Taking Back Vietnam

“Those who control the past, control the future; Those who control the future, control the present; Those who control the present, control the past.” – George Orwell, 1984

American policy planners are very interested in controlling how the history of Vietnam is written and remembered. For some it is a matter of self-interest to cover up their criminal behavior with half-truths and rhetorical non-sequiturs. The more important goal is to make sure the public “remembers” the war as a tragic mistake with noble intentions; that the U.S. is seen as a benevolent – if at times bumbling – paternalistic vanguard of civilization.

Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1973, Counselor to the President for Domestic Affairs from 1973 to 1974, and a member of the House of Representatives from 1952 to 1969, offers what is no doubt considered a sober, well-reasoned analysis comparing the two conflicts in the respected journal Foreign Affairs.[1] He attempts to enumerate important lessons from Vietnam that we can apply to Iraq. It is yet another effort at casting the Vietnam War in a favorable light for American planners.

After the war most Americans viewed the war as a moral crime, not a mistake. They distrusted their government and were increasingly unwilling to uncritically back up what their government told them. The effects of this cultural awakening have frustrated policy planners. The Reaganites had to wage their wars against nationalist movements in Latin America by proxy and funded their efforts with black operations and drugs and arms trafficking. The war in Iraq generated mass protest from the outset.

Policy planners sometimes refer to the public’s unwillingness to believe everything it is told and to support any use of military force as the “Vietnam Syndrome.” In a bit of triumphant glee George H.W. Bush gloated that he had buried the specter of Vietnam “forever in the desert sands of Iraq” after the first Gulf War. Although, Laird says that he “didn't miss the fact that it [Vietnam] was an ugly, mismanaged, tragic episode in U.S. history, with devastating loss of life for all sides” he charges “revisionists” for creating the specter of Vietnam with years of deception, “vilification”, and disinformation that have spun Vietnam in a “bad light” such that “the resulting legacy of that misinformation has left the United States timorous about war, deeply averse to intervening in even a just cause, and dubious of its ability to get out of a war once it is in one.” This mass disinformation campaign allows opportunists to use Vietnam like “an insurance policy that pretends to guarantee peace at home” and undermine “confidence in the United States’ nation-building ability.”

Laird’s analysis hinges upon the interpretation that Vietnam was “a just cause”: “nation-building,” which is of course “our duty.” Laird goes on to state the importance of the topic with respect to the Iraq war, which “began as self-defense”, but has “morphed into nation building.” He chastises opportunists “who wallow in… Vietnam angst,” do not wish “to help the rest of the world,” and cast doubt on “the value of spreading democracy.”

These opportunists are too concerned with domestic priorities like “Social Security and Medicare” and are undermining the U.S.’s ability to defend against foreign aggressors. “Because of pandering to the butter-not-guns crowd, we still do not spend enough of our total budget on national defense.” This domestic “pandering” has caused a “downward trend in defense spending.” The “downward trend” is actually a measure of defense spending compared to GDP: defense spending in real dollars has increased since the post WWII period, but has been outpaced by the GDP. In the real world, the U.S. defense budget is almost as large as what the rest of the world spends combined, more than the next 12 countries combined, and bigger than the Russian economy. Nonetheless, Laird calls for a policy to “reverse the downward trend in defense spending” at the expense of social programs.

How we view history is important for how we view the present; and that is the most dangerous aspect of Laird’s unsupported assertion that Vietnam was a “mismanaged, tragic episode” in a “just cause” rather than a moral crime. If his view is widely believed, then the natural conclusion is that we should continue fulfilling “our duty” of “nation-building” and correct tactical mistakes in our blundering efforts to do good. Notice that Laird’s assertions follow from doctrinal truth; there is no burden of proof for Laird asserts U.S. objectives in Indochina.

During Vietnam Daniel Ellsberg fought in Vietnam as a marine, worked in the State Department and for the RAND Corporation. He advised highly placed officials such as Henry Kissinger, Robert “blowtorch” Komer, Robert McNamara, and John McNaughton. Before McNamara left his post he commissioned a top-secret analysis of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg authored one of the chapters. It is a tremendous source of primary documentation for the war planner’s private discussions and analysis over several decades and across multiple presidencies. Ellsberg read the full report and after witnessing years of deception and hypocrisy he concluded the war was an abhorrent crime that had to be stopped at any cost. The decision was the result of a slow and painful personal development from rabid cold warrior to anti-war activist. Ellsberg knew he faced jail time and the end of his career. The report became known as the “Pentagon Papers” and is a primary source of historical record we can use to evaluate Laird’s assertions. It is a record of private discussions, and as such is unhindered by considerations of domestic opinion.

At the heart of the debate over Vietnam is the question of what the U.S. wanted to accomplish. Laird restates the standard interpretations, “The early U.S. objective in Southeast Asia was to stop the spread of communism”, “support for Democracy,” and to “establish a legitimate indigenous government.”

His framework is deeply flawed: Laird’s proposed objectives are contradictory. The Communist movement in Vietnam was the only movement that had the support of the peasants: a fact that constantly frustrated the U.S. In other words, the U.S.’s objective in Vietnam was to destroy democracy to stop communism. If the U.S. supported democracy it would have allowed the people of Vietnam to decide what to do about their political situation.

In both Iraq and Vietnam the U.S. did not want the establishment of a “legitimate indigenous government.” The likely result in Iraq would be a theocratic government, closely aligned with Iran and with control over its natural resources. In Vietnam the U.S. installed a series of authoritarian dictatorships that the people did not support. According to the Pentagon Papers the U.S. Defense Department noted, “Ho had build the Viet Minh into the only Vietnam-wide political organization capable of effective resistance to either the Japanese or the French. He was the only Vietnamese wartime leader with a national following.” U.S. planners noted that their governments had no support of the people and admitted “South Vietnam was essentially the creation of the United States.” U.S. government analyst Douglas Pike assessed the situation, “Aside from the NLF there had never been a truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam.” Moreover, the U.S. puppets were not indigenous; Diem was schooled and lived in France before he the U.S. put him in power.

