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Rating: 
Summary: Intelligence....and intelligent use
Review: History has a way of repeating itself. 'Intelligence is as only good as the analyst.' This book about events almost thirty years past is so totally relevant today. 'Facts and beliefs are not the same thing.' Agents in the field were getting and giving good information but it was ignored berated dismissed almost out of hand to the very end. Why? Simply 'the Powers that Be' did not like the truth and did not want the truth. They did not want it to be that way (Saigon falling) so the middle bureaucrats gave them what they wanted to hear, not what they needed to hear. And Saigon fell.
To draw parallels to 'intelligence' failures about 'WMDs', Iraqi-Osama ties, the very phrase 'welcome with rose petals' or Tennant's 'slam dunk' phrase is both disturbing and disheartening. This book tells it as it was (and is) 'Intelligence' can be used and misused.
Rating: 
Summary: Good view of our final days in Saigon
Review: The Vietnam War was a product of the Cold War, that great conflict between titan powers that was spawned by the nuclear age and that dominated foreign diplomacy for decades. It was capitalism versus communism and democracy versus autocracy. The conflict raged not only in the battlefields of Vietnam, but also in the homeland, where the war took the center stage of a cultural and social revolution. In all of the commotion and of all the debate, the war, at the field level, became a product of the political chaos that characterized America during that period. Washington, who scrambled for a policy that worked, that appeased the nation, that placated the growing upheaval, in the end never found it. Its failure to do so produced the only solution that was politically viable albeit immoral: get out anyway you can, but by golly DO GET OUT! This is what Decent Interval is about. Decent Interval is Frank Snepp's first hand account of the immoral exit the United States made from Vietnam in 1975. Aside from the issues concerning the righteousness of the war, of lost American lives, of a nation grown weary, and of the social/cultural revolution it became a part of, the fact is, that nevertheless, we were there, and we made commitments. And although making the exit may very well have been the right thing to do, the way we left violated the principles that make up the character of our nation. We failed to live up to the very values that we usually identify as American, or at least those values that we like to believe we possess. We value human life. We value freedom. We value honesty. And most of all we value being recognized as champions of all of that. We love that image of America. In Decent Interval we learn that America's darkest hour in Vietnam did not occur during the war. Instead, our worst folly came in the end. We bungled everything from leaving behind a huge arsenal for the enemy, to turning our backs on thousands of people who were loyal to America, who trusted us, who knew our values, and never in their wildest dreams did they imagine that their service to us would be repaid with deception and abandonment. Decent Interval is not a partisan view in the traditional Pro-war/Anti-war sense. Rather it's a factual account of events as seen through Snepp's eyes. Snepp was a CIA analyst in Saigon, and some have labeled Decent Interval as a whistle blow, but in actuality, the fact that our involvement in Vietnam was full of bureaucratic incompetence and ineptitude, was no secret. Snepp simply gave us the details. . Decent Interval is an excellent read. It epitomizes everything that went wrong in Vietnam. It illustrates the limits of our political power in the face of an increasingly anxious electorate, and how political survivability took precedence over what would otherwise have been considered the "right thing to do."
Rating:
Summary: Good view of our final days in Saigon
Review: The Vietnam War was a product of the Cold War, that great conflict between titan powers that was spawned by the nuclear age and that dominated foreign diplomacy for decades. It was capitalism versus communism and democracy versus autocracy. The conflict raged not only in the battlefields of Vietnam, but also in the homeland, where the war took the center stage of a cultural and social revolution. In all of the commotion and of all the debate, the war, at the field level, became a product of the political chaos that characterized America during that period. Washington, who scrambled for a policy that worked, that appeased the nation, that placated the growing upheaval, in the end never found it. Its failure to do so produced the only solution that was politically viable albeit immoral: get out anyway you can, but by golly DO GET OUT! This is what Decent Interval is about. Decent Interval is Frank Snepp's first hand account of the immoral exit the United States made from Vietnam in 1975. Aside from the issues concerning the righteousness of the war, of lost American lives, of a nation grown weary, and of the social/cultural revolution it became a part of, the fact is, that nevertheless, we were there, and we made commitments. And although making the exit may very well have been the right thing to do, the way we left violated the principles that make up the character of our nation. We failed to live up to the very values that we usually identify as American, or at least those values that we like to believe we possess. We value human life. We value freedom. We value honesty. And most of all we value being recognized as champions of all of that. We love that image of America. In Decent Interval we learn that America's darkest hour in Vietnam did not occur during the war. Instead, our worst folly came in the end. We bungled everything from leaving behind a huge arsenal for the enemy, to turning our backs on thousands of people who were loyal to America, who trusted us, who knew our values, and never in their wildest dreams did they imagine that their service to us would be repaid with deception and abandonment. Decent Interval is not a partisan view in the traditional Pro-war/Anti-war sense. Rather it's a factual account of events as seen through Snepp's eyes. Snepp was a CIA analyst in Saigon, and some have labeled Decent Interval as a whistle blow, but in actuality, the fact that our involvement in Vietnam was full of bureaucratic incompetence and ineptitude, was no secret. Snepp simply gave us the details. . Decent Interval is an excellent read. It epitomizes everything that went wrong in Vietnam. It illustrates the limits of our political power in the face of an increasingly anxious electorate, and how political survivability took precedence over what would otherwise have been considered the "right thing to do."
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