{"id":1908,"date":"2015-11-10T16:38:26","date_gmt":"2015-11-10T22:38:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1908"},"modified":"2015-12-11T10:12:17","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T16:12:17","slug":"analogies-at-war-korea-munich-dien-bien-phu-and-the-vietnam-decisions-of-1965","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1908","title":{"rendered":"Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Yuen Foong Khong, 1992, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ<\/p>\n

This is one of the books that my son, Peter, had as a result of his master’s studies at George Washington University.\u00c2\u00a0 I went through the box and picked out some of them that looked interesting.\u00c2\u00a0 The book sat in another box for a few years until I picked it up this summer because there weren’t any other books in our RI condo that I hadn’t read.<\/p>\n

The subject of this book holds a certain fascination for me as I was convinced that the government was lying to the American people about the motives of the intervention in Viet Nam (as well as what was occurring during the intervention).\u00c2\u00a0 I did not, however, have a very good understanding as to exactly what the motivations were.\u00c2\u00a0 This book went a long way toward providing some insight.<\/p>\n

Khong analyzes, from a human psychological perspective,\u00c2\u00a0two decisions of 1965, the February decision to bomb North Vietnam, and the July decision to introduce ground troops.\u00c2\u00a0 Khong’s assertion is that analogies from prior historical events play a large role in making current decisions.\u00c2\u00a0 He also finds that using these analogies from prior historical events can lead to major mistakes in policy decisions and, once the wrong decisions are made, these same analogies invariably lead to the decision makers’ hanging on to their original thinking despite mounting evidence that they are on the wrong course.\u00c2\u00a0 The three analogies that were most commonly used were the Korean conflict, Munich, and Dein Bein Phu.\u00c2\u00a0 It appears that the analogy of the Korean conflict was the one most used in supporting the two decisions of 1965 that were examined.<\/p>\n

One of the findings is that, in the absence of current information, the decision maker may fill in missing information with the facts from the prior situation, facts that may not necessarily be pertinent to the current situation.\u00c2\u00a0 The author points out that many of the decision makers in the Viet Nam era were some of the brightest and most well educated persons in our society.\u00c2\u00a0 Despite their smarts, they tended to make some grievous errors\u00c2\u00a0in judgement and tended to not listen to\u00c2\u00a0arguments that were in opposition to their way of thinking.<\/p>\n

After reading this book, I could sympathize somewhat with the difficulty these individuals had in making the decisions that they did.\u00c2\u00a0 My particular sympathy is with President Lyndon Johnson as he agonized over these decisions and repeatedly sought opinions from all of his advisors as well as this military leaders before making these decisions.\u00c2\u00a0 From the questions he asked, it appears that he had the best interests of the United States at heart when he finally came to the conclusions that he did.\u00c2\u00a0 It is unfortunate that he didn’t get better advice.<\/p>\n

The book also indicates that one of his advisors, George Ball, was on the right track when he used the analogy of Dien Bien Phu in predicting the disastrous outcome that\u00c2\u00a0would come to pass some years later.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0My sympathy is with Mr.\u00c2\u00a0Ball because his very accurate predictions were ignored in the face of opposition from\u00c2\u00a0almost all of the other advisors.<\/p>\n

While I have less sympathy for the other\u00c2\u00a0advisors, I can now, as a result of reading this book,\u00c2\u00a0better understand how they came to their positions.\u00c2\u00a0 Several of these advisors later admitted that they were mistaken and regretted the advice they provided (William Bundy and Robert McNamara are two such individuals).<\/p>\n

Although I have a better understanding of the thought process that surrounded these decisions, I still can’t forgive individuals such as Walt Rostow and General William Westmorland who never recanted their views despite overwhelming evidence that they were greatly mistaken.\u00c2\u00a0 These are individuals who should definitely share the blame for the loss of over 58,000 American lives as well as the lives of countless Vietnamese.<\/p>\n

Analogies at War<\/em> is an insightful work.\u00c2\u00a0 The author researched his subject carefully and it shows.\u00c2\u00a0 His writing and sentence structure are very clear and he forcefully presents his arguments.\u00c2\u00a0 The only downside of the book, I found, was that, because of the arguments put forth and the information provided, it tended to get somewhat repetitious.<\/p>\n

The book was written in 1992, prior\u00c2\u00a0to our involvement in the\u00c2\u00a0Iraq wars.\u00c2\u00a0 It would be interesting to read an updated version\u00c2\u00a0that would examine the decision making that went into those two wars.<\/p>\n

\"4<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Yuen Foong Khong, 1992, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ This is one of the books that my son, Peter, had as a result of his master’s studies at George Washington University.\u00c2\u00a0 I went through the box and picked out …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14],"tags":[20,38],"class_list":["post-1908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-four-star","tag-history","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1908"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1919,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908\/revisions\/1919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}