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Sniper job on venture towns12/14/2022 ![]() ![]() Otherwise I think that we will face the problem of psychological exhaustion. Having moved very many large units into Vietnam … we must not become prisoners now of a large-unit mentality. However … the essence of guerrilla warfare is never to fight the kind of war your opponent expects. I am quite convinced that too much planning in the government and a great deal of military planning assumes that the opponent is stupid and that he will fight the kind of war for which one is best prepared. His conclusion was as bleak as it was prescient: No one really knew how infiltration was happening. The fact was that “no one could really explain to me how even on the most favorable assumptions about the war in Vietnam the was going to end.” No one really had a plan for pacification. military briefings he heard, the more pessimistic Kissinger became. This doesn’t mean that they love the gangsters it simply proves that the police are not able to protect them.” Many people in American cities are paying for protection against gangsters. Emrick assured him “that all the soldiers in Vietnam were being trained to be good will ambassadors handing out candy and defending the villages.” Kissinger replied drily that “perhaps the problem was not only friendship but physical security against assassination. Emrick, the Pacific Command chief of staff. Stopping in Honolulu on his way to Vietnam, he met with Lieutenant General Paul S. Outright victory in South Vietnam was unattainable because “we know nothing about nation-building.” “Must realize,” he wrote, “that only possible outcome is limited one … in which VC have some kind of role.” Such a compromise solution was the only good option available. But he already knew one thing: This was a war that could not be won by military means.Īfter briefings in Washington before his trip, he jotted down some revealing notes. He knew little if anything about the country’s history and not a word of its language. An expert on European history and nuclear strategy, Kissinger had never previously been to Vietnam. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. In October 1965 Kissinger flew to Saigon at the invitation of the U.S. policy as “shameful.” “Conditions in Vietnam will, in my judgment, get worse,” he warned. The people of South Vietnam must develop a long-term commitment to their government if they wish to attain political and economic stability.”īut how could that happen if the United States undermined the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government, as happened in 1963, when the Kennedy administration approved a bloody coup against the government of Ngo Dinh Diem? When the news broke of Diem’s murder, Kissinger denounced U.S. However, merely physical security will not solve the problem. Their defeat can only be accomplished by adequate military force. “South Vietnam has been plagued by Communist Viet Cong attacks ever since it became independent in 1954. “All history proves that there is no cheap and easy way to defeat guerrilla movements,” he wrote in February 1962. intervention in defense of South Vietnam was a doomed enterprise and that only a diplomatic solution would end the conflict.įrom a very early stage, Kissinger understood the nature of the problem the United States faced. ![]() ![]() As his private papers and diaries make clear, Kissinger realized by 1966 at the latest that the U.S. It has long been assumed that Henry Kissinger “supported” the Vietnam War throughout the 1960s-and that this was one of the reasons Richard Nixon offered him the job of national security adviser. This article has been excerpted from his latest book, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Tisch professor of History at Harvard University. ![]()
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