Comment
Walzer, Michael
There is one major difficulty with Irving Howe's statement. He fails to grasp the significance of the most important point he makes: that in Vietnam the national liberation movement was from...
...The commitment to "hold" South Vietnam en tailed support for dictatorial and militarist governments...
...nor will our withdrawal do so now...
...These two reasons would have justified American intervention on behalf of the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war...
...they were the only foundations...
...But the cadres for such a vanguard probably did not exist in Vietnam and in any case its activities would have been utterly compromised by its reliance on foreign support...
...we must now get out...
...The strategic arguments put forward by Pentagon officials (most clearly stated by Hanson Baldwin in the Times Sunday Magazine, February 22, 1965) are literally insane, a bizarre patchwork of the 19th-century geopolitics and 20thcentury hysteria...
...foreign policy in Southeast Asia...
...That is by no means true everywhere in the world...
...Secondly, if the intervention is on behalf of a regime or movement which has major local and popular support...
...And this after eleven years of patient puppetry by the not-so-stupid men in Washington...
...No, the foundations of the American presence were the old upper classes and the political right...
...and I believe they justified intervention in Korea...
...The U.S...
...military intervention in a country like South Vietnam...
...In a word: we should never have been there...
...I doubt that this was a choice...
...at the moment it is not a nation and has no government...
...Of course, it is possible to imagine a reformist dictatorship, a social democratic vanguard operating in the shadow of American military power while gradually winning local support...
...There, in a sense, is the whole story...
...Granted that our absence would not have resulted in a "happy" political solution in Vietnam...
...He fails to grasp the significance of the most important point he makes: that in Vietnam the national liberation movement was from the beginning led by the Communists...
...I'm not sure that the second of these is a sufficient condition by itself, but that is another argument...
...And the arguments about South Vietnamese independence are cruel and deceitful...
...Vietnam has not been independent in any meaningful sense since 1954...
...It was true in Vietnam from the beginning—and that simple fact ought to call into question all the American rationalizations for intervention...
...failed to establish a democratic regime in the South not because of reactionary stupidity (perhaps it is time we granted the intelligence of the men in Washington and began to argue about their purposes), but because the Communists were the only political group capable of winning an election...
...First, if the intervention seems to be necessary to maintain that rough balance of power upon which international order, such as it is, depends...
...But neither reason makes any sense whatsoever in Vietnam...
...There seem to me to be two possible reasons which might lead American radicals to give support or qualified support to U.S...
...But the pursuit of happiness has not for some time been the end of U.S...
Vol. 12 • April 1965 • No. 2
