8 ms·

On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad, with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reorderin

by apo 8y ago

On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad, with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures, have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command. Astonishingly expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in 2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as if distant war is a presumed government action. Except for the mention of the World Trade Center, this could be a telling of the US involvement in Vietnam. Back then, it was the highly dubious Domino Theory that hawks waved around to browbeat anyone suggesting that such a war was un-winnable, morally indefensible, or just plain hair-brained. Today it's the equally dubious umbrella of Terrorism. Having recently watched Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary, it seems nearly impossible to understand the thinking of the war's supporters. Unless, that is, you replace the word "Communism" with "Terrorism."

platz 8y ago
So we should've just let ISIS take over Iraq and Syria ?
- epicureanideal 8y ago
  ISIS was created by the destabilization of those countries. There are plenty of easy to find links about this, so forgive me for not citing sources. Also, given the nature of the activities, it's difficult to find authoritative sources, but I believe there were some WikiLeaks that had diplomatic cables discussing this. Also if you read Syrian and Russian news, and the Syrians are certainly highly motivated to defeat ISIS as it's trying to take over their country, and the Russians are highly motivated to protect their ally, they both say the US has seemingly been helping ISIS as much as fighting it.
  - platz 8y ago
    Ok, but when are you "starting the clock", if not now, then how long ago? 10 years? 20? 30?
    - boomboomsubban 8y ago
      You don't start the clock anywhere, you should always consider the context that led to things happening.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      Most of the instability in the Middle East can be traced directly to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. Our current strategy is like fighting fire with gasoline, because the people we are fighting have a better understanding of history than we do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
      - flukus 8y ago
        It goes back well before then to the Ottoman domination of the region and probably a few thousand years before that. Sykes-Picot was just a change of management. The area has been dominated by outsiders for most of recorded history.
      - baud147258 8y ago
        > have a better understanding of history than we do Considering the level of literacy in the Middle-East, I doubt that's true. And I wouldn't call what they know history, but rather propaganda.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    ...the US has seemingly been helping ISIS as much as fighting it. Yeah it's amazing that after all the "moderate rebels" have left (if they ever existed in the first place), and we've kept flooding the area with weapons and ammunition, ISIS has ended up with lots of USA weapons and ammunition.
- YZF 8y ago
  The US did let ISIS take over large swaths of Iraq and Syria during Obama's presidency. The lack of action of the US is directly correlated to the rise of ISIS, the prolonged Syrian civil war with its disastrous consequences. It was years and many beheadings before the US decided to do anything about it and really the Russians have done most of the work as well. I really like Obama as a person but his middle east strategy was a disaster. If anything the Russians are proving that you can intervene and be successful if you actually have any sort of coherent strategy and the right allies on the ground. They are the ones bringing an end to this bloody affair (with a lot more blood but still). EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Syrian_Civil_W... So for 3.5 years the US tested the "let's stay out of it and see what happens" strategy (for the most part). What happend? 6 million people internally displaced, 5 million refugees outside Syria, 500,000 people dead. Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, Assad emerge as winners. Well, that really worked out. Not to say they wouldn't have messed it up by intervening but this bad? Hard to imagine. EDIT2: I also understand as a non-american that it's a lot to ask of the US to take care of the world. But if it doesn't, who will? What happens in the rest of the world ends up impacting the entire world, including the US. Maybe I'm too naive though :(
