Real War

by Richard Nixon

  Liddell Hart noted in 1954 that the H-bomb would increase the likelihood of “ ‘limited war’ pursued by indirect and widespread local aggression.” Sir Robert Thompson concurred, and has written that “the invention of atomic weapons and the rise of nationalism” have had an enormous influence on the development of Soviet foreign policy since World War II. He observes: “The great advantage of revolutionary war as an instrument of policy in the nuclear age was to be that it avoided direct confrontation. . . . For the communist powers, therefore, revolutionary war was a low-risk war,” a vital consideration in the nuclear era. The other great advantage of revolutionary war was that it took advantage of Third World nationalism, a force that swept the world soon after World War II and continues strong today. Communism’s “anti-imperialist” message was a clever front for totalitarian parties, and many genuine nationalists were hoodwinked by this seemingly legitimate patriotic response to European colonialism. The first testing ground for this new Soviet weapon was East Asia.

  • • •

  After World War II a vacuum of power was left in East Asia. Among the noncommunist nations only the United States had the capability of filling it. The defeat and demilitarization of Japan, the consolidation of power by Mao Zedong in China, and the availability of Soviet and Chinese arms to any guerrilla force, whether communist or nationalist, that would launch internal or external aggression against noncommunist governments combined to create an extremely dangerous situation throughout the area. Only American aid and even armed intervention could prevent a communist conquest of all of East Asia.

  The first test came in Northeast Asia, in Korea. U.N. forces held the line there against North Korean communists armed with Soviet weapons and aided in the later stages of the war by Chinese communist troops. Those U.N. forces were predominantly American.

  In Southeast Asia the Japanese conquests in World War II—in which Asians had routed the previously invincible Europeans—sparked a new spirit of independence after World War II. When the Europeans tried to reclaim their colonies, they found they were no longer held in awe; their former subjects would no longer tolerate colonial rule. As a result, they either got out voluntarily or were driven out. Indonesia gained independence from the Netherlands in 1949. The British, weakened by the enormous exertions of World War II, began the long process of withdrawing from “East of Suez.” To their great credit, they played an outstanding role in helping the Malaysians develop an effective program for liquidating that country’s communist guerrilla forces. Unfortunately, in Vietnam neither the French nor the Americans who followed them learned adequately from the British experience.

  The Philippines and Thailand managed to handle their own guerrilla insurrections without the assistance of American personnel, but with generous provision of American military and economic aid.

  Indochina—Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—was totally within the French sphere of influence. Because the French would not make adequate guarantees of independence, many Vietnamese who would not otherwise have done so joined the openly communist forces of Ho Chi Minh, a charismatic leader with impressive nationalist credentials gained by fighting against the French.

  The French suffered 150,000 casualties from 1946 until 1954 in their attempt to hold on to Indochina. In March 1954 10,000 French soldiers were trapped in a fortress at Dien Bien Phu. Though they were only 5 percent of the French forces in Vietnam, their fate sealed the fate of France in Vietnam. They fought bravely for fifty-five days but eventually surrendered. It has been estimated that a limited commitment of conventional American air power might have turned the tide of battle. President Eisenhower considered it but insisted that the United States not act alone. Winston Churchill refused to commit British forces, commenting that if the British would not fight to stay in India, he saw no reason why they should fight to help the French stay in Indochina. Even if the strike had taken place, it is probable that the French would have lost in Indochina eventually because of their stubborn refusal to provide adequate guarantees of eventual independence.

  Vietnam was destined to be independent after World War II. The real question was who would control it. The best course for France to have followed would have been to promise Vietnam independence, and then to help the noncommunist Vietnamese prevail over the communist Vietnamese. Even without the actual promise of independence, it still would have been far better for the Vietnamese, as well as for the West, if France had won its war against the Ho Chi Minh forces. Then, when independence came—as it inevitably would have come—Vietnam could have emerged as a free, noncommunist nation. Having taken on itself the responsibility for winning the war, however, France then lost it—not in Vietnam but in Paris. After Dien Bien Phu the French no longer had the will to carry on, and the French government welcomed the opportunity to withdraw from Indochina.

  • • •

  Vietnam was partitioned in 1954, with a communist government in the North under Ho Chi Minh and a noncommunist government in the South with its capital in Saigon. Between the two was a demilitarized buffer zone—the DMZ. Soon Ho’s government in Hanoi was infiltrating large numbers of agents into the South, where they worked with guerrilla forces to set up networks of subversion and terrorism designed to undermine the Saigon government.

  The interim premier of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, became its first president in 1955. He proved to be a strong and effective leader, particularly in containing the communist guerrilla forces that were directly supported by the North in violation of the 1954 Partition Agreement. The Eisenhower administration provided generous economic assistance and some military aid and technical advisers, but Eisenhower rejected proposals to commit American combat forces.

