Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [41]
The United States needed to shed its shackles. “We see two alternatives,” Bundy added.
The first is to use our military power in the Far East and to force a change in Communist policy. The second is to deploy all our resources along a track of negotiation, aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved with no major addition to our present military risks.56
Both he and McNamara, Bundy told the president, favored the first alternative. They could hardly do otherwise. To concede that American military power was inadequate to the task of making the North Vietnamese behave would nullify claims that flexible response was enhancing the utility of force while reducing the moral impediments to its employment—in other words, that it represented an improvement over the strategy of massive retaliation that they openly disdained.
Instead, McNamara and Bundy had neatly removed one of the major obstacles to Taylor’s proposed coercive air campaign—the assumption that the United States needed first to establish a stable government in Saigon.57 All that remained was to find a convenient excuse for launching such a campaign.
This the Viet Cong obligingly provided on February 6, 1965, when they attacked Camp Holloway, the U.S. air base at Pleiku, killing eight Americans, wounding dozens more, and destroying ten U.S. military aircraft.
“Pleikus are like streetcars,” Bundy subsequently remarked. The key was to be ready to hop aboard when one came trundling along.58 Visiting Taylor in Saigon at the time of the Pleiku attack, Bundy was ready for his streetcar.
Within twenty-four hours he was cabling Johnson that, absent a “policy of graduated and continuing reprisal,” defeat in South Vietnam appeared “inevitable—probably not in a matter of weeks or perhaps even months, but within the next year or so.” To attempt a negotiated settlement was folly, amounting to “surrender on the installment plan.” Immediately at risk were not only “the international prestige of the United States” but also “a substantial part of our influence.”59 An opportunity to regain the initiative and turn things around was now presenting itself.
One point deserves particular emphasis here. For Bundy and others in the administration, the urge to act grew out of considerations unrelated to the crisis of the moment or even to Vietnam as such. The formal report rendered by the Bundy mission let the cat out of the bag. “We cannot assert that a policy of sustained reprisal will succeed in changing the course of the contest in Vietnam,” that report acknowledged. “What we can say is that even if it fails, the policy will be worth it.” The very act of bombing the North would demonstrate American will, “damp[ing] down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done.” Pain inflicted on the North Vietnamese would “set a higher price for the future upon all adventures of guerrilla warfare,” thereby increasing “our ability to deter such adventures.” In effect, the United States needed to bomb North Vietnam to affirm its claims to global primacy and quash any doubts about American will. Somehow, in faraway Southeast Asia, the continued tenability of the Washington consensus was at stake.60
Clambering onto his streetcar, Bundy found plenty of company already aboard. Within the administration, his own efforts, reinforced by those of Taylor and McNamara, had forged a solid majority in favor of escalation. On February 8, back in Washington and presiding over a meeting of the National Security Council, Bundy polled those in attendance and found that “without dissent, all agreed to act, that we should apply force against the North.” According to notes taken at the meeting, McNamara chimed in with the comment “that we should move forward and should keep going.”61 Soon thereafter, President Johnson gave his consent.
In this case, moving forward had a specific meaning. Declaring its determination to prevent further incidents like Pleiku, the Johnson administration decided to subject North Vietnam