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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (766593)	12/4/2007 7:29:31 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

50 years that vietnam battle raged - the french lost; we lost The people who won the war in Vietnam are hardly mentioned amidst all the shouting. James Pinckney Harrison's ''The Endless War'' points to that remarkable omission and succeeds in redressing it.The outcome of 1975, he argues, was the result above all of ''the incredible perseverence and resilience of the Vietnamese Communists'' over more than 50 years. By drawing on French and American scholarship and the pamphlets, speeches and party documents of Vietnamese Communist leaders, he tells a heroic tale of courage, lifelong commitment and political brilliance. Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues founded the Vietnamese Communist party in 1930 and proceeded to develop a blend of anti-imperialism, nationalism, Confucian insistence on moral responsibility, programs of political and economic reform, and a mastery of organization surpassing that of all potential rivals. In the 1930's the Communists were hunted, jailed and executed by the French. But a remnant survived to lead a popular war of liberation from 1946 to 1954. Then, argues Mr. Harrison, who teaches history at Hunter College, the United States intervened to deprive the Communists of a victory they had won by their own efforts. During the American phase of the war in the 1960's and early 1970's the Vietnamese Communists endured horrendous casualties, but their morale never faltered. Their Tet offensive of 1968 was a psychological victory, although by the American military calculus of counting bodies it should have been a crushing defeat. Then came President Nixon's policy of Vietnamization, the withdrawal of the last American combat forces after the Paris accords of 1973, and the final Communist victory of 1975. Mr. Harrison quotes with approval the comment of Italian journalist Titziano Terzani that the Vietnamese Communist leaders who had prevailed after so long a struggle ''had an inner fire that made their lives an extraordinarily complete experience rather than an accidental one. And yet these same qualities, this capacity to overcome the natural and acceptable inclinations of man, seemed to me to lead the Revolution itself to the borders of inhumanity ... in the pit of my stomach I could not help finding all this simultaneously extraordinary and disturbing.'' Mr. Berman, a political scientist at the University of California, Davis, and no apologist for American behavior, does acquit President Johnson of the charge that he cowed his advisers into mindless conformity to his compulsive determination to win at any cost. By quoting at fascinating length from recently declassified documents in the Johnson Library at the University of Texas, he traces a battle of memoranda waged in the air-conditioned isolation of the White House. The details are new, especially concerning the skepticism and hesitancy of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, but the overall picture is familiar. We see Secretary of State Dean Rusk almost theological in his reverence for commitments against aggression; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara seeking hope in statistics and assuming without evidence that the enemy will obligingly abandon guerrilla tactics and meet American firepower head-on in conventional battle; Under Secretary of State George Ball warning prophetically of disaster and urging tactical retreat while there is still time; President Johnson afraid on the one hand of being seen as weak and on the other of allowing the war to escalate into direct conflict with China or Russia; and nearly everyone unable to define objectives or to think persistently about the consequences should the assumptions on which escalation was based be wrong. Mr. Ball was persistent. Mr. Bundy voiced strong momentary doubts. But the President wanted ''proof'' that escalation would not work. Those who planned a tragedy were not mindless optimists. They were trapped by a self-imposed necessity of committing ever more resources to an undefined goal. Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts in ''The Irony of Vietnam'' (1979), still the best single book on American policy, say that the goal was not losing, nothing more. Mr. Berman's microscopic study provides confirmation.