Remember all that McCain campaign rhetoric about how Obama’s August 2007 statement on the need for sporadic pursuits of Al Qaeda into Pakistan without prior diplomatic notice showed that he was an irresponsible loon who should never be commander-in-chief? (and a few Democrats sounded off as well before Obama won the primaries)
Well just look at what’s been happening on the Bush-Rumsfeld watch for the last four years, as is hardly surprising given the Bush Doctrine (despite the administration’s inconsistencies in its application) on apprehending terror suspects. The policy of mounting covert missions against terror teams across national borders as required is one that I even find fairly sensible in countries such as Pakistan where Musharraf is stuck between the political difficulties of alienating voters who support al Qaida if he actively cooperates and the fact that al Qaida would depose him if they could.
Highly-publicised attacks by US forces across the border from Iraq into Syria last month and from Afghanistan into Pakistan’s tribal areas in September make up only a small proportion of operations carried out, almost all of them in secret.
The freedom of special forces to go into other countries at short notice, without needing to go through the time-consuming bureaucratic decision-making normally involved in Washington, was approved in a 2004 classified executive order – “al Qaida network exord” – by the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
It came after a series of botched missions, in particular in East Africa, in which there was a failure to inform in advance the US ambassador to Kenya. As a result, Rumsfeld effectively ceded control to the CIA.
What is somewhat more surprising is that apparently Bush hasn’t even been making case by case decisions on such incursions. Having the CIA in oversight of special forces for such sorties makes some sense, but wouldn’t the expectation be that the president would still be the one making the “go” decision?
IOKIYAR spin in 3-2-1…
It’s not a sensible policy. It’s Operation Phoenix all over again. If Obama continues this tactic he’s a fool.
It was a fiasco in Vietnam too. Johnson and Nixon exerted no influence over Operation Phoenix as it lurched out of control into the swamps of Vietnamese vendetta politics.
It’s time for the Dems to set up a new Church Committee. Some of these idiots need to be sent to gaol.
Greg Sheridan had already rewritten history, even before this latest revelation.
I share Katz’s concerns about the tactic.
Does any-one really believe that because the leader has changed the US will abandon its Imperial strategy? Wanton killing of “enemies” is the American way,has been since they slaughtered the “Indians”. They have continued as they began; genocidal religious fanatics with all the delusions of God’s chosen people.
Huggy
Glad to see I am not alone in my assessment of Obama.
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts11102008.html
Roberts is right; the change that is coming is the end of the American empire. Obama may be able to prop it up a little longer but it is over. It’s the Iranian people I worry about, they may well be caught in the death throes of the beast.
Huggy
For younger readers, “Operation Phoenix” was a covert US operation during its Vietnam War, designed to identify and assassinate NLF (Viet Cong) leaders in South Vietnam. “Operation Phoenix” became notorious. The Church Committee was a Congressional committee that investigated various dubious CIA operations. You can tell a polity is in serious trouble when open hearings investigate one of its principal “intelligence” organisations.
“Operation Phoenix” in some ways replicated the covert practices of the NLF in the late 50s and early 60s, when assasination of Govt officials and village chiefs was one of the modus operandi employed in the early years before more commonly small-scale guerilla attacks on army and police outposts were mounted.
Katz may tell us more.
And nobody was in Cambodia either, including Colonel Kurtz
John Kerry was, apparently – seared, I tell you – seared.
Have I shown you my hat?
Then again, Katz, these raids may be the modern equivalent of Operation Claret: the secret cross-border raids into Indonesia carried out by British and Australian special forces during the 1960s Confrontation. Claret is now generally regarded to have been quite a success (and perfectly legitimate, given Indonesia’s raids in the other direction).
Also, I’m aware that some modern historians — I’m sorry, I don’t have a reference to hand at the moment — have been re-examining the Phoenix program with access to recently-declassified documents, and concluding that it was rather more successful, and discriminate, than it was made out to be during the 1970s.
My point is: we simply aren’t in a position to judge whether these raids against al-Qaeda have been “fiasco” or not without more information.
The situation between Indonesia and Malaysia is quite different from that on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Very few Malaysians yearned to become a part of Indonesia. Confrontation was simply territorial war fought at a very low level of intensity.
The ethno-cultural situation in the A-P region is quite different and very volatile. These US raids aren’t just against “al Qaeda”. They are also against the Taliban. The US will run out of patience and money long before Pashtuns give up on their determination to help their brothers against a common enemy.
Those “declassified documents” are part of the stream of lies that kept the Phoenix Program afloat for years. The operatives on the ground, i.e, Snepp, Stockwell, McGehee, deForrest and even Polgar knew better than the glowing lies they agreed to write before they concluded that their careers in the CIA weren’t worth protecting.
Then they started writing books which told the truth as they saw it.
Right, Katz. So your solution to Afghanistan is … what exactly?
No doubt you’ll tell me: a negotiated political solution involving the Taliban. And that would be fair enough — just about everyone involved with the conflict, including many senior military figures, agree that this is the only way to resolve it ultimately.
But you won’t get there while the enemy continue to think that they can get everything they want in the long run, without any need for compromise, because “The US will run out of patience and money long before Pashtuns give up …”
And you certainly won’t have any chance of a positive outcome if you insist that the US and other Western forces must just sit back passively and wait to be attacked.
I am not aware of anyone ever having won a war by that strategy.
I am puzzled that this could possibly be a surprise to anyone. It was quite obvious that such operations commenced in about December 2001/January 2002.
Certain events in Sudan, ladies and gentlemen, are they not recalled?
As for the comments on ‘Phoenix’, which is a mistranslation of Phung Hoang, they reflect completely obsolete views which are also quite false.
As early as 1977, the noted Vietminh and Vietcong leader Madame Nguyen Thi Dinh told Stanley Karnow that “We never feared a Division of troops, but the infiltration of a couple of guys into our ranks created tremendous difficulties for us.’ General Tran Do described Phung Hoang as “extremely destructive” and Nguyen Co Thach, the Vietnamese Foreign Minister after 1975 admitted that Phung Hoang “wiped out many of our bases” in South Vietnam. (See S. Karnow, Vietnam: A History, Viking Press, New York, 1983 pp.600-601).
In translated lecture notes I have of an address to the NVA staff school in 1977, General Giap noted much the same sort of view.
On top of the crushing defeat the Vietcong suffered during Tet 1968, General Tran Van Tra, another Vietminh veteran who was VC Commander of the Mekong Delta in 1963 and who planned and led the attacks on Saigon in Tet 68, recalls in his 1982 history published in Hanoi that Phung Hoang inflicted “large losses in materiel and manpower, especially cadres at various echelons, which clearly weakened us.” According to him (and he was running the operations in the Mekong delta) Tet broke the back of the Vietcong and Phung Hoang was another heavy blow against the already shattered Vietcong infrastructure.
Still believing and repeating forty-year old fables about Phung Hoang when the historical reality is now very well researched, documented and published from what was the other side at the time seems a little silly.
MarkL
canberra
You guessed wrong, Paulus.
Nato and the Americans will bug out of Afghanistan out of sheer exhaustion, like they did out of Somalia.
That is, unless Karzai is taken out by one or other of the groups who hate him. If that happens, the US will feel compelled to go in hard … god help everyone.
Stockwell, Snepp, McGehee, senior figures in the CIA in Vietnam all agree that Operation Phoenix was an ideal recruiting sergeant for the Viet Cong.
Phoenix’s assassins couldn’t kill them fast enough.
Only an idiot tallies war by means of a body count.
The question to ask about Afghanistan and the Pakistan border areas is who benefits from a war there? Send in Crusader troops and every-mans hand and rocket launcher will be activated. (As in Iraq) Ask the Russians, the British and all the rest. Trouble is the US cannot afford to buy off the Taliban, they have enough trouble funding the buy-off of the Sunnis in Iraq.
As for sitting back and waiting for the attack – this is just the same old
“evil Vietnamese” arguments applied to the Afghanis that I heard 40 years ago. Now US tourists wander happily in Vietnam and the “evil” has gone.
Again; qui bono?
Huggy.
Apologies. Forgot the reference:
Tran Van Tra, Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B2 Theatre, 5 Vols (Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, 1982)
Copies of Vol 5 (’Concluding the Thirty-Years [of] War’ are available ex US ARMY FBIS translations (CD only) on Abebooks at US$4.00.
Katz, we now have the full history of Phung Hoang from both sides. The Vietnamese against who it was aimed regarded it as successful and very dangerous. While the forty year old myths and fables are still out there, serious people will surely do the research and examine the facts from both US and Vietnamese archives, rather than believe old fables.
If both Giap and Tran (both formidable men with deeply impressive war records) thought Phung Hoang was both effective and highly dangerous to their war aims and commands respectively, I’ll happily accept their professional assessments!
