The New Empire of Debt: The Rise and Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble (27 page)

Meanwhile, the war ratcheted up another big notch after an incident in the Tonkin Gulf, involving two attacks on U.S. ships. One of the attacks was never confirmed; many think it never happened. The other may have been a mistake. The North Vietnamese now say they never authorized it. Americans said they believed Hanoi was intentionally widening the war. The United States felt it had to retaliate, not for any particular reason, but merely because it felt it had to do something and didn’t know what else to do. Before long, the United States had 200,000 of its own troops in Vietnam and was bombing Hanoi “back to the Stone Age.”
¹⁷

Finally, after American troop levels in Vietnam reached half a million, and nearly half a trillion dollars (adjusted to year 2000 dollars) had been spent, and noncombatants were being killed or seriously injured at the rate of 1,000 a week (MacNamara’s estimate), Americans came to their senses. The idealists left the State Department and the Defense Department. Realists, led by Henry Kissinger, came in and figured out how to abandon South Vietnamese allies and sneak out of the war in the least disgraceful way they could.

Vietnam then did fall to the communists and America’s erstwhile allies were reeducated. But was the world better or worse? No one knew or cared. After Americans left the place, except for a lengthy discussion of MIA and POWs, Vietnam disappeared from the news.What people had worried about so much had happened. Ho Chi Minh had won. But it seemed to make no difference to anybody. Did the rest of Southeast Asia fall “like dominoes?” Not at all. Cambodia lost its head in a mad frenzy of murder.What that had to do with Vietnam is not entirely clear; the world breathed a sigh of relief when Vietnamese communists invaded the place to restore order.

A quarter century later, MacNamara and a group of associates confronted a team led by his old adversary, Vo Nguyen Giap, in a series of meetings held in Hanoi, between 1995 and 1998. The exchange was advertised as an attempt to learn something. It is recorded in a book by MacNamara,
Argument without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy.
Appropriately, there is a photo of that archworld improver, Woodrow Wilson, at the beginning of the book. We do not know what inspiration Robert MacNamara drew from Wilson, but we guess it was the worst sort. Wilson had sent 112,000 Americans to their deaths in World War I in an effort to win a war to end all wars.The result was the opposite of Wilson’s stated intention. But instead of reaching the obvious conclusion—that Wilson was a dimwit—MacNamara rushed to do something just as foolish.

At the height of the war in April 1969, American troops in Vietnam numbered 543,000, at a cost of $61 billion per year—far, far more than the administration’s estimates of $5 billion per year maximum provided back in 1965 (a figure that seemed to emerge time and again amid the vague generalizations MacNamara and others offered).

MacNamara’s book makes amusing reading. It describes a futile effort on the part of the American team to get their Vietnamese counterparts to take a measure of the blame for what they regarded as a “tragedy.” The Vietnamese saw no tragedy and accepted no blame. Instead, the way they see it,
their country was attacked by foreigners
—first the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, with support from America, and then by the Americans. They had undertaken a long, costly war to liberate the country—against a vastly superior military force. It was no tragedy; it was a crime.

On the American side, MacNamara and his fellow imperialists were determined to keep morality out of the discussion.They regarded the whole affair as a series of unfortunate errors, miscalculations, misunderstandings, and mistakes. They faced their former enemies not as sinners or criminals, but as incompetents. They seemed practically desperate for the Vietnamese to play along, to admit that they, too, made mistakes that contributed to the misunderstanding that led to the tragedy. But the old Annamites wouldn’t cooperate.

Asked, for example, if the North Vietnamese hadn’t misread the signal implied in President Johnson’s bombing campaign that began March 5, 1965 (called “Rolling Thunder”), the Vietnamese delegates protested.They didn’t know it was a signal.They thought the Americans were trying to kill them.

