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.
Myth I: The Vietnam War was immoral.
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.
Myth II: The Vietnam War was unwinnable.
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.
The assertion that our very bigness is badness
has infested our culture to a surprising and troubling degree. The creator of the phenomenally successful Star Wars series recently explained that the climactic scene in one of his movies—in which the evil “Empire’s” giant war machines are destroyed by fuzzy little good guys with wooden bows and arrows—was inspired by the Vietnam experience. No matter that in Vietnam the Communist “good guys” packed Soviet automatic rifles and, in 1975, rode state-of-the-art Russian tanks across the South Vietnamese border. The propaganda of disproportionate forces in Vietnam, the myth of small/good versus big/bad, did enough damage to help lose the war for the United States and the people of South Vietnam. Today it is one symptom of the Vietnam syndrome to the extent that it makes Americans ashamed of their power, guilty about being strong, and forgetful about the need to be willing to use their power to protect their freedom and the freedom of others.
Myth III: Diplomacy without force to back it up is the best answer to Communist “wars of national liberation.”
As with all the myths about the Vietnam War, it is important to distinguish between those who believe them and those who use them in pursuit of their own ends. Some do not want the U.S. to help non-Communist governments because they think it would be better if the Communists took power. Others believe that the use of military power by the U.S. has become irrelevant in Third World conflicts because we used power so ineptly in Vietnam. After all, they argue, since we were defeated by a tiny country like North Vietnam, we must have forgotten how to win.
As a result, in the post-Vietnam 1970s, while rhetoric about the limits of power and the promise of creative diplomacy clouded the American political landscape, the Soviet Union and its proxies licked their chops and gobbled up South Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua, and the Ayatollah’s mullahs plunged Iran into the Middle Ages. Each of the 100 million people who were lost to the West during our five-year geopolitical sabbatical is a living symbol of the sterility of arguments about peaceful diplomacy. Any nation that decides the way to achieve peace is to use only peaceful means is a nation that will soon be a piece of another nation. Its enemies will quickly take advantage of its good intentions.
Some critics believe we should never use our power to help a friend who faces aggression. Others believe we should help only those who come up to our rigorous standards of political conduct. We face such a challenge in Central America today. As was the case in Vietnam, totalitarian Communist aggression, which could not survive without the backing of the Soviet Union, is being brought to bear through both covert and direct means against local governments that are far better than the Communist alternative but which cannot pass muster in the rarefied atmosphere of intellectual America.
Increasingly the world balance of power will be determined by who wins these key conflicts in the Third World. To play an effective role, the U.S. must at times side with authoritarian governments that do not come up to our standards in protecting human rights in order to keep from power totalitarian regimes that would deny all human rights. Frequently, however, critics in the Congress and the media pass up the role of world policeman in favor of the role of kindergarten teacher, slapping the wrists of those who throw paperwads in the classrooms and ignoring those who are throwing Molotov cocktails in the streets. The United States must learn to accept the fact that there may be occasional lapses in the behavior of its friends or it will find itself surrounded by enemies.
Many of the high-minded critics of our association with less-than-perfect regimes are probably irredeemable. However, those who want the United States to play a major role on the international stage but are afraid that we will fail again need only be shown that failure in Vietnam was not inevitable.
Myth IV: We were on the wrong side of history in Vietnam.
British historian Paul Johnson has written that the essence of geopolitics is the ability to distinguish between different degrees of evil. He might have added that it is also the willingness to be objective enough to weigh the motives and actions of both sides in any conflict with an equally critical eye. Vietnam proved that, at least for many American intellectuals, this is virtually impossible to do. During the Vietnam era, an astounding number of otherwise thoughtful people gave our side the white glove test while eagerly seeking to justify the far more brutal actions of the enemy.
