There were 15,000 advisers at the end of 1963. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed in August of 1964. There were 25,000 advisors at the end of 1964. The Marines began entering en masse in March 1965, arrayed quite differently than the advisory force. There were 185,000 troops at the end of 1965. Not quite ‘immediately’.

Public opinion began to part company with the Administration in the summer of 1967.

When I was in, Infantry, we were always looking over our shoulders at the IGB, but the training involved swamps, as did the short tours.

“Thanks for the comment. However, I would say the volume, the length, of the explanations makes my case.”

Fair.

“In addition to the various restrictions on trade, in WW II an inconceivable amount of explosive was dropped on the various Axis as far as our bombers’ combat radius would reach. Day and night. Infrastructure shattered.”

Agreed. Ironically the main strategic bombers in WWI were the Germans (who sort of inaugurated aerial terror bombing with things like the Gotha Blitz against Britain). The ravages of famine could be at least as damaging, but considering how in WWII the Axis got both famine and bombings…

“It seems WW I was going to end as the European Usual–my term but you may use it without attribution. Armies go around, tearing up the countryside, a bunch of guys die young who should have died old, the borders get shoved around a bit, the big shots don’t miss a meal.

See Franco-Prussian War. War(s) of League of Augsburg, Spanish Succession, Austrian Succession, Seven Years War. Napoleonic Wars.”

I can’t agree on that for a few reasons, starting with the fact that the “Big Shots” in the Seven Years’ War (at least in Central Europe; Fred the Great spent a LOT of hungry nights on the move), the Napoleonic Wars (sort of Ditto, with Napoleon having lavish meals but still facing the ongoing blockade), and the Franco-Prussian War (with the Emperor becoming a prisoner and the Republican French government that replaced him having to deal with it). Obviously this wasn’t true for everyone (like the British Monarch rarely missed meals during all of this), but it the stakes were often higher than people liked to admit in hindsight.

But the big thing is that in WWI, the prospects for that kind of a “European Usual” were more or less limited to the first year or so, had one side managed to defeat the other, and even that might be generous. But the Austro-Hungarians had went to war from the onset with the plan of utterly annihilating an independent Serbia and possibly even the Serbian people, and while the Germans had the Septemberprogramme.

So almost from the start for various reasons the Central Powers REALLY quickly expanded the scope of their demands, and for various reasons were utterly uninterested in a compromise peace like the “European Usual” because of their decaying economic situation and (as it turned out somewhat exaggerated) fears of Russian industrialization and American influence. So they basically committed their all in an attempt to basically either gain European dominance and a bunch of other objectives, or to lose it. Which is one reason why they broke the laws of war so rapidly.

“There are still Hohenzollerns–the Kaiser took the family plate to Holland for a comfortable retirement–princeing and duking around Europe, making the society pages, marrying the wealthy and not, apparently, needing a nine-to-five to put bread on the table.”

This is true, but that’s largely because A: there are so many Hohenzollerns, B: relatively few needed to be concerned about being indicted for war crimes, and C: Those that did made a quick escape to the Netherlands precisely in order to find a place that wouldn’t extradite them.

In any case, the Imperial Cabinet system they headed up and the dynasty-as-royal house were undermined by the creeping totalitarianism in the Military and utterly shattered by the one-two-punch of the Western Allied victories on the front and the revolution within.

“Ditto for the Hapsburgs. ”

Indeed, and somewhat similar in terms of results; it helped that Austria immediately after the war took such a rather harsh view of the Habsburgs, not helped by a bunch of abortive Habsburg attempts to retake power in Hungary that were thwarted. But when they returned from exile in places like Portugal they were socialites there.

Meanwhile the main engines behind the war were either dead (in the case of people like Franz Josef), in disreputable retirement (von Hoetzendorff and Ludendorff), in exile (Wilhelm II), or sort of clinging to the shadows of their parallel states in the military (like Groener).

“I recall one of the latter sued the government of Austria for the return of one of their palaces. Not sure how that went.”

IIRC the lawsuit was against the Czechs regarding Konopiste Castle.

I don’t think it has been decided yet but I’d need to check.

