why was the vietnam war called a quagmire

Schlesinger and Ellsberg seem to come to this ‘more and more steps’ position”). Gelb himself appears to affirm the step by step part of this interpretation (thus he writes, “Messrs. His broad thesis does not seem to me incompatible with the interpretation he rejected in Foreign Policy-that is, “of step by step, inadvertent descent into unforeseen quicksand.” Mr. Gelb’s concluding lines from Herbert Butterfield that is why I quoted them in The Bitter Heritage (p. I agree that the desire “to preserve American prestige and to avoid a larger war elsewhere” mattered “more than predictions of either success or failure in making our leaders plow on in Vietnam.

Gelb’s point that compressing the Vietnam debate “into an optimism versus pessimism mold distorts the Vietnam tragedy.” I got into the optimism/pessimism problem in “Eyeless in Indochina” in order to raise questions about the anti-quagmire thesis, not because I thought it the central issue. Gelb’s position emerges a good deal more clearly in his comment in The New York Review of December 2. Gelb’s proposition that “US involvement did not stem from a failure to foresee consequences.” Mr. I regret that I misconstrued Leslie Gelb’s argument in his Foreign Policy piece-and only plead in extenuation that, according to him, I share with Daniel Ellsberg the misreading of Mr.

Why was the vietnam war called a quagmire