  - freewilly1040 8y ago
    Not caring too much about massacring civilians is also a key part of Russia's recipe in Syria. And furthermore it is a little soon to be declaring victory for them there. What exactly would your strategy have been for a US intervention in Syria? Which local faction would you have supported? Would you have been willing to risk a hot war with Russia and Iran? When get involved in a war you don't get to say at the outset how far you go with it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - YZF 8y ago
      There was a point, early on, where it was basically Assad against everyone, including half his army (with the other half unsure). At that point a small push would have toppled Assad. I'd have pushed. This was before the foreign fighters, before ISIS (for those most part). Syria was a secular, fairly uniform, fairly peaceful, and fairly organized society. Very different story than Iraq. So that's one option. Another option would have been to threaten Assad and force him to come to some sort of agreement with the demonstrators. This was all before Russia and Iran got involved. Russia got involved when Assad was virtually days away from losing the civil war.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  ISIS didn't exist in 2003 when the USA invaded Iraq. ISIS was formed due to the power vacuum left after the USA withdrew from Iraq, largely by the former officer corps of Saddam's Iraqi Army, who had been left disenfranchised after the policy of de-Ba'athification [1] of the Iraqi government, replacing a vaguely competent government with a completely incompetent government. ISIS was a problem of the USA's own creation, just like the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the current Iranian regime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification
  - baud147258 8y ago
    Shouldn't the URSS be responsible for the creation of the Taliban? Al-Qaeda was financed by Saudi Arabia and the current Iranina regime is the result of a revolution against the American-supported previous regime. Still the US made all those problems worse, but can't hold the full blame for their creation.
    - toomanybeersies 8y ago
      You're right, it's not solely the fault of the USA. It's a very complicated situation. I was just alluding to the fact that the USA is fighting the Taliban in the 2010s, when in the 1980s they were funding them. Obviously if the USSR didn't invade Afghanistan, we might not be in this situation either.
- dang 8y ago
  "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, the comment takes a significant step further into political flamewar. Can you please not do that on HN?
mturmon 8y ago
The parallels are striking. I just finished reading Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, which is a story of Vietnam told through the lens of the experience of one particular American officer, and later civilian consultant: John Paul Vann. I heartily recommend the book - winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and authored by someone who was on the ground in Vietnam on and off during the war. The book was published in 1988, so any parallels that are evident to Afghanistan and Iraq are not the backseat driving of the author. One parallel, out of many, is that Vann many times lamented the lack of devotion the South Vietnamese Army had to the cause of Vietnamese independence. They largely wanted to avoid actual combat and profit off the American military machine by selling services, re-selling war materiel, accepting bribes for the other side, etc. And Vann said many times in the book that if he himself was a young Vietnamese, he would join the NVA (the North Vietnamese Army). And further, that he admired the grit and devotion the NVA had to the cause of independence. Indeed, one could fill a page of further comments on the parallels: asymmetric tactics, politically powerful generals who lied about prospects for winning, presidents who kicked the can down the road, inability to win "hearts and minds", blaming the press when bad news gets out, ease of bombing versus difficulty of holding territory, "nation-building", installation of American-backed Vietnamese leaders (often emigres) who have no credibility in the country... It is actually quite humbling. We should have known better.
- baud147258 8y ago
  Who started the Vietnam war?