“And then, some of bigs retained their influence and Germany was cheating on the military side of Versailles Treaty within about five years. See the diff after WW II. For an idea of the thinking, see this: https://vimeo.com/491670510 ”

Agreed, and a classic video.

“The latter gave the Yurps the longest period of peace since the Battle of Tollense. Must be some fundamental difference. Some hundreds of thousands of US troops sitting ON the sanctuary. It was a comfortable “long tour”. “Accompanied tour”. Bring your family. Schools K-12 complete with football teams, cheerleaders. Ran into a couple of guys at Ft Jackson in 70 who were trying to recall where they’d met. Played ball against each other in one or another athletic conference in Germany/Northern Italy. Or possibly Belgium.”

Very true, though I imagine the “comfort” was somewhat undermined by the threat of WWIII breaking out at seeming any moment and the Soviets going there.

“In college, I knew guys whose growing up was half overseas with their fathers.

Might be the difference.”

I still know some of them even though I am much younger (most likely at least), in part due to the long tours of duty abroad. WWII certainly widened that, but I don’t think it entirely created it given things like the Hawaiian station.

“Oh, yeah. Instead of abdicating, Hitler shot his face off. Not the usual.”

It also helped that he was not a royal head of state and in any case he had personally tainted his case and committed such atrocities there would be little question of his fate. To be honest the fate of the House of Yamato isn’t that different from what we saw with the Central European Autocrats. I think the bigger difference is that (at least as far as non-royals went) the Allies instituted a much more thorough procedure for trying war criminals after the shambolic and mostly stillborn ones following WWI, which along with the occupation helped clear out a lot of the trash.

Not all of it course, as the parade of war criminals that went on to government office or other public life in Germany, Italy, and Japan shows, but enough that there was no longer a coherent “deep state” like what plagued post-WWI Germany.

“WRT keeping the Iraqui army in being:
Talked to a couple of MP who did POW work during Gulf 1. They had to separate Shia troops from Sunni troops or there would be bloody, killing riots.”

Indeed; I wish I were surprised. Doesn’t help that the latter often knew their job and position was at least as much about keeping the Shia in line and had happily lorded over them before. The Iraqi Military under Saddam was at least as much about crushing internal dissent or separatism as it was expanding to form a “New Babylon”, and if anything I’d argue it was even more important given things like the post-Desert Storm war.

Another reason I do figure the entire system and military had to be disbanded and something made to replace it, even if I do think the methodology sucked.

“And this sudden, delicate concern for “corruption” in Ukraine as if it’s….all of a sudden an Important Thing–would have applied in spades to any Iraqui institution especially including their military due to all the fun stuff they had to sell to others. So, faking the vapors over corruption in the Iraqui case probably wouldn’t have seemed politically useful with which to slag the Bush admin, the efficiency of the force would have been close to zero. Separate issue.”

Agreed there. And to be fair I think the bigger issue with people opposing the disbandment is less about the effectiveness of the force (which as we had demonstrated was DECIDEDLY less than ideal) so much as how it turned so many trained killers onto the street without prospects or a career but with their talents and possibly even their weapons. That definitely helped fuel the recruitment for terrorists in the war.

Though I don’t think that changes the fact that the Saddam era military had to go, though how it was done would’ve been more important and frankly looking at the forced demob of Germany and Japan would’ve probably helped.

And this sudden, delicate concern for “corruption” in Ukraine as if it’s….all of a sudden an Important Thing–would have applied in spades to any Iraqui institution especially including their military due to all the fun stuff they had to sell to others. So, faking the vapors over corruption in the Iraqui case probably wouldn’t have seemed politically useful with which to slag the Bush admin, the efficiency of the force would have been close to zero. Separate issue.

Thanks for the comment. However, I would say the volume, the length, of the explanations makes my case.
In addition to the various restrictions on trade, in WW II an inconceivable amount of explosive was dropped on the various Axis as far as our bombers’ combat radius would reach. Day and night. Infrastructure shattered.

It seems WW I was going to end as the European Usual–my term but you may use it without attribution. Armies go around, tearing up the countryside, a bunch of guys die young who should have died old, the borders get shoved around a bit, the big shots don’t miss a meal.

