Eric Margolis :
LIFE CAN only be understood in retrospect. With the wisdom of hindsight, most people consider the 20-year long Vietnam War a terrible mistake, even a crime. But at the time, US military involvement in Indochina appeared to make sense. It certainly did to me. I was proud to wear my nation’s uniform.
General Douglas MacArthur warned Americans “never fight a land war in Asia.”
But that is exactly what the Kennedy administration foolishly did. At the time, US power was at its zenith. Washington was gripped by post-war arrogance and hubris.
There was also a very compelling geopolitical reason. At the time – the later 1960’s – it appeared certain that the Soviets and Red China were working together to dominate all of Indochina. “If we don’t make a military stand in SE Asia,” was the consensus, “the Reds will take the entire region.” So it looked in 1967. So we hear again today. Just replace “Reds” by Al Qaeda or Daesh.
But the basic Western premise back then – as now – was dead wrong. In one of history’s biggest intelligence failures, we failed to see the seismic split between the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, one so profound that the two super-powers almost went to war over their contested Manchurian borders in 1968-1969. Just as our intelligence services also missed the impending collapse of the Soviet Union three decades later.
Had the US been aware of the violent tensions between Moscow and Beijing, it would likely have avoided expanding the Vietnam War, or just left it to its own devices.
Instead, the US and its allies waged a long struggle against the Vietcong local guerillas and the battle-hardened North Vietnamese Army that had defeated some of France’s finest soldiers a decade earlier. President Lyndon Johnson drove the US deeper into the war by staging the phony Gulf of Tonkin naval incident.
It did not take long for US troops in South Vietnam to realise the war was a pointless bloodbath. Without the 24/7 support of US airpower, the American army and marines in Vietnam would not have been able to hold out. Today, without US airpower, American forces would be driven from Afghanistan. By the January, 1968 Tet offensive, it was clear to many of us in uniform that the war was lost (I was stateside at the time). The US won almost every battle thanks to air power, but it lost both the military momentum in the war, the strategic direction and the political struggle. America’s South Vietnamese allies often fought bravely but their political leaders were hopeless.
In one of America’s most humiliating events, US military and government personnel bugged out of Vietnam, abandoning their local allies and girlfriends to the Communists.
Much of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were ravaged by US bombing and toxic chemical defoliation. In the process, some 250,000 American soldiers were killed or wounded; 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died. At least three million Communist soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were killed, mostly by US air power. As I look back, it’s very painful to realise that the war was, to paraphrase the wicked Tallyrand, “worse than a crime, a mistake.”
The red hordes did not swamp Indochina nor did they march on Cleveland. Our side committed as many crimes as our enemies. The CIA-run Phoenix programme, for example, “liquidated” up to 41,000 communist cadres. Our “counter-terrorism” campaign today in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia follows the same pattern.
Today, the US and united Vietnam have $36 billion in bilateral trade and warm commercial and diplomatic relations. Vietnam is becoming an important ally for the US against China.
Alas, we seem to have forgotten everything about Vietnam and learned nothing. The new bogeyman is Iran instead of China, but the song remains the same.
(Eric Margolis is a veteran US journalist)