Often statements by American and South Vietnamese military authorities were assumed to be lies by the same reporters who printed North Vietnamese lies without question. A hue and cry was raised against the United States when an isolated incident of mass murder by American forces at My Lai was revealed; yet when the West learned of the massacre by the Communists at Hue, where twenty-five times as many civilians as at My Lai died in what was anything but an isolated incident, Amnesty International indulgently chalked the crime up to “the merciless tradition of the war” rather than to the merciless bestiality of the Viet Cong. Those who can always see the faults of our friends on the right are too often blind to the faults of our enemies on the left.
It was not that these critics necessarily disliked the United States. It was that they were sapped, as many before them had been, by the Communist PR blitz, the intellectual dream machine that, ever since the Russian Revolution in 1917, has been tricking Western intellectuals into looking at slavery and seeing utopia, looking at aggression and conquest and seeing liberation, looking at ruthless murderers and seeing “agrarian reformers,” looking at idealized portraits of Ho Chi Minh gazing beneficently upon the children gathered around him and seeing a mythical national father figure rather than the brutal dictator he really was.
Many who opposed the war sincerely believed, since the Communists told them so, that South Vietnam would be happy and free under the Communists and that the Americans were simply out of touch with the reality of life in Indochina. Events since 1975 have proved instead that the ones who were out of touch were the bighearted, freedom-loving reporters, editorial writers, academics, and politicians who could not bring themselves to believe that the United States was doing exactly what it said it was doing in Vietnam from the beginning: trying to save the South from being conquered by forces that would enslave it.
Three years ago, writer Susan Sontag appeared before a conference hastily assembled in New York by a leftist coalition that hoped to save some face in the wake of the Soviet Union’s brutal crackdown against the Polish labor movement. But when she stepped to the podium, she outraged her colleagues by stating that communism was a form of fascism and that those who read the conservative Reader’s Digest knew more about the true nature of communism than those who read the ultraliberal Nation. The statements themselves, while true, were not particularly novel. What was most revealing was the vilification to which Sontag was subjected in the weeks that followed. It was further evidence of the capacity of the American left—even after the deaths of hundreds of millions under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and now Cambodian Communist Pol Pot—for self-deception. It reminds us that among those who say the nations of the West are on the wrong side of history in the fight against communism are people who actually write the history. Unfortunately, they will continue to exert tremendous influence in foreign policy debates.
The war against the Vietnam syndrome, then, must be waged on two fronts. First, we must resist the laudable but often excessive idealism in the American character that prevents us from being as skeptical about the actions and motives of “forces of national liberation” as history teaches us we should be. Second, we must recover our confidence in our ability to wield power effectively.
Examining the Vietnam experience can help us on both these fronts. It shows us the true nature of our adversaries in Third World war and how effectively they can hide their intentions behind a dense screen of propaganda and shrewd political manipulation. And it teaches us that it is not wars such as Vietnam, but rather waging them ineffectively and losing, that leads inevitably to tragedy.
Everyone hopes the United States will not have to fight another war like the Vietnam W
ar. The best way for us to avoid such a war is to be unmistakable in our will and sure of our ability to fight one if we must. But getting over the Vietnam syndrome means more than standing ready to use American military forces. It means being willing to provide military aid to friends who need it; being united, with each other and with our Western allies, in our responses to Soviet-backed aggression around the world; and, above all, having the wisdom and the vision to support nonmilitary programs to address the poverty, injustice, and political instability that plague so many Third World countries.
The antiwar movement did not have a decisive effect on the outcome of the war from a military standpoint, but it has had a decisive impact on the political battles that have been waged ever since. The protesters’ rioting and bombing, all undertaken in the name of peace, ended with our withdrawal from Southeast Asia. Most of the physical damage has been repaired. The intellectual and psychological damage, however, still poisons our foreign policy debates. Ten years later the same distortions about the war that made antiwar activists into heroes on the campuses are still accepted as fact on television, in newspapers, and in college classrooms. Before we can cure ourselves of the Vietnam syndrome, we must purge our diet of the intellectual junk food that helped make us sick to begin with.
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