Such failure to consider future possibilities and courses of action is one of the most disastrous patterns of American political thought since 1950.  The failure was repeated in Nam, big time.  There was never, as far as I know, or rarely, serious high level consideration of North Viet Nam’s manpower resources and willingness to use them, although there were those who knew -- I seem to recollect that Townsend Hoopes may have been one of them -- that demographic data of births and combat deaths showed that the North could sustain the war indefinitely.  (As said, when war games showed Hanoi doing well, the Pentagon simply stopped holding war games.)  There was no consideration early in the war of how many men we might really need to put into Nam if our escalation were matched by the other side’s.  There was no consideration of the possibility that our escalations would be matched by the other side – because it was their country, after all.  There was no thought given to the fact that massive bombing cannot ruin a third world agricultural country, as it could and did ruin Germany.  (Mao said that, if the Americans decided to use nuclear bombs against China in the Korean war, this would not be successful because, after all, you can’t effectively use the nuclear weapon on a bunch of fields.  What he rightly or wrongly claimed true about the ineffectiveness of using nuclear weapons against a primitive agricultural nation is certainly true for conventional weapons -- and we proved it in Viet Nam.)

            Gulf II was a reprise of the failure to consider future alternate possibilities and courses of action.  This is so much in everyone’s mind today that little need be said about it.  The failure to consider how to control and govern Iraq after defeating Saddam, the failure to consider how many soldiers would be needed for this, the failure to consider the possibility that other countries in the region would not react to the situation with the Bushian rush to democracy propagandized to us, the failure to consider historical enmities in Iraq -- the list of “failures to consider” which have led us into a horrid situation that bin Laden could but dream of is long, and shows what can happen when the government is in the hands of an unthinking, stupid but obstinate man and his fellow criminal cronies.

            Nor does one recollect an awful lot of domestic problems in which serial thinking has been prominent in the public discourse.  That is not the nature of American public discourse, which focuses on sound bites and sex.  The only, even mere, possibility of linear thinking in domestic affairs which springs readily to mind is Bush’s desire to get rid of social security.  He claimed certain results would follow, but others, who largely were horrified at bad possibilities, claimed very different results might follow.  All of this was serial thinking of greater or lesser competence.  Once incipient, but later actually occurring, disasters resulting from lack of linear thinking do spring readily to mind, however.  The most recent is the real estate and securitized mortgage meltdown of recent months -- a meltdown that was readily foreseeable and that people like Gramlich warned of.  How smart did one have to be to know that adjustable rate mortgages were a personal and national disaster waiting to happen?  Not very.  But one didn’t hear much about this possibility.  How smart did one have to be to know that the securitized mortgage industry was another disaster waiting to happen, when years ago Barron’s was warning, accurately, that buyers, even fairly sophisticated ones, had no notion of how the “tranches” they bought could become disastrous?  Again, not very, and again one heard little discussion of this notwithstanding Barron’s warnings.  Alan Greenspan, Wall Street, Executive officials and ignorant media toadies were too happy about supposedly great economic developments and riches for the financial industry to indulge in the slightest linear thinking, the slighted serial thinking, about what could happen because of obvious matters that were staring them right in the face but which they chose not to see.

            One last point regarding failure to think in a linear fashion.  In the late 1940s George Kennan, one of America’s brilliant thinkers for decades, wrote of containment, the policy we followed with regard to Russia.  Halberstam says of Kennan that “He was convinced that bad things would happen if we tried to apply our power where it did not seem applicable.  Places like Vietnam and China were outside our reach (and concern) as other places, nearer and dearer to us, were outside the reach of the Soviets.  In fact, he believed that there was already an involuntary balance of power forming in the world despite the rhetoric of the two great powers—and in the long run it favored the United States.”

