The March of Folly: Troy to Vietnam: if Barbara Tuchman were still alive, would she be compelled to replace Vietnam with Iraq?
I love all her books but this one stands out as a must-read. She analyzes the mistakes made by powerful and well-organized nation states and how they have made sometimes fatal decisions that can only be defined/described as folly. Her examples are the Trojans and that horse you’ve heard of, the Renaissance popes’ provocation of the Protestant Reformation, Britain’s loss of the American colonies, and America’s (and France’s) involvement in Vietnam. To quote the publisher’s blurb:
Barbara Tuchman defines folly as “Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest.” In THE MARCH OF FOLLY, Tuchman examines 4 conflicts: The Trojan Horse, The Protestant Secession, The American Revolution, and The American War in Vietnam. In each example an alternative course of action was available, the actions were endorsed by a group, not just an individual leader, and the actions were perceived as counter productive in their own time.
A great read, for any student of history or politics, especially for the section on the loss of the American Colonies: I suspect very few Americans realize how little support the Revolutionary War had at home in England and how many prominent people of the time supported the colonists’ goal of independence.
Sadly, I loaned my copy to someone 3000 miles away, but I recall enough of the section on Vietnam to be disgusted by this:
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: June 13, 2004 – June 19, 2004 Archives:
Now here come the dots. Abu Ghraib, by all accounts, was a pressure cooker for information, as that Journal piece referenced above clarifies. “The whole ball game over there is numbers,” a senior interrogator, Sergeant First Class Roger Brokaw, told the paper. “How many raids did you do last week? How many prisoners were arrested? How many interrogations were conducted? How many [intelligence] reports were written? It was incredibly frustrating.” Prisoners were spewing into the system at a pace of over 60 a day. Colonel Thomas Pappas, Jordan’s boss and commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, instituted a quota system for his interrogation teams.
Recall that the Vietnam War was prosecuted by the Whiz Kids — MacNamara et al — who hoped to bring their numbers-based acumen to the war, as if fighting a war had anything in common with rolling out a new model year of cars or selecting bombing targets was akin to selecting dealership locations. I get an echo of that when I read about quotas and artificial targets, street-sweeping roundups of civilians, etc. We’re replaced the body count goals of Vietnam with interrogations and arrest goals in Iraq: an improvement to be sure, but the underlying strategy is just as wrong-headed.