Vietnam: The Costs and Lessons of Defeat
Howe, Irving
March 20, 1965 These remarks, unavoidably, are being written about a month before they will be read. In the interim, changes are likely to occur in the Vietnam crisis. But the...
...but we do not believe in the fatalism of the "dominoes" theory that the loss of one country in an area necessarily leads to the loss of the others...
...The mass of the peasantry—war-weary, suspicious, long-suffering—shows no attachment to the Saigon regime, nor is there any reason why it should...
...Nothing in this perspective should lead anyone but an open or covert supporter of the Communist powers to feel sanguine...
...The land is rich and fertile...
...We reject the authoritarian assumption that there is something inherent in the character structure or the historical traditions of "underdeveloped" peoples which makes it impossible for them to sustain a democratic society...
...What needs to be added is that the United States, through its prolonged support of the Diem dictatorship, the failures of which induced hostility and lethargy among the peasants, disillusionment in the cities, a splintering factionalism which came to the surface with the fall of Diem and has never since been healed—the United States thereby bears a heavy responsibility for the present debacle...
...a negotiated arrangement may bring them peace but it will certainly not allow them to become "masters of their own destiny...
...4) Negotiations, while necessary, are not a way of achieving happy results for either the Vietnamese people or the United States...
...A government in South Vietnam which through the 1950's had expropriated the landlords and given the peasants the land with credits for development...
...To say that the present debacle leads right back to the cupidity and brutality of French imperialism helps not at all in the immediate dilemma, but is a fundamental point for understanding the larger curve of recent Indo-Chinese history...
...In the course of such negotiations, the United States would not be in a position to enforce through diplomacy what it has not been able to enforce through arms: namely, its demand that North Vietnam cease intervening in the South...
...Perhaps no more than a chance...
...For it must he remembered that IndoChina was the only country in the world where, from the beginning, the movement for national liberation was led and largely controlled by the Communists...
...One becomes almost impatient with repeating this and hearing it repeated: which does not make it any the less true or urgent...
...they desert at the first opportunity...
...We think not...
...a government which in the cities had encouraged political freedom so as to begin the creation of a coherent democratic polity—such a regime would have had a chance to survive...
...India, for all its faults and failures, indicates the contrary...
...troops required would run into the hundreds of thousands, anywhere from 200,000 to half a million...
...For as long as these bombings are merely token and sporadic, they have at most a nuisance value: they do not seriously change the balance of power in Vietnam, now overwhelmingly favorable to the Communists...
...If, however, the bombings really endanger the industrial and power centers of North Vietnam, they risk the retaliation of a march south by Ho's army—and that would mean, in a few weeks, total Communist control of the country...
...And we shall all pay for it, perhaps in blood...
...it would make it possible to save, through emigration, the several thousand authentic and uncompromising anti-Communists, some nationalists and others in or near the nascent Vietnamese labor movement, who remain in South Vietnam...
...had chosen to underwrite compensation of the South Vietnamese landlords as a way of painlessly getting the land to the peasants, the cost would have been quite modest by comparison to military expenditures...
...At this moment, Washington seems determined to avoid immediate negotiations and to strengthen its hand for future negotiations by selective bombing in North Vietnam...
...and this, obviously, gave Ho Chi Minh an enormous advantage...
...it would have reactionary consequences at home and abroad...
...and that if the United States proceeds further to escalate the war, the probable result will be to compound defeat with disaster...
...it would hopelessly embroil this country in Asia...
...that negotiations, if they are even possible, must be undertaken not in the delusion that they can magically transform the unhappy reality but that they will register it realistically...
...There remain no significant social forces which make their views felt, except the militant wing of the Buddhists who offer neither a constructive nor even a clear program, but strike an increasingly anti-American note...
...Unless, of course, someone proposes to put forth the weary old nonsense about the Vietcong being mere nationalists (or perhaps "agrarian reformers"), instead of the Communist-dominated movement that it is...
...they are a way of ending a national blood-letting for the Vietnamese...
...There no longer seems to be (if ever there was) a coherent South Vietnamese nation with a wish for self-preservation...
...We favor negotiations, but are dis tressed by some of the arguments ad vanced by those who have been pub licly agitating for such a course...
...In the grip of sterile myths about "free enterprise," A s i a n "psychology," "strong" anti-Communism and the like, our policy helped prepare the ground for Communist victory...
...Further to try to continue this policy means simply to waste life, money and time...
...Still, directly after the partition of Vietnam in 1954, there was perhaps a chance for establishing a viable economy and a coherent society in South Vietnam...
...What can be hoped for from negotiations...
...There is no political magic inherent in "neu tralization...
...there are only cliques maneuvering in Saigon, like vultures circling over the bleeding body of Vietnam...
...and they probably do not help to further (as some apologists have argued) negotiations with Hanoi...
...and there remains the possibility—even if it is little more than a possibility—that both in the United States and Asia something will be learned from the Vietnamese fiasco which will be applicable in time elsewhere...
...But it would be in a posi tion to offer certain economic conces sions to both North and South Viet nam, as a way of enforcing even the limited conditions that have been sketched above, and also in the hope that the historic antipathy of the Viet namese toward China (long an imperialist power in this part of the world) would reassert itself in the direction of a "Titoist" independence...
...2) This debacle is the result, not primarily of Vietcong military power, but of more than a decade of wasted possibilities and reactionary politics on the part of both the United States and its Vietnamese allies and agents...
