Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [45]
By 1965, projecting American power no longer meant choosing between covert-style “dirty tricks” and all-out nuclear war. New concepts and capabilities abounded, providing a panoply of additional options: limited strategic bombing employed as a method of signaling or suasion; conventional combat emphasizing technologically enhanced firepower and mobility; theories of counterinsurgency, pacification, and nation building; and innovative new approaches to covert action, among them a secret program for liquidating Viet Cong cadres that came to be called Operation Phoenix.
Beginning that summer, U.S. forces flooded into South Vietnam, the American troop presence in that country eventually exceeding half a million. In the ensuing years, flexible response faced its most demanding test. It failed that test ignominiously.
No single factor can adequately explain why the event that Americans call the Vietnam War occurred. A profound ignorance of Vietnamese history and the legacy left by European colonialism; Washington’s insistence on seeing communism as monolithic; the ostensible lessons of Munich and the influence of the so-called domino theory; the perverse political impact of domestic anticommunism; a civil-military relationship crippled by mistrust and dishonesty; the limited abilities of key advisers like Taylor compounded by the hubris of others like Bundy and McNamara; Johnson’s fear of being the president who “lost” Vietnam, along with a host of other private insecurities besetting the president of the United States: All of these played a role.
Yet there was also this: In an obscure corner of Southeast Asia about which most Americans knew little and cared less, the survival of the Washington rules was seemingly at stake. By 1965, America’s inability to impose its will on Vietnam threatened the underpinnings of U.S. global leadership. As viewed from Washington, American credibility was on the line. If Viet Cong insurgents and their North Vietnamese backers got away with defying the United States, then others might be similarly tempted. Enemies would be emboldened while nations in the habit of taking their marching orders from Washington might become less inclined to do so. With a strategy of global presence, power projection, and interventionism no longer guaranteeing success, alternative approaches to national security strategy might even gain a hearing at home, with basic strategy no longer taken as given. To those whose interests were served by preserving that strategy, this was an intolerable prospect. So among the explanations for the Vietnam War we can add this one: It was a war fought to sustain the Washington consensus.
In 1961, the “best and brightest” had assumed ownership of that consensus. Determined to remove any doubt as to who was in charge, they moved quickly to assert unquestioned control. Dissatisfied with the means available, they sought to devise new and more flexible instruments of power. Beginning in 1965, they put their handiwork to the test in Vietnam, the brush-fire war that, in their own minds, loomed large as a test of American global leadership. To their considerable dismay, they soon discovered that efforts to douse the fire produced the opposite effect. In attempting to snuff out a small war they produced instead a massive conflagration. Determined to demonstrate the efficacy of force employed on a limited scale, they created a fiasco over which they were incapable of exercising any control whatsoever.
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THE CREDO RESTORED
For a time, the Vietnam War threatened to discredit the Washington rules. Adherence to the American credo and the sacred trinity, as interpreted by Kennedy, Johnson, and their advisers, had produced unmitigated disaster. Washington itself seemingly hovered on the brink of sanctioning a serious debate over basic national security strategy. Heresy enjoyed a brief vogue.
That moment