Coyote Blog

In late 1964, the United States faced a decision about Vietnam. The war had dragged on for 10 years, and the US had steadily poured more dollars and arms and "advisors" into supporting the South Vietnamese against North Vietnamese aggression. "Saving" the South Vietnamese and punishing the North Vietnamese, along with their Chinese and Soviet backers, for their aggression clearly was going to require a larger US commitment, both of arms and probably men. Was it time to ramp up, or find a formula for peace? Here are some of the elements, partially in hindsight, of this decision:

• Everyone wanted to see military aggression punished
• Most Americans at the time would would have been thrilled to hand the Soviets and Chinese communists an "L". There was an definite attraction to fighting the communists down to the last Vietnamese in a proxy war far from home
• Many were increasingly skeptical of the South Vietnamese -- the South Vietnamese government was a corrupt mess and not even really democratic after a military coup the US winked at. But we liked them better than the Russians and Chinese
• After 10 years, it was clear that the military stalemate could not be broken except for an extraordinary infusion of US arms and manpower.

I know there are folks who hold out that America and the South Vietnamese could have won if the war was fought smarter. But I think a majority of folks -- including most everyone on the Left -- would agree the post 1964 escalation was a mistake that cost over a million deaths on both sides and did not prevent -- and maybe even made worse -- a horrific aftermath of reeducation and genocide. All to try to prevent the emergence of the unified Vietnam of today, that appears to most American visitors as one of the most capitalistic countries they have visited.

I set this up all as an unsubtle analog to the Ukraine today:

• I think most people would like to see Russia's military aggression punished. I saw General Milley speak at Princeton and this was his main argument, that we have to establish a red line against military attempts to move borders.
• Many of us find the Putin regime in Russia to be distasteful and would be happy to hand it an "L". It is not much of an exaggeration to say that many Americans would like to see us fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian. I often wonder if the average X user with a Ukrainian flag icon is really knowledgeably pro-Ukrainian or just anti-Russian.
• Until the moment of invasion, the Ukraine was considered by the Left, Right, and media to be on of the most corrupt nations in the West. Their current strong censorship regime and suspension of elections smell bad, particularly given that we live in a county that managed to hold free elections during our Civil War (Lincoln until a few months before the 1964 election was sure he was going to lose and let elections go forward anyway -- god bless general Sherman).
• After 3 years, the war is in a stalemate and Ukraine finds itself in an extended war of attrition with a country four times its size. It strikes me that the only way to break the stalemate is to have some kind of order of magnitude larger external intervention, eg US and NATO troops on the ground

I got started on this post as the result of a pro-Ukraine meme I saw the other day. Unfortunately I cannot find it because X is a river that flows really fast and stuff from a day ago is a few miles downstream and hard to find. But basically it asked this question -- what part of your country would you willingly give up? If the answer is nowhere, don't ask Ukraine to give up Donbas and the Crimea for peace.

Totally reasonable question. And except maybe for parts of California and the District of Columbia, I would answer "nowhere." But there are problems. The first is that the Ukraine did indeed voluntarily give up the Crimea in exchange for peace in 2014. One thing I have never understood is that the same people in this country who are rabidly against any Ukrainian peace deal and want to fight on forever mostly had a collective YAWN over the 2014 Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

The biggest question is -- what is the alternative? The implication is that there is somehow a hope to get the territory under Russian occupation back by military force. But I just don't see it. The Ukrainians have certainly been scrappy and creative and did a better job beating back the Russian thrusts at Kiev in the early days of the war than I would have guessed they would. They are now, though, fighting a static war of attrition with a county 4x its size. So what, at this point after 3 years, is the alternate plan that preserves territory? If that plan is to send a million American soldiers to Ukraine and risk escalation of the war, a nuclear exchange, and possibly a Chinese attack on Taiwan while our back is turned, then I am not going to agree.

Again, I would be happy to see Russia lose, but short of sending the American military into the line of fire, what is the plan? Perhaps Russia's will collapses before Ukraine's, but no one has presented me any evidence of that. That would be a sort of WWI outcome, where one side was eventually exhausted (though only after the intervention of US troops). As an aside, I wonder sometimes, would peace in 1915 perhaps with Germany retaining control of Alsace and Lorraine have been worse than all the deaths that followed, not to mention the platform the war built for the later rise of Hitler and the Nazi party?

As I said before, I am amazed that our ex-peace-protesting-hippies of the Left who would 100% retroactively say that the US should never have escalated in Vietnam after 1964 are in the lead of those who want us to fight in the Ukraine to the very end. Someone needs to tell me what's different, and I have not heard a good answer yet. Comments are open and I would love to be convinced. I can't stand Putin and would be thrilled to see him disgraced but don't know how to do it at any acceptable cost.

Postscript #1: I have a tradition here of pissing off everyone to make sure my followers and readership never get very high. So I would apply much of the same logic above to the war in Gaza. I see conservatives saying stuff like "the Gazans need to know they are defeated" but I must say after over a year of war I sure don't see it. After the cease fire the Hamas army emerged from the rubble with clean uniforms and huge crowds of crazed civilians still braying for Jewish blood. I continue to support Israel and was frankly a supporter of their trying to kick ass in Gaza in retaliation for the October massacres. But I wonder, did the last year of killing and levelling seemingly all the buildings in Gaza do a bit of f*cking good? I don't know.

Postscript #2: Gato Malo, who I enjoy and respect greatly, is among those who make the case that a peace deal with no territorial loss was available early on, but was blocked by US and UK officials who wanted a proxy war with Russia and at the end of the day likely didn't give a sh*t about the people of Ukraine.

Postscript #3: Apropos of nothing in this post, this is pretty funny. I am still looking for the Ukrainian refugee with the lhasa apso.

This was a real time warp for me: (NY Times via Cato@Liberty)

As President Obama prepares to release a review of American strategy in Afghanistan that will claim progress in the nine-year-old war there, two new classified intelligence reports offer a more negative assessment and say there is a limited chance of success unless Pakistan hunts down insurgents operating from havens on its Afghan border.

The reports, one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan, say that although there have been gains for the United States and NATO in the war, the unwillingness of Pakistan to shut down militant sanctuaries in its lawless tribal region remains a serious obstacle. American military commanders say insurgents freely cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan to plant bombs and fight American troops and then return to Pakistan for rest and resupply.

The findings in the reports, called National Intelligence Estimates, represent the consensus view of the United States' 16 intelligence agencies, as opposed to the military, and were provided last week to some members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The findings were described by a number of American officials who read the reports' executive summaries.

Perhaps someone who knows better can accuse me of making a shallow comparison, but doesn't this sound exactly like the situation that plagued the US Army in Vietnam, where enemy fighters would hide out across the border in Cambodia?  From Wikipedia:

The People's Army of Vietnam had been utilizing large sections of relatively unpopulated eastern Cambodia as sanctuaries into which they could withdraw from the struggle in South Vietnam to rest and reorganize without being attacked. These base areas were also utilized by the communists to store weapons and other material that had been transported on a large scale into the region on the Sihanouk Trail. PAVN forces had begun moving through Cambodian territory as early as 1963