A Sense of the Enemy

by Shore, Zachary

  43. Van Kien Dang, 1963, p. 813.

  44. Wayne Morse, a Republican turned Independent turned Democrat, represented Oregon in the Senate from 1945 to 1969. He was one of only two Senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The other was Ernest Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska.

  45. Carlyle Thayer, War By Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Vietnam, 1954–1960 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989).

  46. Bui Anh Tuan ed., Ministry of Public Security (Hanoi, Vietnam: People’s Public Security Publishing House, 2004), pp. 156–71. This official history describes some of the radio communications counterespionage against the Americans and acknowledges the Soviet Union’s assistance in establishing those operations in the 1950s.

  47. Two sources offering a glimpse into Hanoi’s intelligence apparati are Larry Berman, Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2007), and a declassified CIA report on prisoners of war, which offers an outline of intelligence services, Central Intelligence Agency, “The Responsibilities of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam Intelligence and Security Services in the Exploitation of American Prisoners of War,” November 17, 1975, available at http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=11270323004. See also Christopher Goscha, “The Early Development of Vietnamese Intelligence Services,” in R. G. Hughes, P. Jackson and L. Scott, eds., Exploring Intelligence Archives (Londen: Routledge, 2008), pp. 103–15. For a compelling oral history of a Soviet spy in Vietnam, see Xiaobing Li, Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 2010). See ch. 10, “Russian Spies in Hanoi.”

  48. Le Duan cited an American as the originator of this terminology, i.e. “special,” “limited,” and “general war.” Van Kien Dang, 1965, p. 581.

  49. Van Kien Dang, 1963, p. 821.

  50. Victory in Vietnam, pp. 126–27.

  51. Pham Hong Thuy, Pham Hong Doi, and Phan Trong Dam, History of the People’s Navy of Vietnam (Hanoi, Vietnam: People’s Army Publishing House, 1985), p. 89.

  52. Victory in Vietnam, Part II, chapters 4–6 detail the many attacks against American forces leading up to the U.S. deployment of ground troops.

  53. Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 189.

  Chapter 7

  1. One of the best works on the Tonkin incident is Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

  2. Lieutenant General Hoang Nghia Khanh, The Road to the General Headquarters Staff (Hanoi, Vietnam: People’s Army Publishing House, 2008), pp. 112–13.

  3. Combat Operations Department, General Staff of the People’s Army of Vietnam, History of the Combat Operations Department 1945–2000 (Hanoi, Vietnam: People’s Army Publishing House, 2005), p. 210.

  4. Victory in Vietnam, p. 133.

  5. Moise, Tonkin Gulf, ch. 3, “The Desoto Patrols,” p. 60.

  6. Logevall, Choosing War, p. 200.

  7. Van Kien Dang, Toan Tap, 25, Politburo Directive No. 81-CT/TW, August 7, 1964, ed. Vu Huu Ngoan (Hanoi, Vietnam: National Political Publishing House [Nha Xuat Ban Chinh Tri Quoc Gia], 2003), p. 185.

  8. Van Kien Dang, 1964, p. 186.

  9. Ed Moise, Tonkin Gulf, ch. 2, “Thoughts of Escalation.”

  10. Logevall, Choosing War, p. 147.

  11. Dubbing McNamara the “high priest of rational management,” the historian Barbara Tuchman critiqued the Defense Secretary’s strategy of incremental escalation for its cool calculation. “One thing was left out of account: the other side. What if the other side failed to respond rationally to the coercive message?” she asked. “Appreciation of the human factor was not McNamara’s strong point, and the possibility that human kind is not rational was too eccentric and disruptive to be programmed into his analysis.” Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 288. In contrast, Fredrik Logevall notes that McNamara was already exhibiting signs of concern in 1964 that the war was unwise, yet Logevall sees McNamara’s “slavish” loyalty to the President as the reason for his continued support of the policy. Logevall, Choosing War, p. 127.

  12. History of the Sapper Forces, Vol. I [Lich Su Bo Doi Dac Cong, Tap Mot], ed. Headquarters and Party Current Affairs Committee of Sapper Command, by Nguyen Quoc Minh, Vu Doan Thanh, Pham Gia Khanh, and Nguyen Thanh Xuan (Hanoi, Vietnam: People’s Army Publishing House, 1987), p. 83–85.

  13. Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Quoc Minh, History of the Sapper Branch Technical Service, ed. People’s Army of Vietnam (Internal Distribution) [Lich Su Nganh Ky Thuat Dac Cong: Quan Doi Nhan Dan Viet Nam (Luu Hanh Noi Bo)] (Hanoi, Vietnam: People’s Army Publishing House, 1997), p. 91. See also History of the Resistance War in Saigon-Cho Lon-Gia Dinh (1945–1975) [Lich Su Saigon-Cho Lon-Gia Dinh Khang Chien (1945–1975)], ed. War Recapitulation Committee, Ho Chi Minh City Party Committee; Tran Hai Phung, and Luu Phuong Thanh, by Ho Son Dai and Tran Phan Chan (Ho Chi Minh City: Ho Chi Minh City Publishing House, 1994), p. 4. Also The New York Times, March 19, 1963, p. 4.