  Large-scale infiltration from the North began in 1959, and by 1961 the communists had made substantial gains. Sir Robert Thompson arrived in Vietnam that year to head the British Advisory Mission. Thompson had been Secretary of Defense of the Malayan Federation when the communist insurgency had been defeated there. He and the CIA people on the scene understood the importance of local political realities in guerrilla war. In putting down the rebellion in Malaya over the course of twelve years, from 1948 to 1960, the British had learned that local, low-level aggression was best countered by local, low-level defense. Britain had used only 30,000 troops in Malaya, but had also employed 60,000 police and 250,000 in a home guard.

  With the excellent advice he was getting, Diem was able to reverse the momentum of the war and put the communists on the defensive. Just as the war in Malaya had been won, the war in Vietnam was being won in the early 1960s. But then three critical events occurred that eventually turned the promise of victory into the fact of defeat.

  • • •

  The first took place far from Vietnam, in Cuba, in 1961: the Bay of Pigs invasion. That disastrous failure prompted President John F. Kennedy to order a postmortem, and General Maxwell Taylor was chosen to conduct it. He concluded that the CIA was not equipped to handle large-scale paramilitary operations and decided that the American effort in Vietnam fit into this category. He therefore recommended that control of it be handed over to the Pentagon, a decision that proved to have enormous consequences. The political sophistication and on-the-spot “feel” for local conditions that the CIA possessed went out the window, as people who saw the world through technological lenses took over the main operational responsibility for the war.

  Another key turning point came the next year, in 1962, in Laos. At a press conference two months after his inauguration Kennedy had correctly declared that a communist attempt to take over Laos “quite obviously affects the security of the United States.” He also said, “We will not be provoked, trapped, or drawn into this or any other situation; but I know that every American will want his country to honor its obligations.” At the Geneva Conference in July 1962 fifteen countries signed an agreement in which those with military forces in Laos pledged to withdraw them and all agreed to stop any paramilitary assistance. All the countries complied except one: N
orth Vietnam. North Vietnam never took any serious steps to remove its 7,000-man contingent from Laos—only 40 men were recorded as leaving—and the United States was therefore eventually forced to resume covert aid to Laos to prevent the North Vietnamese from taking over the country.

  North Vietnam’s obstinacy in keeping its forces in Laos—which had increased to 70,000 by 1972—created an extremely difficult situation for the South Vietnamese. The communists used the sparsely inhabited highlands of eastern Laos, and also of Cambodia, as a route for supplying their forces in South Vietnam. These areas also gave them a privileged sanctuary from which to strike, enabling them to concentrate overwhelmingly superior forces against a single local target and then slip back across the border before reinforcements could be brought in. The “Ho Chi Minh Trail” through Laos enabled the communists to do an end run around the demilitarized zone between North and South and to strike where the defenders were least prepared.

  If South Vietnam had only had to contend with invasion and infiltration from the North across the forty-mile-long DMZ, it could have done so without the assistance of American forces. In the Korean War the enemy had had to attack directly across the border; North Korea could hardly use the ocean on either side of South Korea as a “privileged sanctuary” from which to launch attacks. But Hanoi was able to use sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia as staging grounds for its assault on South Vietnam. In addition to making hit-and-run tactics possible, these lengthened the border the South had to defend from 40 to 640 miles, not counting indentations. Along these 640 miles there were few natural boundaries. The North Vietnamese were free to pick and choose their points of attack, always waiting until they had an overwhelming local advantage, in accordance with the strategy of guerrilla warfare. Our failure to prevent North Vietnam from establishing the Ho Chi Minh Trail along Laos’ eastern border in 1962 had an enormous effect on the subsequent events in the war.

  The third key event that set the course of the war was the assassination of Diem. Diem was a strong leader whose nationalist credentials were as solid as Ho Chi Minh’s. He faced the difficult task of forging a nation while waging a war. In the manner of postcolonial leaders he ran a regime that drew its inspiration partly from European parliamentary models, partly from traditional Asian models, and partly from necessity. It worked for Vietnam, but it offended American purists, those who inspect the world with white gloves and disdain association with any but the spotless. Unfortunately for Diem, the American press corps in Vietnam wore white gloves, and although the North was not open to their inspection, the South was. Diem himself had premonitions of the fatal difference this might make when he told Sir Robert Thompson in 1962, “Only the American press can lose this war.”

  • • •

  South Vietnam under Diem was substantially free, but, by American standards, not completely free. Responsible reporting seeks to keep events in proportion. The mark of irresponsible reporting is that it blows them out of proportion. It achieves drama by exaggeration, and its purpose is not truth but drama. The shortcomings of Diem’s regime, like other aspects of the war, were blown grossly out of proportion.

  “The camera,” it has been pointed out, “has a more limited view even than the cameraman and argues always from the particular to the general.” On June 11, 1963, the camera provided a very narrow view for the television audience in the United States. On that day, in a ritual carefully arranged for the camera, a Buddhist monk in South Vietnam doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. That picture, selectively chosen, seared a single word into the minds of many Americans: repression. The camera’s focus on this one monk’s act of self-immolation did not reveal the larger reality of South Vietnam; it obscured it. Even more thoroughly obscured from the television audience’s view were the conditions inside North Vietnam, where unfriendly newsmen were not allowed.

