A book on Vietnam offers clues about US adviser

Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, General HR McMaster, is an excellent choice. But the two may be headed for trouble if Gen McMaster’s writings are any indication.
Mr Trump loves soldiers, including the "FA 59" strategic and operational planners among whom Gen McMaster is a revered guru.
He will join the "grown-ups" in the administration – sober figures such as defence secretary James Mattis, secretary of state Rex Tillerson and even vice president Mike Pence.
There are other factions. One, led by Mr Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, is personally loyal to Mr Trump.
Another, comprising extremist ideologues, is led by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and attorney general Jeff Sessions. Well represented in executive branch second-tier staff, they include hardliners such as Stephen Miller, Michael Anton and Sebastian Gorka.
By radical contrast, during the Iraq war, Gen McMaster showed a refined appreciation of the sensitivities of the Iraqi people, never regarding them as the enemy or a burden to be managed.
On the contrary, he argued that the right thing was also the smart thing, and winning over Iraqis by recognising and respecting their dignity and identity was the key to any successful American-led counter-insurgency.
There is no way to integrate this subtle, serious perspective on security and counter-terrorism, since the same logic must hold globally as well as regionally, with hateful and counter-productive measures such as Mr Trump’s ill-fated anti-Muslim travel ban.
Gen McMaster thus seems on a potential collision course with the Bannonites and possibly the president himself.
That’s why the McMaster hire is both heartening and somewhat mystifying.
Mr Trump’s first national security adviser was his hotheaded, Islamophobic loyalist, Gen Michael Flynn, but he was almost immediately fired. Mr Trump then offered the post to vice-admiral Robert Harward, who rejected it over staffing disputes and the chaos swirling around the administration.
Now Mr Trump has turned to Gen McMaster, whose superb and scholarly book, Dereliction of Duty, chronicles, in excruciating detail, the failings of the American political and military systems during the Vietnam War.
It also presages potential clashes Gen McMaster may face in the Trump administration.
The book illustrates how the technocrats assembled by John Kennedy and inherited by Lyndon Johnson shared the disdain of both presidents for military expertise. Men such as Robert MacNamara, Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy believed their analytical and statistical techniques and political imperatives outweighed whatever top military leaders might think.
These military leaders – who Gen McMaster deems "silent men" – colluded in massive administration lies and deferred to a politically motivated and ill considered strategy of "graduated pressure" designed to "communicate messages" and persuade North Vietnam to end support for the South Vietnamese Viet Cong rebels. Given Vietnamese attitudes, this was futile.
Gen McMaster argues the war was lost from the outset, perhaps even before Johnson became president.
The alternative would have been the early and decisive application of massive force that the military wanted but did not press for or even strongly recommend.
Gen McMaster clearly feels the Vietnam War was possibly avoidable but, worse, that there was no need for the United States to lose it if the military had been allowed to fight it their way.
Therefore he is unlikely to now bow to foolish demands from Mr Bannon, and even Mr Trump, both of whom have their own disdain for experts.
That’s very encouraging. If Gen McMaster can insist that he and the other real strategic thinkers know better, and prevail, that will be a huge improvement.
But his book also reveals a blind spot: Gen McMaster delves deep into Vietnam War history, but probably not far enough.
He doesn’t give sufficient consideration to the striking insight that Vietnam was actually "lost" immediately after the Second World War when the US allowed France to reclaim its former colonial possessions in Indochina from the Japanese.
By 1954, Ho Chí Minh and his communist Viet Minh militarily drove the French from the North and became the incontestable face of Vietnamese nationalism.
The colonial-collaborationist southern state under emperor Bao Đai and his thuggish successors had neither nationalist credibility nor political legitimacy.
Ho’s communist/nationalist hybrids were thus virtually inevitable long-term victors. Almost as suspicious of their nominally communist "comrades", but actually age-old antagonists, in China as they were of the colonial West, they ultimately had nowhere to turn but Moscow. Thus was Vietnam lost to the Russian orbit.
The American commitment really required to prevent Vietnam from eventually being united under Ho’s movement was never practically viable, especially because wooing communists wasn’t ideologically or politically plausible.
Along with Gen Mattis, Gen McMaster is by far Mr Trump’s best appointment. Yet even if Gen McMaster prevails on policy, despite the desperately needed sophistication he would undoubtedly provide, he may not have all the answers. But, then, no one does.
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States ­Institute in Washington

Source: The National