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I published the book, it came out, Fool's Errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan.
It's at foolserrand.us, foolserrand.us.
It's on Amazon and paperback and in Kindle.
And I got a brand new blurb from Colonel Douglas McGregor.
He says he recommended it to be part of the coursework at the Army Command and General Staff College.
That's how much he liked it.
Great read, vitally important.
Brilliant achievement, he said.
So check that out, foolserrand.us.
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The Scott Horton Show.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I got Jeff Stein from Newsweek, but nah, he's all right, hear him out.
He's got an article about the new Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, I saw part one of it, which I guess, from what I'm learning in your article here, Jeff, is the best part.
Welcome to the show, how are you doing?
Thanks, I'm good.
Happy to talk to you again.
All right, so now you were in the White House All right, so now you were, I'm just going from memory here, but you were Army Intelligence during the Vietnam War, correct?
That's right.
So can you just remind us a little bit about name, rank, serial number, the years of your tours and what have you?
Sure, I was assigned there as an Army Intelligence case officer in 1968, 69.
I took over an ongoing intelligence network that was targeting the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong military units.
And that was the primary target that I was concerned with.
And that assignment had been preceded by training at the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Hollenberg, Maryland, and a year in Vietnamese Language School before I went there.
All right, so now the Ken Burns documentary, to give it some credit, it does start out really with, I think even a little bit of pre-World War II history there, and then they pick up with the French colony there in Indochina, as they called it, or as the Americans called it then, I don't know what the French call it, and their colonies.
And as you really, I think the crux of your piece here in Newsweek is that what really happened here was it was an anti-colonial war by the natives, in essence, and that the Americans simply refused to see it that way.
And then you say Ken Burns then refuses to see it that way, even though he starts out to tell the story that way, he then, by chapter two, he goes, yeah, well, we were trying to protect the free people from the Reds after all.
Yeah, first of all, I want to strongly say that I want to encourage people to see this series.
I think it offers a lot of terrific new reporting on Vietnam, at least in a TV or video setting.
There's lots of interviews with former North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters and officials and poets and students.
So it's really a useful thing to see.
It's terrific filmmaking.
My critique had to do with what I feel is the filmmakers' jettisoning of an important theme after they have established it in episode one.
Episode one is terrific in terms of recapturing the French colonizing of Vietnam in the mid-19th century and its subjugation of the Vietnamese people and exploitation of Vietnam's resources, which then were primarily tin and rubber, a little bit coal, and France's creation of a servile Vietnamese civil bureaucracy.
And that is really well-explicated in the first episode.
But in episode two, suddenly that idea just evaporates.
And of course, U.S. policymakers would try to reinvent South Vietnam as a bastion, if a flawed bastion, of democracy.
But really, the documentary doesn't have to make clear that this government that we established and propped up in South Vietnam really was a continuation of this sort of French colonial caste.
And therefore, U.S. involvement, military involvement in Vietnam, was really kind of doomed from the beginning because of its false premises.
And the lack of history that American policymakers had about Vietnam and exactly what we were doing there.
Confusion reigned for the next several decades, ending up killing a lot of people.
55,000 or 58,000 American service men and women.
And hundreds of thousands of allied troops, South Vietnamese and South Korean, Thais and Filipinos and so on.
And of course, a couple of million, the figures are hard to really pin down, but a couple of million Vietnamese civilians.
And all this damage was really wrought on a false premise of what we were doing there.
Now, you expect American policymakers to pursue this line, but I think that Ken Burns and his team kind of lose that focus.
All right, hang on just one second for me.
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All right, now, so as far as the narratives go here, and it is, as Kenobi said, it's all dependent on your point of view and the terms you use for a lot of these things.
So I grew up in the, I was a kid in the 1980s, and in the shadow of the Vietnam War, and people still had very hard feelings about it in all directions, and one of the expressions that I commonly heard growing up was that it was a civil war, and it was none of our damn business, and we never should have been there, and that was the anti-war point of view.
But then, so there's a whole other level to that, which is what I first heard from Chomsky, but I guess I didn't really understand it this way until I read Nick Terce's book, and in Terce's book, he really makes it clear that the United States invaded Vietnam.
We didn't come to help prop up a desperate government that needed saving.
We created a government to have one to save.
We invaded that country, and the Viet Cong, they weren't communist guerrillas at all.
They were just the people of the South who were trying to fight us off, and that never even mind the French, that this was the real frame of reference to look at it, and I guess I never really could understand it in that way until I read Terce's book, which sort of leaves it beyond question, I guess, to me, but what do you think of that?
I highly respect Nick Terce and his book on the kind of rapacious behavior of American troops, especially in the Mekong Delta, and I like to count Nick as a friend.
However, I would differ on that interpretation.
The way we usually use the word invasion really is more like the invasion of Normandy to expel the Nazis or the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
I don't think there was an invasion in this sense.
