Vietnam, Afghanistan and U.S. Decisionmaking

In 1979, Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts released a book on U.S. involvement in Vietnam, entitled “The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked. ” Unlike most previous treatments of the conflict, Gelb and Betts didn’t argue that the U.S. failure in Vietnam was the result of a poor foreign policymaking process. Nor did they argue that policymakers had been misinformed or misled about the conflict. They didn’t even argue that policymaker s were under any illusions about how unlikely success in Vietnam was.Instead, Gelb and Betts argued that – while the war in Vietnam itself was an abject failure for American foreign policy – the U.S. decision-making system actually functioned as it was meant to throughout the period of increasing U.S. involvement in the war. Asthey describe: “With hindsight, it seems evident that the costs of the strategy of preventing defeat were incalculable. But at the time of the crucial decisions, the costs of accepting defeat appeared to be incalculable. The system in this case coped as democracies usually do: by compromising between extreme c hoices, satisfying the partisans of neither extreme of opinion within the government but preventing the total alienation of either.”As the authors show, the central question about American involvement in Vietnam wasn ’t why U.S. involvement in Vietnam happened, or why policymakers chose to deepen it over time, but rather why U.S. policymakers considered it vital that Vietnam not be lost to communism in t...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs