In comment thread on Naked Capitalism ( of all places ), Mencius Moldbug lays his revisionist history of Vietnam.  I have never had the time to study the Vietnam war fully, so I neither endorse nor denounce Mencius' writings.  But I did want compile Mencius's comments here, so that anyone could get a quick introduction to a very different take on the Vietnam War.

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Yves Smith begins the discussion by writing:

Oddly, this conundrum reminds me of the situation that led DanielEllsberg to release the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg was perhaps the bestinformed person in the US about Vietnam; he had been there for both theDepartment of Defense and the State Department, and unlike most USoperatives, had spent considerable time on the ground, including underfire.

Like many people in the intelligence community (heworked for Rand), he believed if he could only get the ear of thePresident and get them to understand what a hopeless exercise Vietmanwas, they would withdraw. But reading the Pentagon Papers, which gavethe history of the US involvement from the inside, showed Ellsberg thatevery Administration involved in Vietnam knew full well that the USwould not succeed. The Presidents had not gotten optimistic briefings;quite the reverse. Yet even though they knew this was a costly anddoomed enterprise, they refused to withdraw, deeming the prestige ofthe US to be at stake.

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Mencius Moldbug then responds:

Um, the US military actually won the Vietnam War. At least, if by "won" you mean "defeated the NLF and the NVA."

It'san astounding feat of revisionist history to call Ellsberg "the bestinformed person in the US" about the Vietnam War. He wasn't even asoldier, for cripes sake! It's like saying that Gil Amelio was the bestinformed person in Cupertino about the System 7 scheduler.

Ellsbergwas a civilian staffer at OSD. He wrote and compiled a set of documentsthat said the US military could not defeat the FLN and NVA. No onelistened. So he leaked his own work illegally to the Post, opening our present era of government by journalist. And look at the wonderful results!

Later,the US military defeated the FLN and NVA. Hardly anyone knows. Hardlyanyone cares. Welcome to Ingsoc. If at first you don't succeed, justlie and say you did.

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Mencius continues:

I was wrong about one thing, actually, which you don't mention: thePPs were leaked to the Times, not the Post. Not that it matters.

Ellsberg had been a soldier, He was a Marine. a company commander for two years.

"Hadbeen." Listen to the spin. This is coming out of your own mouth. Youare so brilliantly skeptical on financial matters, and so utterlycredulous on everything else.

Ellsberg was a veteran, but not a soldier(or a sailor). He was a civilian in OSD, in McNamara's policy shop. Hewas one of the DoD "whiz kids,' with people like Alain Enthoven, etc.These were the people who thought they could beat North Vietnam withgame theory and body counts. If anyone was responsible for thescrewups, they were.

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Yves writes:

 When Kissinger became head of the NSC, he interviewed Ellsberg.Ellsberg was recommended to Kissinger precisely because Ellsberg WASconsidered to be the most knowledgeable person re Vietnam.

Whenwith the he was with Department of State and the DOD in Vietnam, unlikethe vast majority of operatives, he spent a substantial amount of timein the field, often at considerable physical risk. He not only joinedsome platoons as a supposed observer, actually wound up having to giveguidance to the commander as he was about to take actions that wouldhave exposed his troops to fire. Ellsberg also wound up taking up armsand acting as a member of the troop.

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Mencius writes:

Yeah. He visited the troops. So did Bob Hope.

Noneof these Harvard types was in any way part of the organizational chainresponsible for the war. They were not, in other words, militarycommanders. What they had was guanxi with people like Neil Sheehan.

AmI saying Westmoreland was perfect? Heck, no. (Though Abrams was a lotcloser.) But to suggest that this glorified management consultant -who, considering his "hard left" connections, was probably not too manydegrees of separation from the actual people who were actually fightingagainst American troops - knew more about the war than its actual commanders, reflects a level of antimilitarism that defies belief.

Similarly,what he leaked was not his own work, it was a compilation. I forget thecircumstances under which Ellsberg came to have access to it, but hisrole in producing it was minor.

