GHOSTS OF VIETNAM
Draper, Theodore
The Vietnam war was beyond doubt the most demanding test of American foreign policy and its makers since the Second World War. The war in Vietnam was not just another crisis in 30 years of...
...it polemicizes almost exclusively against the antiwar "polemicists...
...It was already clear to me in 1967 that the American decision to intervene on a large scale was based "on South Vietnamese weakness rather than North Vietnamese strength...
...There are two Lewys in this work—one makes an admirable effort to get the facts straight...
...President Jimmy Carter consistently supported the war and was saved from making his support too conspicuous only by his relative obscurity in national politics...
...The other was that it had to be settled by negotiation...
...V The heart of the matter is the peculiar strategy that Lewy employs to relieve Americans of a sense of guilt created by the Vietnam war and to dismiss from their consciences "charges of officially condoned illegal and grossly immoral conduct...
...1183-1206...
...Needless to say, Lewy is being less than candid...
...In the stage of massive, direct American intervention during the Johnson administration, the real enemy in Vietnam became China, a point of view put forward most extravagantly by then former VicePresident Richard M. Nixon in 1965 and with monumental obtuseness by Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1966 and afterward...
...We should never have been there at all...
...it is never more schizophrenic than in a chapter that starts by seeking to acquit us of violating the "law of war" and ends by implicitly condemning us to shame...
...Thus I did not even foreclose the question of the number of North Vietnamese regular soldiers in the South in February 1965...
...What makes it so remarkably different for our sense of guilt from "intentionally...
...The once highly touted South Vietnamese land reform was no more than an "empty gesture...
...The thesis of the White Paper was—North Vietnamese forces had invaded South Vietnam in such numbers that the previously officially regarded civil war had turned into a foreign "aggression...
...If the negligence was not "culpable," no war crimes were committed...
...Kissinger's rationale for continuing the war betrayed a basic misunderstanding of both the world and the American people...
...The most cruel and senseless practice for "generating" refugees or as it was also called euphemistically, "relocating populations," took the form of "free-fire zones...
...He convinced me that this form of apologia is as doomed as the American war effort in Vietnam...
...After this long string of "ifs," Lewy concludes: "None of these events was impossible, and if their occurrence in combination was unlikely, this was no more so than the combination of opposite events which did in fact take place...
...Graubard gives no evidence of knowing about Kissinger's article in Look—it is not listed in his bibliography—in which Kissinger had quite a lot to say before 1968...
...Lewy never makes the distinction clear...
...The vast majority of those driven from their homes were old people, women and children...
...It comes from a "Working Paper of the U.S...
...The most we can conclude from the available evidence is that it was extraordinarily necessary for the Secretary of State to have an "invasion" of South Vietnam by a North Vietnamese organized unit at least as large as a division before the United States began its systematic bombing of the North in February 1965...
...The result was: "Some soldiers began to adopt the so-called mere-gook rule, the attitude that the killing of Vietnamese, regardless of sex, age, or combatant status, was of little importance for they were, after all, only gooks...
...It was necessary to go into it in some detail because the present reader could not be expected to have Lewy's book and mine at hand to refresh his memory regarding the background and significance of the 38 question at issue...
...Lewy admits the "weakness" of the White Paper...
...A survey of marines in 1966 in one province revealed that 40 percent disliked the Vietnamese...
...he supported the war aggressively in a notable television debate in which his opposite intellectual number was Professor Hans Morgenthau, who was never taken in by the war...
...Here we have Lewy trying to have it both ways again...
...It was darkly said that America's allies in Europe would lose all faith in American commitments if the United States let down South Vietnam...
...the discrepancy between the State Department and the Pentagon was the real question worth looking into, but Lewy chooses to ignore it...
...Lewy knows what was wrong with this horror...
...The White Paper was a propaganda flop because it failed to sustain the claim of a large-scale invasion from the North...
...Or Lewy demonstrates that the so-called Rules of Engagement, ostensibly designed to minimize the destruction of civilian life and property, were extensively and sometimes wantonly disregarded in practice...
...But such an exercise would reflect only one side of the work...
...I will offer myself as a case in point...
...Nor did I say that the United States had converted the smaller number of North Vietnamese regulars 37 into an "invasion...
...he was now satisfied with denying victory to the enemy, though he never explained how the no-victory-no-defeat for either side was going to be calibrated...
