Serge

Do you ever get the feeling you’re re-living history in slow motion?

From today’s WSJ on the Bush administration’s New Way Forward that’ll be announced next week:

People familiar with the matter say that Mr. Bush will detail his request for billions of dollars in new aid for Iraq next week in an eagerly awaited speech on his strategy to contain sectarian violence there and clear the way for an eventual U.S. military withdrawal. In his speech, Mr. Bush will also call for the deployment of as many as 20,000 additional American combat troops to Iraq as part of a controversial “surge” designed to stabilize Baghdad and other violent regions of the country.

The administration’s emerging Iraq strategy, which it is calling “The New Way Forward,” will also include an effort to funnel U.S. money to moderate Iraqi political parties as a means of building a centrist political coalition to support Mr. Maliki, according to people familiar with the matter.

Excerpts from memos and other documents on the 1961 Honolulu conference from the State Department’s official history of Vietnam (emphasis mine):

During the course of a discussion on how to get Diem to follow U.S. advice Ambassador Nolting observed that we are unlikely to get Diem to carry out his recent commitments to us to the degree or as rapidly as we would expect or like. There would be no automatic fruition of these agreements from the Vietnamese side. This is something we had to live with. The Secretary commented that Diem was the only man we had, that he had some basis for being suspicious because of all the coup talk, and that if we concentrated on fundamental military specifics he thought we could get Diem to cooperate. We had to work with him; we couldn’t expect to change people. He felt that while reforms were necessary, they take a long time and we need some specific action within the next 30 days. Ambassador Nolting agreed with the “specifics approach”, saying that we couldn’t remodel the overall structure of the GVN or change characters.

The Secretary evinced strong interest in building up the Civil Guard and self-defense corps. He reasoned that past experience has shown that after the ARVN sweeps through an area the Viet Cong filters back in and there is nothing to show for it. He guaranteed the money and equipment to strengthen the Civil Guard provided a specific plan was worked out. He suggested as a starter, taking one province, doubling or tripling the Civil Guard as necessary, sweeping the province with the ARVN and consolidating control with the Civil Guard. The Secretary did not object to increasing the ARVN ceiling above 200,000 provided good justification could be furnished him, but he raised the question whether the resources couldn’t better be used to increase the Civil Guard. He tended to brush aside Ambassador Nolting’s worries about raising the necessary piastres to meet the costs of expanding force levels./4/

/4/This sentence is underlined on the source text, apparently by Cottrell, and an exclamation point is written in the margin.

One subject on the agenda but not discussed in the meetings was command relationships in the event U.S. forces Viet Nam (USFV) were established. However, Ambassador Nolting discussed this subject with Admiral Felt and Secretary McNamara separately, indicating his lack of agreement with the JCS-CINCPAC concept. In general his thinking coincided with that contained in the draft message from Ball to Rusk,/5/ a copy of which Joe Wellings had brought with him. Nolting feels that the eradication of the Viet Cong is not simply a military problem but one involving economic, psychological, political and social actions. Although in the next six months the military might need an overriding priority, if ultimate success is to be obtained, there must be a parallel action in these other fields. We must beef them up as we are now beefing up the military. He also feels that creation of a USFV command would encourage the GVN in its present tendency to overemphasize military action and regard it as a cure-all. He fears, too, that it would tempt the GVN to play off the commander USFV and the Ambassador against each other. He therefore wants to stick to a task force concept. As far as I am aware this is the only agenda subject upon which there was a significant divergence of views between the Ambassador and the military side.

This is 1961 standing on the verge of the slippery slope making the same assumptions we are today.