*Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War---US interventionist failure is
quite easy to see.*
On Friday, December 5, 2014 2:57:16 PM UTC-6, MJ wrote:
>
>
>
> *Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War, 50 Years Late *Jonathan Schell
> and Tom Engelhardt, December 01, 2014
>
>
>
> *Originally posted at TomDispatch <http://www.tomdispatch.com/>.
> Introduction, Sunday, November 24, 2014*: When I scanned the front page
> of the *New York Times *one recent morning and spotted this headline
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/us/politics/in-secret-obama-extends-us-role-in-afghan-combat.html>,
>
> “In a Shift, Obama Extends U.S. Role in Afghan Combat,” I instantly wanted
> to pick up the phone. It was an urge I had to repress by reminding myself
> that no one would be at the other end.
>
> A lost friend is like a phantom limb. The remarkable Jonathan Schell died
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175824/tomgram%3A_in_memoriam%3A_jonathan_schell_%281943-2014%29/>
>
> eight months ago and yet there are still mornings like that one when I feel
> an almost overwhelming desire to talk to him about the latest developments
> on this strange planet of ours. I may no longer be able to do that, but he
> still speaks to me through the body of unforgettable work he left behind,
> including, of course, his various path-breaking books
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175510/tomgram%3A_andy_kroll,_the_unlikely_oracle_of_occupy_wall_street/>.
>
> In this spirit, on a Thanksgiving Sunday when our longest war – not Vietnam
> but Afghanistan – is extending itself unendingly into the future, it seems
> appropriate to remember him by reposting the last piece he wrote jointly
> for this website and the *Nation* magazine. Its focus was *TomDispatch*
> Managing Editor Nick Turse’s bestselling, award-winning
> <http://www.beforecolumbusfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ABA2014PR.pdf>
> *Kill
> Anything That Moves*.
>
> That I can write either “bestselling” or “award-winning” in front of a
> no-holds-barred book on American war crimes in Vietnam still stuns me. I
> edited *Kill Anything That Moves* at Metropolitan Books (where I co-run
> the American Empire Project series <http://www.americanempireproject.com/>)
> and in the years it was being written, I regularly told its author that,
> important as his work was, he should expect it, on publication, to fall off
> the edge of the Earth. How wrong I was. It’s useful for all of us to be
> reminded – especially in grim times – that the future is largely
> unknowable, that it regularly makes fools of us all, and that that’s the good
> news <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/677/rebecca_solnit_acts_of_hope>,
> not the bad news.
>
> Reading *Kill Anything That Moves*
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=antiwarbookstore>,
> Jonathan Schell was transported into his past and taken aback by the full
> picture offered of the American war he had covered so memorably
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0306809265/ref=nosim/?tag=antiwarbookstore>. He
> told me so at the time and then used the book, soon after its publication,
> to look back on his own Vietnam experience, and ours as well. Reposting his
> piece seems like an appropriate way to mark the extension of our present
> Afghan war yet further into the future.
>
> *~ Tom Original Introduction*: Forty-six years ago, in January 1966,
> Jonathan Schell, a 23-year-old not-quite-journalist found himself at the
> farming village of Ben Suc, 30 miles from the South Vietnamese capital,
> Saigon. It had long been supportive of the Vietcong. Now, in what was
> dubbed Operation Cedar Falls, the U.S. military (with Schell in tow)
> launched an operation to solve that problem. The “solution” was typical of
> how Americans fought the Vietnam War. All the village’s 3,500 inhabitants
> were to be removed to a squalid refugee camp and Ben Suc itself simply
> obliterated – every trace of the place for all time. Schell’s remarkable
> and remarkably blunt observations on this grim operation were, no less
> remarkably, published in the *New Yorker* magazine and then as a book,
> causing a stir in a country where anti-war sentiment was growing fast.