...The original rationale for getting into it became dimmer and dimmer, and all that remained was to get out of it as gracefully and cheaply as possible...
...We were supposed to go on fighting to prove something to ourselves or to the world at large, not to achieve anything of material or political interest in Vietnam...
...In view of the coming presidential election, I said: "Do we have a presidential candidate in sight who can say to the American people, `We have suffered a failure in Vietnam...
...On the one hand, he gave up a clear-cut victory in Vietnam...
...This intellectual flying-trapeze act took him out of the line of fire and broadened his horizon in preparation for bigger things to come...
...The American people, Congress, South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the Soviet Union had all conspired to let down Henry Kissinger...
...If it had been otherwise, former President Nixon would have been driven out for the sins of Vietnam instead of for the crimes of Watergate...
...But I noted that the White Paper the following month had not even mentioned the 325th, as it might have been expected to do...
...At a conference on Vietnam in Chicago in June of that year, sponsored by the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, Kissinger savagely criticized American policy, especially its "concepts"—military concepts, traditional liberal concepts, balance-of-power concepts, indeed the entire "American philosophy of international relations...
...After laying out all the available information, I commented: Clearly we cannot be sure whether a battalion or a regiment or all of the 325th Division crossed into South Vietnam by January 1965 or at any other time...
...New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp...
...If I had to draw up a list of a half dozen books worth reading on the war, I would put this one among them, despite its flaws...
...And all this for not even victory...
...First, it appeared in 1968, almost three and a half years after the event and a year after I had shown what unholy confusion had attended the whole matter...
...Yet, in some odd way, this is what happened...
...While the country was in an uproar over it during the first Nixon administration, he turned his attention to other matters—the "technetronic era," Japan and Africa...
...By now, there was little or nothing in Vietnam that made 30 years of war advisable or necessary, even to a hitherto fervent supporter of the war...
...It will serve a useful purpose only if it makes us more acutely aware how stupid, miserable, and costly that war was...
...it is more costly to persist.' I fear that unless this is said now and clearly, we will not get out of this morass" (No More Vietnams...
...it was officially conceived and carried out at the very top...
...In this way, Lewy cuts the ground from under his own work...
...An allegation implies a statement without supporting evidence...
...The cheering was premature...
...The key word was "honorably"—the war had to be ended "honorably...
...My final word was: "We may still not know much about the elusive 325th, but we can know a great deal about how it was bandied to and fro by high American officials who could not even convince each other...
...He reports "the growing disdain for the Vietnamese people among U.S...
...Even worse, honor went when power failed...
...Kissinger had clearly learned enough during his two tours of Vietnam and from his Pentagon sources to make him extremely cautious about committing himself to anything that might be called "victory...
...Lewy's use of this "working paper" is so uncritical that it betrays his anxiety to defend the U.S...
...Of course, if the Carters and Vances and Kissingers and Brzezinskis had said all this prematurely, that is, when it needed to be said, they might not be where they are today...
...Kissinger's honorable settlement in Vietnam was fitted into his rickety new "global, conceptual approach," which presupposed that Russia and China could restrain North Vietnam and that the Thieu regime in South Vietnam could be made capable of defending itself without American armed forces...
...In another, the author seeks almost desperately to muffle his blows on the war and even to lead the unwary reader into believing that he is rushing to its defense...
...The tangibles of national strength and stability were sacrificed to intangibles such as American "prestige" and "honor...
...sometimes one wins, sometimes the other...
...This counsel retains its moral worth...
...Obviously, I could not have known of a 1968 "working paper" in 1967...
...In fact, Lewy betrays a guilty conscience of his own...
...He always refers to them with a particularly wrathful peevishness...
...He acknowledges that the crop-destruction program made the local people, not the Vietcong, suffer...
...We might still have been drawn into them, but at least we would have known what we were doing and what they were worth to us...
...There was nothing new about the State Department claims...
...forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, when he was recalled to become Army Chief of Staff...
...Over a year later, in June 1966, Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democratic majority leader, had publicly repeated the number of "only about 400 North Vietnamese soldiers" in the South at the time of "the sharp increase in the American military effort" in early 1965...
...He thought it was necessary to prove to the enemy "that we have the staying power" and "happen to be richer and more powerful...