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    The French in the mid 19th century.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    I don't think it does have a single simple cause. You could argue: - It was the French colonizing the country and imposing a nasty explotative regime - The French for refusing to decolonize the country post WW2 and fightning (and losing) a war to retain their colony - The US for refusing to help Ho Chi Minh when asked - The US for helping the French - The corrupt and brutal South Vietnamese regime propped up by the US - The brutal North Vietnam regime encouraged by the Soviets and Chinese to fight a proxy war against the West - The US for escalating after the Gulf of Tonkin incident
fjsolwmv 8y ago
It's fascinating to see this in the NYT, the paper that served as GW Bush's propaganda wing for selling the lies that persuaded the US public to support the second Iraq war.
- grey-area 8y ago
  Although the nytimes has always served as a mouthpiece for the current administration (this is how they get such good access, this is why they have remained on friendly terms with the Trump admin despite their mainly liberal readership), they have always run the occasional piece of real interest contrary to the official narrative (i.e. real journalism). For example during the Obama administration (which increased the use of drone & missile attacks globally) they posted this inditement of the assassination without trial of a teenage American citizen: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-killed-my-grandson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-ki...
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    >For example during the Obama administration (which increased the use of drone & missile attacks globally) they posted this inditement of the assassination without trial of a teenage American citizen: Though notably, they called the act a "targeted killing," as calling it an assassination would be accusing them of war crimes. Even the conclusion only condemns the killing of American's without trial, not bombing suspected terrorists without worrying about nearby people.
cryptonector 8y ago
The domino thing wasn't that crazy. China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia. Then what? Philippines? Thailand? Of course, the right answer was that we couldn't take on all of those burdens, not even one, really, not for long. But in the aftermath of WWII, I think it's not surprising that this wasn't understood.
- s_m_t 8y ago
  Everyone seems to also forget the then recent success of the Korean war. At risk of confusing what was known then and what is known now, well, look at NK vs SK today. Vietnam under socialist control turned out to be not anywhere as extreme but it would have been hard to guess that right during China's "great leap forward". Of course, things didn't turn out as well for neighboring Cambodia.
  - orbifold 8y ago
    Well the US history in Cambodia is as messy as the one in Vietnam. I don’t recall all the details but the Khmer Rouge was not inevitable without US intervention.
  - eadmund 8y ago
    > Vietnam under socialist control turned out to be not anywhere as extreme Not as extreme as North Korea? No, but even the Soviet Union wasn't as extreme as North Korea. The subjugation of South Vietnam under North Vietnam was pretty brutal though — the Boat People didn't spring from nothing.
    - baud147258 8y ago
      I remember working with a Boat People on my first job. He was a cool guy, but we never talked about Vietnam.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
alan-crowe 8y ago
Domino Theory is interesting because it implies a strategic success condition. USA achieve their strategic aim if (a) the Vietnam domino doesn't fall. OR (b) the Vietnam domino falls gently and doesn't knock the next one over. During the course of the Vietnam war, the communism revolution in China lost it mojo, and the impetus to spreading revolution throughout Asia declined. Viewed as a delaying-action/fighting-retreat the US involvement in Vietnam went on long enough to achieve its strategic aim.
- jacobush 8y ago
  That is the most horrible thing I have read in a long time, and what's so horrible is that it might be some truth to that. Or at least that it could be seen as truthful and right by the people making the decisions at the time.
Gibbon1 8y ago
My thoughts are that since Vietnam the neocons have continually pushed for one 'do over' after another to prove that 'war works'[1]. So every neocon war is a war unto itself. The worst thing is because the motivation for war is ideological, failure can't be accepted rationally. Some small success is motivation for a bigger war. Failure motivation to double down. [1] As opposed to what every disinterest person knows, that war is terrible, impossible to control and casts long dark shadows into the future.

