Attacks Likely to Force Tougher Stance by U.S.

Bob,

Your arguments have merit, even if they're grossly over simplified and too broadly applied to fit to every situation. If only the world could be so simple and romantic as you make it out to be. Mao is another figure misrepresented by history, largely due to the General Stilwell shaping the narrative that was never challenged until recent years. Stilwell effectively blamed his own incompetence on Chiang Kai-shek, and that myth stood for decades. Now historians taking a harder and less bias look, realize Mao wasn't a popular figure and Chiang's army fought much more effectively than Mao's. His victory was a the result of accidents throughout history. His detention by a war lord, heavy casualties due to fighting the Japanese while Mao largely recovered from almost being defeated, to Stilwell's overly critical review of Chiang that limited Western aid, while Mao received sufficient aid from the USSR. The more I study history, the more I realize it isn't predetermined by anyone's predictive models.

Ho didn't win due to legitimacy, he won because support from China and the USSR enabled him to defeat South Vietnam with overwhelming military force. Our tanks could have rolled into Hanoi, but we didn't seek to defeat North Vietnam, due to the perceived risk of triggered a nuclear war with China or the USSR. External factors shaped the outcome just as much as internal factors.

As for our leaders fearing change and embracing the status quo, nothing could have been further from the truth when we first got involved. The post WWII world was anything but static (the world never has been), it was undergoing rapid change in many parts. Our leaders recognized this, and attempted to shape the changes. They wrestled with the tension of promoting self-determination and containing the spread of communism. We didn't even care that much about Vietnam, but since France managed to convince us that if we didn't support them in Vietnam France could fall to communism we provided support, and foolishly stayed after France packed up and went home. Combine that with the red scare and our hubris we stayed. We were half commited to the wrong war.

Fast forward to today, both internal and external factors will drive our future actions in Syria. Those actions won't be shaped simply by the so-called legitimacy of the various groups. That model doesn't help us much with the real world we live in, but it should inform us on how difficult the road will be to get to our desired ends.

RCJ, the following quote from Michael Hauben’s SWJ article of a few weeks back (Postscript: Lessons from a Field Adviser’s Perspective) would seem to contradict your assertion of “one” Vietnamese people:

<blockquote><strong>Reflections on US Misapprehensions Re: Nationalism and the Ethnic Dimension:</strong>

From the outset, the US was obsessively concerned with projecting a stridently anti-colonialist image that it assumed would, by drawing distinctions between Americans and the French and pointing to a shared anti-colonial heritage, resonate with the South Vietnamese masses. On the other hand, it remained consistently ignorant of the depth of the Southern ethnic consciousness—and contemptuous distaste for <strong>North and Central Vietnamese, considered alien ethnic groups</strong>—in the ethos of the Southern (i.e., Deltaic) people.

Consequently, the US early-on decided to oppose leadership by the Southern elite because they were so patently Francophile, and threw their support behind Diem, an ethnic <strong>Central</strong> Vietnamese with strong nationalist credentials but a <strong>Northern Catholic</strong> power base and constituency. (This constituency, far from representing a <strong>Northern</strong> elite, were for the most part impoverished peasants, many from the autonomous Catholic bishoprics, who had accepted evacuation to the South as refugees on the orders of their clergy when the country was divided in 1954. There, they were the beneficiaries of a veritable Diem affirmative action revolution, which meted out favoritism that aroused the resentment of many Southerners of all classes.)

But, as Race pointed out in his classic, War Comes to Long An, it was definitely not nationalism that motivated the Southern peasantry[xix] (whom I found so remarkably void of chauvinism in the modern, nationalist sense), to whom colonialism was a distant irrelevancy, to first take up arms at the behest of the Party. Most had never even laid eyes on a Frenchman, anyway. And later, when the battle was joined against the American enemy, neither anti-imperialist nationalism nor “reunification” with the North struck a chord with Southerners, who had other reasons for fighting.[xx]

Deep-seated Southern regionalism, which well preceded the French colonialism that used this sentiment to its advantage, both generated animosity against <strong>Northern (Catholic)</strong> officials of the Diem regime (at time when Party cadre were locals), and enforced the post-Tet backlash against PAVN. Yet the obvious overrepresentation of ethnic <strong>Northerners</strong> in the civil service and officer corps of the Thieu government precluded the GVN from using ethnic passion as the basis for its appeals to the populace to resist North Vietnamese aggression.

But given the depth of feeling that defined <strong>Northerners</strong> as unwelcome outsiders, it is inconceivable that PAVN’s ethnicity did not of itself motivate Southerners to reject outright the prospect of rule by the DRV. (As for the population segment of <strong>Northern Catholic</strong> origin, expected to remain loyal to GVN because of their 1954 flight south as refugees from Communism, certainly by 1974, anti-war Communist propaganda was gaining a ready audience in the teeming, <strong>North Vietnamese Catholic</strong>, urban slums of Saigon-Bien Hoa, now hard hit by a faltering economy, reflecting a noticeable erosion of the inhabitants’ commitment.)</blockquote>

I added paragraphs where none originally existed and bold emphasis anytime “Northern” and “Central” Vietnamese were mentioned. PAVN was the North Vietnamese Army while GVN was the South Vietnamese Army. Then, don’t forget Outlaw’s Montagnards.

Bill,

I fully agree with you that whack-a-mole won't defeat ISIS. But short of boots on the ground, it will have to do. And yes one can't segregate ISIS from: disenfranchisement of Sunni elites post OIF, the Kurdish question, our Gulf "partners" running amok, and Turkish and Iranian regional aspirations.

I have vommented elsewhere that only ground forces will defeat ISIS.

A novel approach may be to put the Egyptian Army to work as a Sunni occupying force, with Coalition air cover and funding. Just a thought...

Azor,

I associate the scalpel approach with our HVI whack-a-mole approach, which we do very well, but it doesn't work. I think a sledge hammer approach did work on North Vietnam, but failed in South Vietnam for a lot of reasons. It may result in a short term tactical victory in Raqqa, but you can't defeat a network with a sledge hammer. This presents a challenge that traditional approaches will not meet.

The first step in developing an effective strategy is to correctly define the problem. We don't do that well with our normal approach of attempting to artificially disagregate the problem, instead of dealing with the whole problem. Can we really have a strategy for ISIL without one for the Middle East and globally?

Right now the city of Sinjar does not look much like scalpel work. I do not believe ISIS is contained. By scalpel, if you mean that our forces and those we advise look more like a SWAT team than fire and maneuver of units at war, I must disagree. Lets see, 9/11 had a ratio of 1(hijacker):158 (Americans) in favor of the hijackers. Paris recently was 1 terrorist killing 16 and wounding 44. And, you want to use a scalpel. We need to get serious about this.