...He might have said more satisfactorily that the level of familiarity was grossly unsatisfactory and even culpably negligent...
...No wonder that the memory of Vietnam is so oppressive that Americans seem to want to stuff it away in their collective unconscious...
...He never explains what he understands by an American "revolutionary war" in Vietnam or how we could possibly have waged it...
...The politics of this war, which was decisive, was essentially decided by the Vietnamese themselves...
...Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), Vol...
...Lewy also retells the story of the secret bombing of North Vietnam, based on fictitious enemy-action reports., which brought about the demotion and retirement of General John D. Lavelle, commanding officer of the Seventh Air Force...
...While the law of war is an extremely important means of mitigating the ravages of war, it cannot be considered an adequate and sufficient measure of human decency...
...In the very last paragraph of the same chapter, he draws back from making his entire case depend on the "law of war": In the final analysis, of course, law alone, no matter how comprehensive and carefully phrased, cannot assure protection of basic human values...
...if Congress had been persuaded to provide South Vietnam with adequate military supplies...
...Brzezinski's advice against "chickening out" and Kissinger's emphasis on ending the war "honorably" were essentially similar in motivation...
...I also pointed out that Secretary of Defense McNamara, who should have known best, had in April 1965 confirmed the presence of only one battalion, estimated by him at 400 to 500 men, of the 325th in the south...
...He was one of the first of the most militant defenders of the prowar faith...
...Even he seems to have realized it in time...
...In these circumstances, Brzezinski advised Nixon to pledge the removal of American forces from Vietnam "by a particular date (say, two years...
...So many American soldiers were killed or wounded by mines and booby traps in or near hamlets that "it became the prudent thing to doubt the loyalty of every villager...
...Finally, on the day that Saigon fell in the spring of 1975, Kissinger told Stoessinger: "Vietnam is a Greek tragedy...
...Stoessinger also seems to have been ignorant of the Look article, which would have spoiled his time scheme, and which, in essence, already contained the Kissingerian conceptual approach, albeit not with its "global" trappings...
...and only in February 1969 were commanders officially instructed to give at least 72 hours notice to civilians in the areas, as if Vietnamese peasants in far-flung areas were likely to receive and understand such notices or do more than save their disrupted lives if they did...
...In any case, Lewy decided to teach me a lesson about a major turning point in the war—President Johnson's decision in February 1965 to initiate large-scale bombing of North Vietnam...
...Back in the seventeenth century, 39 Hugo Grotius, the father of modern international law, quoted with approval the advice which Euripides in The Trojan Women put into the mouth of Agamemnon addressing Pyrrhus: "What the law does not forbid, then let shame forbid...
...What if the United States could not end the war "honorably" without paying an exorbitant price for the attempt, and then not succeed anyway...
...But the suggestion is dropped, and it is worth considering...
...Ominous fears were also expressed as to what the American people might do if and when they woke up to the reality of a lost war, as if Nixonian America were Weimar Germany...
...Brzezinski's temporary aberration of fighting on for 30 years was the logical outcome of this line of reasoning...
...97-98...
...Neither could Secretary Rusk have based himself on it in 1965...
...a canard means an unfounded and especially a false report...
...Much of the book is the result of serious and painstaking research...
...The only sense of guilt he seeks to relieve is that for very legally circumscribed, intentional "war crimes...
...small-unit leaders ranked highest in their "negative attitudes...
...Here again, the hard questions were evaded...
...Fewer than 20 percent of noncommissioned officers had "a positive attitude" toward the South Vietnamese armed forces...
...How gross is "gross...
...Fighting Russia in Korea was what made the war seem necessary and worthwhile...
...The idea that it will enable a Vietnam veteran to hold his head high is utter rubbish...
...Third, the reason I was struck by the remarkably dissimilar versions of North Vietnamese infiltration by February 1965 was the inordinate importance attached to it as the justification for America's massive intervention...
...Vietnam, he wrote scornfully, was merely "an outlet for basic cravings and fears, and if that issue did not exist, some other one would provide an excuse for the expression of personal and political alienation...
...bombing at all costs...
...The implication is clear: Americans who read Americans in Vietnam should not feel guilty...
...It does not attempt to answer "polemicists on all sides...
...aid had not been cut off in 1975...
...He condemns its "obtuseness and mistakes in judgment...