            Kennan’s view that bad things will result if we try to apply our power where it is not applicable has come true in spades in Nam and Iraq.  It is applicable as well to Iran and much of the rest, if not all, of the Mideast, as may also be -- as is likely to be -- his strategy of long run containment.  Our failure to avoid Chinese entry into Korea (which we could have done), and our efforts in Nam and Iraq to apply military power rather than a true Kennanesque strategy, caused the price we had to pay in lives, treasure and lack of success to rise dramatically.  One can only hope that, in future, Americans will give more thought -- more linear thought -- to the potential results of fighting war after war thousands of miles from our shores against people who do not have the power to seriously threaten to destroy us, the power that was possessed by Germany in World War II.  (This relates to patterns of action that were discussed earlier, one notes.)

            Of course, Halberstam also says that Kennan, who was “in his own way . . . a considerable snob,” was “decidedly uncomfortable with what he considered the great American unwashed who, in his view, might hinder the ability of the elite to make decisions in a democracy.”  I would not agree with Kennan’s view of Everyman, but I do think the pols, the media, Hollywood, and the TV industry have cheapened our discourse, have caused its quality to deteriorate, to the point where he might be right about democracy’s inability to make sound decisions.

            Another pattern pertinent to Halberstam’s book is that of getting sucked in -- sucked into a trap or disaster.  Let me start this with a line from the movie Gettysburg.  Longstreet is discussing with Lee what the Confederates should do.  In both real life and the movie, Longstreet wanted to move around the Union left and occupy advantageous ground between Gettysburg and Washington, where Meade would be forced to attack the rebels.  Lee, on the other hand, meant to strike the Union forces where they were, on the high ground of Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, and, as memory serves, says in the movie that if Meade is still on Cemetery Ridge the next day, he will attack him there.  Longstreet, who in real life was one of the few Civil War generals who understood that the relatively new rifles (called rifled muskets, or just muskets) used in the Civil War had changed the battlefield equation drastically, says in the movie that if Meade is still there the next day, it will be because Meade wants Lee to attack him there.  In short, Meade wants Lee to send his troops into a solid defensive position, as they eventually went into the killing ground of Picketts charge because Lee did not listen to Longstreet. 

            Well, the American forces went into the same deliberately set trap when they kept going north in Korea.  The Chinese infiltrated 250,000 or 300,000 men unseen, and were all around the Americans who marched deeper and deeper into the trap.  To lure the Americans as deeply into the trap as the Chinese wanted them to be, the Chinese moved north but did not blow a bridge which they surely would have blown had they been truly retreating instead of baiting a trap.  The Commander of the First Marine Division, General O.P. Smith, knew this, but was required by the higher brass to keep going north anyway.  Here is Halberstam’s unforgettable description of the situation:

Smith was now sure that the Chinese were baiting an immense trap for him, and there was one bit of empirical evidence that definitely showed that.  That was the Chinese failure to blow the bridge at the Funchilin Pass . . . . Just north of Sudong and south of Kotori, the road became more and more difficult, elevating at an accelerating rate, twenty-five hundred feet in eight miles, to a terrifying stretch known as the Funchilin Pass, becoming, as Matt Ridgway wrote, “a narrowing, frightening shelf with an impassable cliff on one side and a chasm on the other.”  At a critical point in the pass the only way to keep going north was over a concrete bridge that covered four gigantic pipes, which pumped water from the Chosin Reservoir to a power plant.  The mountain was so steep, and the passageway so narrow, that if the Funchilin Pass bridge were blown, given the hideous nature of the terrain and the overwhelming logistical limitations, it would be the end of the offensive for the American troops, so dependent on motorized equipment.  But the Chinese heading north had not blown the bridge.  To Smith, it was like the dog that hadn’t barked.  The failure to blow the bridge on the part of so formidable and shrewd an adversary was a sure sign that the Chinese wanted the Americans to cross it—it was virtually an invitation—but it meant nothing to Almond, so disrespectful was he of his adversary.  “Smith was sure that they wanted us to come across, and that they were going to blow the bridge after we crossed, thus completely isolating us,” said Major (later Major General) James Lawrence, who had been the executive officer at Sudong when the Chinese struck. 

