William Westmoreland Quotes
It is not as if we lost the war. It is that we as a nation did not fulfill our commitment.
This was his description of the Vietnam War in which he commanded the American Forces.
William Westmoreland, Army General & Commander in Vietnam, Quoted in his Obituary, PBS News Hour, July 19, 2005
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The U. S. was evacuating all its forces and agents as the Viet Cong overran Saigon. This ended the Vietnam War. The CIA, had been telling the President and the National Security Staff that the Army reports were exaggerated and we were not faring well in the Vietnam War. Events proved them right. Their earlier track record, especially with President Nixon was very poor in intelligence analysis and prediction. See {634511}, {634509}, and {634503} for Nixon’s view of the CIA.
The CIA and others had known that the Vietnam War was not winnable, yet the CIA Management and the Defense Department were stating the contrary. Gates was then an analyst for the CIA and it was his first job out of college. There was a rationale for the politicians and military leaders to lie about prospects in Vietnam. If we could not win, we wanted to negotiate a settlement on as good terms as we could get. However, if Ho Chi Min and the North Vietnamese knew that we did not think that we could win, they would have no incentive to concede on any points or compromise at all. To be successful in the negotiations, we had to persuade the Vietnamese that we thought we could win and would keep up the fighting and bombing unless they would concede some things. Unfortunately, by the time that we started negotiations, it was too late to be very successful in negotiations. All the parties to the negotiations at that point realized that we could not win. The only people who thought the contrary were a large block of American patriots who had been deceived by the politicians and the military leadership.
The day before, Helms’ deputy testified about the high number of civilian casualties that American bombing of North Vietnam had caused.
This was the same man who as a Senator only 4 years before threatened the North that the South was economically and militarily invincible.
Each day the German Airforce was sending air assaults over England. The English defenders were shooting down 2 Germans for every English plane lost. The British however were running out of pilots. Both sides were terribly weakened. However it was the Germans who cracked and called off the air assault prelude to the planned invasion of England.
This illustrates one of the reasons that the Israeli Arab conflict has been unsolvable over the years. A thousand years ago, the Arabs were a leading intellectual and military power in the world. The rest of the world has moved ahead and they have actually retrogressed. So the Arabs seek dignity which is very elusive. They have never wanted to negotiate terms with Israel when they have been weak and feel defeated. So the pattern has been that they feel they cannot negotiate for justice as they are too week. So periodically they attack Israel which has always defeated them and hoped that after the Arab defeat, permanent negotiations for peace could take place. But the Arabs were feeling too weak. So they just repeated all their extreme demands. After a few years, they would try another attack, lose again and the cycle would repeat. The Israelis fear that if the Arabs every won a war, the Arab moderates might be willing to reasonably negotiate, the extremists would want to continue the fighting and “drive the Israelis into the sea” as they have so often threatened.
William Childs Westmoreland was a United States Army general, most notably commander of United States forces during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968. He served as Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1968 to 1972.