In almost every instance, MacNamara and the rest of the American team tried to keep the discussion on strategic issues, diplomatic initiatives, inputs, outputs, throughputs, and other mumbo jumbo. Even three decades after the fact, despite the public weeping, MacNamara seems almost not to notice that he sent men to kill, who were not always too particular about whom they killed. When a man sticks a knife in his neighbor, it is not easy to disguise what is really happening.The event is right in front of him. But the fog of war, as Clausewitz called it, multiplies by the square of the distance from it. In the Oval Office or the war rooms of the Pentagon, the transactions that took place in Vietnam became “costs” or “losses” or “collateral damage.” It was as if they were running an insurance company. The losses were regrettable perhaps, but also excusable and, generally, forgettable.

The Vietnam War, 1961 to 1975, was far bloodier than we are accustomed to think. America lost 58,000 troops. The Vietnamese lost an estimated 3.8 million, according to MacNamara. Yet, reading the whiz kid’s account of his involvement, it is as if he had never met a single one of them. Every human being in the war was treated as war matériel. They were resources, like bombs and cans of Coke. Treated as assets on the military balance sheet, they are expended as though they were inflated currency.

Robert MacNamara saw the war as a bounded, engineering problem. He expected it to be rational, a system that could be modeled and that would yield to practical planning and logical extrapolation. He expected the war could be won simply by increasing the cost to the Vietcong and North Vietnamese. At some point, the cost would become unacceptably high.

In this sense, he was not unlike the geniuses who ran Long-Term Capital Management into the ground in the late 1990s.They thought the financial world could be modeled, too—just as if it were science.They reasoned that the odds of an investment going up or down could be calculated just as you could figure the odds of hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Then you could make your bets calmly, scientifically; after all, it was just advanced mathematics.

The economists at Long-Term Capital Management included two winners of the Nobel Prize, but their theories were wrong. Neither investing nor war making is a hard science; they are “human” sciences perhaps, closer to art than science. The difference is obvious. You can heat water to 212 degrees Fahrenheit and it will boil—every time (assuming constant pressure). But put a man under heat or pressure, and the fellow could react in any number of different, unpredictable, irrational, and wholly bizarre ways.

Between 1965 and 1975, the United States stepped up its killing campaign. The Vietnamese suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties as the pressure increased. America was turning up the heat, ready for it to boil over and force the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table.The table was set. But the Americans were astonished when no one showed up. It was as if the North Vietnamese didn’t care how hot it got. It was as if they ignored all the resources the United States was bringing to bear and the losses that they were inflicting. It was as if they couldn’t count!

It made no sense to MacNamara. So, he asked the question of the Vietnamese delegation sitting opposite him in Hanoi, 30 years later. How come all the misery we inflicted on the Vietnamese did not bring them to ask for a settlement? Tran Quang Co replied:

I would like to answer Mr. MacNamara’s question . . . . I must say that this question of Mr. MacNamara’s has allowed us to better understand the issue. During the coffee break, an American colleague asked me if I had learned anything about the U.S. during the discussions of the past few days. And I responded that I have learned quite a lot. However, thanks to this particular question, I believe we have learned still more about the U.S. We understand better now that the U.S. understands very little about Vietnam. Even now—in this conference—the U.S. understand very little about Vietnam.

When the U.S. bombed the North and brought its troops into the South, well, of course, to us there were very negative moves. However, with regard to Vietnam, U.S. aggression did have some positive use. Never before did the people of Vietnam, from top to bottom, unite as they did during the years that the U.S. was bombing us. Never before had Chairman Ho Chi Minh’s appeal—that there is nothing more precious than freedom and independence—go straight to the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people as at the end of 1966.
¹⁸

The Vietnam War was not merely a tragedy; or even a crime. It was a farce. American troops had been sent to kill people they didn’t know, in a country they had never been, for reasons none of them could understand, by men as benighted as they were. Ho Chi Minh had expected the United States to come to his aid, not to seek his destruction. Yet, MacNamara and President Johnson sent troops to kill people on the basis of an idea so flimsy that, when the war was over, it disappeared without a trace. Gradually, the war was escalated on the basis of a mistake and run as a series of errors, culminating in a disgraceful rout. At every step of the way, American military and civilian officials misunderstood and underestimated their opponents. General William Westmoreland briefed Congress in July 1967: “The situation is not a stalemate. We are winning slowly but steadily, and the pace can accelerate if we reinforce our successes.” All we need is more resources!

