The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

tried-and-true pacification tactic that had worked for the British from the time of the Boer War at the turn of the century to the Malayan “Emergency”

how did it work for SPAN in Cuba or the US in Philippines

Diem’s overthrow “the worst mistake of the Vietnam War,” a judgment shared by both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon,39 if resisted by other analysts who maintain that the tragedy of America’s defeat was inevitable whether Diem remained in power or not.

there evidently NO capable and ethical leaders in SV

avoided if only Washington policymakers had listened to the advice of a renowned counterinsurgency strategist who had been present at the creation of the state of South Vietnam.

Lansdale apologist

the need to scale back the amount of firepower expended against the insurgents and to make Saigon’s government more accountable, legitimate, and popular to the people it aspired to rule. Victory may have been out of America’s grasp in any case; North Vietnam was a formidable foe and South Vietnam a weak ally.

well-put

this singular visionary, this unhonored strategist, this sidelined adviser who wanted to follow,

is this an ex post facto interpretarion

he was said to be the model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet

not true

opposition to Ngo Dinh Diem in order to consolidate the nascent state of South Vietnam.

never came close to consolidating under Diem

sheds considerable light not only on the course of the Vietnam War, a conflict whose bitter legacy still haunts American foreign policy, but also on such vital issues as how the United States can effectively fight insurgencies abroad, how it can deal with autocratic allies, and how it can most effectively dispense military and political advice to foreign partners of dubious reliability.

He was, for a start, almost certainly not the model for the young American intelligence operative Alden Pyle in The Quiet American (1955); Greene wrote a draft of his novel before Lansdale had even arrived in Saigon.

glad je found this

practically the only admirable character

NOT so

he was deeply suspicious of most covert action, seeing it as a shortcut designed to deal with deep-rooted problems that demanded a political, not a military, solution. And, as this book will show, he had

huh?

Hubert Lyautey

Robert Clive

Frederick ...

T. E. La...

Douglas Ma...

George Crook

Christopher “Kit” Carson.

turboprop

not a turboprop

Charles “Bo” Bohannan

research

most Vietnamese were Confucianists, not Buddhists,

what?