Thanks to Ken Burns, the Vietnam War is once again in the public eye, and I seek to set the record straight in my latest article, coming soon to a newspaper (or a conservative website) near you... See what you think:
The Vietnam War: A Noble But
Ill-Fated Crusade
Given
the renewed public interest that Ken Burns' The
Vietnam War
has generated, now seems like an ideal time to revisit some of the
lessons of that conflict. In particular, I wish to dispel two
oft-repeated myths: that the U.S. effort in Vietnam was hopelessly
morally compromised, and that the U.S. effort was doomed to failure.
Neither of these notions, which have become conventional wisdom on
the left, stand up to serious scrutiny.
First, with respect to the moral foundations of U.S. involvement in
Vietnam, we must begin by acknowledging the context: in the midst of
the Cold War, America was committed to a strategy of “containment”.
That is, from Truman to Reagan, every U.S. President sought to
prevent the spread of communism and Soviet influence by supporting
non-communist governments around the world. In the early 1960s,
President Kennedy decided that the U.S. needed to take a stand
against communist infiltration in South Vietnam, partly because we
had recently been embarrassed by the communist takeover in Cuba and
the defeat of the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion there. U.S.
credibility was on the line: having pledged our support to those who
were fighting communist subversion, we would have looked impotent and
unreliable if we allowed South Vietnam to fall to the communist
North.
Lest
we forget, communism was a force for evil of unparalleled strength
and ruthlessness. Communists held sway over a significant portion of
the planet for only about 70 years, but in this time they killed
approximately 100 million people. Those who suggest the appeasement
of communists, or the abandonment of South Vietnam, must therefore
explain where in the world they would
have been willing to take a stand against such a formidable enemy –
and if the answer is Georgia, or Oregon, or Connecticut, then we must
ask: how much greater would the casualties have been in such a war,
if the advance of communism had been allowed to proceed unhindered to
our very shores? Vietnam was arguably of trivial importance to the
United States, yes, but its very triviality made it an ideal location
to fight a holding action against the communist menace.
The related argument that the means that the U.S. employed to fight
the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were immoral is equally
specious. True, American soldiers sometimes committed war crimes,
and Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. bombing raids in the
North, but the more salient point is that civilian casualities always
represented a failure of U.S. precautions, which were designed to
preserve innocent life, whereas for the communist enemy such
casualties represented deliberate murder on a lavish scale. The Viet
Cong assassinated its political opponents, obliterated thousands of
villages, and massacred civilian prisoners, intentionally and
repeatedly, in order to terrorize the people of South Vietnam. There
is no moral equivalence between the United States of America and the
Viet Cong. Anyone who says otherwise has been watching entirely too
much network news.
Moreover, whatever moral compromises the U.S. may have made in
supporting a flawed regime in South Vietnam, the consequences of
abandoning our friends and allies in that country to their fates
under a communist dictatorship were infinitely worse. The fall of
South Vietnam to the communist North in 1975 led to the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of civilians, including “boat people” who
died attempting to flee a communist-instigated apocalypse. Make no
mistake, therefore – those who advocated a U.S. abandonment of
South Vietnam, who consider themselves advocates of “peace and
love,” have blood on their hands no less than the soldiers who
fought there.
Finally, with respect to the notion that victory was not possible in
the Vietnam War, I invite the reader to consider the events of 1972,
which prove that victory was not only possible, but easily within our
grasp. By 1972, the U.S. policy of “Vietnamization” had
dramatically improved the fighting capabilities of the South
Vietnamese army (ARVN), which permitted a vast reduction in the
number of U.S. troops deployed. In late March, the North mounted a
massive conventional invasion of the South, hoping to take advantage
of the U.S. drawdown. This invasion was defeated, and much of the
North Vietnamese Army was shattered, by ARVN counterattacks,
supported by U.S. military aid, advisors, and airpower. In November
1972, as if to seal this victory, the American people dealt George
McGovern, the avowedly anti-war Democratic candidate for President, a
historic thrashing. He won one state to President Nixon's
forty-nine. The “Christmas bombings” of December 1972 gave the
North Vietnamese the last push they needed to sign the Paris Peace
Accords of 1973, ending the war with an American victory, i.e. a
successful containment of communism in southeast Asia. All that was
required to consolidate this triumph was an ongoing American
commitment to support our friends in South Vietnam. It was,
therefore, the ultimate abandonment of this sacred duty, instigated
by leftist propaganda and communist disinformation, that led finally
to North Vietnam's conquest of the South in 1975. Had President
Nixon remained in office, and had Congress not underminded U.S.
support for South Vietnam, it is my firm belief that that country
would never have fallen.
The Vietnam War today serves as a prism through which one can view
almost any question of U.S. foreign policy, national security, or
even morality and popular culture, and there is still much to be
learned by studying the conflict. The lessons, however, are
certainly not as simple as the ex-hippies who dominate academia and
the mainstream media would have us believe.
“The Vietnam Syndrome,” as President Reagan described it, which
has hobbled our country for decades, persists even today. Among its
most pernicious effects has been to instill in the American people
the false belief that America itself is evil, and any mission we
undertake overseas must be rooted in selfishness, greed, ignorance,
and racism. The truth about the Vietnam War, however, is that we
fought it for a noble cause, and, in the end, sadly, by ceasing to
believe in that cause and in ourselves, we snatched defeat from the
jaws of victory.
Dr.
Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History in the State
University of New York and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com
