Military Review English Edition September-October 2013 | Page 94

because of reductions in military aid to South Vietnam in the final year of the war. That too is a hugely oversimplified answer to a complicated question. The aid cuts (not a cut-off, as is often alleged) were a factor in South Vietnam’s defeat. But seeing it as the sole reason perceives the end of the war with the same illusion that permeated U.S. decision making at the beginning: that winning or losing was exclusively in American hands. For Sorley and others who have written in a similar vein, the war unfolded and ended entirely as the result of American decisions. In their lens, nothing is seen of the character, strategies, strengths, and shortcomings of either our enemy or our ally, or the idea that the leadership, skill, nerve, will, and endurance of the two Vietnamese sides had any bearing on the outcome. The historian Ronald Spector, in his review of Dereliction of Duty, recalled a story about the Confederate general George Pickett’s response when he was asked why the South lost the Civil War. “Well,” Pickett is supposed to have replied, “I kinda think the Yankees had a little something to do with it.”3 The Vietnamese had something to do with America’s failure in Vietnam, too, a truth that Americans would have done well to remember before plunging into war in other distant, unfamiliar places. Sadly, a mass of evidence suggests that we did not learn that lesson well enough. A good deal of that evidence can be found in Cultures of War (W.W. Norton, New York, 2010), by the renowned historian John W. Dower. Cultures of War is not about Vietnam, but focuses on wars before and after. It examines the influence of cultural attitudes in two events of the U.S.-Japanese war in World War II, Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor, and the American decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; and in two events of the war-on-terror era, the 9/11 attack, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The parallels Dower finds in those two eras are arresting in themselves. They also evoke unmistakable echoes of Vietnam, even where that war is not mentioned. An example is this passage from a “supporting paper” submitted in early 2005 for a Defense Science Board report on the U.S. effort in Iraq: To put it bluntly, [U.S. forces] never possessed an understanding of the political and religious nature of their opponent. . . It is clear that Americans who waged
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the war and who have attempted to mold the aftermath have had no clear idea of the framework that has molded the personalities and attitudes of Iraqis. Finally, it might help if Americans and their leaders were to show less arrogance and more understanding of themselves and their place in history. Perhaps more than any other people, Americans display a consistent amnesia concerning their own past, as well as the history of those around them.4 Change the name of the country (and perhaps delete the word “religious”) and every other word in those sentences could have been written about the U.S. war in Vietnam. The same is true in many other places in Dower’s book, as where he notes the American habit of disparaging enemies from other races and cultures. That tendency leads Americans to chronically underestimate the people they are fighting, like the former Navy commander at Pearl Harbor who admitted, “I never thought those little yellow sons-of-bitches could pull off such an attack, so far from Japan.” The word “little” is as significant as the word “yellow” in that sentence, Dower points out, connoting “not merely people of generally shorter physical stature, but more broadly a race and culture inherently small in capability and in the accomplishments esteemed in the white EuroAmerican world.” Both the attitude and the word persist in American culture. Three decades after Pearl Harbor, Henry Kissinger contemptuously called North Vietnam “a miserable little country.”5 Three more decades after that, in a new century, a conservative columnist offered this policy advice: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”6 That arrogance has consequences. In seeing their opponents as inferior primitives, Dower writes, Americans fail to see anything of an enemy’s “diversity, complexity, autonomy, history, and historical consciousness.” That leads to costly mistakes in planning and carrying out wars. The same blindness about our friends can be even more damaging, though military theorists and historians often overlook that point. In Vietnam, miscalculating the qualities and
September-October 2013 ? MILITARY REVIEW