We propped up this government, South Vietnamese government, and well, the thing about one of the characteristics about the Vietnam War is that various American officials had differing views about exactly what we were doing there, including the president, President Johnson, who said he was wondering what we were doing there, and they all kind of knew that this was a doomed effort, but they continued it anyway, mostly at the point we're in in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and 80s, oh, 70s, until Saigon fell in 1975.
It was sort of a Cold War mandate.
It was an ideological war that we were fighting with the Soviet Union, and as somebody said, Vietnam wasn't a country.
It was a piece on a Cold War chessboard, and that's what was kind of driving American intervention in the 1950s and 60s.
Well, I mean, in a sense, that really does kind of verify what they're saying, that it was an outcome-based thing.
In other words, they were creating something to prop up in order to have this Cold War game go on in this larger sense versus Russian China, no?
All right, I know, this is all words.
It's not really, it's all concepts, and as you're saying, hey, ask 100 different people in the government at a time, you might hear different things from everybody and all of that, so.
Yeah, and the series, the Ken Burns series, is pretty good on that, on the confusion and cross-purposes and contradictions in our policy in Vietnam, so that's why I really do urge people to see it.
Again, it's astounding filmmaking and storytelling.
I have my critiques as I've laid them out in my Newsweek piece, but I still think it's worthwhile, very worthwhile seeing, if only to stimulate debates like the one we're having right now.
I mean, it's crazy for me to think, and it must be worse for you, but for me, I mean, this is something that was the very recent past when I was a child, but now, it must be like World War II or Korea or something was to me is what it is to kids nowadays.
It was that long ago, so that kind of thing can fade into history very quickly and seem less relevant all the time when, no, really, it's very relevant, should stay very relevant.
It's very relevant because if you don't understand the folly and the missteps which led us into Vietnam, you can't really understand why we are failing in places like Afghanistan today.
There's a lot of similarities to Vietnam and Afghanistan in terms of our tactics and strategy in that we are propping up kinds of people who are not necessarily aligned with our interests, our national interests, whatever they may be in Afghanistan, and are not really serving the Afghan people, which is why the Taliban have been so resilient and, in fact, have been making a big comeback in Afghanistan in the same way the Viet Cong backed by North Vietnam were resilient and kept advancing even against the incredible resources that the United States poured into Vietnam, financial and military, and yet they were able to survive.
Well, why is that?
And I think if you study how we got involved in Vietnam and whose side we were on and what that side was made up of, then you can more clearly understand why we are failing in Afghanistan.
So I think it's very, very relevant to what's going on today.
Well, I gotta send you a copy of my Afghanistan book and see whether you like my Vietnam comparisons in it.
How do you like that?
Okay.
Hey, listen, one more thing real quick.
I was told, I had read, I hadn't gotten this far in it yet, but I was told that one of the virtues of this documentary is that it shows Richard Nixon's treason in scotching the peace conference or the peace talks of 1968 when he had no official government position whatsoever and he was undermining the negotiations of the Johnson administration there during the presidential campaign.
And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that because it seems like one of the most important stories of that war.
Yeah, that's been reported on some, and I'm really glad that Ken Burns is exploring this again in the series.
And what happened basically is that Johnson was running, excuse me, Nixon was striving to get the 1968 peace talks and the 1968 Republican nomination.
And so he can, and Johnson, President Johnson was conducting a delicate secret peace talks with the North Vietnamese to settle the war.
And part of the settlement would have allowed North Vietnamese troops to occupy part of the country.
There would have been another round of elections, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And Nixon established a back channel to the president of South Vietnam and told him, don't go along with this peace plan, hold out because when I get elected, you're gonna get a much better deal from me.
And that was really, it really gets into the neighborhood of treason and certainly was entirely inappropriate and way out of bounds for Nixon to do that.
But that was a very Nixonian thing to do.
So that is an incredible story of intrigue and treachery on the part of Nixon to derail the peace talks that the Johnson administration was carrying on with North Vietnam.
And of course, we know what happened after that.
Nixon won, he took office in January, 1969 and really amped up the brutality of the war while reducing the number of American troops in Vietnam.
He wanted to get out and he thought the way to get out was to really escalate the violence.
Yeah, well, and it sort of worked in a perverse way, but do you know what the breakdown is when you say approximately 2 million Vietnamese were killed that how many of those were Nixon's air wars versus the previous infantry wars?
Well, the majority of casualties went up during the Nixon administration from 1969 until the president resigned in 1974.
His vice president, Gerald Ford, took over for the final year of the war.
The majority of casualties were during Nixon's time there.
However, these figures are really fungible.
We don't have really good estimates from the North Vietnamese.
So I put a link in my Newsweek piece to a page which really breaks down the casualties and who's doing the estimating and so on.
So you can find it there in my Newsweek piece.
All right, good deal.
Listen, I know you're in a hurry.
Thanks very much for your time today, Jeff, appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Jeff Stein.
He's at Newsweek.
Vietnam War.
New Ken Burns documentary dismisses the origins of the futile, disastrous conflict.
And that's Scott Horton Show.
Check out all the stuff at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org.
My book is Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Find it at foolserrand.us, foolserrand.us.