Here is a good summary of the creation of the PPs. Ellsberg was special assistant to McNaughton, whose project it was.

(Disclaimer:my stepfather, who certainly does not endorse these or any of myopinions, was a student and protege of McGeorge Bundy, one ofMcNaughton's cronies.)

Finally, I don't know how you can sayUS defeated the FLN and NVA. Yes, we won the Tet offensive, but it wasso ferocious compared to what the US military had led the public tobelieve re the weakness of the enemy that it wound up serving theirends.

You didn't even click on the linkI posted, did you? You probably looked at the source and thought"Commentary bad, New York Review of Books good," like a good servant ofthe powerful. An attitude which, I hasten to reiterate, does not maryour financial reporting at all.

From Herman:

As wehave seen, however, the withdrawal had actually been under way since1969; by August 1972, there were no more U.S. combat forces left inVietnam and a year later there were no U.S. military personnel at all.The reason, in Sorley’s words, was that by then “the South Vietnamesecountryside had been widely pacified, so much so that the term‘pacification’ was no longer even used.” Once again, this was not thepicture presented by the media, to Congress, or to the American public.

Areyou saying that there were US combat forces in Vietnam between 1972 and1975? Or that the Viet Cong (NLF) were not defeated? If so, these aresome of the best kept secrets in history.

You write:

Randinterviews of NVA prisoners were like none others they had conducted,including those during WWII, North Korea, and various Cold Warskirmishes. They concluded that the Vietnamese, unlike other opponents,could not be coerced. The only way to defeat then would be toexterminate them, and given their integration into the Vietnamesepopulation, that meant exterminating the Vietnamese, which was not aviable course of action. It took the Vietnamese 100 years to expel theChinese, but they succeeded. Few populations have that sort of tenacity.

Yup. This is exactly the sort of material that appeared in the Pentagon Papers.

Did it turn out to be true? See the above.

Didit make any sense whatsoever? Weren't the Germans and Japanese a littlefanatical, too? Did the US Army have to exterminate them? Listen to thewords that are coming out of your mouth. They are cant, drivel,propaganda. They are not worthy of your keen and skeptical mind.

Whenyou do financial reporting, do you ascribe infinite credibility to theWSJ, the FT, the NYT? Heck, no. You mock them on a regular basis, andthis is as it should be. But somehow, you accept their first drafts ofhistory, published 40 years ago and never revised, as if they camestraight from the Vatican. I just don't get it.

Reading over the above, I'm not sure I've made my interpretation of the Ellsberg scandal clear enough.

Whathappened is that there were two factions within DoD - the actualmilitary (who wanted to fight a normal war against North Vietnam, aweak and easily defeatable adversary), who were Republicans, Birchers,etc; and McNamara's people, the wonks, who wanted to try out thepreposterous and unrealistic ideas of graduated conflict they haddeveloped at places like RAND. (You've heard of "mark-to-model." Thiswas "war-by-model.")

When the wonks' limited war failed toachieve the results their theories were predicting, they shifted toplan B: the war was militarily unwinnable. Because the North Vietnamesewere fanatical supermen, or whatever. Thus, they were not at fault forpreventing the military from winning it.

In order to shop thisline, they constructed a study to fit the result. When the military,quite rightly as it later turned out, ignored them, they fought back byleaking their study to the press.

This is something that happens every fifteen minutes in DC.
Atleast, it is standard operating procedure now. Perhaps less so in theday. But it was especially unusual at the time, because the study wasmarked "Top Secret." Under, say, FDR, Ellsberg would have spent therest of his life in Leavenworth.

When the Supreme Court failedto enjoin publication of the PPs, they came to no legal conclusionabout whether the offence could be prosecuted. But it never was. Why?

Becausethe Court, in reality, was deciding who was stronger: the Times or theUS military. I certainly am no under illusions that the latter isperfect. But neither is the former. DC is a world of power, not hugsand kisses and puppy dogs and "change."

The result of this powerplay was the current precedent that no secrets are off-limits to theTimes and the Post. Which allows them to more or less run thegovernment. But perhaps you won't believe it from me - in that case,try it from Tony Blair.