>
> In 1967, Schell returned to Vietnam and spent weeks in the northern part
> of the country watching from the backseats of tiny U.S. forward air control
> planes as parts of two provinces were quite literally blown away, house by
> house, village by village, an experience he recalls in today’s
> *TomDispatch* post. From that came another *New Yorker* piece and then a
> book, *The Military Half*, which offered (and still offers) an unmatched
> journalistic vision of what the Vietnam War looked like. It was a moment
> well captured in a mocking song one of the American pilots sang for him
> after an operation in which he had called in bombs on two Vietnamese
> churches, but somehow missed the white flag flying in front of them. The
> relevant stanza went:
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *“Strafe the town and kill the people, Drop napalm in the square, Get out
> early every Sunday And catch them at their morning prayer.” *If
> Afghanistan is the war we somehow haven’t managed to notice most of the
> time, even while it’s going on, Vietnam was the war Americans couldn’t
> forget and have never been able to kick, possibly because we never managed
> to come to grips with just what it was and what we did there. Now, so many
> years later, in a monumental essay appearing in print in the *Nation*
> <http://www.thenation.com/> magazine and online here at *TomDispatch*,
> Schell returns (via Nick Turse’s new book, *Kill Anything That Moves: The
> Real American War in Vietnam*
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=antiwarbookstore>) to
> the haunted terrain he last visited so many decades ago*. *All of us,
> whether we know it or not, still live with the ghosts of that moment.
>
> *~ Tom *
> *How Did the Gates of Hell Open in Vietnam? *By Jonathan Schell
>
> For half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it
> possible that we didn’t know what we were talking about? After all that has
> been written (some 30,000 books and counting), it scarcely seems possible,
> but such, it turns out, has literally been the case.
>
> Now, in *Kill Anything that Moves*
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=antiwarbookstore>,
> Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture,
> written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were
> doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth.
> Meticulously piecing together newly released classified information,
> court-martial records, Pentagon reports, and firsthand interviews in
> Vietnam and the United States, as well as contemporaneous press accounts
> and secondary literature, Turse discovers that episodes of devastation,
> murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities
> were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity,
> unfolding, year after year, throughout that country.
>
> It has been Turse’s great achievement to see that, thanks to the special
> character of the war, its prime reality – an accurate overall picture of
> what physically was occurring on the ground – had never been assembled;
> that with imagination and years of dogged work this could be done; and that
> even a half-century after the beginning of the war it still should be done.
> Turse acknowledges that, even now, not enough is known to present this
> picture in statistical terms. To be sure, he offers plenty of numbers – for
> instance the mind-boggling estimates that during the war there were some
> two million civilians killed and some five million wounded, that the United
> States flew 3.4 million aircraft sorties, and that it expended 30 billion
> pounds of munitions, releasing the equivalent in explosive force of 640
> Hiroshima bombs.
>
> Yet it would not have been enough to simply accumulate anecdotal evidence
> of abuses. Therefore, while providing an abundance of firsthand accounts,
> he has supplemented this approach. Like a fabric, a social reality – a
> town, a university, a revolution, a war – has a pattern and a texture. No
> fact is an island. Each one is rich in implications, which, so to speak,
> reach out toward the wider area of the surrounding facts. When some of
> these other facts are confirmed, they begin to reveal the pattern and
> texture in question.
>
> Turse repeatedly invites us to ask what sort of larger picture each story
> implies. For example, he writes:
>
>
>
> *“If one man and his tiny team could claim more KIAs [killed in action]
> than an entire battalion without raising red flags among superiors; if a
> brigade commander could up the body count by picking off civilians from his
> helicopter with impunity; if a top general could institutionalize
> atrocities through the profligate use of heavy firepower in areas packed
> with civilians – then what could be expected down the line, especially
> among heavily armed young infantrymen operating in the field for weeks,
> angry, tired, and scared, often unable to locate the enemy and yet
> relentlessly pressed for kills?” *Like a tightening net, the web of
> stories and reports drawn from myriad sources coalesces into a convincing,
> inescapable portrait of this war – a portrait that, as an American, you do
> not wish to see; that, having seen, you wish you could forget, but that you
> should not forget; and that the facts force you to see and remember and
> take into account when you ask yourself what the United States has done and
> been in the last half century, and what it still is doing and still is.
>
>
>
> *Scorched Earth in I Corps *My angle of vision on these matters is a
> highly particular one. In early August 1967, I arrived in I Corps, the
> northernmost district of American military operations in what was then
> South Vietnam. I was there to report for the* New Yorker* on the “air
> war.” The phrase was a misnomer. The Vietnamese foe, of course, had no
> assets in the air in the South, and so there was no “war” of that
> description.
>
> There was only the unilateral bombardment of the land and people by the
> fantastic array of aircraft assembled by the United States in Vietnam.