            The Chinese did blow the bridge after the Marines crossed it and got further north in the trap, and it took some kind of miracle(s) for them later to fight their way out.  (It was this retreat that caused General O.P. Smith to make the famous statement, when asked what he thought about his Marines’ retreat, “Retreat hell, we’re simply attacking in a different direction.”  (This ranks, one thinks, with General McAuliffe’s response to the German demand for surrender of Bastogne, “Nuts.”)

            Blundering into major disasters has become almost an American specialty.  Need one say that that is how we got deeper and deeper into Viet Nam, and that that has been the story of Iraq since we took over Baghdad?  Robert E. Lee and Ned Almond had nothing on their fellow southerners Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk and G.W. Bush (or on Northern fools like McNamara and Rumsfeld, or a western criminal like Cheney).  And we have for a few years lived with the possibility of blundering into what could prove to be another huge trap, war with Iran (and/or, it was thought for awhile, Syria or North Korea).

            Keeping things secret also played a big part in regard to Korea.  After MacArthur was fired, and came home to vast, Godlike acclaim -- some of the biggest ticker tape parades ever -- the Congress held hearings on our foreign policy.  Halberstam writes that MacArthur’s display of lack of knowledge and thought at the hearings, his utter failure to have taken account of the Soviet Union or of what could happen in Europe, reduced him dramatically.  No longer was he the great hero, the Roman Caesar, returned from decades of foreign wars.  Now, as the public saw, he was just a shrunken old man with narrowly based, right wing ideas. 

            But one part of the hearings was kept from the public, the issue of Chiang’s troops, which MacArthur had wanted to “unleash” and whose “unleashing” against the Communists (who had recently smashed them from pillar to post) was a tenet of the right wing.  As Halberstam says, “the excised parts of the record included a devastating critique of one of [the Republican right’s] great beliefs -- about the value of Chiang’s troops in this war.”  The critique was by such as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Omar Bradley.  Chiang’s “troops were in fact regarded [by the Pentagon] as a disaster waiting for another place to happen.”  But because the hearing record of testimony about Chiang’s forces was kept secret, the right wing, and the associated China Lobby of historical infamy, were able to maintain the myth that in Chiang on Formosa (Taiwan) we had a powerful ally who could do us much good -- and whose enemy, Red China, had to be our enemy. 

            Because the truth about Chiang and his forces was kept from the American public by secrecy, Red China remained our enemy until a semi-wacked out member of the Republican right, the criminal Richard Nixon, and his criminal buddy Kissinger, thereafter did what only a Republican rightist could get away with at the time and opened the door to relations with Mao’s regime in the early 1970s.  And that enmity with China, fostered by secrecy of hearings in 1951, was one of the reasons we got sucked deeper and deeper into Viet Nam. 

Secrecy as a pattern of American public life really took off after Korea, with the creation of the American national security state, and got us into trouble time and time again.  We had secret Johnsonian plans to escalate in Viet Nam, a secret Nixon plan for peace whose actual nonexistence was hidden by its purported secrecy but which helped this disaster get elected, we had secret Nixonian wars in Laos and Cambodia, extensive secret CIA spying on Americans which finally was disclosed in the mid 1970s, secret torture, secret prisons, secret renditions, secret spying on Americans and the rest of the litany of secret horrors associated with G.W. Bush and Cheney.  Nor is disastrous secrecy confined to the national government.  In America it exists everywhere:  in corporations (viz, undesirable results of pharmaceutical trials which are kept secret), in universities, etc.  It is one of those large matters which, as discussed at the beginning of this posting, cuts across field after field, but which we cannot get a sufficient handle on because fields are walled off from each other (and, in the case of secrecy, it is usually and wrongly thought of only as a national security or governmental matter rather than as the pervasive phenomenon that it in fact is).  What happened because of the secrecy of a crucial part of the hearings spawned by MacArthur’s recall was part of a pattern which deeply and often disastrously affects all of American life.

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