backing slowly into the quagmire as those sissy-pants elitists of the Kennedy era did.  Nosiree.  We're going to be real men about it and jump into the quicksand head-first.  First Afghanistan, then Iraq.  Next Syria and Iran, maybe both at the same time.  Perhaps France as well, what the heck.  No sissies here.  Well, maybe that Colin Powell is a little bit of a pansy, but you get the picture.  Hairy-chested brutes pounding their chests, no gentlemen allowed.  Real men.  Tough.  Brutal.  Deaf.  Blind. Deluded.