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You Can't Connect The Dots Looking Forward, You Can Only Connect Them Looking Backwards

Edna Ferber

Now that the war in Iraq is officially over, it might be interesting to pause and reflect on the views U.S. leaders held on Iraq when it was just getting underway, and compare them to the views U.S. leaders had on Vietnam during the same period. Perhaps there are some parallels that we can learn from.

 “The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort,” Bush said of Iraq back then. “Our coalition will stay until our work is done.”

It seems to me I heard the same said when I was in Vietnam.

"We'll stay for as long as it takes. We shall provide whatever help is required to win the battle against the communist insurgents." Robert F. McNamara, 1963.

Shortly after making this statement, McNamara returned to Washington where he promptly told President Johnson that the South Vietnamese army was collapsing, that the U.S. advisors in Vietnam couldn’t help them anymore, and that the President must immediately send more U.S. troops to Vietnam. Skeptical of how he was going to extract himself from Vietnam once he got in, Johnson asked an old friend and mentor, Senate Armed Services Chairman, Richard Russell of Georgia, what his views were. This is the conversation that ensued:

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: What do you think about this Vietnam thing? What, what, I'd like to hear you talk a little bit.

RICHARD RUSSELL: Frankly, Mr. President, if you were to tell me that I was authorized to settle it as I saw fit, I would respectfully decline and not take it.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: [chuckles]

RICHARD RUSSELL: It's a, it's a, it's the damn worst mess I ever saw, and I don't like to brag. I never have been right many times in my life. But I knew we were going to get into this sort of mess when we went in there. And I don't see how we're going ever to get out without fighting a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles [...] I just don't know what to do.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Well, that's the way that I've been feeling for six months.

RICHARD RUSSELL: It appears our position is deteriorating. And it looks like the more we try to do for them, the less that they're willing to do for themselves [...] It's a hell, a hell of a situation. It's a mess. And it's going to get worse. And I don't know what to do. I don't think that the American people are quite ready for us to send our troops in there to do the fighting. And if it came down to an option of just sending the Americans in there to do the fighting, which will, of course, eventually lead into a ground war and a conventional war with China [...] If it got down to that or just pulling out, I'd get out. But then I don't know. There's undoubtedly some middle ground somewhere [...]

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: How important is it to us?

RICHARD RUSSELL: It isn't important a damn bit, with all these new missile systems.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Well, I guess it's important to us-

RICHARD RUSSELL: From a psychological standpoint.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: I mean, yes, and from the standpoint that we are party to a treaty. And if we don't pay any attention to this treaty, why, I don't guess they think we pay attention to any of them.

RICHARD RUSSELL: Yeah, but we're the only ones paying any attention to it.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Yeah, I think that's right [...] I don't think the people of the country know much about Vietnam and I think they care a hell of a lot less.

RICHARD RUSSELL: I know, but you go send a whole lot of our boys out there-

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. That's what I'm talking about. You get a few. We had 35 killed-and we got enough hell over 35-this year [...] The Republicans are going to make a political issue out of it, every one of them, even Dirksen.

RICHARD RUSSELL: It's the only issue they got [...] It's a tragic situation. It's just one of those places where you can't win. Anything you do is wrong [...]

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Now, the whole question, as I see it, do we, is it more dangerous for us to let things go as they're going now, deteriorating every day-

RICHARD RUSSELL: I don't think we can let it go, Mr. President, indefinitely.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Then it would be for us to move in?

RICHARD RUSSELL: We either got to move in or move out. I -

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: That's about what it is.

RICHARD RUSSELL: You can make a tremendous case for moving out [...]

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: Well, they'd impeach a President though that would run out, wouldn't they? I just don't believe that-outside Morse, everybody I talk to says you got to go in, including Hickenlooper, including all the Republicans none of them disagreed with him yesterday when he made the statement "we have to stand." And I don't know how in the hell you're gonna get out unless they tell you to get out.

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Reread the last sentence folks… it seems to me that’s exactly what the Iraqis did a few weeks back… tell us to get out.

Hell, they didn’t even show up for the hand-over ceremony, that’s how little they thought of our effort to help them make a “transition from dictatorship to democracy”.

Say, is that Yogi Berra I hear laughing in the background? Déjà vu all over again...

Continued from left column... 

By the late 40s it could be said with certainty that an arms race had begun, and with it came the knowledge that the threat of nuclear war was real. By the early 50s that knowledge had morphed from a question of whether nuclear war was possible into one of “is nuclear war inevitable?” And during all of this, nary a thought was given to conventional war. After all, why would anyone start a conventional war again… don’t you remember the pain we all felt during World War II?

Apparently not. Memories of pain being short, hubris and jingoism being in great supply (then, and even today), it was only a matter of time until social factors pushed two countries… or in the case of the 1950s, the champions of two political philosophies, into open, direct, and hot conflict with each other.

Why would the advocates of two different political philosophies end up in hot conflict with each other? The answer is just as simple as it was predestined: in 1950 the factors that most determined how countries on opposite sides of these two political philosophies would react to each other boiled down to just two. The first was that the United States had touted to the world its mindset that it would contain communism at all costs, and the second was that its Army was reduced to little more than 600,000, down from the 8.3 million military men it had in uniform during its peak in WWII. Clearly, i) if you were a supporter of communism, you knew the United States was gunning for you, and ii) if you were ever going to strike in a way that invited a U.S. military response, you had better do so now, while the U.S. was at its weakest.

On the U.S. side, looking out at the world, those countries with designs on expanding communism were targets to be dealt with. How, no one had quite figured out. But by God, the U.S. was not going to let communism expand, even though we had no idea how we were going to go about stopping it. Even so, the U.S. at that time was determined that it would not happen, and even coined a new word to define U.S. policy towards communism: containment.

