No More Vietnams (2 page)

They cannot bear to look in the mirror, because if they do, they will see who must share the blame: those who opposed the U.S. war effort and in doing so gave support to the Cambodian communists—who, once they came into power, pulled the triggers and dug the mass graves.

To dwell on Indochina as it is today is to think of how it might be if the Communists had not won. Would the people of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos be better off? Would aggressors in other trouble spots around the world have encountered more resistance from the West? Was the effort to stop the Communists in Indochina a just effort?

The answer to each of these questions is yes, and so the questions are rarely posed. We must pose them now if freedom is to survive and real peace is to be achieved in the world.

• • •

The American failure in Vietnam was a tragedy for the people of Indochina. It was an even greater tragedy for the United States and for millions of people in the world who, without our help, may be deprived of any chance for freedom and a better life.

Vietnam was a crucially important victory in the Soviet Union's war for control of the strategically critical Third World. It was an important victory not so much because it gave the Soviets dominance over Vietnam but because it left the United States so crippled psychologically that it was unable to defend its interests in the developing world, the battleground in the ongoing East-West conflict that is best characterized as Third World war.

Our defeat in Vietnam sparked a rash of totalitarian conquests around the world as we retreated into a five-year, self-imposed exile. In crisis after crisis in Africa, the Mideast, and Central America, critics of American involvement abroad brandished “another Vietnam” like a scepter, an all-purpose argument-stopper for any situation where it was being asserted that the United States should do something rather than nothing. While we wrung our hands and agonized over our mistakes, over 100 million people were lost to the West in the vacuum left by our withdrawal from the world stage.

The Vietnam War has grotesquely distorted the debate over American foreign policy. The willingness to use power to defend national interests is the foundation of any effective foreign policy, but our ineptness in Vietnam led many Americans to question the wisdom of using our power at all. As recently as last summer, a correspondent of one of the major networks concluded a retrospective report on the war by saying, “We do not know yet if [Vietnam was] a turning point, if we have abandoned violence or turned away from solving our problems militarily.” Many of our leaders have shrunk from any use of power because they feared it would bring another disaster like the one in Vietnam. Thus did our Vietnam defeat tarnish our ideals, weaken our spirit, cripple our will, and turn us into a
military giant and a diplomatic dwarf in a world in which the steadfast exercise of American power was needed more than ever before.

This fear of “another Vietnam” was a disaster for our friends around the world because it contributed to a renaissance of the isolationism to which the United States is so prone. The post-Vietnam isolationism was a particularly virulent strain brought on by the combination of our new fear of failure with the old, familiar piousness that makes some Americans reluctant to support friends and allies whose systems are less admirable than ours.

“No more Vietnams” is the battle cry of opponents of the use of American power on the world scene, especially when it takes the form of military aid to governments that are not popular in the editorial columns or the salons of the intelligentsia. It is also a prescription for continued retreat and defeat for the West.

Until we shake this Vietnam syndrome, the United States will court failure in any international initiative it undertakes—in the Third World, in East-West relations, even in relations with our friends. Behind the champagne glasses and polite smiles, every leader and diplomat we encounter in Washington and abroad wonders whether we can be counted upon in a crisis or if we will cut and run when the going gets tough. They carefully analyzed the spasmodic opposition to our small Grenada operation in key media and intellectual circles. They puzzled over the difficulty the Reagan administration encountered in trying to obtain the approval of the Congress for adequate military and economic aid to those fighting Communist aggression in Central America. From these events they cannot help but conclude that we have not recovered from the Vietnam syndrome.

They are half right and half wrong. The American people remain committed to the cause of freedom around the world. In their hearts they understand that American power plays a crucial role in that cause. Throughout the Vietnam War, a majority never stopped believing that the Communists should
be prevented from winning. But their willingness to help South Vietnam resist Communist aggression was sapped by the length and seeming futility of the war, by the shrill voices of dissent, and by the trauma of Watergate. Eventually, in 1974 and 1975, when we could have kept South Vietnam afloat by keeping our commitment to provide military aid at a level commensurate with Soviet support of the North, Congress refused. The American people, by then exhausted, discouraged, and confused, tacitly accepted a congressional decision that led to a defeat for the United States for the first time in our history.

The American people have begun to emerge from the shadow of the Vietnam disaster; their election and reelection of President Reagan proved as much. But an alarming number of those political and intellectual leaders who belonged to the so-called leadership elite remain in the darkness, muttering to one another the tired old verities of the 1960s, the reassuring but thoroughly fatuous myths of Vietnam.

The twenty-year story of the Vietnam War is a long, complicated one with many characters and a wide variety of subplots. The drama is replete with missed cues and lost opportunities. Many must share the blame for missing those opportunities: the military commanders and political leaders who made political, strategic, and tactical errors in waging the war; those in the Congress who refused to do as much for our allies in South Vietnam as the Soviet Union was doing for North Vietnam; and those whose irresponsible antiwar rhetoric hampered the effort to achieve a just peace. In the end, Vietnam was lost on the political front in the United States, not on the battlefront in Southeast Asia.

Some tag the media or the antiwar movement, and frequently both, for the loss of Vietnam. It is true that some of those who covered the war so distorted the truth that it became impossible for Americans to figure out what was happening. But while the antiwar movement—a brotherhood of the misguided, the mistaken, the well-meaning, and the malevolent—was a factor in our eventual defeat, it was not the decisive factor. There
have been antiwar movements for as long as there have been wars; they existed, for example, in the United States during both world wars. What overwhelms them is victory in a just cause. Those who began and escalated the war in Vietnam in the 1960s did not give the American people victories and did not effectively explain the justice of what we were fighting for. In the resulting political vacuum, the antiwar movement took center stage and held it until the curtain fell on one of the saddest endings in modern history.