by apo 8y ago

platz 8y ago

So we should've just let ISIS take over Iraq and Syria ?

epicureanideal 8y ago
ISIS was created by the destabilization of those countries. There are plenty of easy to find links about this, so forgive me for not citing sources. Also, given the nature of the activities, it's difficult to find authoritative sources, but I believe there were some WikiLeaks that had diplomatic cables discussing this. Also if you read Syrian and Russian news, and the Syrians are certainly highly motivated to defeat ISIS as it's trying to take over their country, and the Russians are highly motivated to protect their ally, they both say the US has seemingly been helping ISIS as much as fighting it.
- platz 8y ago
  Ok, but when are you "starting the clock", if not now, then how long ago? 10 years? 20? 30?
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    You don't start the clock anywhere, you should always consider the context that led to things happening.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    Most of the instability in the Middle East can be traced directly to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. Our current strategy is like fighting fire with gasoline, because the people we are fighting have a better understanding of history than we do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
    - flukus 8y ago
      It goes back well before then to the Ottoman domination of the region and probably a few thousand years before that. Sykes-Picot was just a change of management. The area has been dominated by outsiders for most of recorded history.
    - baud147258 8y ago
      > have a better understanding of history than we do Considering the level of literacy in the Middle-East, I doubt that's true. And I wouldn't call what they know history, but rather propaganda.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  ...the US has seemingly been helping ISIS as much as fighting it. Yeah it's amazing that after all the "moderate rebels" have left (if they ever existed in the first place), and we've kept flooding the area with weapons and ammunition, ISIS has ended up with lots of USA weapons and ammunition.
YZF 8y ago
The US did let ISIS take over large swaths of Iraq and Syria during Obama's presidency. The lack of action of the US is directly correlated to the rise of ISIS, the prolonged Syrian civil war with its disastrous consequences. It was years and many beheadings before the US decided to do anything about it and really the Russians have done most of the work as well. I really like Obama as a person but his middle east strategy was a disaster. If anything the Russians are proving that you can intervene and be successful if you actually have any sort of coherent strategy and the right allies on the ground. They are the ones bringing an end to this bloody affair (with a lot more blood but still). EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Syrian_Civil_W... So for 3.5 years the US tested the "let's stay out of it and see what happens" strategy (for the most part). What happend? 6 million people internally displaced, 5 million refugees outside Syria, 500,000 people dead. Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, Assad emerge as winners. Well, that really worked out. Not to say they wouldn't have messed it up by intervening but this bad? Hard to imagine. EDIT2: I also understand as a non-american that it's a lot to ask of the US to take care of the world. But if it doesn't, who will? What happens in the rest of the world ends up impacting the entire world, including the US. Maybe I'm too naive though :(
- freewilly1040 8y ago
  Not caring too much about massacring civilians is also a key part of Russia's recipe in Syria. And furthermore it is a little soon to be declaring victory for them there. What exactly would your strategy have been for a US intervention in Syria? Which local faction would you have supported? Would you have been willing to risk a hot war with Russia and Iran? When get involved in a war you don't get to say at the outset how far you go with it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - YZF 8y ago
    There was a point, early on, where it was basically Assad against everyone, including half his army (with the other half unsure). At that point a small push would have toppled Assad. I'd have pushed. This was before the foreign fighters, before ISIS (for those most part). Syria was a secular, fairly uniform, fairly peaceful, and fairly organized society. Very different story than Iraq. So that's one option. Another option would have been to threaten Assad and force him to come to some sort of agreement with the demonstrators. This was all before Russia and Iran got involved. Russia got involved when Assad was virtually days away from losing the civil war.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
ISIS didn't exist in 2003 when the USA invaded Iraq. ISIS was formed due to the power vacuum left after the USA withdrew from Iraq, largely by the former officer corps of Saddam's Iraqi Army, who had been left disenfranchised after the policy of de-Ba'athification [1] of the Iraqi government, replacing a vaguely competent government with a completely incompetent government. ISIS was a problem of the USA's own creation, just like the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the current Iranian regime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification
- baud147258 8y ago
  Shouldn't the URSS be responsible for the creation of the Taliban? Al-Qaeda was financed by Saudi Arabia and the current Iranina regime is the result of a revolution against the American-supported previous regime. Still the US made all those problems worse, but can't hold the full blame for their creation.
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    You're right, it's not solely the fault of the USA. It's a very complicated situation. I was just alluding to the fact that the USA is fighting the Taliban in the 2010s, when in the 1980s they were funding them. Obviously if the USSR didn't invade Afghanistan, we might not be in this situation either.
dang 8y ago
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, the comment takes a significant step further into political flamewar. Can you please not do that on HN?

mturmon 8y ago

The parallels are striking. I just finished reading Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, which is a story of Vietnam told through the lens of the experience of one particular American officer, and later civilian consultant: John Paul Vann. I heartily recommend the book - winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and authored by someone who was on the ground in Vietnam on and off during the war. The book was published in 1988, so any parallels that are evident to Afghanistan and Iraq are not the backseat driving of the author. One parallel, out of many, is that Vann many times lamented the lack of devotion the South Vietnamese Army had to the cause of Vietnamese independence. They largely wanted to avoid actual combat and profit off the American military machine by selling services, re-selling war materiel, accepting bribes for the other side, etc. And Vann said many times in the book that if he himself was a young Vietnamese, he would join the NVA (the North Vietnamese Army). And further, that he admired the grit and devotion the NVA had to the cause of independence. Indeed, one could fill a page of further comments on the parallels: asymmetric tactics, politically powerful generals who lied about prospects for winning, presidents who kicked the can down the road, inability to win "hearts and minds", blaming the press when bad news gets out, ease of bombing versus difficulty of holding territory, "nation-building", installation of American-backed Vietnamese leaders (often emigres) who have no credibility in the country... It is actually quite humbling. We should have known better.