  14. Robert S. McNamara, Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), p. xix. Earlier scholarship had speculated that the Viet Cong commanders acted on their own initiative in order to garner Soviet support for their cause. Premier Kosygin happened to be visiting Hanoi at the time of the attacks. This view was later discredited once it was revealed that the Soviets had already pledged their support.

  15. Colonel General Dang Vu Hiep, with Senior Colonel Le Hai Trieu and Colonel Ngo Vinh Binh, Highland Memories, Part IV (Hanoi, Vietnam: People’s Army Publishing House, 2000), p. 13.

  16. Highland Memories, pp. 9–14.

  17. Logevall, Choosing War, p. 325.

  18. Letters to the South [Tho Vao Nam], February 1965 (Hanoi, Vietnam: Le Duan, Su That Publishing House, 1985), p. 73.

  19. Letters to the South, p. 74.

  20. Letters to the South, Letter to Muoi Cuc (Nguyen Van Linh) and the Cochin China Party Committee [Xu Uy Nam Bo], February 1965, p. 75.

  Le Duan’s strategy represented, of course, a form of deterrence. By crippling the ARVN forces, he believed that American decision-makers would be dissuaded from escalating their commitment to the South. In fact, the increased attacks on both ARVN and American forces produced the opposite result. They served only to strengthen those American decision-makers’ desire to escalate. The problem with Le Duan’s analysis was that it assumed a rational, as opposed to an emotional, decision-making process on the part of top American officials. It also required the American decision-makers to share Le Duan’s perception of American vulnerability.

  21. James Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization, vol. 49, no. 3 (1995), pp. 379–414.

  22. Truong Nhu Tang, A Vietcong Memoir (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1985), p. 58.

  23. See William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940–1941 (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1968). For a penetrating analysis of President Franklin Roosevelt’s policy toward Japan during the prelude to Pearl Harbor, see Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), ch. 4, “Developing Interpretation Through Textual Analysis: The 1941 Case.”

  24. Lien-Hang T. Nguyen cites the postwar writings of General Tran Van Tra as evidence of southern communists’ resistance to Le Duan’s push for conventional warfare. See Nguyen, Hanoi’s War, ch. 2.

  25. Van Kien Dang, Le Duan speech, December 1965, p. 599.

  26. Letters to the South [Tho Vao Nam], Le Duan, Su That Publishing House, Hanoi, 1985. Letter to Muoi Cuc (Nguyen Van Linh) and the Cochin China Party Committee [Xu Uy Nam Bo], November 1965, p. 124.

  27. Letters to the South, Letter to Muoi Cuc (Nguyen Van
Linh) and the Cochin China Party Committee [Xu Uy Nam Bo], November 1965, p. 145.

  28. Letters to the South, Letter to Muoi Cuc (Nguyen Van Linh) and the Cochin China Party Committee [Xu Uy Nam Bo], November 1965, p. 161.

  29. Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013). See also Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

  30. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War, ch. 2.

  31. Van Kien Dang, 1965, Speech Given by Party First Secretary Le Duan to the Twelfth Plenum of the Party Central Committee, December 1965, p. 568.

  32. Van Kien Dang, Le Duan speech, December 1965, p. 568.

  33. Van Kien Dang, Le Duan speech, December 1965, p. 569.

  34. Van Kien Dang, Le Duan speech, December 1965, p. 575.

  35. Van Kien Dang, Le Duan speech, December 1965, p. 579.

  36. Van Kien Dang, Le Duan speech, December 1965, p. 586.

  37. Van Kien Dang, Le Duan speech, December 1965, p. 590.

  38. Van Kien Dang, Le Duan speech, December 1965, p. 592.

  39. Van Kien Dang, 1966, Speech Given by Chairman Ho Chi Minh to a Conference of High-level Cadres Held to Study the Resolution of the Twelfth Plenum of the Party Central Committee (January 16, 1966), pp. 4–17.

  40. Van Kien Dang, Resolution of the Politburo, August 1968, p. 409.

  41. Van Kien Dang, Resolution of the Politburo, August 1968, p. 376.

  42. Major Events: The Diplomatic Struggle and International Activities During the Resistance War Against the Americans to Save the Nation, 1954–1975 (Hanoi, Vietnam: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1987). See cables for January and February 1969, in particular January 1, 1969, p. 202, and February 1, 1969, p. 211.

  Chapter 8

  1. I have relied on two separate English editions: one from 1925 and another from 2005. Luo Guanzhong, The Romance of Three Kingdoms, trans. C. H. Brewitt-Taylor (Rockville, MD: Silk Pagoda, 2005). See also Luo Guanzhong, San Kuo, or Romance of Three Kingdoms, trans. C. H. Brewitt-Taylor (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1925). The story of Cun Ming’s lute is found in ch. 95.

  2. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), pp. 193–94.

