The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [226]
The grander folly was to reverse the conduct of the war only halfway—that is, by taking out the Americans while maintaining the strategy of increasing punitive pressure from the air (or “negative reinforcement,” as it was called). Apart from its domestic purpose, disengagement on the ground would have made sense only if the objective it had been intended to achieve had been given up at the same time.
Withdrawal of combat troops is an unusual way to win a war, or even to force the way to a favorable settlement. Once started, it could not easily be halted and would, like escalation, build its own momentum and, as forces dwindled, become irreversible. Understandably bitter, the American military saw it as precluding success and, since they had small confidence in Vietnamization, making even a tenable settlement unlikely. It had become necessary because the idea that the war could be fought without arousing the public ire had proved an illusion. Nixon and Kissinger, for all their hard-headed calculations, were apparently victims of another illusion. They appear to have thought that American withdrawal from ground combat could be accomplished without weakening South Vietnam’s already infirm morale and without re-affirming the determination of the North. Of course it did both.
Reduction of effort does not signal to the enemy stern and determined intentions, but rather the reverse, as in the case of General Howe’s evacuation of Philadelphia. American colonists saw in that departure a trend that was drawing the British away, and knew they need make no terms with the Carlisle Peace Commission. Hanoi received the same message. When Nixon announced the withdrawal program in June 1969 and the first American contingent of 25,000 sailed for home in August, the North Vietnamese knew the contest would end in their favor. Whatever the cost, they had only to hold out. As if in recognition, Ho Chi Minh, after half a century’s struggle, died in September.
At home, Nixon’s plan failed to recognize that something more than distress at casualties was active in the dissent; that many people felt a sense of wrong in the war, a violation of the way they felt about their country; that although protest would subside for a while with the return of troops, the deeper feeling was a corollary of the war itself and would grow stronger with continued belligerence.
In its assured belief that the Americans, like the French, would lose the war at home, Hanoi remained intransigent. In anger and frustration, the United States turned to “negative reinforcement.” Plans for a “savage blow” or a “decisive blow” or the “November option,” as it was variously called, were drawn. Blockade would be established, harbors, rivers and coastal waters mined, dikes broken, Hanoi carpet-bombed. “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” Kissinger said in the course of the planning. He was correct in that everything has a breaking point; the test is the degree of force required. Faced by the objections of civilian analysts who argued that the proposed measures would not significantly reduce the North’s capacity to fight in the South, and by fear of awakening what Kissinger called the “dormant beast of public protest,” the November option was called off.
Frenzied Vietnamization was pursued with ARVN doubled in numbers and gorged with arms, ships, planes, helicopters, more than a million M-16 rifles, 40,000