> These ranged from the B-52, which laid down a pattern of destruction a mile
> long and several football fields wide; to fighter bombers capable of
> dropping, along with much else, 500-pound bombs and canisters of napalm; to
> the reconfigured DC-3 equipped with a cannon capable of firing 100 rounds
> per second; to the ubiquitous fleets of helicopters, large and small, that
> crowded the skies. All this was abetted by continuous artillery fire into
> “free-fire” zones and naval bombardment from ships just off the coast.
>
> By the time I arrived, the destruction of the villages in the region and
> the removal of their people to squalid refugee camps was approaching
> completion. (However, they often returned to their blasted villages, now
> subject to indiscriminate artillery fire.) Only a few pockets of villages
> survived. I witnessed the destruction of many of these in Quang Ngai and
> Quang Tinh provinces from the back seat of small Cessnas called Forward Air
> Control planes.
>
> As we floated overhead day after day, I would watch long lines of houses
> burst into flames one after another as troops moved through the area of
> operation. In the meantime, the Forward Air Controllers were calling in air
> strikes as requested by radio from troops on the ground. In past
> operations, the villagers had been herded out of the area into the camps.
> But this time, no evacuation had been ordered, and the population was being
> subjected to the full fury of a ground and air assault. A rural society was
> being torn to pieces before my eyes.
>
> The broad results of American actions in I Corps were thus visible and
> measurable from the air. No scorched earth policy had been announced but
> scorched earth had been the result. Still, a huge piece was missing from
> the puzzle. I was not able to witness most of the significant operations on
> the ground firsthand. I sought to interview some soldiers but they would
> not talk, though one did hint at dark deeds. “You wouldn’t believe it so
> I’m not going to tell you,” he said to me. “No one’s ever going to find out
> about some things, and after this war is over, and we’ve all gone home, no
> one is ever going to know.”
>
> In other words, like so many reporters in Vietnam, I saw mainly one aspect
> of one corner of the war. What I had seen was ghastly, but it was not
> enough to serve as a basis for generalizations about the conduct of the war
> as a whole. Just a few years later, in 1969, thanks to the determined
> efforts of a courageous soldier, Ron Ridenhour
> <http://www.ridenhour.org/about_ron.html>, and the persistence of a
> reporter, Seymour Hersh <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh>, one
> piece of the hidden truth about ground operations in I Corp came to light.
>
> It was the My Lai massacre, in which more than 500 civilians were murdered
> in cold blood by Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, of the
> Americal Division. In subsequent years, news of other atrocities in the
> area filtered into the press, often many years after the fact. For example,
> in 2003 the *Toledo Blade* disclosed
> <http://www.toledoblade.com/special-tiger-force> a campaign of torture
> and murder over a period of months, including the summary execution of two
> blind men by a “reconnaissance” squad called Tiger Force. Still, no
> comprehensive picture of the generality of ground operations in the area
> emerged.
>
> It has not been until the publication of Turse’s book that the everyday
> reality of which these atrocities were a part has been brought so fully to
> light. Almost immediately after the American troops arrived in I Corps, a
> pattern of savagery was established. My Lai, it turns out, was exceptional
> only in the numbers killed.
>
> Turse offers a massacre at a village called Trieu Ai in October 1967 as a
> paradigm. A marine company suffered the loss of a man to a booby trap near
> the village, which had in fact had been mostly burned down by other
> American forces a few days earlier. Some villagers had, however, returned
> for their belongings. Now, the Marine company, enraged by its loss but
> unable to find the enemy, entered the village firing their M-16s, setting
> fire to any intact houses, and tossing grenades into bomb shelters.