  3. I am adapting this scenario as Kahneman constructed it. I note with regret that this discussion presupposes that productivity is the most valuable trait for academics to possess. It ignores the possibility that creativity and depth of ideas could be more meaningful than the quantity of scholarly output. For the sake of clarifying the continuity heuristic, this simplification is useful.

  4. The more specific version of the fundamental attribution error is the actor–observer asymmetry. In a meta-analysis of psychological studies of this effect, one scholar has found little support for the effect’s existence, save for its prevalence in cases where observers attributed negative, as opposed to complimentary, characteristics to the actors in question. For my purposes, it is enough to use the fundamental attribution error as a short-hand label for a specific type of faulty thinking. I take no position on whether or not most people commit this error. Instead, I find that the particular historical actors discussed in this chapter attributed stable, negative dispositions (namely aggression) to the foreign leaders they observed. See Bertram F. Malle, “The Actor–Observer Asymmetry in Attribution: A (Surprising) Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 132, no. 6 (2006), pp. 895–919.

  5. F.O. 371/257. Memorandum by Mr. Eyre Crowe. Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany. (8882. *) Secret. Foreign Office, January 1, 1907.

  6. See for example Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

  7. F.O. 371/257. Memorandum by Mr. Eyre Crowe. Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany. (8882. *) Secret. Foreign Office, January 1, 1907.

  8. The fact that the Kaiser remained in power for more than another decade does not diminish Fitzmaurice’s point. His objection was to Crowe’s assumption that national interests alone determined policy. Even the same individuals can come to perceive their own interests, as well as their nation’s interests, differently over time.

  9. G. P. Gooch and Harold Temperley, eds., British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914 (London: H.M.S.O., 1926–1938), appendix.

  10. The international relations theory of constructivism in part challenges the realist school along these lines. My purpose here is merely to elucidate how a static view of the enemy has influenced the history of twentieth-century international conflict, not to debate the merits of one international relations theory over another. See Alexander Wendt’s classic article, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization, vol. 46, no. 2 (1992), pp. 391–425.

  11. For the best recent study of Kennan’s career and thinking, see John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).

  12. George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 25, no. July 4 (1947). For the classic work on essentializing non-Western behavior and beliefs, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).

  13. Marc Trachtenberg has argued that Kennan’s impact on the Cold War has been overstated by historians. Regardless of the extent of his influence, my aim here is to assess the shortcuts and assumptions underlying Kennan’s analysis in the oft-cited Long Telegram and Foreign Affairs article. See Marc Trachtenberg’s response to Robert Jervis on John Lewis Gaddis’s biography of George Kennan. H-Diplo, May 8, 2012, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-diplo&month=1205&week=b&msg=SQRzD0MRH6ws2OYW4mNKvA&user=&pw=.

  14. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), pp. 149–56.

  15. Nathan Leites, The Operational Code of the Politburo (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951).

  16. Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953).

  17. Alexander George, “The Operational Code: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 2 (1969), pp. 190–222.

  18. Margaret Hermann, “Circumstances Under Which Leader Personality Will Affect Foreign Policy.” In Search of Global Patterns, ed. James Rosenau. (New York: Free Press, 1976). See also Margaret Hermann, “Explaining Foreign Policy Behavior Using the Personal Characteristics of Political Leaders,” International Studies Quarterly vol. 27 (1980), pp. 7–46. See also Margaret Hermann and Charles Kegley, “Rethinking Democracy and International Peace: Perspectives from Political Psychology,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 39 (1995), pp. 511–34.

  19. Ole Holsti, “Foreign Policy Viewed Cognitively.” In The Structure of Decision, ed. Robert Axelrod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).

  Ole Holsti, “The ‘Operational Code’ as an Approach to the Analysis of Belief Systems.” Final Report to the National Science Foundation, Grant NO. SOC 75–15368 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977).

  20. See for example Mark Schafer and Stephen G. Walker, “Democratic Leaders and the Democratic Peace: The Operational Codes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton,” International Studies Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3 (2006), pp. 561–83. See also Stephen G. Walker, Forecasting the Political Behavior of Leaders with the Verbs in Context System of Operational Code Analysis (Hilliard, OH: Social Science Automation, 2000).

  21. In more recent times, numerous foreign policy analysts have made similar claims about Arab thinking. Seymour Hersh even alleged that the neoconservatives influencing the George W. Bush administration relied on Raphael Patai’s 1973 book The Arab Mind as their bible for understanding Arab behavior. Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone: How a Secret Pentagon Program Came to Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker, May 24, 2004.

  22. The exact text reads: “For there is one road which, if past experience is any guide to the future, will mo
st certainly not lead to any permanent improvement of relations with any Power, least of all Germany, and which must therefore be abandoned: that is the road paved with graceful British concessions—concessions made without any conviction either of their justice or of their being set off by equivalent counter-services.” Op. Cit. F.O. 371/257, “Crowe Memorandum.”

  23. Jerrold M. Post, ed., The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders: With Profiles of Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 52.

  Chapter 9

  Parts of this chapter appeared in articles in Armed Forces Journal and Joint Force Quarterly. I am grateful to the editors for their permission to reprint that material here.