baud147258 8y ago
Who started the Vietnam war?
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  The French in the mid 19th century.
- arethuza 8y ago
  I don't think it does have a single simple cause. You could argue: - It was the French colonizing the country and imposing a nasty explotative regime - The French for refusing to decolonize the country post WW2 and fightning (and losing) a war to retain their colony - The US for refusing to help Ho Chi Minh when asked - The US for helping the French - The corrupt and brutal South Vietnamese regime propped up by the US - The brutal North Vietnam regime encouraged by the Soviets and Chinese to fight a proxy war against the West - The US for escalating after the Gulf of Tonkin incident

fjsolwmv 8y ago

It's fascinating to see this in the NYT, the paper that served as GW Bush's propaganda wing for selling the lies that persuaded the US public to support the second Iraq war.

grey-area 8y ago
Although the nytimes has always served as a mouthpiece for the current administration (this is how they get such good access, this is why they have remained on friendly terms with the Trump admin despite their mainly liberal readership), they have always run the occasional piece of real interest contrary to the official narrative (i.e. real journalism). For example during the Obama administration (which increased the use of drone & missile attacks globally) they posted this inditement of the assassination without trial of a teenage American citizen: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-killed-my-grandson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-ki...
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  >For example during the Obama administration (which increased the use of drone & missile attacks globally) they posted this inditement of the assassination without trial of a teenage American citizen: Though notably, they called the act a "targeted killing," as calling it an assassination would be accusing them of war crimes. Even the conclusion only condemns the killing of American's without trial, not bombing suspected terrorists without worrying about nearby people.

cryptonector 8y ago

The domino thing wasn't that crazy. China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia. Then what? Philippines? Thailand? Of course, the right answer was that we couldn't take on all of those burdens, not even one, really, not for long. But in the aftermath of WWII, I think it's not surprising that this wasn't understood.

s_m_t 8y ago
Everyone seems to also forget the then recent success of the Korean war. At risk of confusing what was known then and what is known now, well, look at NK vs SK today. Vietnam under socialist control turned out to be not anywhere as extreme but it would have been hard to guess that right during China's "great leap forward". Of course, things didn't turn out as well for neighboring Cambodia.
- orbifold 8y ago
  Well the US history in Cambodia is as messy as the one in Vietnam. I don’t recall all the details but the Khmer Rouge was not inevitable without US intervention.
- eadmund 8y ago
  > Vietnam under socialist control turned out to be not anywhere as extreme Not as extreme as North Korea? No, but even the Soviet Union wasn't as extreme as North Korea. The subjugation of South Vietnam under North Vietnam was pretty brutal though — the Boat People didn't spring from nothing.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    I remember working with a Boat People on my first job. He was a cool guy, but we never talked about Vietnam.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
AnthonyMouse 8y ago

alan-crowe 8y ago

Domino Theory is interesting because it implies a strategic success condition. USA achieve their strategic aim if (a) the Vietnam domino doesn't fall. OR (b) the Vietnam domino falls gently and doesn't knock the next one over. During the course of the Vietnam war, the communism revolution in China lost it mojo, and the impetus to spreading revolution throughout Asia declined. Viewed as a delaying-action/fighting-retreat the US involvement in Vietnam went on long enough to achieve its strategic aim.

jacobush 8y ago
That is the most horrible thing I have read in a long time, and what's so horrible is that it might be some truth to that. Or at least that it could be seen as truthful and right by the people making the decisions at the time.

Gibbon1 8y ago

My thoughts are that since Vietnam the neocons have continually pushed for one 'do over' after another to prove that 'war works'[1]. So every neocon war is a war unto itself. The worst thing is because the motivation for war is ideological, failure can't be accepted rationally. Some small success is motivation for a bigger war. Failure motivation to double down. [1] As opposed to what every disinterest person knows, that war is terrible, impossible to control and casts long dark shadows into the future.