US Politics: Delusional Incompetence

 

US Politics: Delusional Incompetence

Peter Schultz

 

                  The following is from David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest, wherein it is clear that the best and the brightest Americans failed in Vietnam.

 

“As in China, it was a modern army against a feudal one, though it was not perceived by Western eyes, particularly Western military eyes, which saw the ARVN was well equipped, with radios, airplanes, artillery and fighter planes, and that the Vietcong had virtually nothing, except light artillery pieces. Western observers believed the reverse, believed that the ARVN was a legitimate and real army, and that the Vietcong, more often than not wearing black pajamas, not even uniformed, were the fake army, the unreal one – why, they did not even have a chain of command. It was ironic; the United States had created an army in its own image, an army which existed primarily on paper, and which was linked to U.S. aims and ambitions and no way reflected its own society. We believed in the army, the South Vietnamese did not…. [There was an] illusion about a dynamic new leadership that would persist relentlessly through the years….”  [167]

 

                  Americans were delusionally incompetent, blinded by their power and deluded by it. Losing in Vietnam was “unthinkable” for Americans and, so, after they lost, that loss had to be disappeared. Amazingly, Nixon’s Peace with Honor was accepted as a kind of victory, even after the “North” Vietnamese took over and renamed Saigon “Ho Chi Minh City.”