...It looks increasingly doubtful that we can maintain a position, much less win a war, in South Vietnam against the opposition of apathy in the 'ally.'" This is the heart of the matter...
...A million North Vietnamese chose to leave their homes and move South, because they did not wish to live under a Communist dictatorship...
...The Wall Street Journal, not usually charged with being "soft" on Communism, understands all this very well: "It is doubtful," says its editorial of February 24, 1965, "that Europe could have been reclaimed from the Nazis if the peoples had any sympathy for Hitler or were uninterested in his removal...
...The truth is that the situation in South Vietnam is just about hopeless...
...The sons of the peasants, driven into the army, lack the will to fight...
...What actually happened is wellknown— though the full details need very much to be told...
...It is simply not to be thought of . . . though various maniacs and fanatic ideologists are doing just that...
...We favor negotiations, but have no illusions as to their probable conse quences or meaning...
...To escalate the war is sheer madness...
...To read, in a statement initiated by A. J. Muste and his friends, that "many problems will remain, but withdrawal of U.S...
...For the people of Vietnam, the choice now seems to be between varieties of disaster...
...And even if such an intervention were successful, what would then be the political consequences in a country devastated, a country charged with sullen hostility to its "liberator...
...the disaster in Vietnam was due to the narrowness and class selfishness of the local leadership supported by the U.S...
...It will lead, almost certainly, to greater demoralization among the South Vietnamese, still more tragi-comic coups among ignorant and inept generals, and the possibility of American "advisors" being expelled by a South Vietnamese regime which would decide that its only recourse is to make a deal with the Communists...
...And we reject the defeatist mystique which regards Communist victories as inevitable in all but the prosperous and industrialized nations —though we recognize that if the present political trends continue, there will be new and even more explosive Vietnams tomorrow...
...troops will provide the only chance that the people of South Vietnam can become masters of their own destiny"—this strikes us as grotesque...
...there is no political or moral leadership able to inspire or rally the people...
...It is a grim prospect, but we see no other choice...
...the country, given peace and a modicum of reasonable efficiency, could be self-sufficient...
...it would lessen (though not eliminate) the danger of a blood-letting by a victorious Vietcong...
...were to undertake the "pacification" of South Vietnam through its own troops, and even if this did not provoke, as it probably would, largescale intervention by the North Vietnamese or Chinese "volunteers," the number of U.S...
...Was disaster inevitable...
...The cities are sullen, demoralized and politically dormant...
...Such an intervention would surely cement still further the ties be tween the Vietcong and the popula tion, since guerrilla resistance could then be justified all the more in the name of anti-imperialism...
...Here, with some adroit diplomacy and political flexibility, there may be some arrangements that could be negotiated with the Russians...
...The policy of war by proxy has reached a dead-end because of the unwillingness of the South Vietnamese soldiers to fight and the incapacity of their officers to lead...
...Whatever happens between the moment this is being written and the time it will be read, we believe the following points—constituting not an analysis but a summary of position— will continue to be relevant: 1) South Vietnam, as an independent political entity or a coherent society, is on the verge of dissolution...
...For Southeast Asia the danger of further Communist penetration would be very real (it already is very real...
...Military estimates indicate that if the U.S...
...and it would end the agonizing and hopeless struggle...
...The bombings of North Vietnam are of no significant military value...
...government to understand or its refusal to accede to the social upheavals in the "underdeveloped" countries...
...they will drive the people of Vietnam into the arms of the Communists...
...Economic aid from the West could slowly have helped win the adhesion of the people...
...Far more important than the military defeats, though obviously connected with them, is the fact that the process of internal social decay is very far advanced in South Vietnam...
...For the United States negotiations and withdrawal from Vietnam under the conditions likely to follow from negotiations, could mean a significant defeat in the present world struggle...
...What they will reflect is the present relationship of power...
...It would be a disaster for humanity...
...Both Hanoi and Moscow have, by now, declared themselves in favor of the French proposal to reconvene the Geneva Conference...
...Talk about negotiations is in the air...
...it was due to the failure of the U.S...
...March 20, 1965 These remarks, unavoidably, are being written about a month before they will be read...
...But the fundamental facts, precipitated by years of political reaction and obtuseness, are not likely to change...
...3) Short of negotiations, which are bound to be painful and costly, there is no way out of the Vietnamese debacle...
...Authentic nationalists, both anti-Communist and anti-imperialist, had begun to appear...
...It has been pointed out that even if the U.S...
...This would entail an orderly withdrawal of American troops...
...At best, the establishment of some sort of "transitional" regime in Saigon, in which the Vietcong would necessarily, by direct or indirect means, be strongly represented...
...The total effect of their political activity is to speed the descent into chaos, with some of them seemingly expecting that in consequence they will take power and arrange a deal with the Vietcong...
...Instead, a brutal and senseless policy of peasant uprooting, in the name of the strategic hamlet program, was underwritten by the U.S., thereby further alienating the peasants...
...As for the prospect of a large-scale war, which some American generals and certain ferocious columnists of advancing years now believe to be necessary, there is no need to argue that in our columns...
...and they will lead to a more or less stabilized version of that rela tionship...
...it is, at best, a formula for ending a hopeless struggle and ac cepting a new relationship of power in South Vietnam—a relationship which, for anti-Communist democrats both there and here, is likely to prove depressing...
...In no other country of Southeast Asia does the indigenous Communist movement have anything like the power it has had in Vietnam...
Vol. 12 • April 1965 • No. 2
