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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
David Frum, author of "How We Got Here -- The '70s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life"
There is a difference between what it would have accomplished had it succeeded and what it in fact accomplished. The involvement in the end didn't accomplish anything because it ended in defeat. And was it worth the cost? No. Defeat means that you spend nearly as much as you do in lives and treasure as you would have done to win and you reap nothing. I am one of those who believes that the war was winnable with different methods.
But in the first place, given all that we know now, the right decision was not to have gotten involved at all. The correct decision would have been back in 1962 to have taken the defeat. It must have been very hard on the South Vietnamese, but states, as DeGaulle said, are selfish monsters. From the point of view of American interests, that was probably the right answer, to have let that one go.
Having made the decision to intervene, the right way to intervene was to, if you're going to intervene, take the war to the North. The argument used against doing that is not even halfway plausible: The argument that the Johnson administration used was, we can't invade the North because this is just like Korea. Invading North Vietnam would be just like invading North Korea, which Gen. MacArthur did in 1951, and if we do that, China will come into the war and we'll have World War III. It's hard for me to believe that they actually meant that seriously. China was engaged in civil war -- that's when the cultural revolution was taking place; the country's top leaders, civilian and military, were being executed. It's inconceivable -- China lacked the capacity to make war.
And even if they'd wanted to, it's one thing for China to intervene in North Korea, about a hundred miles away from the country's industrial center of gravity and main population base. It's quite another if you get a topographical map and just feel for the bumps. China, in fact, fought a war with North Vietnam in 1979 and was beaten by the Vietnamese.
I think the Johnson administration wanted to fight the most limited possible war. They were not prepared to do what it took, so they made the first of a series of inadequate efforts that led to ever-escalating involvement, with bad results.
The ending of the Vietnam War was disgraceful, not just because the U.S. lost -- countries, even great powers, lose sometimes -- but because the U.S. broke faith. When the agreements were reached in Paris in January of 1973, the U.S. made promises to the South and threats to the North. Both the threats and the promise were disregarded. That is the thing that, over the long haul, has probably hurt the U.S. most. The U.S. has been, on the world stage since 1975, an actor with a reputation for bad faith.
The U.S. is trusted less by its friends and feared less by its enemies. Pipsqueak powers like Iraq and North Korea, even Somalia -- it's hard to imagine more insignificant, weaker characters than that -- and yet they in fact take a contumacious attitude toward the U.S. Why? Because at some level, they just don't believe in American firmness.
Meanwhile America's friends -- small friends, not the big powerful friends, I don't think it's had an impact on them so much -- but countries like Israel and Taiwan are just not going to put any credence at all in American promises. Twenty-five years seems like a very long time to us, but I suspect that the Taiwanese remember it as if it were yesterday. Why was the Gulf War fought? Where in the world did the Iraqis get the insane notion that they could hope to grab control of the world's oil supply? They didn't believe American threats.
I think the war is probably the single most important of the series of disasters that caused Americans to lose faith in the competence and integrity of their government and their institutions in general. The war creates the anti-war movement -- which is not so numerically significant and had a much smaller role in ending the war than I think most Americans believe -- but it was still an important part of American culture. It had a big impact on the academy, movies. And it left behind an oppositional style that is still here.
The most important political effect is not what the anti-war movement did, but the destruction of the Democratic Party's reputation for credibility on foreign and security affairs. From 1940 to 1970, the Democrats were the party Americans trusted on national security. There was a Democratic president that had taken the country into war in 1940, while many of the most visible Republicans had opposed it. Vietnam destroys that. The hawks of the Democratic Party desert the party. The doves take over the party apparatus. To this day, that has left the Democratic Party to be perceived as the more weak-willed party, a party uncomfortable with the use of force, hostile to the interests of the military.
