We've talked a bit about Vietnam and clear and hold as an example of what is happening in Iraq, and this Nation article by Rick Perlstein, in the course of dismantling two revisionist accounts of Vietnam, discuss that in this paragraph
Sorley's plot is even simpler than Moyar's: Everything was going atrociously in Vietnam until a new general, Creighton Abrams, became the new commander in June 1968, with a nifty new way of war. And by 1970, Sorley proclaims, "the war was won." Westmoreland, the previous commander of US forces, had defined victory via attrition: "to inflict on the enemy more casualties than they could tolerate, thereby forcing them to abandon the effort to subjugate South Vietnam." What came to be known as Abrams's "strategic somersault" was aimed at creating an atmosphere of security for Vietnamese civilians, winning their hearts and minds. Westmoreland's addiction to reckless search-and-destroy missions was replaced with a "one war" approach integrating "military and civilian approaches to an unprecedented degree."
It was also, Sorley asserts, a more humane approach to the war. "Compassion for the Vietnamese was something Abrams felt strongly and could express eloquently," he insists. The doctrine was known as "clear and hold," and Sorley's account of it allegedly inspired the November 30, 2005, White House document "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" and its doctrine of "clear, hold, and build"--which, in turn, is the foundation for the Republican argument that nothing that happened before the installation of General Petraeus should count in evaluating our adventure in Iraq.
Sorley's claim that the war effort became more successful because it became more sensitive is so surpassingly strange he can't sustain it. Here he is approvingly quoting an American military briefer on the air assaults launched by the United States to check North Vietnam's massive 1972 Easter Offensive: "If ther're any lights burning in Hanoi tonight, they'll be candlepower." He boasts that this particular aerial campaign "ruined North Vietnam's economy, paralyzed its transportation system" and "reduced imports by 80 percent." He describes Col. George Patton, son of the great general, as one of the commanders who "took seriously Abrams' message" of winning hearts and minds. And yet this was an officer, as Seymour Hersh reported in the book My Lai 4, who sent out a Christmas card in 1968 in which the message "From Colonel and Mrs. Patton II--Peace on Earth" accompanied a color photograph of a stack of corpses, and who was famous for saying, "I do like to see arms and legs fly."
In December 2005 in the Boston Globe, Hanoi-based journalist Matthew Steinglass interviewed experts in an outstanding position to evaluate Sorley's claims about "clear and hold." Steinglass talked to David Elliot, who interviewed 400 Vietcong defectors during the Vietnam War for the Rand Corporation (and later wrote The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975). Elliot found Sorley's claims absurd: "Only the 'clear' part was a success." What was the "clear" part? "Indiscriminate bombing and artillery shelling which led to rural depopulation"--with some villages hit by more than 300 mortar shells a day. Another one of Steinglass's interviewees was the chief Communist strategist, Gen. Le Ngoc Hien, who has been openly critical of the Communist side's mistakes. He finds Sorley's claim that the war effort became more successful because it became more sensitive "completely wrong."
Discuss.