...When did Kissinger awake to the realities of the war...
...UNLIKE Kissinger, Brzezinski was at first much less circumspect...
...His conclusion to a chapter on "American Military Tactics and the Law of War" begins with a general absolution: The American record in Vietnam with regard to observance of the law of war is not a succession of war crimes and does not support charges of a systematic and willful violation of existing agreements for standards of human decency in time of war, as many critics of the American involvement have alleged...
...American brigade and division commanders falsified reports to hide their persistent utilization of an unauthorized herbicide agent...
...What it suggests is that even as sharp and knowledgeable a specialist in foreign affairs as Brzezinski had completely lost his way and no longer made sense when he talked about the Vietnam war...
...More important were the conditions that Kissinger attached to such a settlement...
...If American policy was that bankrupt, one might imagine that the best thing to do would be to get out of the war as soon as possible at 31 the least possible cost...
...In the end, Kissinger blamed Watergate and a failure of nerve for the debacle in Vietnam...
...Brzezinski hit on essentially the same reasons for what he thought was a good war...
...The rest that needed to be said was that we should have decided to get out of the war as soon as possible, to cut our losses as soon as possible, to stop killing Vietnamese and Americans and wasting our national substance as soon as possible...
...Thus the book lends itself to different conclusions or interpretations depending on what chapter and even what paragraph one chooses to cite...
...Newsweek hailed him as "one of the fastest-rising stars in the Johnson Administration" and "one of the architects of U.S...
...It was also an admission that the war had become too much for even its most ardent and hardened supporters...
...4 Stoessinger, op...
...they should feel ashamed...
...I have thought it necessary to deal at some length with America in Vietnam because it is the most ambitious effort to decontaminate the American role in Vietnam...
...The basic idea—or, to use Kissinger's favorite term, "concept"— was that of a negotiated settlement, hardly a novel one at the time...
...But the first sentence of the very next paragraph goes this way: If the American record is not one of gross illegality, neither has it been a model of observance of the law of war...
...Lest the reader think that this is hindsight on my part, I may be permitted to recall that I also attended the Chicago conference on Vietnam of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of Foreign Affairs in June 1968...
...It was based on work done in the previous year and a half or so...
...It could come as a surprise that, in order to rise to the top of the post-Vietnam American political system, it was almost necessary to be wrong, hopelessly and certifiably wrong...
...John G. Stoessinger in his Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power (Norton, 1976) gave two different reasons—that Kissinger did not speak up until 1968 because he was interested "in a global conceptual approach" and because he was looking for an opportunity to test it in action (p...
...Corruption in the South Vietnamese army was so great that it enabled the enemy to purchase supplies in South Vietnamese cities, obtain war materiel and food from South Vietnamese officials and officers, and buy positions as hamlet and village chiefs...
...it was the American "commitment" itself that condemned us to an almost unimaginably interminable bloodletting...
...Without these presuppositions, it would have made no sense for the NixonKissinger policy to drag the American people through four more years of a war emptied of all meaning but that of getting out of a trap into which the United States should never have fallen...
...q Notes In his Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind (New York: Norton, 1973), Stephen R. Graubard claimed that Kissinger "had nothing to say" because he still "did not know enough about the issues" until 1968 (pp...
...it is costly to get out...
...he also attempts to clear it of some specific varieties of guilt on a most selective basis...
...Ten years later, Lewy knows better than to bewail our loss of "honor" or "prestige...
...After outlining this equivocal approach, Kissinger fell silent on the issue of Vietnam for almost two years, an uncharacteristic reticence that his friendly memorialists have had great difficulty explaining.' Kissinger broke his silence on Vietnam in the summer of 1968, by which time even the inner circles of the Johnson administration had given up the war as a lost cause...
...11-13...
...The most that could be said at the time was that Secretary Rusk and the State Department claimed to know better...
...By 1968, when this rationalization was made, it was already 40 abundantly clear that the riches and power that we had were not the right kind for a war in Vietnam and that we would be much less rich and far less powerful the longer we stayed...
...If we could not end the war "honorably" and could not "chicken out," it had to go on and on indefinitely...
...2 No More Vietnams...
...In effect, he succeeded in establishing some distance between himself and both the extreme hawks and extreme doves...
...What, above all, gives Lewy the air of being 36 a defender of the prowar faith is his criticism of the Vietnam war's critics...
