In Retrospect, by Robert S. McNamara - a belated review.

By proxy:  Occasionally, books get another surge or popularity apart from the first printing and go to a second edition.  This is a book that easily deserves a second printing, if indeed it has not had one yet:  The reasons are clear, and one obvious one is the U.S. government, when McNamara was secretary of defense leading up to the escalated military expeditions to southeast Asia, did rely on a kind of war of words and of numbers against the Viet Cong and what remained of the Viet Minh from colonial times.  The world of computerized strategy had been introduced from business into the way government worked and the wars we fought.  Everyone, including the French, probably, was using some sort of computer to study and determine everything from interpersonal to regional and global conflicts.  That is not a mystery today.

 

What does remain a mystery for most Americans concerned by developments in South and southeast Asia during the 1950’s through the end of the Viet conflict in the early 1970’s is how could we have devastated the communist and socialist enemy so thoroughly and then been declared “losers,” and resoundingly.  Some of this in one way or another has to do with the fact that many and much of the fighting in the Viet war was South of a demilitarized zone (17^th parallel above Hue City) where Viet Cong incursions made more and more headway as time went on.  Bombing Hanoi might have been effective, but it was ignored by an American public focusing on the pitched armed struggle in the South that was portrayed in everyone’s living room at night.  There were also the American press, various popular socialist revolutionaries and their student followers everywhere, who gave in psychologically to flourishing, but probably fairly isolated, if not very misinterpreted and overstated, aspects of the Viet conflict.  The flip side of giving into the image of the Viet Cong and its chief general Vo Nguyen Giap (which is what the well – known flower power movement did and the press appears to have done) as a superior fighting force was the belief that southeast Asia was in a series of “domino” states that would cascade into communism should Saigon City fall to the North.  There is also the serious criticism of the U.S. that Westmoreland, Taylor, and McNamara were at cross – purposes; a hint of this might also have made for poor morale in the field and thus the war unwinnable.  

 

Not only has the “domino” theory been disputed and disproven but the flower power movement has also been declared to have been counterproductive, and even disavowed by some or declared just to have been a mistake of hubris and plain ignorance.  It was morally wrong to try to persuade people that things like the scent of flowers would draw the enemy to a more peaceful demeanor (trees might have been better, but trees take longer to grow and require more husbandry than flowers.)  That the domino effect would draw the world into a communist abyss has been equally disparaged in later years.  The domino effect was the domestic solution to the flower children and its cautionary advocates have survived the Viet and Cold War and other conflicts whereas most ‘flower children’ everywhere are at most tepid on either front.  With respect to the current military conflicts and the overall effects of the conflicts in southeast Asia, one can draw actually glean very few similarities in how they are / were resolved:  The Viet conflict, and its ancillary actions were resolved in a political environment designed to disparage a popularly elected president, and were resolved in reaction to an official call for drafting more people into the military when an elite and volunteer armed forces were on the immediate administrative horizon.  None of those circumstances prevails today, for the most part, and history itself will really judge for better or worse the U.S. reaction to global terrorist threats, as recognised first by the war on terror under Clinton and then under Bush and Obama.