>
> A Marine marched a woman into a field and shot her. Another reported that
> there were children in the shelters that were being blown up. His superior
> replied, “Tough shit, they grow up to be VC [Vietcong].” Five or ten people
> rushed out of a shelter when a grenade was thrown into it. They were cut
> down in a hail of fire. Turse comments:
>
>
>
> *“In the story of Trieu Ai one can see virtually the entire war writ
> small. Here was the repeated aerial bombing and artillery fire Here was the
> deliberate burning of peasant homes and the relocation of villagers to
> refugee camps Angry troops primed to lash out, often following losses
> within the unit; civilians trapped in their paths; and officers in the
> field issuing ambiguous or illegal orders to young men conditioned to obey
> – that was the basic recipe for many of the mass killings carried out by
> army soldiers and marines over the years.” *The savagery often extended
> to the utmost depravity: gratuitous torture, killing for target practice,
> slaughter of children and babies, gang rape. Consider the following
> all-too-typical actions of Company B, 1st Battalion, 35th infantry
> beginning in October 1967:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *“The company stumbled upon an unarmed young boy. ‘Someone caught him up
> on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to
> kill him ’ medic Jamie Henry later told army investigators. A radioman and
> another medic volunteered for the job. The radioman ’kicked the boy in the
> stomach and the medic took him around behind a rock and I heard one
> magazine go off complete on automatic ’ “A few days after this incident,
> members of that same unit brutalized an elderly man to the point of
> collapse and then threw him off a cliff without even knowing whether he was
> dead or alive “A couple of days after that, they used an unarmed man for
> target practice “And less than two weeks later, members of Company B
> reportedly killed five unarmed women “Unit members rattled off a litany of
> other brutal acts committed by the company [including] a living woman who
> had an ear cut off while her baby was thrown to the ground and stomped on ”
> *
>
> *Pumping Up the Body Count *Turse’s findings completed the picture of the
> war in I Corps for me. Whatever the policy might have been in theory, the
> reality*,* on the ground as in the air, was the scorched earth I had
> witnessed from the Forward Air Control planes. Whatever the United States
> thought it was doing in I Corps, it was actually waging systematic war
> against the people of the region.
>
> And so it was, as Turse voluminously documents, throughout the country.
> Details differed from area to area but the broad picture was the same as
> the one in I Corps. A case in point is the war in the Mekong Delta, home to
> some five to six million people in an area of less than 15,000 square miles
> laced with rivers and canals. In February 1968, General Julian Ewell, soon
> to be known by Vietnamese and Americans alike as “the Butcher of the
> Delta,” was placed in charge of the 9th Infantry Division.
>
> In December 1968, he launched
> <http://www.thenation.com/article/my-lai-month> Operation Speedy Express.
> His specialty, amounting to obsession, was increasing “the body count,”
> ordained by the high command as the key measure of progress in defeating
> the enemy. Theoretically, only slain soldiers were to be included in that
> count but – as anyone, soldier or reporter, who spent a half-hour in the
> field quickly learned – virtually all slain Vietnamese, most of them
> clearly civilians, were included in the total. The higher an officer’s body
> count, the more likely his promotion. Privates who turned in high counts
> were rewarded with mini-vacations. Ewell set out to increase the ratio of
> supposed enemy soldiers killed to American soldiers killed. Pressure to do
> so was ratcheted up at all levels in the 9th Division. One of his chiefs of
> staff “went berserk,” in the words of a later chief of staff.
>
> The means were simple: immensely increase the already staggering firepower
> being used and loosen the already highly permissive “rules of engagement”
> by, for example, ordering more night raids. In a typical night episode,
> Cobra gunships strafed a herd of water buffalo and seven children tending
> them. All died, and the children were reported as enemy soldiers killed in
> action.
>
> The kill ratios duly rose from an already suspiciously high 24 “Vietcong”
> for every dead American to a completely surreal 134 Vietcong per American.
> The unreality, however, did not simply lie in the inflated kill numbers but
> in the identities of the corpses. Overwhelmingly, they were not enemy
> soldiers but civilians. A “Concerned Sergeant” who protested the operation
> in an anonymous letter to the high command at the time described the
> results as he witnessed them:
>
>
>
> *“A battalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 battalions in the
> Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 a month 1500, easy. (One
> battalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10%
> right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about
> 120-150 murders, or a My Lay [My Lai] each month for over a year.” *This
> range of estimates was confirmed in later analyses. Operations in I Corp
> perhaps depended more on infantry attacks supported by air strikes, while
> Speedy Express depended more on helicopter raids and demands for high body
> counts, but the results were the same: indiscriminate warfare, unrestrained
> by calculation or humanity, on the population of South Vietnam.
>
> Turse reminds us that off the battlefield, too, casual violence – such as
> the use of military trucks to run over Vietnamese on the roads, seemingly
> for entertainment – was widespread. The commonest terms for Vietnamese were
> the racist epithets “gooks,” “dinks,” and “slopes.” And the U.S. military
> machine was supplemented by an equally brutal American-South Vietnamese
> prison system in which torture was standard procedure and extrajudicial
> executions common.
>
> How did it happen? How did a country that believes itself to be guided by
> principles of decency permit such savagery to break out and then allow it
> to continue for more than a decade?