Those who parrot the slogan “No more Vietnams” in opposing American efforts to prevent Communist conquests in the Third World base their case on four articles of faith:

• The war in Vietnam was immoral.

• The war in Vietnam was unwinnable.

• Diplomacy without force is the best answer to Communist “wars of national liberation.”

• We were on the wrong side of history in Vietnam.

The time has come to debunk these myths.

The assertion that the Vietnam War was an immoral war was heard more and more often as the years dragged on. This said less about the war than about the construction that critics were putting on the idea of morality. Like all wars, Vietnam was brutal, ugly, dangerous, painful, and sometimes inhumane. This was driven home to those who stayed home perhaps more forcefully than ever before because the war lasted so long and because they saw so much of it on television in living, and dying, color.

Many who were seeing war for the first time were so shocked at what they saw that they said
this
war was
immoral
when they really meant that
all
war was
terrible.
They were right in saying that peace was better than war. But they were wrong in failing to ask themselves whether what was happening in
Vietnam was substantively different from what had happened in other wars. Their horror at the fact of war prevented them from considering whether the facts of the war in Vietnam added up to a cause that was worth fighting for. Instead, many of these naive, well-meaning, instinctual opponents of the war raised their voices in protest.

Sadly, their voices were joined with those of others who did not like the war because they did not support its aim: resisting Communist aggression in South Vietnam. These critics' outrage was thoroughly premeditated. It was not that the war was immoral, but rather that their pretensions to a higher morality dictated that the United States should lose and the Communists should win. Except for a small minority, these critics were not Communists: Some believed the Vietnamese would really be better off under the gentle rule of Ho Chi Minh and his successors. Others knew this was not true but didn't care that Ho was a totalitarian dictator. Their immorality thesis was that we were fighting an indigenous uprising in South Vietnam and therefore opposing the will of the Vietnamese people; that the people of Vietnam would be better off if we let the South Vietnamese government fall; and that our military tactics were so harsh that we needlessly and wantonly killed civilian Vietnamese.

This thesis was false on all counts.

Antiwar activists portrayed the National Liberation Front as the soul of the Vietnamese revolution, an indigenous nationalist movement that had risen spontaneously against the repressive Diem regime. This made powerful propaganda in the West, providing both rallying point for antiwar forces and apparent evidence for the frequently made contention that the United States had intervened in a civil war. In reality the National Liberation Front was a front for North Vietnam's effort to conquer the South, and as such was just another weapon in Hanoi's arsenal. Many Viet Cong had infiltrated from the North, and all took their cues from the North. When the war was over and Hanoi had no further use for it, the National Liberation Front was immediately liquidated. Instead of being
awarded positions of power in the new Vietnamese government, many of its members were sent to “reeducation” camps, along with hundreds of thousands of other South Vietnamese, by those who had directed the war effort from the beginning and who now ruled all of Vietnam: the warlords in Hanoi.

In fairness to some of the antiwar activists, it could be contended that they could not have foreseen the reign of terror the Communists have brought upon the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. While they could be charged with naivete for overlooking Ho's murderous policies in North Vietnam, some deserve credit for condemning, however belatedly, the genocide in Cambodia. Certainly today the record is clear for all to see: A Communist peace kills more than an anti-Communist war.

The claim that United States tactics caused excessive casualties among civilians must have seemed bizarre to those who were actually doing the fighting. Our forces operated under strict rules of engagement, and as a result civilians accounted for about the same proportion of casualties as in World War II and a far smaller one than in the Korean War. Many American bomber pilots were shot down, ending up dead or as POWs, because their paths across North Vietnam were chosen to minimize civilian casualties.

For example, the two weeks of bombing in December 1972, which ended American involvement in the war by convincing the North Vietnamese that they had no choice but to agree to peace terms, caused 1,500 civilian fatalities, by Hanoi's own estimate, compared with 35,000 killed in the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II. But by 1972 the war that was being reported in the United States bore scant resemblance to the war being waged in Indochina. Most American media reports conveyed the impression that our pilots, some of whom died in the air in order to save lives on the ground, were war criminals who had caused civilian fatalities comparable to those at Dresden, Hamburg, and other German cities where civilian targets were deliberately bombed for the purpose of breaking the enemy's will to resist. By then intellectual America
was so possessed by its obsessive self-hatred that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it believed the worst about the United States and the best about our enemies.

This was a favorite argument of those who did everything in their power to prevent the United States from winning. They reasoned that if the Vietnam War was proved unwinnable, then all battles against totalitarian aggression were unwinnable. If we concede their point, we are giving a green light to Communist aggression throughout the Third World.

The Vietnam War was not unwinnable. A different military and political strategy could have assured victory in the 1960s. When we signed the Paris peace agreements in 1973, we had won the war. We then proceeded to lose the peace. The South Vietnamese successfully countered Communist violations of the cease-fire for two years. Defeat came only when the Congress, ignoring the specific terms of the peace agreement, refused to provide military aid to Saigon equal to what the Soviet Union provided for Hanoi.

But the myth of unwinnability was based on a more subtle assumption.

During Vietnam many decided that wars such as the one being waged against the North Vietnamese were unwinnable because victory by Communist revolutionaries was inevitable. They believed that a liberationist surge was sweeping the Third World and that there was nothing the Western world could do, or should do, to stop it. The supposed primitiveness of our adversaries was a status cymbal they crashed loudly and proudly; that our “brutal” modern tactics were apparently ineffective against barefoot peasants in black pajamas was only further proof that their cause was right and ours was not. We were bullies, imperialists, blustery militarists armed to the teeth and fighting out of sheer bloodlust. The Communists, in contrast, were dedicated servants of principle, armed with little
more than the joyful conviction that they were fighting for country, freedom, and justice.