ROLLING THUNDER
by Bill Bonner
"The bastards have never been bombed like they're going
to be bombed this time."
Richard M. Nixon
Some things just don't work as well as you think they
should. Arguing with your wife, for example. Or diet
plans. Or hair growth tonic. The rhythm method.
Psychotherapy. Momentum investing. Handouts to poor
people. Strategic air power.
>From the very beginning of aviation, military
authorities have had high hopes for the persuasive power
of dropping bombs on people. It was assumed that a few
tons of high explosives, loosed from a passing airplane,
would improve your enemy's behavior.
In the first World War, planes were still too callow to
allow the weight of serious destruction. But by WWII,
planes could get off the ground with enough bombs to
really teach someone a lesson...or so it was thought.
The Germans thought they could bring about a change of
attitude in Britain by sending over the Luftwaffe each
night and bombing grocery stores and theatres as well as
ammunition dumps. They did change attitudes, but not the
way they hoped. Instead of softening up, the Brits
turned a hard face...and mobilized for war with greater
resolve.
When the tide turned in the air, and the god of war
floated over to the other side, the British and
Americans saw an opportunity for a little attitude
adjustment on the continent. They reduced Dresden, Koln,
and other German cities to rubble. But a study done
after the war showed that even this intense bombing did
little to slow the German war machine. Railroads were
patched together. Production was shifted from one
facility to another. The wheels still turned.
Faith in air power remained. Besides, by the 1960s, the
analogies of WWII didn't seem to apply - especially to
non-industrialized nations with no planes of their own.
In the digital mind of U.S. defense secretary McNamara,
there was no question about whether or not airpower
could do the trick, but what amount of bombing it would
take. Robert McNamara made his calculations. He
approached the issue as though he were a Fed chief with
650 basis points to work with. How far would he have to
go - and at what cost - before the enemy gave up, he
wondered?
But many people saw the obvious problem. There were few
targets in Vietnam against which bombs might be
effective. Averill Harriman, returning from a fact-
finding mission, warned Kennedy that "we shall replace
the French as the colonial force in the area and bleed
as the French did."
By 1964, Kennedy sensed that the war was a losing
proposition. He wanted out...but he also sensed an
election coming up. "I can't do it until 1965 - until
after I'm re-elected," said the president. It was "no
profile in courage," comments Barbara Tuchman in "The
March of Folly."
Lyndon Johnson also sensed a problem, but believed he
could not "lose" Vietnam to the communists. That would
be a stain on his presidency, he believed - a stain
darker than a Texas tort lawyer's heart. "I am not going
to be the first U.S. President to lose a war," he
declared.
Charles De Gaulle offered his views, if not his help.
America was being drawn into the war on the same
illusions as the French 10 years before, he said. The
military superiority of a modern nation was useless in a
backwater like Vietnam, he noted. It was a "a hopeless
place to fight..."; a " rotten country" that would
likely destroy the U.S. army just as it had the French.
Instead of fighting, the only way out was negotiation,
he advised.
Johnson would have none of it. Undersecretary of State
George Ball explained to de Gaulle that "that the U.S.
did not believe in negotiating until our position on the
battlefield was so strong that our enemies would make
concessions."
This presumed, of course, that the war would go in their
favor.
Alas, it did not.
"Reports from Saigon told of progressive crumbling,
riots, corruption, anti-American sentiment, neutralist
movement by the Buddhists," writes Tuchman. "I feel,"
declared one American official in Saigon, "as though I
were on the deck of the Titanic."
The Johnson Administration decided to raise the stakes.
On March 2nd of 1964, a campaign of bombing named
"Rolling Thunder" began. And "by April it was apparent
that Rolling Thunder was having no visible effect on the
enemy's will to fight," Tuchman writes. "Bombing of the
supply trails in Laos had not prevented infiltration;
Viet Cong raids showed no signs of faltering."
Like another President 36 years later, Johnson decided
to bribe as well as bully. More than $1 billion in aid
was offered if only North Vietnam would accept U.S.
peace terms.
But having taken to the air, America found nowhere to
set down. Attitudes in North Vietnam hardened under the
bombing. Hanoi announced that it would not negotiate
until the bombing was stopped. The U.S. said it would
not stop bombing until the Viet Cong stopped fighting.
Still, people were as optimistic as investors in a bull
market. McNamara, toting up his bombs and trying to
quantify war, saw nothing but good coming out of it.
It was the kind of war America had to learn to fight, he
said, "a limited war...the kind of war we'll likely be
facing for the next fifty years." And so it was!
The thunder continued to roll. And McNamara continued
adding up his figures. A CIA study revealed that each $1
of damage caused to the enemy cost the U.S. $9.60.
(Probably a bargain compared to the rate of return on
bombing in Afghanistan.) By the end of 1967, the
Pentagon had dropped over 1.5 million tons of bombs -
already more than the U.S. had used in Europe in all of
WWII - and the bombing had scarcely begun.
McNamara was growing uneasy. He didn't like the numbers.
Asked to determine how much damage would have to be
inflicted upon Ho Chi Minh's forces to bring him to stop
the war, the CIA came up with an alarming answer: There
was no level of bombing or naval action that would be
"so intolerable that the war had to be stopped."
McNamara was a fool. But he was a smart fool. Soon, he
had moved on...he resigned from the Pentagon and took
his talent for doing dumb things brilliantly to the
World Bank.
His replacement, Clark Clifford, quickly came to the
same conclusion. He saw that "the course we were
pursuing was not only endless but hopeless." Johnson,
realizing that he had been trapped, withdrew from the
race for another term. Vietnam had ruined him.
But the bombing continued. Richard Nixon took up the
illusion - that increasing the pressure on Ho Chi
Minh...with more bombs...would cause the old man to give
up.
He intensified the bombing attacks and expanded them
into Cambodia. Each bomb dropped may be a losing
proposition, perhaps he reasoned, but we can make it up
on volume!
The French continued to offer the same opinion. It was a
"hopeless enterprise," said Jean Sainteny to Henry
Kissinger. That opinion had spread far and wide. The New
York Times labeled Nixon's campaign in Cambodia a
"Military Hallucination." In a rare occurrence, the
Times was right.
Widening the war was an act of folly, opines Barbara
Tuchman, "designed to bring down trouble upon the
perpetrator...the kind of folly to which governments
seem irresistibly drawn as if pulled by a mischievous
fate to make the gods laugh."
Nixon knew the war was a hopeless cause. He just wanted
to bring the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table in
order to win a "peace with honor." How could he do it?
He stepped up the bombing with his "Christmas bombing"
campaign - the heaviest of the entire war.
Did Hanoi finally give up? No, Hanoi persevered. Nixon
and Kissinger gave up, signing the Geneva Peace Accords
on the 27th of January 1973.
The U.S. stock market hit a high on almost that very
day...and then fell for the next 21 months, losing half
its value. As a percentage of GDP, stocks registered a
high of about 90% of GDP in 1968. They did not reach
that level again until nearly 30 years later.
Your editor,
Bill Bonner
P.S. Writing about the folly of others gives no immunity
from foolishness - neither in your editor, nor in
Barbara Tuchman.
Your editor's foolishness is on display regularly, his
wife assures him.
Tuchman's can be found in the second paragraph of the
first page of her book. Wondering why people do
obviously stupid things she becomes delusional: "Why
does American business insist on 'growth' when it is
demonstrably using up the three basics of life on our
planet - land, water and unpolluted air?" Using up the
planet's land and water? She almost makes McNamara and
Johnson look sensible.