>
> Why, when the first Marines arrived in I Corps in early 1965, did so many
> of them almost immediately cast aside the rules of war as well as all
> ordinary scruples and sink to the lowest levels of barbarism? What chains
> of cause and effect linked “the best and the brightest” of America’s top
> universities and corporations who were running the war with the murder of
> those buffalo boys in the Mekong Delta?
>
> How did the gates of hell open? This is a different question from the
> often-asked one of how the United States got into the war. I cannot pretend
> to begin to do it justice here. The moral and cognitive seasickness that
> has attended the Vietnam War from the beginning afflicts us still. Yet *Kill
> Anything that Moves* permits us, finally, to at least formulate the
> question in light of the actual facts of the case.
>
> Reflections would certainly seem in order for a country that, since
> Vietnam, has done its best to unlearn even such lessons as were learned
> from that debacle in preparation for other misbegotten wars like those in
> Iraq and Afghanistan. Here, however, are a few thoughts, offered in a
> spirit of thinking aloud.
>
>
>
> *The Fictitious War and the Real One *Roughly since the massacre at My
> Lai was revealed, people have debated whether the atrocities of the war
> were the product of decisions by troops on the ground or of high policy, of
> orders issued from above – whether they were “aberrations” or “operations.”
> The first school obviously lends itself to bad-apple-in-a-healthy-barrel
> thinking, blaming individual units for unacceptable behavior while
> exonerating the higher ups; the second tends to exonerate the troops while
> pinning the blame on their superiors.
>
> Turse’s book shows that the barrel was rotten through and through. It
> discredits the “aberration” school once and for all. Yet it does not
> exactly offer support for the orders-from-the-top school either. Perhaps
> the problem always was that these alternatives framed the situation
> inaccurately. The relationship between policy and practice in Vietnam was,
> it turns out, far more peculiar than the two choices suggest.
>
> It’s often said that truth is the first casualty of war. In Vietnam,
> however, it was not just that the United States was doing one thing while
> saying another (for example, destroying villages while claiming to protect
> them), true as that was. Rather, from its inception the war’s structure was
> shaped by an attempt to superimpose a false official narrative on a reality
> of a wholly different character.
>
> In the official war, the people of South Vietnam were resisting the
> attempts of the North Vietnamese to conquer them in the name of world
> communism. The United States was simply assisting them in their patriotic
> resistance. In reality, most people in South Vietnam, insofar as they were
> politically minded, were nationalists who sought to push out foreign
> conquerors: first, the French, then the Japanese, and next the Americans,
> along with their client state, the South Vietnamese government which was
> never able to develop any independent strength in a land supposedly its
> own. This fictitious official narrative was not added on later to disguise
> unpalatable facts; it was baked into the enterprise from the outset.
>
> Accordingly, the collision of policy and reality first took place on the
> ground in Trieu Ai village and its like. The American forces, including
> their local commanders, were confronted with a reality that the
> policymakers had not faced and would not face for many long years.
> Expecting to be welcomed as saviors, the troops found themselves in a sea
> of nearly universal hostility.
>
> No manual was handed out in Washington to deal with the unexpected
> situation. It was left to the soldiers to decide what to do. Throughout the
> country, they started to improvise. To this extent, policy was indeed being
> made in the field. Yet it was not within the troops’ power to reverse basic
> policy; they could not, for instance, have withdrawn themselves from the
> whole misconceived exercise. They could only respond to the unexpected
> circumstances in which they found themselves.
>
> The result would combine an incomprehensible and impossible mission
> dictated from above (to win the “hearts and minds” of a population already
> overwhelmingly hostile, while pulverizing their society) and locally
> conceived illegal but sometimes vague orders that left plenty of room for
> spontaneous, rage-driven improvisation on the ground. In this gap between
> the fiction of high policy and the actuality of the real war was born the
> futile, abhorrent assault on the people of Vietnam.
>
> The improvisatory character of all this, as Turse emphasizes, can be seen
> in the fact that while the abuses of civilians were pervasive they were not
> consistent. As he summarizes what a villager in one brutalized area told
> him decades later, “Sometimes U.S. troops handed out candies. Sometimes
> they shot at people. Sometimes they passed through a village hardly
> touching a thing. Sometimes they burned all the homes. ‘We didn’t
> understand the reasons why they acted in the way they did.’”
