Sunday, May 08, 2005
Vietnam - From 30 Year Memorial to Catharsis
It is now 30 years since the end of the Vietnam War and the news media has provided a variety of retrospectives from different viewpoints. I'll draw on three items that make some interesting points. Mr. Liscomb offers us a 50+ year strategic perspective that contrasts the very uncertain and dangerous situation in Asia in the 50's with it's much healthier state today. Mr. Morris deals more directly with the war in Vietnam and it's damage to US morale and global influence - covering a shorter period in the middle of Lipscomb's long-term purview. The last item by Mr. Sherwood really discusses what may be the next stage in the country's healing process - an essential step for those older Americans who were participants then as well as for all Americans who will participate in our future conflicts.
Mr. Thomas Lipscomb's grand strategic perspective on What America Won in 'Nam begins by setting the context for the struggle : " the Vietnam War began in the late 1950s with the return of Communist cadres to what had now become South Vietnam as a 'National Liberation Front' to create an insurgency against the Diem government. Better known as the Viet Cong, the NLF was not an independent political movement of South Vietnamese. According to an editor of the official North Vietnamese People's Daily, 'It was set up by our Communist Party ... .' So this was no civil war. North Vietnam began and supported a campaign of Viet Cong subversion of its equally sovereign Southern neighbor, and after the destruction of the Viet Cong at Tet in 1968, intervened directly with its own military."
In Lipscomb's view, Secretary of State Dulles had set the obectives that led to our subsequent engagement : "The object of American action in South Vietnam was intended to stabilize Asia in general and Southeast Asia in particular. At the times, Asia was anything but stable. ... Dulles wanted to save "essential parts" of Asia. America understood at the outset it was unlikely to save all of it." The instabilities were related to Communists attempts to overthrow or convert existing governments in Malasia, Singapore, India, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines as well as in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
Lipscomb sees success because : "And now, 30 years later, the new "Asian tigers" have standards of living and booming economies that would astonish an old Asia hand like Dulles. Asian prosperity is the wonder of the 21st Century and particularly valuable to United States trade at a time when the stagnant European Union is becoming an increasing problem. "
Perhaps so, but this article resembles a good analysis of a chess game at move 10 of a complex opening that jumps to move 70 when the game is won. A lot happens in between; and understanding the mid-game is essential. In this case, we abandoned allies who fled their overrun country and died by the 10's of thousands; almost 25% of the entire Cambodian population was killed by the Kyhmer Rouge; and our self-induced national sense of weakness led other countrys to push into the power vacuums created by our withdrawal.
The mid-game phase is addressed by Mr. Stephen Morris in a NYTimes Op-Ed that begins a discussion of The War We Could Have Won thusly : "The Vietnam War is universally regarded as a disaster for what it did to the American and Vietnamese people. "
He correctly dismisses the notion that we were oppossing a Vietnam nationalist movement, noting that :
"For all the claims of popular support for the Vietcong insurgency, far more South Vietnamese peasants fought on the side of Saigon than on the side of Hanoi. The Vietcong were basically defeated by the beginning of 1972, which is why the North Vietnamese launched a huge conventional offensive at the end of March that year. During the Easter Offensive of 1972 - at the time the biggest campaign of the war - the South Vietnamese Army was able to hold onto every one of the 44 provincial capitals except Quang Tri, which it regained a few months later. The South Vietnamese relied on American air support during that offensive.
If the United States had provided that level of support in 1975, when South Vietnam collapsed in the face of another North Vietnamese offensive, the outcome might have been at least the same as in 1972. But intense lobbying of Congress by the antiwar movement, especially in the context of the Watergate scandal, helped to drive cutbacks of American aid in 1974. Combined with the impact of the world oil crisis and inflation of 1973-74, the results were devastating for the south. As the triumphant North Vietnamese commander, Gen. Van Tien Dung, wrote later, President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam was forced to fight "a poor man's war.""
That is an accurate summary; but it fails to reflect the extent and impact of anti-war press distortion and publicity and how that imagery was utilized by North Vietnam as a strategic asset. As he notes the Vietcong were basically defeated by 1972; in fact, they never recovered from being almost annihilated during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Tet'68 was a major military defeat for the VC and NVA ; it was also an enormous political image victory for them. The press imagery showed combat in the cities and at American headquarters and gave little attention to the fact that the attackers were literally decimated while US and South Vietnam forces suffered relatively light losses.
Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather's predecessor at CBS, set the tone by declaring the event a catastrophe and the beginning of the end for our side. It was, in fact, a desperate gamble that succeeded in large measure because of the increasingly biased public views expressed by Cronkite and others in the news media. ( No Blogs then to give the other side of the story.) The impact of the press in combination with the anti-war activists was the decisive factor in creating the attitude of defeat and disengagement that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think Morris is correct in his conclusion:
"In 1974-75, the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Hundreds of thousands of our Vietnamese allies were incarcerated, and more than a million driven into exile. The awesome image of the United States was diminished, and its enemies were thereby emboldened, drawing the United States into new conflicts by proxy in Afghanistan, Africa and Latin America. And the bitterness of so many American war veterans, who saw their sacrifices so casually demeaned and unnecessarily squandered, haunts American society and political life to this day.""
Sadly, that is all too true; but the haunting began to be reversed in the last election campaign when large numbers of veterans lined up to oppose Sen. Kerry's bid to be Commander-in-Chief. Despite the best attempts of the Main Stream Media to marginalize or ignore them, the Swift Boat Veterans succeeded in setting Sen. Kerry's dismal record straight. ( Oh, yes, it is now 98 days and counting since Sen. Kerry last promissed on national television to sign his SF-180 and release his full military records; don't hold your breath.) The national catharsis on America's conduct, at home and afield, in the Vietnam Conflict is only partially done. The next step is outlined in Mr. Carlton Sherwood's article, titled Winning America's "Lost" War . In his words :
"Thirty years ago, Americans were transfixed by the chaotic images flickering across their TV screens. Hordes of frantic South Vietnamese men, women and children desperately clinging to the U.S. Embassy fence in Saigon, pleading for escape. .... If the film footage wasn't compelling enough to make the point, all three television networks, the only sources of broadcast news in the last days of April 1975, made certain their audience got the message. This undignified, ignominious retreat, they reported, marked the end of the Vietnam War, a shameful chapter in U.S. Military history, "the first warAmerica
But, was it, really? Did the U.S. military lose the Vietnam War? If not, who was responsible?"
"Now, thanks to a distinguished group of Vietnam combat veterans, the American public is beginning to hear different, far more factual answers to those questions and many others. This time, they will get it straight from those who know Vietnam best, .....
Earlier this year, the former POWs created the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation (VVLF), a non-profit educational organization, designed, in part, to "separate truth from fiction, to expose the myths about Vietnam and those who perpetrate them and, to do so, factually and accurately."
The chairman of the VVLF is Col. George E. "Bud" Day, a Medal of Honor recipient and Air Force pilot who was held prisoner by the North Vietnamese Communists for six years. "
"If the names of Col. Day and others on VVLF Board seem familiar, they should be. Last year, they were among the handful of Vietnam combat veterans who publicly denounced Sen. John Kerry for his post-Vietnam activities, for his "slander and betrayal of all those who served in Vietnam." First, in Swift Boat TV ads and later in the documentary, "Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal," the VVLF Board members excoriated Kerry for his 1971 testimony before the U.S. Senate where he accused the POWs and other Vietnam combat veterans of genocide, deliberately "murdering" and "torturing" hundreds of thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians."
Sherwood lays responsibility for the way the war ended on Congress - "Instead, it was Congress or, more specifically, the nearly two to one Democrat majority in the Senate (61 to 37) and the House (291 to 144) in 1975 that voted to cut off all military funding to the Saigon government that was directly responsible for the defeat of South Vietnam. Congressional Democrats literally abandoned our South Vietnamese allies and it was they, not the U.S. military, who were responsible for the carnage that followed," ( I would add that Congress's actions should be put in the context of the Media's strong support of anti-war activism.)