There is a very good reason we study Giap.
MarkL
Canberra
They didn’t say it was successful, they said it gave them military problems.
Please observe nuance.
So, just to be clear, Katz: you want the West to simply wash its hands of Afghanistan and walk away right now? Let the Taliban re-take power (or full-scale civil war re-commence) and let al-Q back in to re-establish bases and training camps? It’s all just so futile that we should concede defeat immediately?
It’s surprising you seem to think this. You had made some good points on the running of the war on other threads — such as the valid observation that the Howard government inexplicably failed to obtain any sort of Australian involvement in NATO strategy-making.
This implied, to me, that you were in favour of the war at a broad level, but just thought that some aspects of it had been mis-managed up till now. Evidently I was wrong about that.
Cui bono, Huggy? You do, for one. The risk of terrorist attack in the West is lessened while terrorist organisations do not hold secure training bases in Afghanistan.
But I’m sure that wasn’t the answer you were looking for. I can see you’re just itching to unload a conspiracy theory on us concerning the Afghanistan war, so why don’t you enlighten us?
I just hope it’s some new and entertaining conspiracy theory, rather than the old chestnut about the gas pipeline, that has not been built and will not be.
Nuance indeed!
No, sorry, Katz. Go and read the references. They said it was successful in doing what it was intended to do, which was to disrupt Vietcong infrastructure and capitalise on the US-ARVN victory at Tet. It stopped Vietcong recruiting because they could not tell who was genuine and who was an infiltrator. Then it made them start looking at each other when anything went wrong for therm – it shredded their morale and their operational effectiveness. Tran discusses all of this.
So successful was Phung Hoang it that Tran not able to reconstitute in B2 Bulwark Area (Mekong) using Vietcong cadres, in fact, he was losing ground. That was why the decision was made to move NVA regulars south the essentially replace the shattered Vietcong.
All of this has been public knowledge for 20-30 years now, and with the release of the last US archives and ARVN archives (by the Vietnamese) we have the full picture.
Believing old fables is not necessary when the historical reality is now available. That’s why I provided references.
There is a heck of a lot of very good Vietnamese scholarship on Phung Hoang. They even copied the concept to help root out their fellow-communist Pol Pot’s merry genocidal maniacs in central Cambodia. Giap, in particular, thought it very effective against the shattered Vietcong because it exploited their broken morale after Tet. That’s why he sent 45,000 NVA regulars to B2.
MarkL
canberra
MarkL – keep up the good fight. Don’t expect facts to sway them, though.
Katz – I thought “The One” was committed to winning in Afghanistan (unlike Iraq). Or, do you think he’ll do th enormal Defeatocrat about face.
Well, Razor, if the choice is between a very large Vietnamese scholarship based on primary material, plus the professional assessments of Tran, Giap, Tran Do… (the people who actually fought the war on the then-enemy side) and obsolete 30-year old perceptions from the anti-war gang of the era plus US first generation writings, I know which is the intellectually honest conclusion to reach.
I would find it quite puzzling if people preferred old fables to objective reality.
How can one learn anything that way?
Robert Merkel seems to be perfectly reasonable an interlocutor in the few threads here that interest me (they are mostly Robert’s posts on ADF matters to which I respond) but I accept that others may choose to cleave to fable rather than fact for reasons of their own.
That is their problem, not mine.
MarkL
canberra
Paulus – No I have no new conspiracy theory. I think however the critical question in all these conflicts is who benefits? Answer that and you may understand why we are actively prosecuting a war against 30 million people in a part of the world that we know nothing about. ” The risk of terrorist attack in the West is lessened while terrorist organisations do not hold secure training bases in Afghanistan”.
Have you any evidence for that statement – did the Bali bombers come from a training camp in Afghanistan? Did Timothy McVeigh? Did the Israelis who dropped all those cluster bombs on women and children in Lebanon get their training in Afghanistan? Sorry but your statement is an unprovable assertion.
Huggy
My references are better than your references.
My references ran the Phoenix Program. In what way were they “anti-war”? But please feel free to continue to inhabit your world of fantasy.
You seem to be very reluctant to recognise the distinction between a program that produces momentary and unsustainable gains and a strategy that produces victory. Not surprising, really.
Razor, with his manichaean view of the world, so typical of the RWDB, imagines that because I disagree with his fantasies I must be a supporter of Obama.
They are a never-ending source of amusement, aren’t they?.
I didn’t say I wanted this. I said that this is what is likely to happen. I’m sufficiently free of egotism to recognise that my wishes don’t always come true.
My constant line on Afghanistan, since 2001, has been that sooner or later invading armies are always eaten down to the bone. Then the skeleton withdraws. US resolve has historically been proven to be weaker than most world powers when wading through a quagmire.
I don’t expect this national characteristic to change.
One of the criteria for a just war is that there must be some reasonable prospect of achieving war aims.
From this point of view the US misadventure in Afghanistan is an unjust war.
Katz,
I’ve just pulled down Frank Snepp’s “Decent Interval” from my bookshelf and had another look at it. It’s been a while since I first read it, but my recollection was that it said little to nothing about Phoenix.
And sure enough, the index of my edition (Penguin, 1980) doesn’t even mention the word “Phoenix” once.
Snepp was the CIA’s “Chief Strategy Analyst” at the US Embassy in Saigon. His book has a lot to say about the overall politics of the war, the internal workings of the CIA and State Department and the Saigon Embassy, the South Vietnamese government, and the intelligence assessments the CIA prepared.
No doubt Decent Interval is a valuable historical source in those areas. But it has nothing to do with Phoenix.
Your argument is falling to bits by the minute.
Obama’s capacity to change the direction of US foreign policy is severely limited. His Pakistan riff belies an unpleasant but unavoidable truth. What can he do?
.
Pakistan’s a feudal matrix that alternates between different postures, niow a
feudal kleptocracydemocracy, now afeudal kleptocracysecular military dictatorship. US policy needs must take an interest in the region because it depends on oil. If the oil goes Americans are a bunch of sitting ducks..
They could I s’pose go into Pakistan, topple the government and attempt to run it themselves. That’d draw much larger howls of protest than the usual CIA nasty business. Besides they don’t want to do that. They prefer their Empires with all the benefits and none of the costs, what the historian William Williams referred to as a non-colonial imperialism.
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They could ignore Pakistan. This entails the risk of the emergence of a nuclear armed Jihadist State. Cue: Nuke War with India.
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They could ignore the NW province and its tribal regions. This ebntails the risk of persistent terrorist attacks.
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What can Obama do? Well at the very least he can do the usual thing just without the Bush administration’s free-for-all approach. He can not categorically exclude any who expresses dissent or indeed any kind of criticism of his plans. He can not turn realpolitik into some cartoon Crusade. He can not endorse the use of force against unarmed civilians or the torture of random persons snatched off the street and thrown in prison. He can proceed under the apparatus of the rule of law, habeas corpus and the rest.
.
There’s a lot he can do better than Bush. Hell I know dogs’d do a better job.
Katz, as an addendum to the above, Snepp’s memoir focuses on the period 1972-75, and particularly the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the hurried evacuation of the American presence. Phoenix had ended well before then.
“I think however the critical question in all these conflicts is who benefits? Answer that and you may understand why we are actively prosecuting a war against 30 million people in a part of the world that we know nothing about.”
Hmm, I think the elected government of Hamid Karzai might dispute the notion that the US and NATO are waging war against them.
But please, Hunnybunny, tell me who benefits? I’ve been dying to know, and thereby be able to understand the war.
The Phoenix Program lived on in other guises after its administrative end in 1972.
Ralph McGehee, one of the principals of the Phoenix Program, quotes favourably Snepp’s comments on counter insurgency in Vietnam. McGehee has written extensively on Operation Phoenix.
Snepp, as a CIA strategist, was one of the major users of the intel arising from the torture and interrogation program initiated with the Phoenix Program and continued after its administrative conclusion in 1972.
Snepp was in a perfect position to witness the medium-term consequences of the Phoenix Program.
My sources are perfectly intact.
‘Right, Katz. So your solution to Afghanistan is … what exactly?’
This is such an archetypical tactic of the warlovers that I thought it had been discredited long ago, when they kept justifying aggressive war against Iraq with a similar question.
The blindingly obvious response, which is given surprisingly rarely, is “Please explain what OUR problem is that requires a ’solution’ in the first place?”
A ’solution to Afghanistan’ … what a vacuous abstraction.
Should I stand by for patronising fairy tales about Islamofascist plans for the New Caliphate?
