The original 1964 or '65 edition of Halberstam's _The Making of a Quagmire_ is well worth reading. The book covers Halberstam's experiences in the former Belgian Congo during the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s and goes on to his coverage of the course of the early stages of the Vietnam War up to late '63 during the U.S. armed forces' advisory phase when the war was small and local and just one more nasty little brush-fire guerrilla war in South-east Asia in the immediate post-colonial period of the '50s and early '60s. Halberstam could see, as could others, the U.S. military leadership in both South Vietnam and the Pentagon were working hard at deluding themselves about the nature and course of the guerrilla/anti-guerrilla war in South Vietnam. Quite a number of middle-ranking U.S. officers up to colonel in MACV, established on Feb. 8, 1962, and South Vietnam's U.S. advisers in MAAG, which was subsumed by MACV on May 15, 1964, were making and sending accurate and detailed reports showing the real state of the war on the ground in South Vietnam and these unpalatable reports were deliberately disregarded by the U.S. military leadership and their political masters. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
🙄 I like Halberstam and I think he was a good journalist, but he was so wrong in his assessment of how easy it was to topple a paper tiger like Hussein.