  Recently, in the Soviet Union, a Crimean Tartar set himself on fire to protest the thirty-five-year exile of his people from their ancestral homeland. A picture of this did not make the network news; it did not even make the front pages; I saw a story about it, with no pictures, buried on page twenty-one of the Los Angeles Times.

  Communist regimes bury their mistakes; we advertise ours. During the war in Vietnam a lot of well-intentioned Americans got taken in by our well-advertised mistakes.

  Some Buddhist temples in Vietnam were, in effect, headquarters of political opposition, and some Buddhist sects were more political than religious. The fact that Diem was a devout Catholic made him an ideal candidate to be painted as a repressor of Buddhists. They also played very skillful political theater; the “burning Buddhist” incident was an especially grisly form. But the press played up the Buddhists as oppressed holy people, and the world placed the blame on their target, Diem. The press has a way of focusing on one aspect of a complex situation as “the” story; in Vietnam in 1963 “the” story was “repression.”

  • • •

  President Kennedy grew increasingly unhappy at being allied with what was being portrayed as a brutal, oppressive government. Apparently without seriously considering the longterm consequences, the United States began putting some distance between itself and Diem.

  On November 1, 1963, Diem was overthrown in a coup and assassinated. Charges that the U.S. government was directly involved may be untrue and unfair. However, the most charitable interpretation of the Kennedy administration’s part in this affair is that it greased the skids for Diem’s downfall and did nothing to prevent his murder. It was a sordid episode in American foreign policy. Diem’s fall was followed by political instability and chaos in South Vietnam, and the event had repercussions all over Asia as well. President Ayub Khan of Pakistan told me a few months later, “Diem’s murder meant three things to many Asian leaders: that it is dangerous to be a friend of the United States; that it pays to be neutral; and that sometimes it helps to be an enemy.”

  The months of pressure and intrigue preceding the coup had paralyzed the Diem administration and allowed the communists to gain the initiative in the war. Once Diem was disposed of, the gates of the Presidential Palace became a revolving door. Whatever his faults, Diem had represented “legitimacy.” With the symbol of legitimacy gone, power in South Vietnam was up for grabs. Coup followed coup for the next two years until Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky took over in 1965. The guerrilla forces had taken advantage of this chaotic situation and gained a great deal of strength in the interim.

  • • •

  President Kennedy had sent 16,000 American troops to Vietnam to serve as combat “advisers” to the regular South Vietnam units, but after Diem’s assassination the situation continued to deteriorate. In 1964 Hanoi sent in troops in order to be in a position to take over power when the government of South Vietnam fell. By 1965 South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse. In order to prevent the conquest by the North President Johnson in February started bombing of the North, and in March the first independent American combat units landed in Danang. As our involvement deepened, reaching a level of 550,000 troops by the time Johnson left office, fatal flaws in the American approach became manifest.

  In World War II we won basically by outproducing the other side. We built more and better weapons, and we were able to bombard the enemy with so many of them that he was forced to give up. Overwhelming firepower, unparalleled logistical capabilities, and the massive military operations that our talent for organization made possible were the keys to our success. But in World War II we were fighting a conventional war against a conventional enemy. We also were fighting a total war, and therefore, like the enemy, we had no qualms about the carnage we caused. Even before Hiroshima an estimated 35,000 people were killed in the Allied firebombing of Dresden; more than 80,000 perished in the two-day incendiary bombing of Tokyo a month later.

  Vietnam, like Korea, was a limited war. The United States plunged in too impulsively in the 1960s, and then behaved too indecisively. We tried to wage a conventional war against an enemy who wa
s fighting an unconventional war. We tried to mold the South Vietnamese Army into a large-scale conventional force while the principal threat was still from guerrilla forces, which called for the sort of smaller-unit, local-force response that had proved so successful in Malaya. American military policy-makers tended to downplay the subtler political and psychological aspects of guerrilla war, trying instead to win by throwing massive quantities of men and arms at the objective. And then, the impact even of this was diluted by increasing American pressure gradually rather than suddenly, thus giving the enemy time to adapt. Eisenhower, who refrained from publicly criticizing the conduct of the war, privately fumed about this gradualism. He once commented to me: “If the enemy holds a hill with a battalion, give me two battalions and I’ll take it, but at great cost in casualties. Give me a division and I’ll take it without a fight.”

  In Vietnam during that period we were not subtle enough in waging the guerrilla war; we were too subtle in waging the conventional war. We were too patronizing, even contemptuous, toward our ally, and too solicitous of our enemy. Vietnamese morale was sapped by “Americanization” of the war; American morale was sapped by perpetuation of the war.

  • • •

  Democracies are not well equipped to fight prolonged wars. A democracy fights well after its morale is galvanized by an enemy attack and it gears up its war production. A totalitarian power can coerce its population into fighting indefinitely. But a democracy fights well only as long as public opinion supports the war, and public opinion will not continue to support a war that drags on without tangible signs of progress. This is doubly true when the war is being fought half a world away. Twenty-five hundred years ago the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote, “There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited. . . . What is essential in war,” he went on, “is victory, not prolonged operations.” Victory was what the American people were not getting.