Well, so much for knowledge of history or of proper historical methodology, Katz. You are using as ‘proof’ of your argument a CIA strategist uninvolved in Phung Hoang, and accept a single source from a man (on a portion of one side of the program) as invalidating an extensive Vietnamese scholarship written by the very people against whom Phung Hoang was aimed.
That is quite astonishing.
You DO know that McGehee was only a ‘principal’ in one segment of the US program, and that the bulk of Phung Hoang was run by ARVN, don’t you?
So your sole source directly involved in Phung Hoang had visibility only of a fraction of it.
What is very strange here is that you have shifted ground from a position of “It was a fiasco”, ‘the US were idiots, depending on bodycounts etc’ to ‘only MY US source is trustworthy and the VC/NVA Vietnamese have no value’.
In essence, you are defending an obsolete perception which is demonstrably false according to the VC/NVA Vietnamese themselves.
So a rational observer has a choice here. The first is to accept the ‘Katz view’ based on one source plus an unsubstantiated personal opinion, or accept a raft of US and Vietnamese scholarship supported by a vast mass of primary sources plus the opinion of General Giap, General Tran van Tra, Madame Nguyen Thi Dinh, General Tran Do and Nguyen Co Thach.
One of whom was the man in command of B2 (the Mekong Delta) itself.
The weight of evidence is massively against your interpretation.
A rational person will take the Vietnamese view over yours after this depth of time and research.
If you are aware of the generations of historical scholarship, we are entering the 3rd in regard of the Vietnam War – which is where we REALLY start to find out what happened. However, it is quite common for people raised on the very partial history of Stages 0 and 1 to get very upset when their dearest shibboleths are revealed as such.
May I suggest you actually read some of the Vietnamese scholarship of the past 20 years? It is very interesting.
It reveals, for example, how they played the US left like a piano in support of Communist war aims – they called them ‘collaborators’. It shows how much they funded the ‘anti-war’ movements. It shows how they got the ‘anti-war’ movement leaders to foreign locations, and how they were given their orders to attack their own governments. Fascinating stuff with innumerable PhD theses in it for the historian.
MarkL
canberra
Interesting. Just spent an enjoyable bit of time going through my 1ATF Operation ACORN reports and Det 1 DIV Int Unit after-action reports as well as Robert Hede’s BENRPTs back to ROIC Beinhoa (Hede was the 1ATF/Phuoc Tut SPO). Fascinating. 1ATF certainly ran its ACORN ops very neatly and with an impressive economy of force. Forgotten how… colourful Hede’s reports were.
In case you do not know, ACORN was 1ATF’s name for Phung Hoang operations.
Anyhoo, looking at McGehee, he says he was only a ‘group’ leader in Saigon, running the group snagging blacklisteds out of the Ministries. So he was a base drone, not running even a province Phung Hoang web. He also says that he could never understand the wiring diagrams during briefings, which is startling.
That’s not even SPO level – he was just a line operations guy who now makes his living writing stuff of varying quality about the CIA. That is, when he’s not accusing the gubmint of the evil Clinton of trying to ‘entrap’ him in the K-mart at Herndon.
So describing him as a ‘principal’ is vastly overstating his role and function. He was not such, he was a worker bee, and one in Saigon.
‘Fraid General Tran would know a hell of a lot more about it than him.
Got anything else?
MarkL
Canberra
Oh, dearie me.
You DO know that without US funding, ARVN would have dried up and blown away in a week? Even Ky and Thieu admitted that the entire SVN apparatus, including ARVN, were mere puppets of the US.
The CIA funded and oversaw the Phoenix Program and its successors. The CIA ran the training and indoctrination programs. CIA “advisors” sat at the elbow of evey vietnamese “team leader”.
Like all military buffs, who swoon at the whiff of cordite and at the sound of the stamp of boots on square drill, MarkL is intellectually and emotionally incapable of understanding the social and political context in which wars are fought. So stow your swagger stick and take a stroll down Reality Street.
I note, for example, that MarkL studiously avoids discussion of the disastrous effects of the Phoenix Program on the hearts and minds of millions of South Vietnamese. Snepp, McGehee, Stockwell, and others, came (too late) to recognise this truth.
Whatever temporary, tactical successes that were achieved via the Phoenix Program were minuscule compared with the political blowback of the Program (and its successors).
If you can judge by the respect accorded to him by the Bushites Hamid Karzai is not important.
The only real beneficiaries of the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq and the massive military “aid’ budgets that go to Pakistan and a whole cluster “failing
” states are of course the US arms merchants. The Military too and the spooks in the security apparatus. The mistake is to look to these countries as the cause of the “problem” the only important thing is that the kleptocrats in the US have sufficient excuse to enrich themselves at the US taxpayers expense and by the exploitation of the “lesser races” . C’mon guys you have just witnessed the biggest theft in the history of the planet – the global meltdown- do you really think it stops at the end of Wall street? Vietnam, Iraq Afghanistan all part of the endless war that is necessary to enrich the ruling circles in the US. It’s called Imperialism and it’s no different from the Imperialism of Rome and the British Empire (masters of fomenting war they were).
If it was not Iraq or Afghanistan it would be some-where else but it would be the same tune and the same tactic – send in the crusaders, kill lots of women and children- and then send in more crusaders to keep the peace. The monstrous alliance between the military and Industry must be fed.
I doubt if Obama can change this, even if he really wanted to.
Huggy
Katz, I am well into my second decade of ADF service, and I am certainly used to the poorly informed opinions of civilians regarding my profession. Kindly note that I have been civil, and have provided you with references to back up the actual reality of Phung Hoang – from the Vietnamese “enemy” side. It is now perfectly plain that you have had no exposure to their assessments of its effectiveness and prefer the old comfortable shibboleths to the facts.
I am calmly certain that I have done vastly more research into that conflict – well, into any conflict – than you, judging by the obsolescence of your expressed opinions on such matters and how thin your knowledge is. I am not going to respond to the obvious bait-and-switch, (the ARVN was US funded and Phung Hoang was a CIA op – this is hardly news) except to say that Tran, in Volume 3 and 4, covers that issue quite well. You will need an international inter library loan to read those, our copies are not available to the public. Tran differs most markedly from your view, which is superficial. Again, I will take his views over yours, for the reasons already discussed.
Finally, why do you automatically shift to this ad hominem nonsense when provided with information you obviously have never heard of before, and so terminate what had been a civil discourse? How can you learn by behaving so?
Anyhoo, I have a chapter of The Pelopponesian War to read, and then a real treat, a newly de-archived report on the technical capabilities of IJN surface radars. They actually had some quite decent electronic systems in 1944.
MarkL
Canberra
MarkL, mark I:
MarkL, mark II:
Spot the contradiction?
There’s no “bait and switch” on my part here. I raised the topic of the Phoenix Program in this thread as a parallel to the likely failure of the US in the Pashtun region of A-P. I was clearly referring to the “hearts and minds” element of such programs.
Meanwhile you switched the topic to its narrowly an irrelevantly military aspects.
And I repeat, you seem to have an aversion to discussing the original context of this exchange — hearts and minds.
Why is that MarkL?
(And please try to stay on topic.)
Fascinating debate as to the effectiveness of Operation Phoenix, fellas.
Markl definitely has it on points. You just can’t fault his sources.
Still, Katzie, take heart.
This is just another one of the “how we won the battle but lost the war” arguments that in the end, changes nothing.
Success or no, Operation Phoenix didn’t win the war for the US: It still got it’s clock cleaned a treat and the helicopters still ended-up picking-up the last few US personnel from the Embassy roof in ‘75.
That’s what you get for butting into other people’s civil wars.
Evan, MarkL’s sources tell us little about hearts and minds. And as you rightly point out, the US got reamed because it decided to involve itself in other folks’ civil war.
Civil wars are about hearts and minds.
The point is that South Vietnam’s armed forces were much better armed in 1975, the year of their defeat, than their NVA enemies. In 1975 SVN was in possession of the third biggest airforce in the world!
Their problem wasn’t hardware, it was software — the population of South Vietnam refused to invest their hearts and minds in the defence of an American puppet.
IS a cross border raid into say Syria to hit an AQ leader really an apples on apples comparison with Operation Phoenix?
Has Syria been mentioned before in this thread?
Katz the quote from paper in the post itself talks about cross border raids in Syria and Pakistan.
Why on earth do we accept that a country , any country , is warranted in attacking another country purely on the credibility of its own word?
All a country has to do to ‘justify’ an aggressive, immoral invasion/raid is to dress it up in the propaganda term of ‘anti-terror’ or mention AQ, and they can do what they want apparently.
And the credibility of the USA is less than zero.
WMDs anyone? [Just to give one example of many.]
I am amazed that this idea is given even a smidgin of consideration before being condemned as immoral.
