Lessons from America’s Previous Unwinnable War
Down in the comments section of my fairly innocuous post on Bob Woodward’s appearance on Comedy Central (of all things), there’s a fairly long discussion of Vietnam: whether it could have been won by military means, the role of the anti-war movement, etc. Among other things, it is a revealing look at the ignorance of at least one person on the subject of recent history – ignorance that seems characteristic of a particular world-view, which is used to justify a tedious set of complaints about “the Left” that tends to block out reasonable discussion of current issues like rotten leaves clogging a gutter.
At root is the mistaken belief that America could have “won” in Vietnam through military means. Yes, perhaps we could have won a few battles that were otherwise lost, but Vietnam was not a war of battles. Vietnam was a political war, waged to preserve an increasingly untenable status quo (the partition of Vietnam into North and South) against the concerted wishes of a majority of the population. The lesson of Vietnam is not “fight on to victory,” but rather, “stay out of fights you can’t win.” Colin Powell, the once-respected American military leader and statesman, laid this out fairly clearly in his now-ignored “Powell Doctrine.” It’s good advice, ignored at the peril of our nation.
First, the facts. The situation in Vietnam did not start out hopeless. After the French left, Vietnam was partitioned into North and South – an arrangement that ran against the grain of history and culture – but the people were promised an opportunity to reunify under a referendum in 1956. At that time, the South was under the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem, widely regarded as one of the promising leaders of the New Southeast Asia (along with Marcos in the Philippines, Sukarno in Indonesia and Lee in Singapore). Diem, paranoid about being defeated in the polls by the northern leader Ho Chi Minh, changed the terms of the referendum to exclude Ho and won handily in a rigged vote. The activities of the NLF (Vietcong) to destabilize his government began soon thereafter, and Diem turned to the US, under President Eisenhower, for aid.
When Kennedy took office in 1961, the presence of a small number of US military advisors in South Vietnam seemed like a prudent policy to lend support to a solid regional ally. However, in 1962 and 1963, Diem’s rule became increasingly corrupt and authoritarian, pushing more of his domestic opponents into the arms of the Vietcong. This increased the need for American support, which ramped up slowly as part of a largely uncontroversial series of troop deployments in strategic areas around the world. As Diem’s personal behavior became more and more bizarre and erratic through 1963, the CIA became alarmed at the mounting threat and recommended that unless swift action were taken to replace Diem, the insurgency would spiral out of control.
In October, 1963, several Vietnamese generals approached the Americans to gain their support for a coup d’etat against Diem. The National Security Council recommended backing the generals, provided that they could guarantee the personal safety of Diem and his family. Kennedy signed the order, the coup took place, and two days later, Diem’s body was found in the back of a supply truck, riddled with bullets. The coup and Diem’s murder instantly destroyed whatever remained of the legitimacy of the government in the South and the situation immediately deteriorated. Kennedy demanded that the NSC draw up plans for the disengagement of American forces and the unwinding of our commitment in Vietnam, but following his assassination less than a month later, those plans sat unread on the desk of the new President, Lyndon Johnson.
LBJ chose to disregard the direction of his predecessor and escalate American involvement in Vietnam. His motives for doing so remain open to interpretation to this day. There is an apocryphal story that Johnson, when asked in 1966 why we were in Vietnam, angrily unzipped his trousers, pulled out his penis and waved it in the face of his questioner. “You wanna know why we’re in Vietnam? This is why we’re in Vietnam!” It seemed as good an answer as any at the time.
The problem is, after 1963, American troops were fighting to prop up the illegitimate government of an artificial state. The Vietnamese wanted and were promised reunification in 1956. Ho Chi Mihn, a nationalist who fought the Japanese in World War II and the French in the war for independence, offered a much more compelling choice that the succession of unstable, corrupt and incompetent regimes in the South, despite the problems of his Communist ideology. There is nothing American military might could do to affect this basic set of facts on the ground. All our presence could do is prolong the conflict, destroy people and property, and increase the alienation of the local population. In contrast, all the North had to do was wait for America to leave, and they knew they would soon achieve unification on their terms. Unless our goal was to unseat Ho in the North – which would certainly have provoked a war with Russia and/or China – there was simply nothing we could have done.
American failure in Vietnam was not a failure of military might or will. Absent a feasible alternative to the VietMinh, there was little hope of preserving the partition indefinitely against the concerted opposition of a well-organized guerilla movement, and no chance whatsoever to unify Vietnam under anyone but Ho. The longer we stayed, the worse things got. And by aligning ourselves so closely with the discredited leadership of the South (and in fact playing a key role in undermining its remaining legitimacy by backing the coup), we pushed the VietMinh and their supporters in neighboring countries into positions of much more extreme opposition than would otherwise have been the case. There were, for example, plenty of opportunities throughout the 1950s to keep Ho from aligning with the Communists (he was not initially Communist in ideology – just nationalist), but instead we achieved the opposite.
Intelligent observers understood this problem as early as 1963. Dissenting voices such as Walt Rostow and Roger Hillsman were prominent in the Kennedy administration, but were forced out by Johnson’s single-minded determination to escalate the war. Opposition grew among serious-minded legislators, including Fulbright, Robert and Ted Kennedy, Gene McCarthy and others, who were nevertheless committed to broader American security goals of the Cold War.
Of course, theirs is not the opposition we think of. It was the popular anti-war movement of the late 60s – composed largely of younger people – whose views about the war were far more strident and unburdened by nuance. Some were as principled and well-informed as the policy elites; others were universal pacifists, unapologetic sympathizers with Communism, or people afraid of dying in combat if they were drafted. Their mixed motives and confrontational tactics, perhaps underpinned with a self-righteousness that some found distasteful, made them a polarizing influence on American culture that continues to this day.
Long after the last pony-tail of the 60s turned gray, and the denim jackets of Woodstock crumbled to threads, American conservatives seem to have this abiding hatred of the anti-war movement that blocks out all reasonable discussion on a whole spectrum of issues. The hippie-haters get so rat-holed into bombastic denunciations of the aesthetics and ideology of the 60s counterculture that they forget a basic fact: the anti-war protesters were right about the war. We had no business being in Vietnam, we couldn’t win, and a lot of Americans and Vietnamese were dying for no reason. And, whatever their motives, without the anti-war movement’s active participation in our democratic process through protest, dissent and confrontation, it may have taken our leaders even more years, more dollars and more lives to reach that conclusion.
The anti-war movement didn’t undermine our commitment. Our commitment was misplaced to begin with – maybe not for the reasons many on the Left believe, but misplaced nonetheless. The idea that we could somehow have “won” in Vietnam represents little more than the bitterness of people who were betrayed by their leaders, yet touchingly cling to the myth of American infallibility and invincibility. It’s easier to swallow the lie than to question core beliefs about the value of force, the trustworthiness of a certain type of “gung-ho” leader, and the certainty that the good guys (e.g., us) will always prevail.
Here in the real world, the facts are less subject to wishful thinking. Some struggles are unwinnable. Vietnam was one of them. That’s the reasoned opinion of scholars, policy-makers and the surviving historical figures from the period, all of whom are much more informed on the subject than your average redneck yahoo ditto-head with the “kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out” bumper sticker. Certainly everyone is entitled to their opinion, but if we are seeking historical truth, it matters who you listen to. And it matters even more how you let that information shape your views of current events.
10:10:28 AM 
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