One question should suffice to demonstrate how incorrect Laird’s analysis is: What right did the U.S. have to intervene in the internal affairs of Vietnam? The answer is none. The Vietnamese were fighting a decades old struggle for independence from colonial rule against the Japanese, the French, and the United States. It did not ask for the U.S. to invade their country. That is why the invasion was a moral crime against the people of Vietnam (and Laos, and Cambodia), not an American tragedy. The U.S. was there to continue an imperial rule for the French. They violated the Geneva agreements of 1954 that called for national elections, which the U.S. refused to allow, temporarily separated Vietnam in two, which the U.S. asserted to be a national border, and stated that no foreign country could intervene in Vietnam militarily, which the U.S. promptly did.

We can rightly dispense with Laird’s contention that we were supporting democracy and establishing a legitimate indigenous government: as we have seen the U.S. was there precisely to prevent a democratic indigenous government because it would result in a communist government. U.S. planners believed that other countries in the region would fall to communism, the “domino theory,” and thereby shut out U.S. access to important strategic resources: “rubber, oil, and tin.” In 1948 George Kennan wrote in the secret Policy Planning Study 23 document that in the “far east” the U.S. would have to “maintain [its] position of disparity” unhampered by “idealistic slogans” and “vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.” They must deal in “straight power concepts” free of “idealistic slogans.” (Recall that Kennan was is considered an icon of liberals.) The National Security Council wrote in 1952, “Communist control of all of Southeast Asia would render the U.S. position in the Pacific offshore island chain precarious and would seriously jeopardize fundamental U.S. security interests in the Far East. … Southeast Asia, and especially Malaya and Indonesia, is the principal world source of natural rubber and tin, and a producer of petroleum and other strategically important commodities.” [2]

More importantly Vietnam was a threat by example: if other developing nations saw that they could develop independently of the global economic system dominated by western banks and investors then they might do so as well. That would pose a tremendous challenge to U.S. hegemony and therefore Vietnam had to be crushed. This objective was successful; Vietnam was pounded almost to the point of extinction with aftershocks felt today.

This brings us to the next hole in Laird’s analysis: that the U.S. was defending South Vietnam. Laird says, “I believed then and still believe today that given enough outside resources, South Vietnam was capable of defending itself… I had cautiously engineered the withdrawal of the majority of our forces while building up South Vietnam’s ability to defend itself.” U.S. marines invaded South Vietnam in 1965 and focused the majority of its firepower on the Southern country throughout the war. B52s carpet-bombed southern hamlets, at the end of the war there were an estimated 500 tons of bombs dropped for every man woman and child in the country. The U.S. dumped tons of poisonous dioxins on the Southern countryside, although they spared the north from that atrocity. The bombings and poisons killed agriculture and plants and turned lush landscape into a pock marked moonscape. They butchered livestock and explicitly attacked the civilian population. They planned on widespread starvation and destruction. John McNaughton wrote in the late 1960s that the U.S. should not overtly attack North Vietnam because it might draw in Russia or China but “destruction of locks and dams, however - if handled right - might offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million) unless food is provided - which we could offer to do 'at the conference table'." (Try to square that with Laird’s assertion that we were defending the Vietnamese people.)

The U.S. forced the domestic population out of their villages and into concentration camps where they lived in squalor and sickness while the U.S. bombed and burned their country. The majority of this was done in South Vietnam, the country we were ostensibly defending. No one knows exactly how many people we killed in Vietnam; the accepted estimate is 3 million dead. All of this in “defense.” [3]

A Wider War
In the early 1970s the U.S. bombed Cambodia and Laos. Official estimates place the number dead from the bombings in Cambodia in the hundreds of thousands with massive starvation and food shortages expected to cause many more deaths. The Khmer Rouge emerged from the ashes of this destruction and chaos to terrorize Cambodians for another decade. In Laos, the plain of jars was absolutely destroyed by U.S. bombings. Peasants lived underground in bunkers to get away from the warplanes and farmed at night. There is an explicit call for genocide in Cambodia on record from Richard Nixon to Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, relaying Nixon’s orders, told Alexander Haig that they wanted “a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” Laird has this to say about the campaign of genocide, “When President Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia, I protested vigorously. I did not oppose the bombing itself, as I believed the United States should fight the war as it needed to be fought -- wherever the enemy was hiding -- or not fight it at all. What I opposed was the deception.” The U.S. can slaughter whom it wants, when it wants, and however it wants. No reason to be secretive about it.

The ideological fight over Vietnam is ongoing. The apologists persist in labeling the war an American tragedy; which is about as intellectually honest as calling the Holocaust a German tragedy. Their purpose is obvious: to ensure that the U.S. is never considered the perpetrator of crime, no matter how heinous, so that future policy goals can proceed unhindered by “idealistic slogans” and “vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.”

Notes:
[1]Laird, Melvin. Foreign Affairs. November/December 2005
[2] The quotes from the Pentagon Papers are from Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. 2001
For a much more in depth review of the Pentagon Papers and Vietnam see:
Pentagon Papers: Senator Gavel Edition. Boston. 1971-1972.
Chomsky, Noam. The Mentality of the Backroom Boys. 1973
Herring, George C. The Pentagon Papers. 1993
[3] Journalist Jonathan Schell has documented the Pacification program extensively. See:
Schell, Jonathan. The Real War. 1987
Schell, Jonathan. The Village of Ben Suc. 1987
Schell, Jonathan. The Military Half. 1987