As for the Vietnam thingy it appears that MarkL is attempting to rewrite history, yet again, regurgitating all the old talking points refuted yonks ago.
Oh dear.
Its over Markl., the US had it’s arse kicked. They never had the faintest understanding of what they had got themselves into and suffered the consequences.
And unfortunately killed a lot of innocent people in the process.
In light of the fact that before “Shock and Awe” there was no al Qaeda in Iraq, and probably none in Syria, US raids on al Qaeda operatives (presuming that they do only damage al Qaeda personnel, could be classified as the US cleaning up the mess they caused.
However, several children were killed in the recent outrage. This kind of behaviour is likely to have detrimental consequences for hearts and minds in the region, along the same lines as American attitudes to the innocent victims of 9/11.
Apples and apples? You decide.
I’d argue that al Qaeda scored an accidental strategic success at 9/11 because they induced Bush to behave in an intemperate and foolish manner, detrimental to the interests of the USA.
However, no one, including al Qaeda, could have guessed at the time just how stupid Bush was — hence accidental.
If I recall correctly, MarkL thought that the invasion of Iraq was destined to be one of the greatest military successes of all time, and would lead George Bush to be reagrded as one of the besr Americam presidents ever.
He doesn’t seem to talk about it any more.
Apolgies for da typos above.
MarkL – if you had to recommend a book on the Vietnam War to a civvie what would you recommend?
I have no stake in this discussion but I’m always interested when I read claims that some source or other is inaccessible to the groundlings – especially as, as an academic, I think it’s very important that government funded research (including research materials) should be available to anyone who’s interested in it.
So I had a look in the NLA catalogue and General Tran Van Tra’s history of the bulwark B2 theatre is available both in book form and online via PURL for anyone who wishes to read it. http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/3844412?lookfor=tran%20van%20tra&offset=4&max=19
Katz – So because you’ve chosen to believe Syrian Govt Run media that innocent children were killed it is an apples on apples with Operation Phoenix and you don’t like George Bush. Compelling stuff.
Adrian – which wars and counter-insurgencies do you think were run better than the Iraq war and why?
Most of the Left’s criticism of Iraq comes down to nothing more than “some bad stuff happened so it is a terrible military failure” Apparenly there were some wars fought by leftists where nothing bad happened.
Katz – on the flip side I do think it is reasonable of you to raise the risk of Operation Phoenix-like abuses but I just don’t think we are anywhere near that point yet on what I have read.
Well, Kingsley, I’d say that the Battle of Agincourt certainly showed superior tactical understanding, use of weaponry, intelligence and general use of available resources and understanding of the enemy.
By all accounts the British were outnumbered by 10 to 1, yet managed to inflict a swift and decisive victory on the French. Looks like we haven’t learnt much in nearly 600 years.
FYI, we all understand that wars have ‘bad stuff’, that’s why a ‘better run’ war is one that does not drag on indefinitely, is undertaken for valid reasons, and results in minimum loss of life, particularly civilian. Under these criteria, Iraq is a text book example of an incompetently (or deviously) devised, planned, and executed war, but of course there are others. It just happens that the Iraq war is one of the worst of a bad bunch.
Only those whose ideology prohibits them from engaging with reality, or who think that the loss of innocent life is a good thing would seek to defend the catastrophe that is the war in Iraq.
What is this, the Egotism ‘R’ Us thread?
Like I said to Paulus upthread, it’s not what I think, or even, dare I say, what you think. The issue of relevance revolves around how these acts are perceived in the Middle East.
You’re more than welcome to think that George Bush is a genius. Be my guest.
So why waste your time with inferior arguments?
Are you conceding that some left-wing arguments are unchallengeable?
So we have to go back to the BATTLE of Aginourt? Not the WAR of Agincourt.
The US have had hundreds of thousands in theatre for 5 plus years for only 4000 fatalities. The COIN part of the story is all but done and dusted when most good counterinsurgencies take more like 10 years.
There have been mistakes made in Iraq indeed quite serious ones but its all relative. Every war has had its mistakes and even some of the finest military and political minds of history have made them. If you are going to argue the Iraq war is the worst of the worst you are going to need to demonstrate why the mistakes in the Iraq war were so much more numerous and deeper than the others.
I’d give the overall effort a “B minus”. Probably an A+ for the invasion. A “C” for a lot of the occupation leading up to about 2005 maybe evcen a “D” then I think the COTW gained ground and had the momentum leading into the 2006 elections. Then it was lost again with the Iraqi Govt takign so long to form and Maliki taking so long to recognise Al Sadr was part of the problem not solution. Then you get the Surge which is also A+
The people who give it a “F” are the one’s who occupy the extremist position.
Katz – “The issue of relevance revolves around how these acts are perceived in the Middle East.”
Too true Katz . I wonder whether the average Middle Easterner is upset the US pursued the delightful people from AQ inside Syria and whether they believe Syrian TV images that children were killed or not? Indeed I wonder if they are also able to recognise that if some children were accidentally killed that AQ kills them deliberately. I suspect there are large numbers in both camps. But again does that really equate to Operation Phoenix? In my judgment “no”, in yours evidently “yes”
There are risks with what the US are doing here but there are also risks in not doing anything. Bush Rumsfeld et al indeed even people more down the realist end of the Spectrum like Sec Gates have obviously decided the risks of doing nothing are greater.
Incorrect. See above.
“The US have had hundreds of thousands in theatre for 5 plus years for only 4000 fatalities’
Mmmmmmm, sorry Kingsley, but before they went they were telling us it would be over in months. In fact quite a few years have passed since they declared “Mission Accomplished”, so how, exactly, is that a success?
It’s passing strange that only the US casualties seem to be of any significance to Kingsley. And 4000 US casualties is 4000 too many for a war without a point.
Pollytickedoff – whether someone claimed success too early on not is not relevant to measuring its actual success or failure. If the worst you can say is Bush etc were too optimistic then I’m afraid that puts him in pretty good historical company .
katz – So you are saying you are in favour of these cross border raids???? Should I ready myself for a “nuance” or fine distinction argument?
Adrian – The problem with other casualties is reliability of numbers. You could go to the Iraq Index and get a pretty reliable number for the ISF for most of the war.
If you think the war was without a point that is your prerogative but that has little bearing on judging its management. Which means you haven’t at this point been able to make an actual argument why this war’s management and indeed overall outcome was so bad compared to others.
Likewise if you want to say all wars are bad then that’s fine but that’s not the argument.
mmmmmmm,
So even though they claimed it would be months and years later we’re still there that is a success.
So, even though their original planning was up the shit and they had to go the surge, that is success.
Interesting definition of success. You aren’t a company CEO are you?
Kingsley
MarkL – if you had to recommend a book on the Vietnam War to a civvie what would you recommend?
The best all-round one I can recommend is Stanley Karnow’s excellent work, which is either a firm starting point for research into the subject, or a very solid coverage of the conflict if no further research is intended. Because of the way Karnow researched it (he went to Vietnam and delved into archives, then cross-validated a lot of the data by talking to senior participants), it is regarded as the first book of the third generation of scholarship on the conflict. That is a remarkable achievement less than a decade after it ended. We are only got to third generation scholarship on WWI in the 1990s, by way of contrast. Karnow is also very readable, a strong positive. That is why this book remains a standard university text on the subject. If you go on Abe Books (www.abebooks.com) and sort for Australia (assuming you are in Australia, it’s US$1 in the US) you’ll find this copy. There are others at this price level:
Vietnam: A History: The First Complete Account of Vietnam at War (ISBN: 0140073248)
Stanley Karnow Bookseller: Red Books (Wynnum West, QLD, Australia)
Price: US$ 6.84
[Convert Currency]
Quantity: 1 Shipping within Australia:
US$ 7.84
MarkL
Canberra
Let’s clear one thing up before people get all disillusioned with Obama and start thinking he’s some kind of neocon.
In the presidential debates Obama said he was thinking in particular of “high value” targets. If the US military had Osama Bin Laden in their sights just across the Pakistan border I’d hope they’d do something about it.
I get a bit concerned with the way fellow lefties go into a full disenchantment spiral after hearing only half of a story – usually without much context. It’s as though many on the Left just can’t wait to be disappointed. It didn’t take long for this kind of thing to happen to Rudd, too.
I suspect Obama will be fine on foreign policy.
Kingsley,
Let’s hope the battle of Agincourt has no further paralells, if any, with the GWOT. If i remember rightly, it was part of the Hundred Years’ war.
ON baiting and switching
I just see two flaws in your argument, a lack of nuance and a lack of knowledge.
Fact 1, the bulk of Phung Hoang ops were run by ARVN – they provided the source data and the bulk of personnel within the program.
