Phillip Carter on the "Stabbed in the Back" Narrative
He tries to lay to rest the ghost of Vietnam, which is its turn the ghost of the western front of World War I:
Vietnam Ghosts - Intel Dump -: Ah yes, the "stabbed in the back narrative." This narrative is popular among American military officers of a certain age, who believe if only they'd had gutsy political leadership, support from the homefront, and a willingness to steamroll North Vietnam with overwhelming force, we might have won the war.
It's a good story, but it's wrong. No amount of America firepower could have crushed the North Vietnamese people's will. It's true that we made many missteps in waging the Vietnam War, and that we might have achieved a better outcome in the short term had we backed better South Vietnamese leaders, implemented smarter counterinsurgency strategies sooner, and pursued Vietnamization earlier. But the ultimate outcome was ordained long before 1973, and probably long before American combat troops arrived in 1965. Most of the histories I've read suggest the die was cast sometime around when the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. We didn't lose the Vietnam War because of any "stab in the back." We lost because we failed to see the strategic environment correctly, and we chose a war of a time, place and manner that we could not win.
This narrative came to mean a great deal to the cohort of American military officers who shepherded the services through the post-Vietnam years. They vowed to never again fight a war like Vietnam. These generals embraced the Weinberger-Powell doctrine prescribing when, how and why they would fight. They rejected counterinsurgency efforts and small wars, choosing instead conventional wars with defined objectives and familiar features. And they rebuilt the Army with capabilities to fight these wars, marginalizing those who thought about small wars and pushing them into the special forces, civil affairs, military police and intelligence communities. Even during the 1990s, when the Army deployed for peacekeeping operations around the world, these missions remained peripheral.
On the very next page, Sanchez criticizes the decision to send "unprepared and improperly trained soldiers" into the "guerilla warfighting conditions" of Vietnam. He appears to miss the connection, however, between his misunderstanding of the Vietnam war and the Army's lack of preparedness for Iraq, which flowed from that deeply flawed view.