>
> Alongside the imaginary official war, then, there grew up the real war on
> the ground, the one that Turse has, for the first time, adequately
> described. It is no defense of what happened to point out that, for the
> troops, it was not so much their orders from on high as their circumstances
> – what Robert J. Lifton has called “atrocity-producing situations” – that
> generated their degraded behavior. Neither does such an account provide
> escape from accountability for the war’s architects without whose blind and
> misguided policies these infernal situations never would have arisen.
>
> In one further bitter irony, this real war came at a certain point to be
> partially codified at ever higher levels of command into policies that did
> translate into orders from the top. In effect, the generals gradually – if
> absurdly, in light of the supposed goals of the war – sanctioned and
> promoted the *de facto* war on the population. Enter General Ewell and
> his body counts.
>
> In other words, the improvising moved up the chain of command until the
> soldiers *were* following orders when they killed civilians, though, as
> in the case of Ewell, those orders rarely took exactly that form.
> Nonetheless, the generals sometimes went quite far in formulating these new
> rules, even when they flagrantly contradicted official policies.
>
> To give one example supplied by Turse, in 1965, General William
> Westmoreland, who was made commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam in 1964,
> implicitly declared war on the peasantry of South Vietnam. He said:
>
>
>
> *“Until now the war has been characterized by a substantial majority of
> the population remaining neutral. In the past year we have seen an
> escalation to a higher intensity in the war. This will bring about a moment
> of decision for the peasant farmer. He will have to choose if he stays
> alive.” *Like his underlings, Westmoreland, was improvising. This new
> policy of, in effect, terrorizing the peasantry into submission was utterly
> inconsistent with the Washington narrative of winning hearts and minds, but
> it was fully consistent with everything his forces were actually doing and
> about to do in I Corps and throughout the country.
>
>
>
> *A Skyscraper of Lies *One more level of the conflict needs to be
> mentioned in this context. Documents show that, as early as the mid-1960s,
> the key mistaken assumptions of the war – that the Vietnamese foe was a
> tentacle of world communism, that the war was a front in the Cold War
> rather than an episode in the long decolonization movement of the twentieth
> century, that the South Vietnamese were eager for rescue by the United
> States – were widely suspected to be mistaken in official Washington. But
> one other assumption was not found to be mistaken: that whichever
> administration “lost” Vietnam would likely lose the next election.
>
> Rightly or wrongly, presidents lived in terror of losing the war and so
> being politically destroyed by a movement of the kind Senator Joe McCarthy
> launched after the American “loss” of China in 1949. Later, McGeorge Bundy,
> Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor, would describe
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805090878/ref=nosim/?tag=antiwarbookstore> his
> understanding of the president’s frame of mind at the time this way:
>
>
>
> *“LBJ isn’t deeply concerned about who governs Laos, or who governs South
> Vietnam – he’s deeply concerned with what the average American voter is
> going to think about how he did in the ball game of the Cold War. The great
> Cold War championship gets played in the largest stadium in the United
> States and he, Lyndon Johnson, is the quarterback, and if he loses, how
> does he do in the next election? So don’t lose. Now that’s too simple, but
> it’s where he is. He’s living with his own political survival every time he
> looks at these questions.” *In this context, domestic political
> considerations trumped the substantive reasoning that, once the futility
> and horror of the enterprise had been revealed, might have led to an end to
> the war. More and more it was understood to be a murderous farce, but
> politics dictated that it must continue. As long as this remained the case,
> no news from Vietnam could lead to a reversal of the war policies.
>
> This was the top floor of the skyscraper of lies that was the Vietnam War.
> Domestic politics was the largest and most fact-proof of the
> atrocity-producing situations. Do we imagine that this has changed?
>
> *Jonathan Schell, a fellow at The Nation Institute, a * TomDispatch
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175871/tomgram%3A_jonathan_schell,_a_niagara_falls_of_post-9_11_violence/>*
>
> regular, and the peace and disarmament correspondent for the *Nation*
> magazine, died
> <http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175824/tomgram%3A_in_memoriam%3A_jonathan_schell_%281943-2014%29/>
>
> on March 25, 2014. Among many other works, he was the author of * The
> Real War
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0306809265/ref=nosim/?tag=antiwarbookstore>*, a
> collection of his *New Yorker
>
> * reportage on the Vietnam War. This was originally a joint *TomDispatch
> */*Nation* article and appeared in print in the *Nation *magazine*.
>
>
> http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2014/11/30/seeing-the-reality-of-the-vietnam-war-50-years-late-2/
>
>
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