Fact 2, the ARVN was US funded in terms of much (but not all) of its equipment and operations budget. However, the bulk of its personnel costs were paid for by the SVN government.
Fact 3, Phung Hoang was a CIA supported and coordinated program built on a series of SVN and ARVN provincial programs. These were unconnected prior to Phoenix and remained quite disjointed after it. Phung Hoang (the attack on Vietcong cadre and infrastructure was a segment of what you call ‘Phoenix’, just as Acorn was an an even lower level.
No contradiction actually exists, your perception of one is merely an artifact of your lack of knowledge.
Where you lack nuance is in assuming that ALL ‘Phoenix’ programs were coherent – a classic civilian assumption (see it all the time) whereby military operations are assumed to be monolithic. They were, and are, not. The ‘hearts and minds’ components of ‘Phoenix’ were actually run only partially under ‘Phoenix’, they tried to coordinate Phung Hoang (used consistently here to mean the attack on the Vietcong cadres) with the various civil security programs (‘hearts and minds’). These were different programs run under an umbrella coordinating structure. Indeed, the H&M programs were copied from Bernard Templer’s efforts in Malaya. ‘Phoenix’ was not monolithic at all.
Original Contention:
Bait
Switch
Nice try, but no banana. By your own words, you certainly were not “clearly referring to the “hearts and minds” element of such programs”. You were referring to the alleged failure of the program.
Evan
True. However, we spend a lot of time examining both the successes and the failures of various wars and campaigns to extract the lessons. Phung Hoang was quite successful in its intention of attacking Vietcong cadres and infrastructure. What Giap says if that it was one of the factors which led to the defeat of the southern insurgency after their own hubris smashed it in the self-inflicted disaster of Tet. In turn, they responded with a highly sophisticated and successful plan to defeat US home morale through use of communist controlled and funded US puppet organisations (the ‘anti-war’ movement), and then switched to conventional warfare. As Giap himself notes, the RSVN actually won its civil war, but was so weakened by the effort that it fell (at the second attempt) to his purely conventional regular invasion.
Katz
You merely continue the ’switch’ here. This is a very great over-simplification. Chin Peng’s merry band in Malaya? The Hukbalahap in the Philippines? AQ and affiliates in Iraq? We helped local governments win those.
Heart and minds was invented by Templer. Your really do need to read John Cloake, Templer, Tiger of Malaya: the life of Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, London, Harrap, and Kumar Ramakrishna’s excellent, Emergency Propaganda: The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds 1948-1958, Curzon Press, Richmond
Your argument is all over the place at this point.
And the point is utter tosh. A superficial examination of their ammunition stocks and spare parts holdings shows the opposite. M-48 vs T-55? Please. ARVN infantry with 50 rounds per man at best? Where the ARVN had good leadership, ammunition and working equipment, they fought very hard. 18th Division, for example, stopped the entire NVA army’s advance for 12 days at Xuan Loc. See George J. Veith and Merle L. Pribbenow, II, “Fighting is an Art”: The Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s Defense of Xuan Loc, 8-20 April 1975,” The Journal of Military History 68 (January 2004): pp 163-214.
Sure, in airframes sitting on runways. Regrettably, only 12-15% of that force was able to fly. US/AFRVN airpower and hard ARVN fighting stopped the first NVA invasion. So Hanoi instructed its US puppets to apply pressure to cut off US funding for ARVN ammunition and spares support. They happily obeyed their puppetmasters.
Explain Le Minh Dao and his men, then. If this was actually true, why the massive purge 1975-80? The one thing the Vietnamese have not released from their archives is how many hundreds of thousands they killed in the slave labour camps 1975-1995.
Easily discernable in your very thin knowledge is a strong emotional attachment to a one-sided, incomplete and quite primitive 1970s view of this conflict. Stop living in the past, we know vastly more about it now than we did then, thanks mostly to the Vietnamese. They, at least, have candidly admitted their blunders and cast a harsh light on the so-called ‘anti-war’ movements they controlled.
And so to work, for me.
MarkL
Canberra
MarkL, you’ve addressed Katz’s Bait and Switch.
But not his Nuance, which he invokes every time he is called out on a barefaced contradiction (to use a polite term), his hoary old excuse being that you are far too dumb to understand the subtlety of his arguments. It always gets a run when he has been proved wrong and he is scrambling to cover himself.
Are you brave enough (or do you have the time to waste) to try to clean out that Augean stable on this occasion?
I loved this quote from Obama, as reported by an aide. Incidentally, this is a great article. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_lizza
‘According to an aide, Obama said something to the effect of “This is ridiculous. We met with Stalin. We met with Mao. The idea that we can’t meet with Ahmadinejad is ridiculous. This is a bunch of Washington-insider conventional wisdom that makes no sense. We should not run from this debate. We should have it.”’
Glad to see you’ve finally engaged with the debate MarkL.
MarkL has praised Karnow’s work on Vietnam. I agree with him. It is an excellent history of the war, especially its political and diplomatic aspects.
Here is Karnow’s last word on the Phoenix Program.
My emphasis.
Is it some kind of hysterical amnesia that causes you to praise Karnow’s first explanation, while completely ignoring his second explanation? How much weight does Karnow give to each of these explanations?
Whatever, even if the Phoenix Program was achieving some momentary success, still its proponents could not persuade US military authorities to cease and desist from its horrendous bombing program, which did so much to turn Vietnamese hearts and minds against the US and its South Vietnamese puppets.
MarkL as a member of the Wooda Cooda Shooda school of historical revisionism, just cannot bring himself to admit that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.
Instead, they chase off after chimerae, like the Malayan Emergency and the Huk and al Qaeda in Syria, as if by proving that these situations were winnable, therefore Vietnam must have been winnable. How pathetic.
Please note, I never raised these other conflicts. The only conflict I raised was the Pashtun region of A-P. I don’t intend to attempt to prove that Phoenix-style programs will never work. Such a proposition is absurd. My modest argument is that they didn’t work in Vietnam and they are unlikely to work with the Pashtun.
And then this:
Karnow, supports my contention that Phoenix posed only momentary problems and that Giap and the Communists adapted to its challenge.
Does MarkL disagree with Karnow on this point?
Poor MarkL. His argument by authority seems to have blown up in his face, like a Bouncing Betty, a long-surviving relic of that unwinnable war.
And then this:
Please note that MarkL subscribes to the “Stab in the Back Theory” of military defeat in South Vietnam.
The dye was cast for the US war effort in Vietnam in March 1968 when Johnson agreed to de-escalate the war. He made this decision under direct pressure from European central bankers and as a result of the advice of the “Wise Men”, who were leading spokesmen for corporate America.
Would MarkL please reveal his evidence that European bankers and Wall Street were “puppets” of Hanoi? Such evidence would be the biggest scoop of the 21st century!
And finally, given the supposed success of the South Vietnamese militias and the huge availablity of arms and war materiel, why was there no post April 1975 insurgency in South Vietnam? The Viet cong started their own insurgency in the early 1950s with much less than was available to SVN loyalists in 1975.
The answer is, the people of South Vietnam had minimal commitment to the American puppets. There hearts and minds were elsewhere, and not necessarily with the Communists either.
MarkL – thanks heaps fella will secure a copy asap.
Pollytickedoff – yep they got some stuff wrong now how does that compare to other significant conflicts? Heck they even got some predictions wrong, never hear do fthat happening before?
This is just the standard meme of it didn’t go perfectly so I’ll say it was a catastrophe. It has to be compared against others to give it some context and I don’t think you’ve ever done that. I’m not saying it was an absolute triumph just that it wasnt a total unmitigated disaster as the Left try to label it by merely saying here is some things they didn’t get right. Indeed I wonder if judging it to be anything at all this early is even rational which applies to me as much as you.
In turn, they responded with a highly sophisticated and successful plan to defeat US home morale through use of communist controlled and funded US puppet organizations (the ‘anti-war’ movement…
Ah. The “And I would’ve gotten away if it weren’t for you meddling kids” argument. Colour me skeptical. Yes, there were front organizations, but how effective would they have been if the US had stayed in post-1973? How effective was the Left in the US? Judging by the use Nixon made of the “Silent Majority”, and the absolute ass-kicking he gave to McGovern in 1972, not effective at all. It was Nixon and Kissinger who got the troops out of Nam – not Henry and Henrietta Hippie. Why did they do that? War fatigue among the populace.
The answer is, the people of South Vietnam had minimal commitment to the American puppets.
Actually, a lot of the city folks liked the Americans around – my in-laws for one. They helped with the sanitation and the electricity. Never the less, the city folk were – and are – a minority in Việt Nam; attitudes were different in the bush. And minimal commitment to the “puppets” – agreed. I’ve never heard anyone laud the achievements of Nguyễn Văn Thiệu – even my own immediate family. Corrupt, nepotistic and insecure.
