The Price of Imperial Arrogance
Atlantic Free Press, Netherlands Thursday, 16 November 2006 by Stephen Lendman
Lyndon Johnson was a conflicted man about Vietnam almost from the time he took office. As early as May, 1964, he confessed his doubts about the conflict to his good friend Senator Richard Russell in one of the many phone calls he taped in the Oval Office. That was three months before the fateful Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave him congressional authorization for military action in Southeast Asia without needing a formal declaration of war for it. Later that year, he privately acknowledged the Tonkin Gulf incident never happened and told Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara “we concluded maybe they hadn’t fired at all.” He was referring to the claimed attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on two US destroyers which, on its face, seemed preposterous but which propelled this country deeply into the Vietnam conflict that didn’t end until President Gerald Ford evacuated the last of the US forces and a few South Vietnamese collaborators in humiliation from the rooftop of the US Embassy in Saigon 11 years later in April, 1975.
They left behind a nation in ruins, its landscape devastated and chemically poisoned that remains so today, and a few million dead Southeast Asians in three countries showing the kind of men Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were - imperial war lords who never had to answer for their war crimes as they never do under a system of victor’s justice. The only compensation the victims got was their freedom from US aggression when realizing it couldn’t win it decided to give up a futile fight and pull out.
Long before he left office, Johnson knew the war was unwinnable, and in 1965 told Secretary McNamara “I don’t believe they’re ever going to quit. And I don’t see….that we have any….plan for victory - militarily or diplomatically” - spoken as he was about to escalate the conflict dramatically by shipping over many thousands more US forces that would eventually exceed a half million before things began to be scaled down in preparation for the final exodus in disgrace and defeat. Johnson did it even while confiding to his closest Senate friend, Richard Russell, that he was on the horns of his greatest dilemma. He had to find a way out of the Vietnam mess he felt was pointless but said he couldn’t do it without being impeached - for Johnson, a classic Hobson’s choice or in his own words “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.” He asked his savvy friend for advice, but Russell told him he had none. Johnson felt trapped, and in May, 1964, (when the US commitment stood at a 16,000 troop strength level) he told Russell “We’re in quicksand up to our necks, and I just don’t know what the hell to do about it.”
He did a lot about it, but made a criminal and coward’s choice that destroyed him. It was apparent on March 31,1968, two months after the momentous Tet offensive showed how hopeless things were and how pointless it was to pursue an agenda certain to fail. Johnson addressed the nation on national television that night saying he wouldn’t seek reelection for another term. His only way out was to “cut and run” because he was so unpopular he had no chance to win. Lyndon Johnson left office in January, 1969 a disgraced and defeated man. This powerful, bigger-than-lfe figure was never the same again, and four years later he was dead.
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