See Franco-Prussian War. War(s) of League of Augsburg, Spanish Succession, Austrian Succession, Seven Years War. Napoleonic Wars.

There are still Hohenzollerns–the Kaiser took the family plate to Holland for a comfortable retirement–princeing and duking around Europe, making the society pages, marrying the wealthy and not, apparently, needing a nine-to-five to put bread on the table. Ditto for the Hapsburgs. I recall one of the latter sued the government of Austria for the return of one of their palaces. Not sure how that went.

Liddell-Hart, like all veterans of the First World War, is excused for asking what the hell happened. In his history of it, he uses the term “infanticide” twice, referring to the Brits’ failure to take charge of the government and…do something.

And then, some of bigs retained their influence and Germany was cheating on the military side of Versailles Treaty within about five years. See the diff after WW II. For an idea of the thinking, see this: https://vimeo.com/491670510

The latter gave the Yurps the longest period of peace since the Battle of Tollense. Must be some fundamental difference. Some hundreds of thousands of US troops sitting ON the sanctuary. It was a comfortable “long tour”. “Accompanied tour”. Bring your family. Schools K-12 complete with football teams, cheerleaders. Ran into a couple of guys at Ft Jackson in 70 who were trying to recall where they’d met. Played ball against each other in one or another athletic conference in Germany/Northern Italy. Or possibly Belgium.

In college, I knew guys whose growing up was half overseas with their fathers.

Might be the difference.

Oh, yeah. Instead of abdicating, Hitler shot his face off. Not the usual.

Whether or not politicians in DC cynically seized on the “attack” to exaggerate it into needing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution may be an open question. But outside the media distortion, there is no evidence that it was planned ahead of time, or instigated by the US.

Also forgetting my contempt for W, the mistake was not thinking or lying about WMD’s but the disbanding of the Iraqi Army . Our plan was to go in under forced ( remember as Rummy said the Army you have not the one you wanted) and to rely on the Iraqi Army to provide security and allow us to leave quickly.

Firstly: To the extent W “lied” about WMDs, it was a matter of magnitude rather than essence since Saddam did have them.

Secondly: I cannot agree that disbanding the Saddam era Iraqi Military was a mistake, though I do think the method was. One reason why the decision was made was because very early on we learned the extent of the corruption and incompatibility of the military and its leadership with a constitutional government, since it was basically a totalitarian organization meant to promote Sunni Arab supremacy under the Great Leader while crushing the opposition, and could not be trusted to NOT go over en masse to the enemy like Baathists or Sunni Islamists.

One of the classic problems we saw in previous peace settlements or occupations such as WWI was the failure to dismantle the kind of profoundly undemocratic “Deep State” military-bureaucratic complex or local cliques, and Afghanistan shows some example of the problems of keeping too much, and it’s REALLY hard to understate how tainted and bad the memory of the Iraqi military was by this point.

The issue is that a more or less uncontrolled discharge of Saddam era troops meant the very authoritarian-minded, Sunni-supremacist trained killers out onto the countryside (regularly with their own guns), where they could be easy recruitment fodder for AQII and Baathist holdouts and the like. Oh yeah, and also likely to fight turf wars with their hereditary Shiite opponents.

Something like confining them to barracks pace Art Deco or POW camps strikes me as probably being a better idea in the long run, even if it would have made the situation more difficult in the immediate term.

However, I do have a few major issues

The means issue was illustrated in the two world wars. In the second, we had the means to put the Axis countries under the war in all its horror and did so. That was a solid win. In the first one, the Allies couldn’t, thus didn’t, and the Armistice was a mutual agreement as to exhaustion and the prospect of five million doughboys in camps in the US ready for the 1919 fighting season. The result was we let the Germans run their own affairs and….

This is not quite true. In particular while there was remarkably little fighting and ravaging of the core of the Central Powers, the blockade had brought occupied Europe to famine, hence the “Turnip Winters” that could only be alleviated by the Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Turks engaging in wholesale looting of what territory they did occupy, especially in Eastern Europe, which essentially was exporting famine. That and some fortunate technological breakthroughs like the Haber Process.