...The Vietnam war followed the same general course...
...Lewy's tricky formulas do not white-wash illegal or immoral conduct...
...The Korean war turned out essentially to be a Korean war, which ultimately made it tangential to America's larger interests and preposterously expensive for what we could get out of it...
...If they could not think up better reasons for supporting the war, no one could...
...After this, Brzezinski apparently decided that it was the better part of valor to leave the Vietnam war alone...
...Brzezinski returned to Columbia University after two years in Washington, apparently sorely disillusioned with the exercise of planning without power...
...Yet his generalizations would make it appear that the United States has no need to feel guilty at all about anything...
...The answer partly depends on the answer to another question—guilt about what...
...cit., pp...
...With the defeat of France in 1954, the Eisenhower administration took over responsibility for South Vietnam, now split off from North Vietnam by the Geneva accords, on the ground that loss of all of Vietnam would inevitably bring about the loss of all the other "dominoes" in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Malaya, Burma, and Indonesia...
...O IV ne way Lewy tries to make a bad war look better is the soft reproach...
...He gave as his reason for such a long-range projection that the United States could not "commit itself to the extent it has, and `chicken out...
...There was no good way of getting out of the Vietnam war but the worst way was to pay the price of getting out later rather than sooner.* In effect, Kissinger and Brzezinski, two celebrated intellectuals who lent their considerable talents to a prolongation of the war, gave up the job of justification when they fell back on ending it "honorably" and not "chickening out...
...And if two 41 anything-and-anyone-you-want-to-see-and-hear personal tours of Vietnam, lasting altogether a month, and top-level briefings in the Pentagon, let alone mere reading of the newspapers, were not enough to give one something to say about Vietnam, very few Americans would have felt obliged to summon up the moral courage to take a stand against the war...
...Even if the 1968 "working paper" is taken at face value, the number of North Vietnamese troops in the South increased from 2,000 at the end of 1964 to 7,000 by September 1965...
...The false counsellors were rewarded with more power than they had had before they made their ghastly mistakes about the war...
...He raises the question whether South Vietnam could have survived if U.S...
...Yet he can still find it "morally significant" that the tactics employed "did not intentionally aim at inflicting casualties upon the civilian population...
...The real authors of the report about the 400 North Vietnamese regular soldiers in the South were Secretary McNamara and Senator Mansfield, no inconsequential authorities on such a matter, and their information had clearly come from the Pentagon...
...Or so it seemed until now...
...Whatever the Russian role might have been, and we still know little for sure about it, the Korean war was far more a feint than the real thing...
...I said at the outset that this was a schizophrenic book...
...Elsewhere, Lewy changes "some" to "many" soldiers who lived by this "rule," which helps to explain the high civilian casualties, civilian inclusion in the inflated body counts, and the deliberate "generation" of a vast horde of refugees...
...What if the road to peace in Vietnam did not run through Russia and China...
...The idea of the "subtle triangle" appeared in one of Rockefeller's speeches (Graubard, op...
...Brzezinski's service in behalf of the war helped to get him an appointment in 1966 to the State Department's Policy Planning Council...
...He has spent most of his book making quite credible the combination of events that in fact took place, with particular emphasis on the internal weaknesses of the South Vietnamese armed forces...
...It is a continuing shame, however, that the shamefulness of this war should be incidentally mentioned in a book designed to cover up the shame by taking refuge in narrow and dubious legalisms...
...The odds were still against the South Vietnamese but their defeat was not a "foregone conclusion...
...He hints at an explanation without reflecting on what its implications might be...
...Henry Kissinger...
...This bill for the war ignores all the indirect costs, such as the corrosive economic inflation it stimulated and the feverish social turmoil it provoked...
...Richard Nixon was now president and vast demonstrations all over the country for a Vietnam "moratorium" had just taken place...
...Kissinger's position on the war made its first public appearance in Look magazine of August 9, 1966, in the second year of massive American intervention...
...It was persisted in by the American military command despite what Lewy calls its lamentable "cost-benefit equation...
...5 Lewy says that only a part of the "working paper" was published in Viet-Nam Documents and Research Notes, issued by the U.S...
...According to this "working paper," which did not appear in print in the United States until 1969, 4,000 North Vietnamese regulars went south by February 1965 and another 1,800 by March 1965...
