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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Michael Lind, author of "Vietnam: The Necessary War: Grand Strategy, Domestic Politics, and the American War for Indochina"
Vietnam was a disastrous failure. The result was both a geopolitial catastrophe, where the U.S. was humiliated and defeated by the Soviet bloc, and a domestic political catastrophe, because American public support for the Cold War melted down for much of the 1970s. So it was a resounding defeat. But the thesis of my book is that it was a defeat, but it was not a mistake. It was a battle that was worth fighting, because Indochina was one of the most important fronts in the Cold War along with Korea and Taiwan and West Germany.
I criticize the argument that many conservatives and military people have made, though not all military people: that civilians unjustly restrained Gen. Westmoreland, who could have won the war between 1965 and 1968 with fewer limits on either the scope of the war or the intensity.
The new archival evidence from the Soviet Union and China suggests that there was a genuine threat of Chinese intervention if the U.S. had actually invaded North Vietnam. There was a secret agreement between China and North Vietnam that China would go to war with the U.S. if the U.S. invaded, and that seems like a plausible threat since they did that during the Korean War. In retrospect it now appears that the Johnson administration was prudent in ruling out an invasion of North Vietnam.
The problem with the other alternative that is sometimes discussed, cutting off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, is that that would have been a good idea, but you would have had to suppress the Hanoi-controlled insurgency in South Vietnam first. Basically, there is a certain amount of wishful thinking on the part of the right, particularly thinking that the war could have been won very quickly by massive use of firepower, or by an invasion of North Vietnam or cutting off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Once the U.S. was committed to South Vietnam, and to Indochina in general, this was a long-term commitment that required a combination of low-intensity war and conventional war. There was no quick, easy solution.
In terms of foreign policy, I think it's had a bad effect on both the left and the right. There used to be realistic liberals and essentially the anti-war movement took over liberalism in the late 1960s. The so-called Cold War liberals, in the tradition of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, were either marginalized or driven into the Republican Party. Up until recently, the Democrats have been almost completely pacifist and isolationist. They've opposed every single weapons system, every later campaign in the Cold War, and an overwhelming majority of Democrats voted against the Gulf War. This has only changed slightly since the Kosovo war, where for the first time in a quarter of a century, some liberals supported the use of military force abroad.
It was bad for the liberals, and the conservatives learned the wrong lessons from the Vietnam War. I agree with the thesis of many military experts and civilian experts on the military, that the U.S. fought the wrong kind of war in Vietnam. Initially it should have concentrated on countering guerrilla war instead of trying to fight a massive World War II or Korea-type conventional war. But that's the sort of war that the Pentagon wants to fight. They've adopted the Weinberger and also the Powell doctrine since the Vietnam War, which holds that the U.S. should almost never intervene militarily anywhere, but if it does, it should have completely unrestrictive massive firepower, completely obliterating the enemy.
And that's just unrealistic. As we've seen both in the Gulf War and in the Balkan war, diplomacy imposes limits on all-out war. And in a lot of situations like the Balkans and Haiti and Ethiopia, what's needed is a long-term, low-level commitment, in which the U.S. engages in low-intensity conflict -- really almost policing -- where your enemies are snipers, or even crowds, and using massive firepower is both inappropriate and immoral to deal with those sorts of threats. So I think that the left and the right came away with dangerously mistaken conclusions about how to conduct the military dimension of foreign policy.
Finally, the effect of the war on American society is grossly overrated. If you look at most of the trends that are attributed to Vietnam in the U.S., whether it's the unwillingness of people to serve in the armed forces, a kind of rejection of authority in society -- usually Vietnam and Watergate are blamed for these things. But you see the same trends in Britain and Western Europe, the societies that are closest to the U.S., which obviously did not fight a Vietnam War in the 1960s. So it seems to me that almost all of these social and political trends have nothing to do with the Vietnam War. They are simply part of the evolution of these wealthy industrial democracies in the last quarter of the 20th century.
It's just intellectual laziness that leads people to ascribe these global trends to one war fought by one country. If the U.S. had simply forfeited Indochina in 1965 and withdrawn into isolationism and appeased the Soviet Union, I think there still would have been a counterculture, a student movement, all of those things would have happened. There still would have been a collapse of support for the draft, because all of those things also happened in France and Britain and in West Germany around the same time.
