Argument Without End, by Robert McNamara

Discussion in 'Non-Fiction Books' started by dirtydog, Mar 28, 2010.

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    McNamara, Robert, Argument Without End, PublicAffairs, New York, 1999, 479 pages.
    Co-authors: James Blight, Robert Brigham, Thomas Biersteker and Herbert Schandler.

    In the period 1995 to 1998, Robert McNamara, former U.S. Secretary of Defense for John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, travelled to Hanoi with other prominent American former government leaders and academics to discuss the VIetnam War: why did it happen, and how could it have been prevented. McNamara's group spoke with former Vietnamese leaders including Vo Nguyen Giap, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh and Nguyen Co Thach, trying to identify missed opportunities on both sides that could have prevented or shortened the war.

    Primary period of concern is 1961 to 1968 (Kennedy and Johnson administrations) but there is some coverage of other periods from 1945 to 1960. There is little coverage of events during the Nixon and Ford administrations (1969 - 1975).

    Several points are raised by the North Vietnamese which ought to be familiar to students of the subject:
    - In 1946 Ho wrote the U.S. President several times asking for assistance in establishing a Vietnamese state free of French control, and received no response.
    - the Vietminh/French war from 1946 to 1954 was supported by the U.S., mostly so that France would support U.S. interests in postwar Europe. U.S. aid compromised 80% of French military spending in Indochina from 1950 onwards. For this reason the Northern leadership considered the U.S. to be a hostile, neo-colonialist, imperialist power.
    - the North Vietnamese distrusted the Chinese (Chou En Lai), and to a lesser extent the Russians (Vyacheslav Molotov), who they felt bullied them into giving up half the country in 1954.
    - the 1954 Geneva Agreement provided for a unification election in 1956. However the state of South Vietnam, led by Ngo Dinh Diem but created and funded by the U.S., refused to hold the election.
    - North Vietnam restrained the southerners from launching an insurgency in the period 1954 to 1958. In January 1959 the Lao Dong (Vietnam Workers Party) approved Resolution 15 which approved armed struggle in the south. The National Liberation Front (for South Vietnam) was officially formed in December 1960.

    A major theme of the book is missed opportunities. For example, in 1962 the North Vietnamese government suffered from a case of not letting the left hand know what the right hand was doing. Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan, in the Politburo, hoped that the Geneva Agreement on Laos of July 1962 would be useful to help the United States accept a neutral government in South Vietnam. They did not so inform their foreign minister, Ung Van Khiem, and Khiem took a confrontational stance when meeting with U.S. State Department diplomat Averill Harriman just after the Laos Agreement was signed. This reinforced Kennedy's belief that a neutral government in South Vietnam would be impossible (pages 125-129). The book has many examples of this type of diplomatic failure or missed opportunity for a negotiated settlement.

    McNamara's analysis is long on exposition of the positions of North Vietnamese leaders, but spends little time on the significant, and in some cases heroic resistance of South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians to the North Vietnamese army, especially in the period 1973 to 1975 when American military supplies to South Vietnam were radically reduced by Gerald Ford and the U.S. Congress. When the spring 1975 NVA offensive occurred it was well supplied with tanks, trucks and artillery supplied by Russia (1).

    McNamara reaches several conclusions which are debatable.
    There is no evidence that the South Vietnamese would ever have been able to accomplish on their own what they failed to achieve with massive American assistance. The level of congressional funding was irrelevant to the final outcome.
    The [possible] achievement of a military victory by U.S. forces in Vietnam was indeed a dangerous illusion. At no time... would it have been possible at acceptable cost -- in terms of American and Vietnamese lives lost and without the risk of war with China and Russia -- to achieve a military victory in Vietnam... When U.S. support was removed, the inevitable results could have been predicted, whether in 1964, 1968, or 1973. (pp. 367-368)
    And yet, I have a vision of massive numbers of Russian tanks rolling over the South Vietnamese army in 1975, at Ban Me Thout, at Nha Trang, at Xuan Loc, and just outside Saigon. Russia supplied the tanks, and the U.S. did not prevent that supply. These same T34 tanks were decisively defeated by South Vietnamese M48 tanks backed by U.S. airpower at Quang Tri in 1972 (2).

    North Vietnam was well supplied and had good generals, South Vietnam had been betrayed by Gerald Ford (by refusal of military supplies) and had mediocre generals. Russian tanks outnumbered American tanks in 1975. Inevitable results? I don't think so.
    ****
    (1) For an interesting treatment of this period, see Richard Nixon's book, No More Vietnams.
    (2) See Guenter Lewy and Denis Warner, Certain Victory: How Hanoi Won the War, Oxford University Press, 1978, 578 pages.
     

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