| Friday, February
2, 2007 Dear Sir:
You wrote:
"If we
could get Iraq as stable as Viet Nam was after Tet we would be a long
way toward victory... And that is why understanding what happened in
Viet Nam is important."
Your humble correspondent cannot overemphasize the
difficulty people born after the events of Vietnam have in determining
exactly what did happen. The narratives tend to fall into three major camps:
left-influenced narratives, neocon-influenced narratives, and narratives
that correspond to your own. The three narratives appear to derive from,
respectively, the Communist-influenced anti-war movement, the propaganda
produced by MacNamara's "whiz kids", and people who remained aloof from the
previous two groups. These are all mutually exclusive recollections of
events.
Well, for starters, look at the facts: Viet Nam didn't fall to any
insurgency. There was a full blown invasion by armored corps in 1972. This
was defeated. US ground troops had minimal participation in that, with 300
US KIA for the year. This much at least is not in dispute.
Everything else is hard to find. The very ethnic composition of Viet Nam
is hard to find, and the history of the Empire of Annam and Cochin China is
even harder to come by. French Indo China was composed of a number of parts.
Laos and Cambodia were fairly easily defined; the balance, called Viet Nam,
was composed of many parts and ethnicities. It had once been part of China
(and the Chinese haven't forgotten that). The French protectorate had
installed the last Emperor, Bao Dai, about 1932; he remained until Premier
Diem -- yes, that one, the man Kennedy had murdered as his reward for asking
for American assistance -- put him on an airplane and ended the Empire after
the Geneva Accords.
The notion of independence from France became wide spread in Viet Nam as
well as all of Southeast Asia after the French were unable to protect Indo
China from the Japanese, and the Vichy government gave the Japanese a free
hand in the former Protectorate. The collapse of the Dutch colonization of
Indonesia, coupled with the US proclamation of independence of the
Philippines in the wake of WW II gave a strong impetus to independence
on the part of all the peoples of Southeast Asia. The British moved toward
the dissolution of their Empire. The French tried to hold on.
Viet Nam was never a unified nation, and its only unity was as a French
protectorate. The Geneva Accords which ended French rule acted as if there
were a single nation, but in fact there wasn't a great deal more national
unity there than there was in Iraq.
All this is rather hard to come by. Even the number of US military
advisors to Viet Nam prior to Kennedy's inauguration (certainly under 1500,
very likely under 750, likely under 500) is hard to determine. Eisenhower
was determined to avoid a "land war in Asia". By the end of 1961 there were
about 3500 and the number grew.
The Diem government attempted to stop the insurgency -- many of the Viet
Cong or Vietnamese Liberation Army were former South Viet Nam trained in
the North and reinfiltrated -- and on one occasion killed a dozen
protestors. Another dozen bonzes set themselves on fire. The result was an
enormous propaganda success, with the result that Kennedy authorized the
assassination of Diem. Since Diem was the only political figure nationally
recognized (other than Ho Chi Minh) the result was predictable. Political
chaos ensued.
Some areas under the control of various sects -- Cao Dai and Hoa Hao are
the best known and were the strongest -- stayed calm. The rest of the
country was now up for grabs. The US military mission changed from support
of an on-going government to one of nation building. This was much more
difficult. More troops were sent in. US casualties climbed.
For a table of just what happened see
http://www.rjsmith.com/kia_tbl.html . Note the figures for US
casualties. Note also that the 1972 NVA casualty figures are inaccurate: it
is known that a force of at least 150,000 NVA regulars was destroyed.
http://www.ichiban1.org/html/history/1969_1973
_vietnamization/17_vietnam_cease_fire_1972_1973.htm
The point of all this was containment: it was widely (and accurately)
seen that the fall of Viet Nam would lead to the collapse of the "dominoes"
all over South East Asia. Laos and Cambodia were the first of the dominoes,
after which came Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, Malaysian parts of the
Indonesian archipelago, and Indonesia itself. Indonesia itself was unstable
and in 1965 very nearly fell to a communist coup in which several Indonesian
generals, and the daughter of the Minister of Defense, were murdered by
soldiers of Sukarno's Palace Guard. Nasution escaped (barely; he was
wounded) and rallied the regular army to resist. (Note that Wikipedia says
"On the pretext of stopping a communist coup, Nasution and Suharto led their
forces to liquidate the PKI and topple the regime of Sukarno. The pivotal
role of Suharto led to his assumption of the Indonesian presidency in 1967."
Considering the number of people killed by the Palace Guard before Nasution
was able to rally the resistance, this was some pretext.) Had Viet Nam not
been kept out of the hands of world communism, it is unlikely that Indonesia
would have remained in the "Third World" rather than become part of the
Communist "Second World."
When Viet Nam did fall, Laos and Cambodia, as predicted, underwent their
ordeals of communist purgation, with Pol Pot's liquidation of the
intelligentsia (defined as those who could read or wore glasses) having a
genetic effect that has yet to be detailed. But note that Viet Nam did not
fall to insurgents. It didn't fall to infiltrators. It fell to a second
invasion in armored corps strength; and since the 1972 invasion was not
merely resisted but utterly defeated with 300 US KIA, it is unreasonable to
suppose that our casualties would have been higher in 1975 had we chosen to
assist our allies. Congress refused to do that, even to the extent of
sending emergency materiel aid. Viet Nam accordingly fell. About 2 million
people were then sent to labor camps, and more than 100,000 were liquidated.
Those executions received far less attention from the US press than the
fewer than a dozen Buddhist bonzes who protested Diem's "harsh repression".
So much for the "civil war" in Viet Nam.
Do not rely on the long Wikipedia "history", which apparently cannot be
altered or annotated. Some of the bare facts given are correct, but the
interpretations inserted are systematically biased. Hardly astonishing.
Worse, most of the historical facts are not there at all.
As to the propaganda made up by McNamara's "Whiz Kids", I had to live
with that nonsense at the time. McNamara used to make up his data on the fly
for reasons I never understood. Much of this figured in Nixon's 1968
campaign: recall that McNamara was Kennedy's creature, despised by Johnson
but held in high esteem as one of the knights of the Camelot Round Table,
and sent to honorable exile at the World Bank. I have a low opinion of
McNamara.
=============
Apparently the talk show hosts can't read the Constitution. President
Bush is telling people that he has to follow strict guidelines in issuing
pardons. This is nonsense, of course. He may prefer to follow those rules,
but the President's power of pardon is personal and absolute and without any
regulation or limitation whatever.
It is astonishing that political commentators don't know that.
Meanwhile the US Attorney down on the border is clearly on the wrong
side. Why?
=============
http://www.trunkmonkey.com/content/view/44/51/
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