Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 18:50:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bryan C <bunnyoncoke-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Terrorism and Vietnam


>When theoretical gobbledy-gook and empirically
>substantiated historical events get together, we are
>really in trouble.  The political decisionism 
>enacted in Vietnam can hardly be attributed to the
>NLF/NVA.

I don't think you understood my email, and I'm not
sure I understand what you mean by "political
decisionism." If you mean the distancing of decision
making from the actual war, I would certainly agree
that the method of the NLF/NVA is not the cause of
this (leveling/panoptic) distancing. What you fail to
grasp is that this "political decisionism" has existed
in most of the US's wars of the 20th Century (for
example it was the president, not a general who
decided not only whether, but where to use the atomic
bomb) and it was this which enabled the
counterstrategy of the NVA. Their refusal to become
spatially mappable disabled decision making at a
distance. There were no specific fronts, battle lines,
etc; instead the whole country became a war zone.

>Most of the other comments you are making are not 
>applicable to the causes and sources of events.

I was not trying to demonstrate the causes of the
terrorist attacks, rather their effects; especially in
light of the increasingly probable bombing of
Afghanistan.

>I think that you are not aware of the actual 
>circumstances. Imagine, if you can, hundreds of air-
>sorties and infantry-missions every month for years 
>in which the US wins almost all of them and the 
>typical death toll ratio is about 1 US to 12 VC, and 
>that is a conservative estimate.  

Let's revise that statistic shall we? Try 
1US-3VC-8Villagers.  As a direct effect of trying to
force a spatial strategy on an unmappable "enemy"
thousands of innocent villagers were killed along with
the VC.  Listen to the rest of this quote from Douglas
Anderson, a marine stationed in Vietnam:

"I saw cruelty and brutality that I didn't expect to
see from our people against the villagers.  It took me
a while in country to realize why it was happening. 
In this type of fighting it was impossible to know who
the enemy was at any one time.  Children were suspect,
women were suspect. Frequently, the ARVNs [soldiers of
the Army of the Republic of Vietnam] themselves were
on two payrolls.  Their army was heavily infiltrated
with VC or people who were politically ambivalent, who
could change sides as easily as changing clothes."

The counterstrategy represented more than an effective
attack and thus a threat to their *bodies* it
represented an attack on their fundamental conceptions
of the nature of battle and war.

>Why do you suppose that we didn't win?  The answer is

>political, just as we refused to "takeover" Germany, 
>Japan, Korea, or Babylon/Iraq, we did not takeover 
>Vietnam.  You can read about all of the reasoning you

>like for this decision, but if you were stationed in 
>Vietnam and not allowed to follow-up your battles 
>with pursuit of the enemy, and instead had to hold a 
>defensive position, time after time, how would you 
>feel.  The soldiers were prevented from winning by 
>their own government.  

I again reassert that the panoptic distancing of the
battle planners has been fundamental to the USA's
battle narrative for many, many years (I can provide
more examples if you like); this strategy was simply
rendered null. I find disturbing your proposition for
the takeover of Vietnam, especially since it was
hegemonic/imperialist urges like this that have gotten
us into our present situation.

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