Battle of the Books
Literary quagmire! Looks like Obama’s hitting the books to figure out the best way to have his own Vietnam. Wall Street Journal:
WASHINGTON — The struggle to set the future course of the Afghan war is becoming a battle of two books — both suddenly popular among White House and Pentagon brain trusts.
The two draw decidedly different lessons from the Vietnam War. The first book describes a White House in 1965 being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead. President Barack Obama recently finished the book, according to administration officials, and Vice President Joe Biden is reading it now.
The second describes a different administration, in 1972, when a U.S. military that has finally figured out how to counter the insurgency is rejected by political leaders who bow to popular opinion and end the fight.
…
The two books — “Lessons in Disaster,” on Mr. Obama’s nightstand, and “A Better War” on the shelves of military gurus — have become a framework for the debate over what will be one of the most important decisions of Mr. Obama’s presidency.
…
In Washington, books are flying off shelves. None of the major bookstores near the White House have the recently released paperback edition of “Lessons in Disaster” in stock …
The impact of all the book-reading on the Afghanistan decision isn’t clear. The administration’s review of its Afghan strategy is expected to last until the end of this month, and views are likely to evolve. “A Better War” shaped the debate over the 2007 troop surge in Iraq: Military commanders and top Pentagon civilians pushed the book ardently on surge skeptics, winning important converts.
…
“Lessons in Disaster” entered West Wing circulation after Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, one of the top foreign-policy voices in the White House, gave it to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel after reading it himself. Mr. Emanuel read the book in a weekend, then showed it to the president, who was already working on his own copy. Instead, Mr. Emanuel gave his copy to senior White House adviser David Axelrod, according to an administration official familiar with the book’s path.
Once in Mr. Obama’s hands, the book drew attention throughout the administration’s foreign-policy ranks …
Good Lord. Still fighting the second-to-last war … and studying the wrong part of it.
OK, here’s what DC is reading, so your hindsight can be 50-50, too. Amazon links and reviews:
Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam Gordon M. Goldstein
As national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy was the prototypical best and brightest Vietnam War policymaker in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Goldstein … painstakingly recounts his subject’s role as national security adviser and ponders the complexities of the elusive inner Bundy … late in life Bundy came to regret his hawkish ways … Vietnam, he said, was overall, a war we should not have fought.
Just what we need the president of the United States to be focused on right now … McGeorge Bundy’s navel.
A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam Lewis Sorley
There was a moment when the United States had the Vietnam War wrapped up, writes military historian Lewis Sorley … ”The fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won,” he says in this convention-shaking book. … South Vietnam was ready to carry on the battle without American ground troops and only logistical and financial support. Sorley says that replacing General Westmoreland with Abrams in 1968 was the key. “The tactics changed within fifteen minutes of Abrams’s taking command,” remarked one officer. Abrams switched the war aims from destruction to control; he was less interested in counting enemy body bags than in securing South Vietnam’s villages.
A Better War is unique among histories of the Vietnam War in that it focuses on the second half of the conflict, roughly from Abrams’s arrival to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Other volumes, such as Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, tend to give short shrift to this period. Sorley shows how the often-overlooked Abrams strategy nearly succeeded–indeed, Sorley says it did succeed, at least until political leadership in the United States let victory slip away … In the end, the mighty willpower of Abrams and diplomatic allies Ellsworth Bunker and William Colby was not enough. But, with its strong case that they came pretty close to winning, A Better War is sure to spark controversy.
Because the idea of America could win a modern war is … controversial?
A Modern War Reader is a good place to go if you’re interested in wars less than 40 years old. But you can go 2500 years back if you like at A Boutique Warmongery. Get right at #1 in Books. Then get Fit for Combat. Because you do want to live forever, right?
In compliance with FTC regs re blogger conflict of interest, I’d like to disclose that if I had to base my Afghan war strategy on Vietnam, I’d go with the part about how we could have won. Also, your purchases help support the site through modest commissions, at no additional cost to you.
(Care to comment? Use the “contact” link to assure me you are a real human being interested in commenting on the topics at hand. Include your preferred screenname and temporary password. Lefty Kumbayah singers, moderate handwringers, meanspirited rightwingers all welcome. This is a free speech zone as long as you keep it clean and make an effort to be accurate.)
Topics: Afghanistan, Obama, books, vietnam
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:24 pm on Wednesday, October 7, 2009
9 Responses to “Battle of the Books”
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October 7th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I think your “disclosure” says it all. Also, the FTC can KMA.
