David Halberstam. The Coldest Winter.

Of the American military miscalculations of the twentieth century, Douglas MacArthur's decision to send his troops all the way to the Yalu stands alone. (Vietnam was a political miscalculation and the chief architects of it were civilians.) All sorts of red flags were there for him, flags that he chose not to see. So it was that his troops, their command split, their communications often dangerously weak, the weather worsening by the day, pushed north, while the Chinese watched and patiently waited for them on the high hills, already preparing to block the narrow arteries of retreat or escape. The same general who had argued for Inchon because of the vulnerability of the North Korean supply lines now allowed his own supply lines to grow dangerously long in territory over which he had no control. The same general who had wanted to land at Inchon because it might end the war quickly and spare his troops from fighting in the cruel Korean winter was now ready to send them farther north just as the Manchurian winter arrived. "One of the things I found hardest to understand--and to forgive as a commander," Matt Ridgway said nearly forty years later, "was how completely oblivious the Tokyo command was to the conditions under which our men would have to fight" (pp. 369-70).

The importance and value of a good, independent intelligence man in wartime can hardly be overemphasized. A great intelligence officer studies the unknown and works in the darkness, trying to see the shape of future events. He covers the sensitive ground where prejudice, or instinctive cultural bias, often meet reality, and he must stand for reality, even if it means standing virtually alone. Great intelligence officers often have the melancholy job of telling their superiors things they don't want to hear. A great intelligence officer tries to make the unknown at least partially knowable; he tries to think like his enemy, and he listens carefully to those with whom he disagrees, simply because he knows that he has to challenge his own value system in order to understand the nature and impulse of the other side (p. 378).

So the men of the Dai Ichi had doctored the intelligence in order to permit MacArthur's forces to go where they wanted to go militarily, to the banks of the Yalu. In the process they were setting the most dangerous of precedents for those who would follow them in office. In this first instance it was the military that had played with the intelligence, or more accurately, one rogue wing of the military deliberately manipulating the intelligence it sent to the senior military men and civilians back in Washington. The process was to be repeated twice more in the years to come, both subsequent times with the civilians manipulating the military, with the senior military men reacting poorly in their own defense and thereby placing the men under their command in unacceptable combat situations. (The title of a book by one talented young officer, H. R. McMaster, studying how the senior military had been snookered by the senior civilians' pressures during Vietnam, was Dereliction of Duty.) All of this reflected something George Kennan warned about, the degree to which domestic politics had now become a part of national security calculations, and it showed the extent to which the American government had begun to make fateful decisions based on the most limited of truths and the most deeply flawed intelligence in order to do what it wanted to do for political reasons, whether it would work or not. In 1965, the government of Lyndon Jonson manipulated the rationale for sending combat troops to Vietnam, exaggerating the threat posed to America by Hanoi, deliberately diminishing any serious intelligence warning of what the consequences of American intervention in Vietnam would be (and how readily and effectively the North Vietnamese might counter the American expeditionary force), and thereby committing the United States to a hopeless, unwinnable post-colonial war in Vietnam. Then in 2003, the administration of George W. Bush--improperly reading what the end of the Russian empire might mean in the Middle East; completely miscalculating the likely response of the indigenous people; and ignoring the warnings of the most able member of the George H.W. Bush national security team, Brent Scowcroft; and badly wanting for its own reasons to take down the government of Saddam Hussein--manipulated the Congress, the media, the public, and most dangerously of all, itself, with seriously flawed and doctored intelligence, and sent troops into the heart of Iraqi cities with disastrous results (David Halberstam. The Coldest Winter. New York: Hyperion, 2007, pp. 390-91).

(Completed just days before his untimely death, David Halberstam's stunning, gripping, and readable account of the little-known events of the Korean War is a textbook illustration of the adage that every good line of argument needs to be lifted aloft in it end, like a candle in a cave, in order that readers might see its larger significance -- here, the patterns of miscalculation and deceit that have led us into the quagmires of Vietnam [see Halberstam's Making of a Quagmire] and Iraq. More workmanlike than eloquent, The Coldest Winter nevertheless plays to Halberstam's strengths and experience as a journalist, seamlessly weaving into the historical record the voices of the survivors of that largely forgotten war.)