He could have saved himself the trouble of making it up and taken the communiqué, word for word, sent by French General Raoul Salan, who in October, 20 years before, reported that the Vietminh were on the run. All that were left were isolated bands susceptible to police operations.

“Not once during the war,” wrote General Bruce Palmer in his book,
Twenty-five Year War,
“did the Joint Chiefs of Staff advise the commander-in-chief or the secretary of defense that the strategy being pursued most probably would fail and that the U.S. would be unable to achieve its objectives.”
¹⁹

Achieve its objectives? No one really knew what America’s objectives were. Or if they were attainable. Or, if they really made any difference to anybody in America. The United States had become an empire with scarcely anyone noticing. Its goals were no longer those of its people but of the empire itself. An empire must routinely and habitually contest control of periphery areas. The imperial people had merely come to believe what they had to believe to go along with the program.

The madness began as an oversimplification back in the Eisenhower administration. In 1954, President Eisenhower provided his now famous “domino” speech, by way of explaining that if South Vietnam were lost to communism, all of Indochina would fall. In November 1995, General Vo Nguyen Giap put it to Robert MacNamara generously:

Dominoes, dominoes, dominoes—this theory was an illusion. Whatever happened in Vietnam had nothing to do with what happened in Laos, nothing to do with Indonesia . . . . I am amazed that even the brightest people—people like yourself—could have believed it.
²⁰

Believed it? What was there to believe? That a state—an abstract as well as physical thing—of 35 million people (in 1965) of various cultures, languages, religions, ethnic and racial groups, political preferences, modernization, and sexual preferences, living in a land of 127,000 square miles (about the size of New Mexico), including mountains, swamps, beaches, plains, jungle, hamlets, and cities could be understood as a small, three-dimensional object painted in two colors! The idea was not stupid. It was just absurd. Einstein had said that things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. America’s empire builders of the 1960s had gone too far. It was as if they had simplified the Old Testament as: “Jews kick butts in the Holy Land.” They had lost the nuances and details that made it interesting.

Whether Laos or Cambodia would be affected by events in Vietnam, no one could say. But what they could say with complete assurance was that Vietnam was not a domino. If proximity caused nations to change their political systems, why hadn’t West Germany become like East Germany? Why did Switzerland keep its federal system when it was surrounded by centralized governments? And who ever heard of dominoes that fell only in one direction? If the presence of a communist South Vietnam might cause Thailand to topple toward communism, mightn’t the presence of Thailand on its border cause South Vietnam to topple toward constitutional monarchy?

It was not merely mad to kill people on the basis of the domino theory, it was Wilsonian. But once the madness took hold, there was nothing stopping it. Soon, almost every member of the chattering classes had decided that what was literally and obviously untrue was worth (someone else) dying for.

Thirty years after the fact, MacNamara seemed embarrassed to recollect why he and his colleagues once thought the matter was so vitally important. They figured the communists were taking over everywhere. If Vietnam also fell to communists, it would be a disaster. But why? No one seemed to recall.

Yes, there were the dominoes. If Vietnam went communist, so might all of Southeast Asia. We now know that it was nonsense. But what if it had been true? If the people of Southeast Asia wanted to “go communist,” who were we to tell them not to? It was only because America presumed to empire that the question even came up. Empires are involved in constant warfare—the struggle to control vassal states on the periphery.Typically, they do so to maintain order throughout the empire, as well as to obtain new sources of tribute. But our answer presumes a logic that isn’t there. Empires fight for dominoes—not for any particular, logical reason, but merely because they are empires.