Quite true Saigon.
Moreover, by 1970 the US Army in Vietanm was in a state of collapse.
Mutinies were breaking out, insubordination was rife, fragging was becoming more common and about 50% of the ranks were using illegal drugs.
Here is the ever-reliable Stanley Karnow again;
Thanks for reminding me about just how good an historian Karnow is, MarkL!
A question for everybody – was fragging just an American phenomenon in that war? And if so, why? I never heard of the South Koreans doing it to each other, nor the Thais nor other Asian countries in the conflict. I don’t even know if the Aussies and Kiwis did it? (I hope not). Why were the Americans so vulnerable to it?
Down and out at saigon @ 71,
I seem to recall the French doing it to their offices on the Western Front during WW1. There were also several mutinies, including some involving Australians, but I don’t know if there was any fragging. And on the Eastern Front in that war, with the outbreak of the Russian revolution there was a fair bit of it, I gather. All this is from faint memories of distant long ago reading, so I wouldn’t take it as gospel.
There was a bit of verbal abuse of Blamey in the Middle East when he denigrated the 6th Division, but no violence so far as I know.
Googling Karnow I came across this reference to his book on the PBS tv show on Vietnam.
Aparently, I say apparently cos I can’t confirm this quote, Karnow said that US intervention in Vietnam was in the nature of a ‘failed crusade….motivated by the loftiest intentions….[including] the defence of South Vietnamese independence’.
Hmmm, at least 3 shonkies in there, any one of which sheds light on his mindset.
Is the quote accurate?
Fragging is an urban legend. Or, to be more precise, it did happen in Vietnam, but at such a low level as to be statistically insignificant.
In ‘Unheralded Victory’, Mark Woodruff gives the figures: 2,594,000 Americans served in Vietnam; 58,183 died there; and 86 of these deaths were incidents of ‘fragging’ murder.
The rate of ‘fragging’ was much less than the modern homicide rate in any major city of the US.
Woodruff notes that the Australian Army, with 47,000 personnel who served in Vietnam and 2 incidents of ‘fragging’, actually had a higher rate than the US military.
Woodruff belongs to the Windschuttle school of revisionism — if it isn’t judicially proven, it didn’t happen.
In reality, almost 1500 Army officers’ deaths could not be explained. An unknown proportion of them were doubtless the result of fragging.
The practice was sufficiently widespread for it to get a name in Vietnam, and for soldiers openly to threaten officers with this punishment.
How many were fragged? We will never know, but it is certain to be more than Woodruff’s pseudo-exact figure of 86.
“Woodruff belongs to the Windschuttle school of revisionism.” Yes, as opposed to the school of ‘making numbers up out of thin air to suit an argument’.
I know it’s just part of the revolting revisionist methodology to demand sources for historical assertions, but what’s your source for those 1,500 ‘unexplained’ officer deaths?
I would have thought that the stereotypical method of ‘fragging’ – rolling a hand grenade into the officer’s tent – would hardly have been classified by the Army as an ‘unexplained’ death, even if the actual culprit was not caught.
Historians have many sources, as do battlefield generals sitting down afterwards to write histories. On hearts and minds, there are also personal memoirs. Two that Aussies can read are:
* “When heaven and earth chaged places: a Vietnamese woman’s journey from war to peace” by Le Ly Hayslip [New York: Plume, 1990]
* “The Sorrow of War: a novel” (also subtitled ‘a novel of North Vietnam’ in the 1996 edition), by Bao Ninh {translated by Phan Thanh Hao, Vo Banh Thanh} – various editions including London: Minerva, 1994; London: Secker & Warburg, 1994; New York: Riverhead, 1996.
Le Ly Hayslip’s themes would certainly bear out Katz’s assessment of the South Vietnamese: “There hearts and minds were elsewhere, and not necessarily with the Communists either.”
How easy is it to forget the experiences of non-leaders, who somehow pick up the pieces after “the captains and the kings depart”?
And of course in an entirely trivial way you are correct Paulus.
Fragging, literally, means the use of a hand grenade in the manner described by you. However, this method of despatch was more risky than an unfortunate “accident” in the jungles of Nam, which was the location of many “unexplained” deaths, which for convenience’ sake were also called “fragging”.
Terry Anderson, an historian, estimates rather more than 1500.
So you see, Paulus, there is something more than “thin air” behind the 1500 estimate.
And rather more based on real life evidence than the neurotic revisionist Woodruff, whose book I have read, between chortles and guffaws.
Stop fragging each other or we’ll all end up fragged and then we won’t have a website anymore.
Learning from history is always important, but the last American helicopters left the rooftops of Saigon 33 years ago.
The good thing about Obama’s victory is that it seems to have marked an end to the refighting of the Vietnam war in the US – and the culture war that goes along with it.
I took 15 minutes out of my 30 minute watch meal-break to briefly address this.
Comment: Paulus’ point on Katz’s retreat behind a smokescreen of ‘oh, but my superior nuance’ and other very simple tricks of semantics and ‘the jejeune sophistry of the undergraduate’ (as my old Professor Emeritus of History used to call it) is neatly showcased here. This particular trick (the patronising opening) is supposed to confer a species of superior self-regard on the author. It is very transparent. This does not bode well for the author, as it usually indicates that he/she has just added a small sliver of new knowledge to their thin resume, and is now going to crow about it.
Comment: Yup, he’s had a look at Karnow. Well, at least Katz has moved from very primitive 1970s views to a 1984 view. He’s now a mere 24 years behind (but has a good general history book on the topic to read).
Comment: No, this is not ‘Karnow’s last word’. This is what he wrote in an excellent general history of the conflict 24 years ago. Much more has been written since which specialises in this umbrella program.
Comment: So what? How does this support your original contention that ‘Phoenix’ was a ‘fiasco’? All you have noted is that there are many factors involved in war, and they interplay in a complex manner. This is only news to an interlocutor both unfamiliar with conflict and lacking much knowledge about it.
Comment: None at all, which is obvious from the nature of his work. He wrote an excellent general history of the entire conflict, not a weighted study of the array of programs run under the ‘Phoenix’ umbrella. That is why I carefully use the term ‘Phung Hoang’ for the attack on the VC infrastructure and cadres, rather than ‘Phoenix’ which refers to the over-arching program of gathering a multitude of disparate ‘pacification’ and rural development programs under one umbrella.
Comment: Oh, Please. It should be obvious that bait and switch won’t work with me. We are discussing your original contention that ‘Phoenix… was a fiasco’, not the bombing campaign.
Comment: This was not the point you made – that ‘Phoenix… was a fiasco’. Your wriggling about and increasingly frantic bait-and-switch does not obscure that fact that I have demolished your argument on this point – which was my aim. You are still on my historical and logical hook. Your point here merely demonstrates again your profound lack of knowledge about military history. Any war is winnable if the measures employed are sufficiently extreme (something I am very glad was never done in Vietnam), as a cursory knowledge of history shows. To show how wide the selection of examples is: ask the Britons post the Great Revolt, or the National Socialists in WWII. There are two millennia of examples in between, all of which I suspect you know nothing about.
Comment: Correction of fact in the above: the Hukbalahap were not with AQ in Syria. OK?
You made the usual juvenile error of a very silly sweeping statement. I then used examples to prove this was flawed. You appear to be addicted to these sweeping generalisations, as you have made some more in this… communication. This tells me that you do not actually debate (civilly, as I am doing here) much. Again, I have used a few basic historical examples to demolish your sweeping generalisations. If the use of examples upsets you, do not make sweeping and inaccurate generalisations about a subject you repeatedly prove you know little about.
Comment: See above. Glad you admit here that your original point that ‘Phoenix… was a fiasco’ is wrong. If the use of examples to expose the gross flaws in your sweeping generalisations upsets you, do not make inaccurate sweeping generalisations. That is what examples are for – I hope you understand this now. I note that you used the Pashtun as your own example, but somehow conflate my use of examples as invalid. This is very poor rhetoric.
Comment: Well, no, He actually does not. You are apparently surprised to realise that Giap (of all Generals, you are surprised at this in HIM?) adapted to an enemy riposte. That is what the profession does for a living. Been doing it since Muwatallish and Ramses II had a slight tiff at Kadesh. (This is an example, not a chimera) It is plain that you have never realised this before! BTW, I pointed this out a couple of posts up.
Glad you have finally caught up with something which was common knowledge in 1275BC. No need to be so surprised by it.
Hmm. Sorry about that. Formatting problem at my end, I suspect.
MarkL
Canberra
MarkL has laboured mightily and produced an anaconda.
Much of it is as worthless as history as it is inadequate as invective.
