Useful Fools

Posted By John Moore on November 22, 2003

This article was posted to provide a focus for the inevitable Vietnam references that turn up in response to other Useful Fools articles. This is the place to fight out the old fight, if you are a reader of this blog.

Left wing opinion, widely reflected today in History courses and the media, is that the US lost a war in Vietnam against a local, popular guerilla movement (the Viet Cong). Furthermore, it is asserted that the people in South Vietnam wanted to re-unite with the North under communism. Some have argued that the US had nefarious motives (profit, oil, etc) in its war in Vietnam. It is assumed that the US was defeated in the field of battle by this movement.

All of that is incorrect.

The US entered the Vietnam War as part of George Keenan’s Containment Doctrine, developed under Truman. This doctrine was based on the (correct) observation that the Soviet Union had the intent of dominating the world by using subversion or military power to convert countries to communism, in a manner where the USSR would control those countries, or at the very least be strong allies. Their subversive methods often relied on hijacking genuine popular revolutions or the sentiment behind them. Their military methods involved direct invasion and conquest (Eastern Europe) or conquest by proxy (the Korean War, use of Cuban troops in Africa). The subversive methods were used throughout the world, both through the use of direct KGB assets (such as Kim Il Sung in North Korea, Soviet intelligence agents in the US) or those who were indigenous communists (such as Ho Chi Minh, who became a communist while living in Paris). The Containment Doctrine was to stop this expansion of Soviet Power by combating Soviet methods by our own intelligence operations, providing aid to existing governments, and directly involving our troops in combat.

Vietnam was historically a French colony, and the French were hated by many Vietnamese. After World War II, the French chose to re-establish their oppressive colonial regime. The Viet Minh, headed by Ho Chi Minh, fought the French (who were collaborating with the Japanese) until the Japanese took direct control of Vietnam in March, 1945. Then, with US help through the OSS, the Viet Minh fought the Japanese forces for a few months until the defeat of Japan. At that point, Ho Chi Minh welcomed back the French, signing the “March 6” agreement to bring the French army back into Northern Vietnam. The Viet Minh and the French cooperated to kill thousands of leaders and members of nationalist groups (potential rivals to the communists), with the French giving Ho Chi Minh military equipment..

Having destroyed other legitimate nationalist groups, in 1946 Ho Chi Minh turned against the French. Starting in 1950, Communist China armed and trained the Viet Minh, and supplied the artillery that lead to the final French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The US refused to support the French with its available air power.

In 1954, the Geneva Accords ended the war. Elections were to be held in 1956 to choose a government for Vietnam. In the meantime, the country was split into two parts. All of the Viet Minh were to go north, while all who fought for the French were to go south. Civilians were to be able to move as desired. Hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese moved south and fewer Viet Minh sympathizers moved north (many were ordered to stay in the South to form the core of a communist insurgency in case the Communists lost the elections).

The Geneva accord called for nationwide elections. However, South Vietnam did not sign the accords and hence did not participate, negating the validity of the elections. The North violated the accord, leaving forces intact in the South. In addition, the North obstructed free movement to the south (see Lan Nguyen’s addendum below). The North did not attack at the time because they were weakened from their radical land reform and the resulting popular unrest and internal resistance.

Subsequent corruption and dictatorship by the Diem Regime in the South made it ripe for a revolution, and the VC (the military arm of the National Liberation Front) started operating against the government. They were supported by the North. The US supported the South with supplies and military advisors.

In 1963, the US government under Kennedy encouraged the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) to overthrow the corrupt dictator, Diem. Diem was replaced by a series of subsequent governments.

In 1965, with the South in danger of losing the war, the US started bombing North Vietnam and deploying US combat troops in country. At the time, the VC was mostly native South Vietnamese, although they were commanded by the North. Under Lyndon Johnson, the US was strongly restricted in its bombing of the North, causing it to be ineffective. Since the North was the arsenal of the VC in the South, this effort failed to suppress supplies going to the VC.

By 1968, the US had large numbers of troops in Vietnam. During the traditional truce at the annual Tet holiday, the VC launched a massive offensive. They were trying to win the war with a single surprise attack, and believed their own propaganda that the people would rise up and join them. The military result was that the VC were effectively destroyed, and never recovered. The failure of the people to join the VC, and the VC’s execution of thousands of civilians in Hue (the only major city they captured) gave lie to the contention that the war in the south was a popular revolution. This fact was lost on US press commentators and of course on the anti-war protest movement. Subsequent to Tet, 1968, almost all communist forces in the South were NVA invaders from the North, who traveled through “neutral” Laos and Cambodia on the “Ho Chi Minh Trail.”