October 7th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
There’s nothing so dangerous as a bad analogy.
October 7th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
According to press reports, McChrystal’s recommendations were forwarded to the President today. By most accounts, that report has been languishing in DC for many months.
That aside, Sorley’s book is excellent, but Mark Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken, IMHO, is even better since he had the benefit of time and access to more resources.
By comparison, Lesson’s in Disaster may be the out Obama seeks. On the other hand, the WSJ opinion piece by Moyar on October 6 (Afghanistan and Leadership) is a better reference point and places COIN in context of what Petraeus and McChrystal propose.
October 7th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
As a past participant in that war (long ago and far away) I don’t feel like I have to read a lot of books about it. But over the intervening years I have and many were good, most were bad, written by someone who never was there, didn’t know anyone there and relied on recolections that made the wrong people look good.
Anyway, If Obama is looking for some kind of spiritual revelation or someone or some group to make a decision on what to do and how to do it, all is lost. Obama has no background, nor experience, nor attitude or aptitude to make any decisions about any war anywhere.
I would have better confidence in letting my 13 year old grandson make decisions about Afghanistan than Obama.
The democrats and their far left progressives want the money spent on war. They want it to spend on their projects and aspirations to bring America into the Communist, Marxist community of failed states. To ruin our Founder’s vision and the promise of the once greatest Nation on this earth.
If the decisions do not give our Warriors a fighting chance and the Afghan people a hope for freedom from tribal warfare and poverty, I think every commissioned officer in theater should resign.
But that is just me, an old grunt who has seen our politicians give away the hopes and dreams of millions and commit them to murder and imprisonment, or to leaving the land that they were born in and loved for a strange place far away.
Papa Ray
Central (used to be West) Texas
October 8th, 2009 at 3:51 am
And yet to understand the decision to go to war in Vietnam, the President ought to read Richard Reeve’s “President Kennedy: Profile in Power”.
October 8th, 2009 at 4:07 am
[...] Obama looks to the strategies of LBJ’s successor for success in Afghanistan — because, of course, to the left, all wars truly are [...]
October 9th, 2009 at 1:53 am
The base problem is that liberals do understand what happened or why in Vietnam.
They believe that the US lost the war and that we were evicted from the country by the NVA.
That is wrong. The US won the war, signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam and withdrew our troops in early 1973. There were less than a thousand US troops in the country when the NVA invaded the South in 1974. It would have been honorable for the US to come to the aid of the South Vietnamese govt. at that time, but Congress, under the control of the dishonorable liberals, refused to allow it.
The subsequent conquest of South Vietnam inflicted terrible suffering on the people of that country. It is something the US should be very sorry about, but don’t expect BO to appologize to anyone about it. He doesn’t know it happened.
October 9th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Heads up on new book from Triumph Foresaken author:
Yale University Press has just published Mark Moyar’s new book A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq. Mark interrupted work on the sequel to Triumph Forsaken in order to write this book, because he believes, based on his experiences as a professor at a military university, that America’s civilian and military leaders have been relying on poor counterinsurgency history and theory. Like Mark’s earlier works, A Question of Command challenges a large body of conventional wisdom, arguing that counterinsurgency theorists have been focused on methods when they should be focused on leadership. Drawing on nine case studies—including Vietnam and Afghanistan—the book explains how counterinsurgents can obtain the leadership required for victory. He has already written two Op-Eds derived from the book, in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Additional news is available at http://www.markmoyar.com. The website also has a link to Amazon.com, which at present is selling the book for less than anyone else.
October 11th, 2009 at 3:01 am
Right after his inauguration I sent Obama three books. In my cover letter I said that I had found them valuable and informative about the problems we faced after 9/11, and that he would profit from reading them. The books were “What Went Wrong” and “The Crisis In Islam” both by Bernard Lewis and “The Closed Circle” by David Pryce-Jones, about Arab and Muslim political culture. Obviously Obama never bothered to read them, or he would not have been going around saying the stupid things he says for the last nine months. I think reading those books would be much more useful to him, and to his advisors like Axelrod, than any amount of reading about Vietnam. Perhaps that is why he did not read them.
Leftists see the defeat of the US in Vietnam as their greatest triumph. Now they have another chance to repeat this triumph in Afghanistan. It is possible that they believe that, if they can pull an American defeat off again, the US will be permanently rendered incapable of opposing the spread of tyranny and oppression ever again.