There is nothing new here, merely more specious elaboration of his previous incorrect and irrelevant points.
Embarrassingly for MarkL I have demonstrated:
1. Karnow ackowledges that the Phoenix Program was a failure.
2. Karnow contradicts MarkL’s “Stab in the Back” conspiracy theory about the collapse of the American effort in Vietnam. This theory alone disqualifies MarkL as a credible commentator on the Vietnam War.
3. Karnow acknowledges that the SVN regime was and remained a puppet regime that excited little loyalty or commitment from the people of South Vietnam. MarkL’s reference to the small number of exceptions (yes there are usually exceptions) is testament to how threadbare is his argument.
But perhaps MarkL will magically produce another “authority” who will save him from the embarrassment of having been exposed as misquoting his previously proclaimed “authority”.
Is Terry Anderson a historian in the same way that David Irving is a historian?
I ask this because your link is to what must be the most obscure site regarding the Vietnam War that’s ever been linked to. You must have spent most of the day searching for it so as to find somewhere, anywhere, on the Web someone, anyone, who you could muster up in support of your argument.
GregM, I really have not idea what this discussion is about and have no allegiance to any argument if you enter “vietnam war fragging” into google, Terry Anderson’s site is the second one you get.
Thanks Shaun, I was just about to point that out to GregM. Makes you wonder how hard he really tried, doesn’t it?
Here ya go GregM, the full citation for you:
Terry Anderson, “The GI Movement and the Response from the Brass,” in Melvin Small and William Hoover, eds., Give Peace A Chance (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1992), p. 105.
And here’s a bonus from the Armed Forces Journal, June 1971
For your information GregM, here’s what Wiki says about the Armed Forces Journal.
I imagine that, since its foundation in 1863, the AFJ has seldom been accused of being a mouthpiece for commie propaganda.
Hope that helps, GregM.
This peculiar detour over Operation Phoenix has been highly educational, if not necessarily enlightening (they needn’t be congruent). Thanks are due to all the combatatants, but esp. to MarkL for his patience, civility, and unusual erudition.
Coupla thoughts:
– The Vietnam war and the Afghan war were/are fought for very different reasons, so it’s rather, um, unclear what the success or failure of Phoenix has to do with the price of tea in Kandahar.
– You lefties need to learn how to think in perpspective; as I’ve pointed out here before, the war against insane, mass-murdering, globally-aspiring totalitarian communism ended in 1989, not in 1975. You’re quarreling over the pros and cons of a Queen’s Bishop fianchetto maneuver, when all along it’s mate in five.
– It seems to be a popular adage around here that to a man with a hammer, every problem rewemblew a nail; y’all seem intent on proving that to a Baby Boomer, every problem is Vietnam. Katz, for pete’s sake, take off the granny glasses, put down the Richard Brautigan and turn the Stephen Stills record off. I’m glad it was fun for you but it’s over, baby.
– It’s not at all clear to me that continuing the Afghan war is strictly necessary as a condition of victory in the present struggle, butbthose who have a problem with these things might try to think a little harder and with more lucidity about why these things are happening; unless of course you embrace Huggybunny’s “Major Barbara” theory of international conflict.
Ugh. Time for my pills, y’all.
– j_p_z, busy dream-questing for unknown Kadath
“They never had the faintest understanding of what they had got themselves into and suffered the consequences.”
.
I would like to ask Hannah’s Dad to consider reading a “A Bright Shining Lie” by Neil Sheehan.
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bright_Shining_Lie
.
It is a great book , well written and the point I’d like to convey is that there were plenty of advisors who understood the history , cultures involved and the geopolitics of this conflict way before the rest of the world. Unfortunately the politicians who carry the responsibility for the decisions made in war also had other advice and often act contrary to the best advice available.
Thank you for your insights Japerz. I’ve been missing them recently. I feared that Bush and Paulson had Sovietised your ISP as well as most of the US financial system. Gosh, how things have changed since last we chatted!
Please explain to me how the motives of one side in a war may influence the outcome of that war. I believe that in a previous phase of history this view of history was called “The Triumph of the Will.”
But you may have an altogether less portentous name for it.
I too am puzzled as to the relevance of Phoenix or its components, as I thought the original context (way back above) was cross-border raids by US forces [from Iraq into Syria and from Afghanistan into Pakistan]. If we MUST search for a Vietnam War analogy, Katz, how about any of these?…
i) cross-border venture by ARVN into Laos
ii) cross-border surge by ARVN, US into eastern Cambodia aiming at COSVN bases and munitions etc
iii) cross-border sorties from Cambodia and Laos into South VietNam by DRV, NLF units; supplied along the HCM Trail from DRV
iv) cross-border incursions by PRC into northern DRV, and DRV retaliation
Thanks for the references Markl, and thanks Laura for pointing out that General Tran Van Tra’s memoir is available online.
Aw c’mon Katz, you know perfectly well that mentioning “Triumph of the Will” makes Baby Godwin cry. Are you so keen to skip the roolz all’a sudden? Whyzat, shoogapie?
Lookit, I know doing actual thinking is hard (which is why yer fellow Boomers have quite understandably avoided it for decades), but sooner or later there comes a time, etc. etc.
As to this silly business of differing war motives (surely you can come up with something better, and I won’t mind if you call me Shirley), wouldn’t you say the Marshall Plan differs slightly from, oh, Carthago Delenda Est? The Japanese brass on board the Missouri certainly never saw that one coming: they were ashamed of the magnanimous terms they got, and said so for the frankest of reasons; had they been the victors, they knew very well what their hideous terms woulda been. You could ask a Korean if you don’t believe me.
So I don’t know what you’re saying, really; Saigon fell in ‘75. I don’t know any Yank irridentists looking to get it back. Do you?
– j_p_z, busy having his gold fillings nationalized
(Must apologize for these posts, which are written on a hand-held device, which compromises clarity, spelling and coherence six ways to Sunday… It would hardly surprise me if everything I’ve just written was wrong… Oh well, if so, I’m sure stern LP critix will straighten my arse b4 too long…)
murph
I read Sheehan’s book some time ago, and of course am familiar with him from the Ellsberg era. And it/he supports my case that the US simply didn’t understand what was going on in Vietnam.
Your wiki reference gives the unfortunate reality:
“and his doomed and tragic attempt to implement a war winning formula for the beleaguered U.S. army and how he eventually compromised with the military system he once criticised”
As you say, there were people that understood that the US was fighting the wrong war in the wrong way [was there ever a right way?] for the wrong reasons.
They were called ‘anti-war critics’ and were persecuted and savaged by the powers that be. Wasn’t Sheehan on Nixon’s ‘enemies list”?
Ome swallow does not a summer make, and unfortunately the generals, politicians, media managers, business leaders, the powers that be as I noted before, had no idea about the war.
Particularly the morality.
“there comes a time, etc. etc.”
…when we heed a certain call
and the world must come together as one?
“having his gold fillings nationalized”
Is that what an irridentist does?
There you go again, Japerz, talking about the era of American greatness.
Seems like nostalgia indeed is what it used to be, after all.
Shorter Katz: Oops, guess I got nuthin’.
(folds, joins the Doug Yule Fan Club)
Well, can’t say I blame ye. It does be goin’ aroond.
– j_p_z, boiling his copy of “Another Green World” for the vitamins
irridentist! heh FDB
Fine. Great. Here I am, doing all this complex stuff about Brian Eno and nutrition, but Fancy Dave can just swan in here from stage right and soak up all the laughs with his “irridentist” routine. Oh, fucking terrific. Fine. See if I ever bother to do my routine about planar dimensionality now. Why bother?? I’m sure FDB will just have some fucking fart joke you’ll all like better!! Right?!?
If anyone wants me, I’ll be sulking in my dressing room. In the dark. Sipping a dirty cup full of soapy water. Lukewarm, of course. And spiked with no-name vodka. Smirnoff’s, if you must know. Now get lost, I’ve got tears of jealousy to cry.
There there japerz.
For what it’s worth, I really liked your Eno joke. And if the AGW extract gives you indigestion, it’ll work twice!
Sorry, not quite a fart joke.
so, j_p_z gave us a spray, and now his dressing room is gonna cop a spray [not quite a fart]
Who said liquidity was missing?
God dammit. Mr. Bahnisch, do you see what I have to put up with?? What, why did I quit the Berliner Ensemble, tell me, please!! To come all the way to ze Australia, and to be treated like ZIS?!! I ASK YOU!!
(Hurls chipped shot-glass at the dressing-room mirror.)
Pietro, my dahling, give me an injection of my “special medicine,” please, my dove. I know ze doctors varned you not to, but zis is, how you say, a difficult night. Is like one of your John Cassavettes movies, zat you see in film school, und zen nobody vants to know about, vunce you hit ze big time. So give me ze shot, darling. I promise, no vun else vill know.