And even that wasn’t enough by the end, with the assorted partners in crime ultimately falling out over the spoils and starting to struggle for a share of the looted gods (hence Vienna stopping foot transports headed for Germany n order to feed itself threatened to bring Red-on-Red fighting).

Moreover, even as a proud American I’ll be the first to admit that the US direct involvement (though VERY significant) is often overblown; the Central Powers were suffering badly even before the US entered the war and indeed the revocation of the Sussex Pledge that prompted US entry was part of an all-or-nothing gamble to win the war within the next two years by trying to stop the lifelines to Western Europe at the cost of thoroughly angering the remaining neutrals. The depths to which that did not work is underlined not only by the US’s entry into the war but the ability of the ALlies to maintan a blockade over Germany well after peacetime started in order to avoid takesy-backsies.

Moreover, while the US was probably the fourth largest/most important Western Allied combatant (after Britain, France, and Italy) the spearheads that shattered the CP Lines were usually British or French (with the US engaging in smaller breakthroughs like St. Mihel and the Meuse-Argonne being the first attempt to spearhead on a large scale US forces in the war just as it ended). And it is telling that even Erich Ludendorff- the ultra war hawk of the Reich and sort of a testing run for Hitler and Stalin- bluntly told the Kaiser in a moment o weakness that the front would not hold for another 48 hours and that Germany had to seek peace at any terms.

And the ability of the Allies to break into Germany’s “sanctuaries” can be seen by the rather extensive occupation zones in the former Central Powers to keep an eye on things

Really, I think the problem with WWI was not the inability to penetrate the Central Powers’ “sanctuaries” (which the Allies successfully did) but a lack of will to enforce the terms of the peace, as well as warring about what the terms were. While the Allies were squabbling about how many German ships should be parceled out to who or where the boundaries between Southern Slav annexations and Italian claims were, their shared front broke apart in the face of a genocidal Turkey rebounding, the Bolsheviks threatening world war, an unholy Communist-Nationalist alliance in Hungary nearly reconstituted half the Habsburg Empire, the German military and Bureaucratic establishment that had helped push the world into war and then made it so nightmarish remained substantially intact and able to do things like consider illegal rearmament and a tactical alliance with their old frenemies the Bolsheviks towards that ends.

So the key weakness I think was will. The Allies actually did try to monitor and limit the abilities of the Central Powers to operate after the war, but they just fell well short with things like the armaments inspection regiment collapsing badly.

Not help by things like heavy subversion, propaganda from the likes of the Germans and Kemal, and useful idiots like Keynes (the man who largely inspired our modern financial system, whose magnum pus on Versailles supposedly being too much for Germany to repay- still cited ad infinitum to this day- was the product of Keynes falling for intentional disinformation by the German government about its own finances and assets).

I think this reinforces your point but also touches on another one: that sanctuary penetration or destruction is limited by will and the ability to see things through. In particular by committing to destroy and remake the “problematic” elements of one’s enemy’s societies.

When EVERYBODY agrees on something, it raises my hackles.

I hear this a lot from commenters on the right. I counter with:

a) Not everybody is agreeing
b) Those who are agreeing are doing so for different reasons

The US Deep State may be beating the up-to-but-not-quite-including-war drums for their own distract-the-masses propaganda reasons including giving Biden and thus the Democrats a boost in the midterms. That doesn’t make my reasoning invalid that Russia is a bully nation that needs a good punch in the nose before they get tempted to attack NATO.

What I find interesting is how support for Ukraine seems to be cross-cutting both the right and the left, where some traditional lefties are calling for an immediate cease-fire because they think that any fighting is evil, but some other traditional lefties are backing Ukraine because “Russia” is an abstraction they can use as a stick to beat Republicans, and other lefties want to make Biden look like a wartime President, and so on. Some righties are old cold warriors who want to see Russia beaten, some believe that backing Russia strikes a blow against globalism, some are rooting for Biden and the woke US military to screw up and embarrass themselves, and so on.

It’s just weird to see internet places that are usually nigh-on echo chambers suddenly filled with acrimony and name-calling.