VVLF Chairman Col Day puts it this way "The false history of Vietnam has been used to endanger and demoralize our troops in combat, undermine the public's confidence in U.S. foreign policy and weaken our national security. Radical leftists such as Sen. Kerry and Jane Fonda lied about the war 35 years ago and are lying about it today. The goal of the VVLF is to continue the work of countering more than three decades of misinformation and propaganda, and set the record straight." And this time, they have the power of the internet and blogs to sustain them in their struggle against conventional views and old media.
I wish them well in setting the record straight and in completing the catharsis, for their sake and for all of us.
Mr. Thomas Lipscomb's grand strategic perspective on What America Won in 'Nam begins by setting the context for the struggle : " the Vietnam War began in the late 1950s with the return of Communist cadres to what had now become South Vietnam as a 'National Liberation Front' to create an insurgency against the Diem government. Better known as the Viet Cong, the NLF was not an independent political movement of South Vietnamese. According to an editor of the official North Vietnamese People's Daily, 'It was set up by our Communist Party ... .' So this was no civil war. North Vietnam began and supported a campaign of Viet Cong subversion of its equally sovereign Southern neighbor, and after the destruction of the Viet Cong at Tet in 1968, intervened directly with its own military."
In Lipscomb's view, Secretary of State Dulles had set the obectives that led to our subsequent engagement : "The object of American action in South Vietnam was intended to stabilize Asia in general and Southeast Asia in particular. At the times, Asia was anything but stable. ... Dulles wanted to save "essential parts" of Asia. America understood at the outset it was unlikely to save all of it." The instabilities were related to Communists attempts to overthrow or convert existing governments in Malasia, Singapore, India, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines as well as in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
Lipscomb sees success because : "And now, 30 years later, the new "Asian tigers" have standards of living and booming economies that would astonish an old Asia hand like Dulles. Asian prosperity is the wonder of the 21st Century and particularly valuable to United States trade at a time when the stagnant European Union is becoming an increasing problem. "
Perhaps so, but this article resembles a good analysis of a chess game at move 10 of a complex opening that jumps to move 70 when the game is won. A lot happens in between; and understanding the mid-game is essential. In this case, we abandoned allies who fled their overrun country and died by the 10's of thousands; almost 25% of the entire Cambodian population was killed by the Kyhmer Rouge; and our self-induced national sense of weakness led other countrys to push into the power vacuums created by our withdrawal.
The mid-game phase is addressed by Mr. Stephen Morris in a NYTimes Op-Ed that begins a discussion of The War We Could Have Won thusly : "The Vietnam War is universally regarded as a disaster for what it did to the American and Vietnamese people. "
He correctly dismisses the notion that we were oppossing a Vietnam nationalist movement, noting that :
"For all the claims of popular support for the Vietcong insurgency, far more South Vietnamese peasants fought on the side of Saigon than on the side of Hanoi. The Vietcong were basically defeated by the beginning of 1972, which is why the North Vietnamese launched a huge conventional offensive at the end of March that year. During the Easter Offensive of 1972 - at the time the biggest campaign of the war - the South Vietnamese Army was able to hold onto every one of the 44 provincial capitals except Quang Tri, which it regained a few months later. The South Vietnamese relied on American air support during that offensive.
If the United States had provided that level of support in 1975, when South Vietnam collapsed in the face of another North Vietnamese offensive, the outcome might have been at least the same as in 1972. But intense lobbying of Congress by the antiwar movement, especially in the context of the Watergate scandal, helped to drive cutbacks of American aid in 1974. Combined with the impact of the world oil crisis and inflation of 1973-74, the results were devastating for the south. As the triumphant North Vietnamese commander, Gen. Van Tien Dung, wrote later, President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam was forced to fight "a poor man's war.""
That is an accurate summary; but it fails to reflect the extent and impact of anti-war press distortion and publicity and how that imagery was utilized by North Vietnam as a strategic asset. As he notes the Vietcong were basically defeated by 1972; in fact, they never recovered from being almost annihilated during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Tet'68 was a major military defeat for the VC and NVA ; it was also an enormous political image victory for them. The press imagery showed combat in the cities and at American headquarters and gave little attention to the fact that the attackers were literally decimated while US and South Vietnam forces suffered relatively light losses.
Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather's predecessor at CBS, set the tone by declaring the event a catastrophe and the beginning of the end for our side. It was, in fact, a desperate gamble that succeeded in large measure because of the increasingly biased public views expressed by Cronkite and others in the news media. ( No Blogs then to give the other side of the story.) The impact of the press in combination with the anti-war activists was the decisive factor in creating the attitude of defeat and disengagement that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think Morris is correct in his conclusion:
"In 1974-75, the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Hundreds of thousands of our Vietnamese allies were incarcerated, and more than a million driven into exile. The awesome image of the United States was diminished, and its enemies were thereby emboldened, drawing the United States into new conflicts by proxy in Afghanistan, Africa and Latin America. And the bitterness of so many American war veterans, who saw their sacrifices so casually demeaned and unnecessarily squandered, haunts American society and political life to this day.""
Sadly, that is all too true; but the haunting began to be reversed in the last election campaign when large numbers of veterans lined up to oppose Sen. Kerry's bid to be Commander-in-Chief. Despite the best attempts of the Main Stream Media to marginalize or ignore them, the Swift Boat Veterans succeeded in setting Sen. Kerry's dismal record straight. ( Oh, yes, it is now 98 days and counting since Sen. Kerry last promissed on national television to sign his SF-180 and release his full military records; don't hold your breath.) The national catharsis on America's conduct, at home and afield, in the Vietnam Conflict is only partially done. The next step is outlined in Mr. Carlton Sherwood's article, titled Winning America's "Lost" War . In his words :
"Thirty years ago, Americans were transfixed by the chaotic images flickering across their TV screens. Hordes of frantic South Vietnamese men, women and children desperately clinging to the U.S. Embassy fence in Saigon, pleading for escape. .... If the film footage wasn't compelling enough to make the point, all three television networks, the only sources of broadcast news in the last days of April 1975, made certain their audience got the message. This undignified, ignominious retreat, they reported, marked the end of the Vietnam War, a shameful chapter in U.S. Military history, "the first war
But, was it, really? Did the U.S. military lose the Vietnam War? If not, who was responsible?"
"Now, thanks to a distinguished group of Vietnam combat veterans, the American public is beginning to hear different, far more factual answers to those questions and many others. This time, they will get it straight from those who know Vietnam best, .....
Earlier this year, the former POWs created the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation (VVLF), a non-profit educational organization, designed, in part, to "separate truth from fiction, to expose the myths about Vietnam and those who perpetrate them and, to do so, factually and accurately."
The chairman of the VVLF is Col. George E. "Bud" Day, a Medal of Honor recipient and Air Force pilot who was held prisoner by the North Vietnamese Communists for six years. "
"If the names of Col. Day and others on VVLF Board seem familiar, they should be. Last year, they were among the handful of Vietnam combat veterans who publicly denounced Sen. John Kerry for his post-Vietnam activities, for his "slander and betrayal of all those who served in Vietnam." First, in Swift Boat TV ads and later in the documentary, "Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal," the VVLF Board members excoriated Kerry for his 1971 testimony before the U.S. Senate where he accused the POWs and other Vietnam combat veterans of genocide, deliberately "murdering" and "torturing" hundreds of thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians."
Sherwood lays responsibility for the way the war ended on Congress - "Instead, it was Congress or, more specifically, the nearly two to one Democrat majority in the Senate (61 to 37) and the House (291 to 144) in 1975 that voted to cut off all military funding to the Saigon government that was directly responsible for the defeat of South Vietnam. Congressional Democrats literally abandoned our South Vietnamese allies and it was they, not the U.S. military, who were responsible for the carnage that followed," ( I would add that Congress's actions should be put in the context of the Media's strong support of anti-war activism.)
VVLF Chairman Col Day puts it this way "The false history of Vietnam has been used to endanger and demoralize our troops in combat, undermine the public's confidence in U.S. foreign policy and weaken our national security. Radical leftists such as Sen. Kerry and Jane Fonda lied about the war 35 years ago and are lying about it today. The goal of the VVLF is to continue the work of countering more than three decades of misinformation and propaganda, and set the record straight." And this time, they have the power of the internet and blogs to sustain them in their struggle against conventional views and old media.
I wish them well in setting the record straight and in completing the catharsis, for their sake and for all of us.