Unfortunately, Tet was a gigantic propaganda victory for the North. Reporters, who had been assured that the VC were losing (which they were), suddenly saw brutal combat in the cities of Vietnam. They falsely concluded that they were being mislead (as they often had been), and reported the incident as a great defeat for the US. Some, such as Walter Cronkite, decided to use their position of trust to shape the news against the war, with the hope of ending what they viewed as a futile and un-winnable war.

Shortly thereafter, President Lyndon Johnson, who had badly mishandled the war against the advice of his military, and who had micromanaged the campaign against the North, announced he would not run for re-election.

The subsequent election was won by Richard Nixon on the theme of “Peace with Honor”. Nixon’s plan was to strengthen the South, seriously damage the communist position, negotiate an enforceable peace agreement, and withdraw all American troops except a few advisors and black operators. The peace agreement would be enforced by American air power if the North launched major attacks. Nixon kept his word, and was able to defeat a major Communist offensive (the Easter Offensive of 1972) with almost no US ground participation – leaving the ground fighting to the much maligned Army of South Vietnam (ARVN). After finally removing most of Johnson’s restrictions on US bombing of the North, the US mined Haiphong Harbor, the North’s only cargo port, and attacked Hanoi with B-52’s in the Christmas Bombings on 1972. After negotiating without substance for years, the Communists, confronted with a demonstrated willingness by the US to truly damage them, signed a peace agreement within a month.

However, the Communists continued to fight, utterly ignoring their agreement to cease infiltrating into the South. After Watergate, Nixon lost his political power at home, and ultimately his office. The administration was no longer able to enforce the peace agreement against a rabidly anti-war congress. US military intervention (via air power) to counter overt communist invasions was banned by Congress, as was almost all military aid.

Given this abject betrayal of South Vietnam, the Communists invaded with a massive force (22 divisions with integrated armor and anti-air artillery including missile units), and fairly rapidly defeated a now betrayed and demoralized South Vietnamese army. After the conquest, many Vietnamese were sent to forced labor camps, where they died out of sight of the media, often while clearing mine fields with inadequate tools, while sick and malnourished. As was typical with communist conquests using indigenous anti-regime personnel, many of the remaining NLF and VC were themselves imprisoned in these camps, because the North’s rulers did not want people trained in subversion who might fight the new dictatorship. Thus, ironically, many former NLF and VC became “boat people.”

Many analysts have claimed that the war in South Vietnam had part of its desired effect – the prevention of the spread of Communism into all of Southeast Asia and the Philippines, but it was still a major defeat for the US, leading many other nations in the world to conclude that the US was an unreliable ally. During the subsequent Carter administration, which itself gave no confidence to anti-communist forces and US allies (especially by betraying the Shah of Iran), many nations in the world experienced communist-led insurgencies (Cambodia, Angola, etc.) or insurgencies (like the one in Nicaragua) where a broad popular movement overthrew the government, after which the Communist members of the movement seized power and disenfranchised or imprisoned their revolutionary partners. Other nations distanced themselves from the US and made accommodations with the Communists, damaging US interests world-wide. It was not until Ronald Reagan changed the terms of the conflict from containment to roll-back of Soviet gains that the situation began to reverse.

Another negative effect of the Vietnam War and the way it was prosecuted, especially under Johnson, was the enormous transfer of power from the moderate left to the far left in US politics. The left went from being anti-Communist to pro-Communist (although they won’t admit it today), and many became truly anti-American on all issues of foreign policy, and remain so to this day. On issues of national security, there are few moderate left in America today. The kinds of attacks on the administration that are required of Democrat presidential candidates to be nominated today would never have occurred prior to this shift.

Also, trust in government was seriously damaged as the Johnson administration consistently lied about the progress and plans for the war, and the Nixon administration, facing strong antiwar movements, hid a number of necessary military actions such as the invasion of part of Cambodia and the shadow war in eastern Laos. The distrust (and its never good to unquestionably trust the government) has led to a large amount of destructive cynicism in the Vietnam generation. This has damaged the quality of modern political discourse, and has granted too much power to a relatively monolithic mass media as a mostly left wing, powerful political force.

The Vietnamese boat people represent yet another tragedy of that war. South Vietnamese, including many former Viet Cong, risked and often lost their lives fleeing the now Northern dominated dictatorship of Vietnam.

The biggest lesson from the Vietnam War is that one should understand the full ramifications of an intended conflict, from the political (domestic and international) to the military. Vietnam was won in the military arena, but subsequently lost in the political.

Another big lesson is to not lie to the public except when absolutely necessary for operational security, and then to correct that information as quickly as possible. In other words, public trust is very important.

A third lesson is to be prepared to use adequate force and to have the will to last out the enemy.