This “Berliner On Sombel” you speak of, Mr Jayper, would that by any chance be from EAST Berlin? Are you apprised of the information that we in Australia take an exceedingly dim view of Herr Brecht? For a start, he seems to have been somewhat less than forthcoming when arraigned before the Unamerican House Commie (I think that’s what it was called, Percy can you check that for me please? The Hansard’s over there in the corner under last month’s “Sporting Globe”. Thanks Perce.)
So if you don’t mind stepping into this little booth, I think we’ll be requiring you to drop the lederhosen. You do of course realise that certain sausages of an Germanic type are strictly prohibited, I’m sure. Notice H.M. Customs 1957/4683 sections (g) and (h) I think you’ll find.
And these hypodermics, Herr Jayper. In the equestrian trade are we??
Katz, Katz, Katz, what ARE we to think of you? While you do have considerable quiet amusement value at this stage, it would be cruel to use it woundingly. That would be like laughing at a first-year cadet for his ignorance.
Comment: A genuine howl of pain from the punctured ego, that. Yes, Katz, I know you failed in any way to prove your contention that ‘Phoenix… was a fiasco’. So does everyone who has bothered to follow this. Some have even stated that, haven’t they?
Comment: I am puzzled. Why should I bother with invective? I have not used any; leaving that in your capable hands. As for the history being ‘worthless’, you are busily utilising the 24 year old source I provided for you. So much for Karnow’s worth, then – at least in your view. No, wait! It is both worthless and excellent, according to your ruminations. Interesting.
The quality of your argument is …low – but you are no longer capable of even that, now. And this squeak of frustrated pain is the proof. SO you will do what the immature always do, completely reject everything, change the ground, and bruit it about that you ‘won’, like a kiddie in a kindergarten playground who lost the footrace and yells ‘you cheated!’. The real pity is, you do not even understand that there is no ‘winning’ involved. Only learning – at which you have failed.
Comment: And here it is, the Ad hoc fallacy I expected. Here, should I be interested in such things, I’d note this as the classic proof of ‘victory’ in debate.But Katz is – it is not about ego, it is about reality, and learning about it. I honestly do not think you understand this.
Comment: Actually, he does not. Furthermore, you have not by the rules of logic or even common sense. However, this guff from here down is not about that, but about your bruised ego. This is little more than a childish cry of outrage that the ‘faster kid’ somehow ‘cheated’.
Comment: Interesting – but somehow I do not think I will withdrawn my published articles on Vietnam just because you know nothing about the conflict. Oh, and you really should display your ego and immaturity like this.
Your tactic here is juvenile. You invent something, ascribe your invention to me, then try to use that as something meaningful, to ‘prove’ that the ‘other kid cheated’ in the footrace because he was faster. I have to admit, you are amusing; but you don’t even understand this as the self-parody it is.
Comment: An argument you cannot even begin to address, and have not the knowledge to.
Comment: That you consider knowledge gained from a library to be ‘magic’ is an indicator of overweening ego and considerable immaturity.
Shorter Katz: I’ve got nothing, and the bad man’s facts and logics hurtses my delicate ego.
Oh, so you understand, that’s gentle, chiding mockery, not invective. The latter, I have left exclusively to you during this discussion.
But despite your self-demonstrated inability to sustain a logical argument, and abysmal ignorance of history, continue to read Karnow. You know very little about this conflict, and you will actually learn something (should you do more than cherry-pick Karnow to feed your open anti-American bigotry).
I have led this particular horse to water, anyway. I just doubt that it knows enough to drink.
MarkL
Canberra
Is that so, MarkL?
Poetic MarkL:
“I am the Dean of KP College,
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.”
I think the following applies best, here:
Dolphin 45
MarkL
Canberra
Normally, with a normal president. Not with a reformed drunk high on teachings.
Whereupon MarkL’s head explodes.
In MarkL’s labyrinthine tunnels of yearned-for counterfactuals, he fails to perceive the significance of the fact that the Phoenix Program, which remained a deep secret from the oversight of civil government and public scrutiny until 1975, was discontinued by the CIA in 1972!
The CIA, the chief projectors, architects and funders (by means of its secret budget, courtesy of US taxpayers) of the Phoenix Program, decided that the program was not worth continued support, even with someone else’s money and other nations’ lives. Clearly, the CIA came up with its own assessment of the value of the program.
Gallingly for revisionists like MarkL, chewing bitterly on the gristle of vicarious defeat, the CIA was the first to arrive at the sound judgment of responsible historians.
Keep hunting down those traitors, MarkL!
‘Dolphin 45′
Comment: Amusing. My 15 year old son took 2 minutes 55 seconds on Google to work out what this meant. You still have not been able to manage it. Guess that whole ‘history’ thing still has you beat all hollow, eh?
So what? You may recall other events of that year. Oh, I forgot, your historical knowledge is too poor to do so.
Wrong. Again. If the CIA acted as described, where did all the existing programs (village defence, rural militia, provincial anti-VC networks etc etc) come from? Mars?
Comment: Mere unsupported opinion of someone who has demonstrated a very poor knowledge of history.
And thank you for the kind compliment. Erm… you DO understand that ALL historical scholarship revises what is known, and that, by definition, all history is ‘revisionist’? At least, according to my friendly Emeritus Professor of History and his staff.
(Truly embarrassing silliness deleted)
1/10 is your mark today. Try harder next time, please.
Dolphin 45
MarkL
canberra
Is it your argument that the CIA discontinued the Phoenix Program in 1972 because the CIA either needed or desired to redeploy its assets to another major project? If not, what does your above comment mean?
You appear to be unaware of fact that an “emeritus professor” is a retired professor who continues to work on an honorary basis. An “emeritus professor” therefore has no “staff”. Your knowledge of academia is troublingly sketchy.
Your lack of acquaintance with the concept of “historical revisionism” is still more troubling. Here are more than 25,000 uses of the term “revisionist history of”. As you may be able to perceive, a “revisionist” history purports to do much more than make minor amendments to the historical record. On the contrary, a “revisionist history” purports to overthrow well-established orthodoxies, even to perform paradigmatic shifts in historical understanding.
Perhaps you could ask your “emeritus professor” and his “staff” to explain this to you in terms that you would understand.
What I loved about this discussion was the role reversal. I, described here in the past as a ‘Right Wing Death Beast’ (quite an accolade in my view), and the one as an accusation by you (as my left-wing interlocutor) as a ‘revisionist’, while you played the role of an ultra-reactionary: bitterly clinging to views 30 years out of date in order to sustain your open anti-American bigotry. Which I notice you did not deny (and I intended it as a compliment, knowing that your circle would approve).
The irony is delectable, at least to me. Especially when using good (but dated) sources which are ‘revised’ by more up to date Communist Vietnamese sources. It’s an interesting reversal to see you ardently defending your cherry-picked interpretation of AMERICAN sources and down playing COMMUNIST VIETNAMESE sources.
That must really smart, when so earnestly hunting through the same source for things with which to feed an open anti-American bigotry.
Oh, as for the Emeritus matter? He was faculty head before retirement but he still spends several days a week there (health permitting) supervising advanced students and lecturing on his specialities. His (yes)former staff still playfully refer to him as ‘boss’ and in return are called ‘my loyal staff’.
I thought this would be clear from the nuances of the context. I DO apologise, I forgot how truly un-nuanced you are.
In terms of ‘revisionist history’, of course yours is one interpretation (and it is correct within its definition), as is mine; which is also correct within its limits as I defined it for you. Your missed this nuance, didn’t you? How amusing that I am the one playing ‘revisionist’you, the reactionary, in the context of this recent conflict.
Anyhoo, the taxi is due in 30 minutes as I am off overseas for two weeks or so. This whole ’spend four months a year travelling overseas’ thing gets very old, very fast, let me tell you. First time on an A380, though.
I truly treasure your sentence:
That pretty much sums this discourse with you up, my friend! A plaintive plea of ignorance on your part.
TTFN!
MarkL
canberra
PS: You have not found it, have you, reactionary compadre?
Dolphin 45
Operation Pheonix…
Is that what happended to JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy then?
No, the Phoenix Program didn’t come into operation until 1968.
If there was any CIA program implicated in JFK’s death, it may have been Operation Mongoose, or maybe some rogue elements irritated by JFK’s pusillanimous attitude to the Bay of Pigs misadventure.
Shorter MarkL: I’ll be out of Canberra for 4 weeks staying in a backpackers near Manly and the janitorial staff in the basement of the department of defence supply (where I work) bought me what they thought was the story of Walter Mitty, but it turned out to be a Tonka Toy A380.