No More Vietnams (3 page)

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.

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.

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 War. 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.

The Vietnam War began when World War II ended. The war in the Pacific radically changed the geopolitical landscape of Southeast Asia. It marked the end of Japan's regional hegemony and, most significantly, the beginning of the end of colonialism.

The great powers were totally at odds on the future of the European empires. President Roosevelt insisted on rapid decolonization. Prime Minister Churchill and General de Gaulle demanded a return to the status quo
ante bellum
. General Secretary Stalin, while talking of national independence for the colonies, consolidated his grip on Eastern Europe and began scanning the world for possible Communist conquests like a vulture searching for fresh carcasses.

Churchill had once proclaimed that he had not become the King's First Minister in order to oversee the dissolution of the British Empire. But this was his heart and not his head speaking. As a realist, he knew that independence for the colonies was inevitable. Nationalism was fermenting beneath the surface in all of them. It was not a question of whether movements for independence would arise, for they already had, but rather whether they would win power by peaceful or violent means
and whether they would be controlled by true nationalists or by Communists who would impose a new colonialism far more oppressive than any that had come before. Would the colonies trade their old masters for new ones—or would they finally become their own?

France had ruled all of Indochina—Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam—for over half a century. The French first had controlled only southern Vietnam, but local politics, geopolitical competition from China, and imperial ambition soon led them to conquer the entire region. Some popular histories portray French colonial rule as an unrelieved reign of terror. That picture is less a truth than it is a caricature. Like other imperial powers, France was often guilty of economic exploitation of its colonies, but the French also instituted social programs, particularly in education and land development, that greatly improved the lot of the average Vietnamese. The hospitals, schools, and other public facilities Mrs. Nixon and I visited in French colonial Hanoi in 1953 were among the best we saw on our official visits to over fifty Third World countries during the Eisenhower years. However, although in many respects Vietnam did benefit from their presence, the French failed in the most critical respect: They lacked the vision to prepare the Vietnamese for eventual self-rule and to set up a process to ensure stable government during the transition.

Vietnam was destined to be independent. In the 1920s and 1930s, Vietnamese resentments over colonial rule, coupled with a deep sense of nationalism, led to a ground swell of opposition to the French. The fashionable view that only Ho Chi Minh's Communist party sought independence is a myth. Scores of political groups organized to alter Vietnam's status as a colony. These included the Constitutionalist party, the Vietnam People's Progressive party, the Journey East movement, the League of East Asian Peoples, the Vietnam Restoration, the Vietnamese Nationalist party, the Vietnam Restoration Association, the Greater Vietnam Nationalist party, and two militant religious sects. Some sought self-determination within the French Community. Others wanted
to break all ties with France and pushed for open warfare. Still others favored collaboration with Japan.

The turning point was World War II. The Japanese conquests of Southeast Asia shattered the aura of invincibility that the European powers had enjoyed as colonial masters. After the war, Europe's former subjects no longer held them in awe and would not tolerate foreign rule indefinitely. The Europeans found that they could either grant independence to their colonies voluntarily or be driven out militarily. Some, like the British in Malaysia, saw the writing on the wall and provided for a peaceful transition to independence. Others, like the French in Vietnam, asserted that they had come, as one French general put it, “to reclaim our inheritance” and delayed serious consideration of independence until it was too late to do so without bloodshed.

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