Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [50]
In 1967 and again in 1968, just after the Tet Offensive that marked a dramatic turning point in the war, Shoup testified before Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the latter case, Senator Albert Gore, Democrat of Tennessee, posed what had emerged as the central question of the day: “What do we win if we win?” Fulbright had remarked earlier in the proceedings that “this war is supposed to prove that aggression doesn’t pay, not only in Vietnam, but everywhere else.” Success in Vietnam would, it was claimed, preclude similar challenges elsewhere. “If we win this war,” Fulbright continued, “and if we stay the course and if our will does not weaken, from now on all Communists are going to be good boys and there will be no more aggression. Isn’t that the theory?”
Shoup responded that even if the United States managed to prevail militarily—an unlikely prospect—it would achieve nothing of value. “I do not think that the gain, no matter how greatly embellished,” he told Gore, “will ever equal one one-thousandth of the cost.” Assume victory, Shoup said: “[W]hat is the reason, where is the proof, that the same situation wouldn’t break out within months in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Korea, and you could keep on going.” Vietnam was a limited war conducted against the backdrop of putatively unlimited obligations and informed by an assumption of inexhaustible resources. But the assumption was false: “[S]omeplace up the line,” Shoup argued, the United States was going to say, “ ‘it is too much for us,’ and at that spot, whether we like it or not, we are going to have to say, ‘we can’t help.’ ” Regardless of the Vietnam War’s immediate outcome, “there is no finality; no finish to this thing.” The logic ostensibly impelling the United States to make a stand in Vietnam held out the prospect of war without end.13
The longer the fighting in Vietnam dragged on, the more radicalized Shoup became. By April 1969, when the Atlantic published his essay “The New American Militarism,” Shoup might have passed himself off as a hard-core leftist. Fidel Castro himself would have found little in the essay with which to disagree.
The United States, Shoup now charged, had become “a militaristic and aggressive nation.” Here lay the ultimate explanation for why Americans found themselves in the “tragic military and political morass of Vietnam.” In describing the origins of this new militarism, Shoup suggested that there was plenty of blame to go around. Sharing in that blame were “pugnacious and chauvinistic” veterans groups; greedy defense contractors always keen to fatten their profit margins; a public deluged with manufactured images fostering a distorted understanding of combat; handsomely funded think tanks that fed “militaristic new philosophies into the Defense Department”; and, worst of all, generals eager to try out new toys, test young officers, or advance their own careers. For these groups, the phrase communist aggression served as an all-purpose justification for demanding more resources and more vigorous action. “Militarism in America is in full bloom,” Shoup concluded, “and promises a future of vigorous self-pollination—unless the blight of Vietnam reveals that militarism is more a poisonous weed than a glorious blossom.”14
Like a good marine, Shoup swung from the heels, holding nothing back. Whereas Fulbright sought to educate and influence, Shoup had a different purpose: to chastise