As my dad used to say "poop or get off the pot."

Anyways thank you. I am very pessimistic, but articles like yours give me some reason to hope. Generally I think it will take a nuclear weapon going off in the Washington suburbs, killing our political leaders families before they get serious about fighting. The death and mayhem that will follow that will make anything we have seen or read about seem like a walk in the park. Would be nice if we could avoid that terrible nightmare.

1) Halberstam saw the war as unwinnable under *any* circumstances. His criticism
of MacNamara is generally accurate, but he then assumes all players were MacNamara
and then paints everyone with the same brush.

2) "Limited war" in Vietnam proved an excuse for LBJ to "Pussyfoot" around. When
you read what Westmoreland requests and what LBJ actually delivers, invariably
it's less than what WEstmoreland requested to do more than stablize the situation. Youi're
right on when you say that MacNamara and his buddies were obsessed with "sending
signals" to the north as part of their "limited war" fantasies. Hence they would give
Westmoreland enough troops to "send signals" but never enough to give him
enough to make progress in the war (and WEstmoreland is honest about this). Halberstam
smears Westmoreland with MacNamara's mistakes.

3) Part of MacNamara's blindness came from the old DOmino Theory–which more
or less everyone believed in at the time. The idea of monolithic communism concealed
the reality of the Sino-Soviet split. If books such as Ilya Guiduk's Soviet Union and
the Vietnam war are to be believed, the USSR was actually never in a position to deny
aiding and resupplying North Vietnam. Hence the idea of sending a "signal" to the
North Vietnamese was useless. They weren't bound by the same nuclear "respectability"
that the USSR was.

4) IN his recent Triumph Forsaken, Mark Moyar argues that timid US response to
North Vietnamese aggression between '62-64 was what prompted the full fledged
Northern invasion. Recent Northern accounts of what the North Vietnamese thought
are incredulous that the US didn't simply invade the NOrth or cut off the Ho Chi Minh
Trail. The average American asked these questions throughout the war. Only America's
civilian leaders thought such questions outrageous–because they were addicted as you
quite rightly point out–to the concept of limited war. I don't have the source at the moment
on hand, but I believe Ike told LBJ that he needed to go all out if he decided to fight
against the NOrth–and to threaten CHina with nuclear annihilation ("Smash the serpent on the head" or something like that was his expression) if it continued to intervene.

5) Holbrooke's claim that somehow everything was tried in Vietnam is nonsense.
One of the most interesting questions about the Vietnam war today is trying to under-
stand how AMerica's civilian leaders could create such a disaster–which was largely
the result of taking their own fantasies with such seriousness. That Holbrook still takes
these fantasies seriously is probably why Kerry had use for him in his
administration. One might defend LBJ by saying that domestic affairs were what
interested him and Vietnam was a sideshow. Some historians have argued that the cost
of his civil rights legislation was keeping VIetnam on the back burner. In any event,
one of the first things he told Nixon in '69 was that his attempt at gradual escalation
in the VIetnam war had been a mistake. I'm not sure what Holbrook's excuse is.
what Holbrook's excuse is.

I'm not a military historian, or really even much of a historian at all for that matter. But I'm curious about your views on the US Revolutionary War. Did the British lose – at least in part – because they employed a strategy of "limited war?" Or was it because of logistical issues that made it difficult to conduct a "total war" so far from their center of power?

One gets the impression from certain historical accounts (namely, Jeff Shaara's novel) that the British underwhelmed this effort and treated it as a small rebellion to quell at every turn rather than an all-out take-no-prisoners enterprise.

I'm sure this is overly simplified, but would welcome any comments you wish to make.

Once the world learned that although we had unbeatable cards, we would refuse to play them, they repeatedly called our bluff. And we'd slink away from the table browbeat and apologetic. A curious form of poker that we gave birth to.

Gradually, we even came to believe that since we'd never play the face cards anyway, we didn't need them at all. An even more precarious situation, but one that our "mom's for peace" found wholly to their liking. Where once we lacked only the will, now I fear that we lack the means as well.

Where are the MacArthurs and Pattons of this generation?

I am not sure that I can agree with Pat's Cold War comparison to today's GWOT. While the Soviets were idealogically driven to promote and spread their system of governance, they remained a country bound by and defended by a military that was "conventional". They maintained an uniformed army and navy, fought by conventional means using conventional weapons. The U.S. could not meet these forces head on for the reasons referred to by Pat, but even if by proxy, the two opposing Super Powers were using conventional means to further their interests. Remember that the Soviets made the same mistake in Afghanistan that we did in Vietnam. They did not fully commit, and ended up in an unpopular, messy, protracted struggle that they eventually pulled out of. Today's enemy (fundamentalists, jihadists, whatever) are not bound by the same conventional constraints. This should be clear by now, even to the apologists out there. This is a shadowy enemy, wearing no uniform except the fervent glint in their eye and the explosives strapped to their bodies. We have become complacent, to say the least. Unlike European nations, we have no unfriendly neighbors on our borders, and have a comfortable buffer in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to separate us from antagonistic conventional forces. However, 9/11 should have been a wake-up call for the American public (and it was…for a little while). We are at war, and I agree with Col. Snodgrass that if we haven't the will to maintain a long and ultimately costly war, the enemy just has to sit and wait until the American public rolls over. North Korea and Iran are testing our will right now, as is Venezuela. What will we show them?