Strategically, the word had a nice ring to it. Tactically, no one had any idea how to implement such a policy. In the end, this inability to convert a named strategy into a tactical policy would be the undoing of nearly all of America’s post World War II military excursions. [2]

From the communist side, looking out… one could only see the menacing frown of Uncle Sam’s face, scowling at those who espoused communist principles of government.

What was wrong with this whole scenario was that in the early 50s the only place the U.S. was “looking out” towards was Europe. Somehow, it neglected to look back over its shoulder… at the new east, Asia, rather than the old east, Eastern Europe.

The result was that with its eyes firmly fixed on Europe, and diplomatic efforts focused on anticipating and preparing for an outbreak of armed hostilities there, the  U.S. was caught flatfooted and bewildered when war broke out thousands of miles away, in Korea.[3] One of the reasons for the shock of the event and the bafflement that ensued was due to the role the Signal Corps played… or rather, the role the Signal Corps didn’t play.

By orders issued at the end of the second world war, the Signal Corps had begun to dismantle the global military communication network that it managed at that time. By the time of the start of the Korean War, communication to the U.S. from diplomatic outposts (which depended on military communication links almost exclusively) in Korea was reduced to that of a single telephone line that often simply did not work. At that time, the only reliable means of communicating with the U.S. from Korea was to either send sea born documents to an interim location (e.g. Japan), from where they could then be telegraphed back to the U.S., or ship them by boat directly to the U.S., a transit time that could take between 18 and 32 days.

The relevance of this degradation in the physical means of communication was an impact on the objective of communication—to effect a transfer of information that allows the receiver to understand the views of the sender. If one looks philosophically at the purpose and function of communication, one quickly realizes that the purpose of communication is to foster understanding between two communicants. Without a means to effectively communicate, not only were U.S. diplomats in Korea at a disadvantage in terms of explaining the scene on the ground to those back in Washington, but the U.S., China, and the two Koreas were unable to exchange views with each other in a manner that could have precluded the Korean War. The dismantling by the Signal Corps, under orders, of its Asian communication links, effectively guaranteed that anything anyone in Asia was saying was not being well heard in Washington… and vice versa.

As an example, on 30 September 1950, Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai publicly warned “The Chinese people… will not tolerate seeing their neighbors savagely invaded by the imperialists.” As a statement of intent on the part of the Chinese to intervene if a war broke out in Korea, nothing could have been clearer. Yet no one in Washington heard it, let alone tried to figure out what it meant.

These types of incidents are the causes of war. Fortunately, what we now know about how wars are started is more than we knew then. Among other things, today we know:

1) War is costly.

2) Leaders care more about issues than about people.

3) Leaders are unsure of the value other states place on an issue.

Focusing on these three items, one can easily see that the only way to preclude war is i) for leaders to care more about people than issues, and ii) for leaders to focus hard on understanding what an opposing side’s values are on each particular issue that can lead to war. As shown above, without knowledge of what the Chinese were saying about the Korean issue, it was next to impossible to foretell that North Korea was on the brink of invading the south, and that the Chinese were going to stand behind them.

As a refresher of the historic events that led to the Korean War, the reader should recall that for nearly forty years (since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905) Korea had suffered terribly under Japanese rule. After World War II instead of simply letting the Korean people have their country back and fend for themselves, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to jointly occupy Korea, setting the 38th Parallel as the dividing line between their areas of responsibility. With the involvement of the Allies, it was agreed that a unified, fully independent Korea would come into existence only after elections took place. Unfortunately, as we all know, as in the case of Germany, the provisional boundary that was set in place toughened over time into a lasting boundary that still exists today. As in Germany, on one side of the boundary the Soviets installed a Communist government, on the other the U.S. attempted to foster a republic with an elected president. By 1948 this task was completed on both sides, with the U.S. and Russia beginning at that time to remove their occupation forces. The U.S. was the first to complete its withdrawal, taking all of its troops out by mid-1949, leaving behind only an advisory group to help train a South Korean military force. 

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Footnotes:

[1] Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz (1780 – 1831), a Prussian soldier and German military theorist, studied and published a dialectic on the moral and political aspects of war. His work Vom Kriege (On War) famously stated "War is the continuation of policy by other means." – To return to your place in the text, click here:

[2] As we know today, for one country to “contain” another country’s ambitions, a commitment of both military, fiscal, and popular support for the effort must be made by the people of that country… a commitment to stay the course in all three of these areas for a period in the order of 30–50 years or more. Time and again it has been proven that while the American people will allow a limited use of its youth (military) in support of a cause against another country, and its money (fiscal), it will not support a 50 year commitment to the cause. Why? Simply because the cost in terms of youth and money is too great for most Americans to stomach, no matter how worthy the cause. In simple terms, gone are the days of the American people supporting the kind of 50 year occupation that it unknowingly set in motion, and therein allowed to happen, in the cases of Japan and Germany. – To return to your place in the text, click here:

[3] In addition to the two issues previously listed as a source of encouragement for a communist leaning country to undertake military action against US interests, in the case of North Korea some also cite as an incentive for them to invade South Korea an address to the National Press Club on January 12, 1950, by then US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, wherein he described the boundaries of U.S. interests in a manner that made support for South Korea appear ambiguous. Presumably, since the U.S., which was so hell bent on stopping communism that it listed all the areas of the world where it would intervene militarily to stop its spread, did not include Korea, then that meant that the North could press its case by military means, with impunity, and without fear of a military response from the U.S. – To return to your place in the text, click here: