"Disease of victory" infects US military to this day

Walt is still catching up on his reading. I'm still stuck in 1988, which seems to have been a banner year for books about the American malaise. Earlier this month I recommended The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream, by Studs Terkel, in which ordinary folks talk about what they thought was wrong with America. The point of reading The Great Divide a quarter of a century later is that things seem not to have changed, except perhaps for the worse.

I'm now half-way through Neil Sheehan's 1988 book, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. His name may ring a bell in connection with the Pentagon Papers which he obtained from Daniel Ellsberg in 1971. Mr. Sheehan's series of articles revealed a secret US Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War and led to a case in the Supreme Court case when the American government attempted to halt publication.

The Vietnam War, which Mr. Sheehan covered for UPI and the New York Times, was the subject of A Bright Shining Lie, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. The monumental book is a penetrating analysis of why the United States lost the war, based on the wartime experience of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann -- something of an American counterpart to Lawrence of Arabia.

According to the dust jacket summary, "A Bright Shining Lie reveals the truth of the war in Vietnam as it unfolded before the eyes of John Paul Vann: the arrogance and professional corruption of the US military system of the 1960s; the incompetence and venality of the South Vietnamese army; the nightmare of death and destruction that began with the arrival of the American forces."

In the chapter titled "Taking on the System", the author identifies the syndrome which caused the US military to fail in Vietnam, which persists even today in the American campaign in Afghanistan. He calls it "the disease of victory". Here's the quote.

"By the second decade after World War II, the dominant characteristics of the senior leadership of the American armed forces had become professional arrogance, lack of imagination, and moral and intellectual insensitivity. These are the kinds of traits that cause otherwise intelligent men...to behave stupidly.

"The attributes were the symptoms of an institutuional illness tha might most appropriately be called the disease of victory, for it arose out of the victorious response to the challenge of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

"The condition was not limited to the armed services. It had also touched the cilian bureaucracies -- the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the lesser civilian agencies -- that joined the armed services in managing American overseas interests for the president. The attitudes had spread as well to the greater part of the political, academic, and business leadership of the United States.

"World War II had been such a triumph of American resources, technology, and industrial and military genius, and the prosperity that the war and the postwar dominance abroad had brought had been so satisfying after the long hunger of the Depression, that American society had become a victim of its own achievement. The elite of America had become stupedfied by too much money, too many material resources, too much power, and too much success."

Walt asks you, dear reader, to ponder the stalemate in Iraq and the debacle of Afghanistan. Were any lessons learned from Vietnam? Was the illness which John Paul Vann and Neil Sheehan identified even treated, let alone cured? Has anything changed? Evidently not. On the contrary, Walt sees the possibility that the illness has become terminal.