 As for Herman's article, I note he claims that Ho Chi Minh was an ally of the Chinese.

Um, where do you think they got their arms from? Bolivia? Sure, many were shipped directly from the Soviet Union.

WhenMcNamara managed to arrange to meet his old enemies (I believe over adinner in Hanoi), it was very awkward and the worst moment was when hementioned the role of the Chinese in supporting the Vietnamese. Hishosts nearly jumped across the table, furious. They said that thatshowed how little the US knew about Vietnam. The Vietnamese hated theChinese, who had been occupiers, and were not going to put themselvesin a position to be under their thumb again.

I love that "had been occupiers." Yeah, what - 500 years ago?

As La Wik puts it:

"Fromat least 1965 onwards, both China and the Soviet Union provided aid toNorth Vietnam in support of its military activities."

Of course, Wikipedia is a hotbed of Birchers. You can't trust it at all.

Here'sa simpler explanation: the Hoists and the Maoists were both a bunch ofOrwellian gangsters. They worked together for a while. Then they fellout. They were mad at McNamara because he was saying that Eastasia hadnot always been at war with Oceania.

He was also assigned fortwo weeks to a platoon that was sent into a VC controlled area (RachKen) to demonstrate that the US could take and pacify such an areas. Hewas with them at all times, took and (despite his civilian standing)returned fire.

He returned fire! Yeah, so did Michael Yon.

Ellsberg is to Bob Hope as the people who were actually running the war were to Ellsberg.

Anyreports of VC presence or absence came from the same South Vietnamesegovernment that had consistently demonstrated a pattern of lying inorder to maintain our sponsorship, so I take the claim that SouthVietnam was pacified as of 1972 with a pound of salt.

Really?You don't think there were any Americans in Vietnam between 1972 and1975? All those Times reporters, all those State people, whom you trustthe way a Catholic trusts the Pope, they just went home? Talk about thedog that didn't bark.

Think about what you know about the Vietnam War. Think about how much of it predates 1969. Ask yourself why.

As for your belief that the government is controlled by the press, that is delusional.

Really?Because you go on for several miles about the press's misdeeds, Iassume you at least agree that the press is very influential.Otherwise, why would you care? I'll also give you the credit ofassuming you read that Tony Blair speech.

The question is then:who has the most influence over what appears in the press? Gee, let meguess: (a) journalists? (b) Punch Sulzberger? (c) the White House? (d)the Freemasons, Skull & Bones, etc?

Occam's razor, people.

I live in San Francisco and am a regular reader of the SF Bay Guardian, which is about as Maoist as it gets these days.

As for "vote scrubbing," I heard about it constantly. But maybe this was just SF osmosis.

Whichdo you consider worse: "vote scrubbing" (removing felons from the voterrolls) or the addition of illegal voters to the rolls? Is it worse todrop a legal voter, or add an illegal one? Why? How much of the latterdo you think is going on, which party do you think is responsible, andwhen was the last time your beloved press mentioned it to you?

As for Communism, I will have to agree - I get a very Pravda feeling off our official press. But not in the same way.

Thereare two kinds of Orwellian state: in one, the government controls thepress, and in the other it's the other way around. In both cases, thetwo are permanently and irrevocably on the same page. Whether or notyou agree that our system is actually a case of the second type, I hopeyou'll agree that they are both creepy as hell.

And I simply can't believe "the first time any Administration had tried to challenge the freedom of the press."

Doyou really get all your history from Howard Zinn? What was John Adams,a dogcatcher? Forget the Sedition Act - Abraham Lincoln must haveclosed half the newspapers in the North at one time or another. Trythis Google search. Or this Wikipedia page. And don't even start me on FDR.

I don't know where you're getting your history from, Yves. But I think you really ought to consider switching providers.

Iam not saying that the Washington Times, the John Birch Society, theARVN, Commentary, ExxonMobil, etc, are purveyors of nothing but thepure, sweet truth. If only it were as easy as that! What I'm saying isthat all these stories have about fifteen sides, and you are barelygetting one.