Vietnam was ultimately betrayed by a United States Congress, newly filled with anti-war leftists, who abandoned Vietnam to its conquerors from the North. Cambodia was likewise lost, leading to the murderous Pol Pot regime, which ironically was later defeated when Communist Vietnam, by then a Soviet proxy, invaded Cambodia, a Chinese proxy.

General Giap, the North Vietnamese Commander, stated that he knew he could sustain far more casualties than could the US. North Vietnam was cynically breeding generations of cannon fodder… conscripted peasant soldiers from the North who would be killed in vast numbers, but always replaced by more.

The impact of leftist propaganda (much of it produced by the USSR or local American communists and sympathizers, and disseminated by the anti-war movement) is another lesson. Millions of Americans were led to believe that the war in Vietnam was between the US as an imperialist power (which is absurd given US history and the facts at the time) and the oppressed peasants of South Vietnam. The dangers of international Communism were obscured. Although there was some truth early in the war that the US was propping up a very unpopular and oppressive regime (Diem, until JFK had him deposed), in fact the most oppressive faction in the war was the North and through them, the Viet Cong.

The few cases of US war atrocities were widely used as propaganda by all war opponents, while the US press, especially after the anti-war movement started, failed to report the huge number of atrocities against civilians that were committed as the official policy of the NVA. These actions were taken against villagers who refused to cooperate with the VC/NVA, and often consisted of the brutal murder of the village chieftain and his family. In a similar matter, once the oppressive regime of Diem had been replaced, the VC found it impossible to recruit adequate volunteer forces, as the peasants were no longer interested in revolt. Hence the VC used press gangs to forcibly induct South Vietnamese peasants.

Furthermore, the far left Vietnam Veterans Against the War, partially funded by Jane Fonda, held the “Winter Soldier Investigation” which produced damaging charges that atrocities were normal and approved practices by American Soldiers. John Kerry then testified to the Senate using the results of this “investigation:”

I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit – the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

It turned out that this “investigation” was a propaganda exercise:

When the Naval Investigative Service attempted to interview the so-called witnesses, most refused to cooperate, even after assurances that they would not be questioned about atrocities they may have committed personally. Those that did cooperate never provided details of actual crimes to investigators. The NIS also discovered that some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans. Guenter Lewy tells the entire study in his book, America in Vietnam

It is likely that if the apologists for the enemy, such as Kerry, had not been so effective, and the Watergate scandal had not unseated Nixon and deeply damaged the Republican Party, South Vietnam today would be a prosperous democracy like South Korea, and the North would be the same despotic, corrupt and poor regime that it is now.

—————————–UPDATE——————————
I would like to thank Lan Nguyen, former South Vietnamese aviator, for reviewing this history and adding the following commentary.

John,

As I have mentioned before in a previous note, your article is spotless. I can only add few more facts are well known within the Vietnamese but rarely known from the outside world for whatever the reason.

1) During the repatriated period of 1956, the North had exercised maximum control to restrict the movement of people migrating to the South. In large cities near the port of Haiphong, where foreign observers were present, movement was fairly unrestricted but outside those cities, movement was utterly restricted. You could not leave your town or village without a pass by a VC high ranking official, and it’s almost impossible to get that pass. My parent-in-law left the town in Thai-Binh province outside of the foreign observer’s watch, by a note from my mother-in-law’s brother who was a very high ranking VC official asking her and her family come to visit him. Only then the local officials allowed them to leave.

2) In the South, in the area where they controlled, the VC staged a force marriage en mass to marry local woman with the repatriated soldiers. Their purpose is to impregnated woman to establish a family relationship for the fathers to coming back later in the insurgency period.

3) South Vietnam has never had a chance to have a good government. In all fairness, Diem’s government is the least corrupted government. His downfall started when he began to “cap” the reformists as VC. Many reformists were not the VC and were also religious leaders of Buddhists, CaoDai and HoaHao. When he started capping the Buddhist leaders, the shit hits the fan. My wife’s 1st cousin is the famous girl being killed at Saigon protesting Diem’s regime and her statue was erected afterward in middle of Saigon capital. Her death is the final call to arm to Buddhists in Vietnam, considering more than 80% of the population is Buddhists. Few months later, Diem was overthrown and the country was falling in even deeper shit.

We, the principle soldiers of South Vietnam, did the right thing to defend our freedom, with your help, the principle soldiers of America. Losing that war is nothing to be ashamed. Our battle was staged utterly wrong from the beginning and spiraled down the slippery slope. You and your comrade in arm have never betrayed us. We fought for the right thing side by side, and losing that war did not negate our principles. We are forever in debt for your blood and suffering.

Your friend,

Lan Nguyen
A proud South Vietnam Aviator fighting alongside you guys to the bitter end.

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