...This meant that combat operations, crop destruction, and "specified strike zones" were utilized to drive Vietnamese peasants from their homes in the hundreds of thousands...
...The question naturally arose whether the incursion of North Vietnamese forces was large enough to justify the massive intervention of American ground forces...
...A fair treatment would not have taken something put out by the State Department years later and subsequently generally ignored as if it were the last word on the subject...
...The book is America in Vietnam, by Professor Guenter Lewy of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst...
...To have waged a revolutionary war in Vietnam, we would have needed a revolutionary South Vietnamese regime...
...This was one way of exonerating the Vietnam war of blame for the widespread popular unrest and widespread opposition to the war...
...The dilemma that this situation presented was: the war could not be won if it was not revolutionary, and it could not be revolutionary if it was up to the South Vietnamese...
...Both of them seem to think that it was enough for them to say, "Sorry, folks, we were wrong about the war," to gain political absolution...
...As for "his hawkish position on Vietnam," the magazine's piece entitled "Diplomacy: The Thinker," went on, "he is apt to act as though he had a monopoly of the truth...
...The word "intentionally" plays a crucial role in his brief for the defense...
...Sometimes, his tantrum gets in the way of elementary fairness...
...In one respect, the problem of the Vietnam war resembled that of the Korean war...
...A few pages later, however, he seems to backtrack...
...But does the author make good his claim that "the sense of guilt created by the Vietnam war in the minds of many Americans is not warranted...
...For example, the American forces in Vietnam deliberately pursued a policy of "the encouragement and creation of refugees...
...This substitution of terms is really the core of Lewy's case...
...In fact, America's allies were increasingly alarmed at the frittering away of American resources in Vietnam and the social turmoil in the United States that threatened to escalate out of control...
...60, 65, 76-77...
...After all his pious protests against my "allegation" and "canard," Lewy ends by agreeing with me on this point...
...LEWY, HOWEVER, has triumphantly brought forth a new source of intelligence on what I called "the elusive 325th...
...he merely called for a "prayerful assessment" of the procedures and concepts that had landed us in such a mess.' Kissinger saved his own conceptual prescription for the speeches that he composed for Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the presidential campaign that summer and for an article in Foreign Affairs written in his own name in the same period...
...In 1972, Kissinger thought that he could get a Soviet "linkage" to a Vietnam settlement through the grain deal, which gave hundreds of millions of dollars worth of American wheat to Russia at bargain prices at the expense of the American consumer, a price that, Kissinger argued, "was well worth a Vietnam settlement...
...It was ludicrously wrong to have made the consequences of getting out far worse than the expense of staying in...
...And now, as the most influential member of his staff and his closest confidant, Brzezinski has with him Professor Samuel P. Huntington, one of the hardest of prowar hardliners and the least repentant...
...My very point was that leading officials of the United States were divided in their pronouncements on the subject...
...converted this into an "invasion" in order to have a justification for its own escalation...
...Since American interests in both Korea and Vietnam were minimal, other reasons had to justify American intervention...
...If one sought to make a devastating condemnation of the Vietnam war, one could do so out of Lewy's book, as I have just done...
...He has an entire chapter on American "atrocities" in Vietnam, one of which was the My-Lai "massacre," using these very terms— "atrocity" and "massacre...
...The work comes recommended by Charles B. MacDonald, a military historian, as "a sober, objective answer to polemicists on all sides" that "should enable the Vietnam veteran at last to hold his head high...
...But Kissinger did not offer any new concepts or policies himself...
...I said that Secretary Rusk, the only one who then vouched for the presence of an entire North Vietnamese division in the South, had shown an extraordinary need for at least a division to justify the U.S...
...It should be said at once that those who read this book in order to assuage their guilt over the war are doomed to disappointment...
...II, pp...
...Lewy twice uses the same phrase—that the United States and its allies in Vietnam failed "to understand the real stakes in a revolutionary war...
...He himself contributes the most damaging evidence that American 34 officialdom was disastrously guilty of misconceiving and mishandling the war...
...military personnel in Vietnam...
...All they might have is the dismal satisfaction of knowing that they were right...
...In his fighting-on-for-30-years period, Brzezinski made a similar miscalculation...
...In the case of Korea, American policy-makers considered North Korea to be nothing but a Soviet puppet ordered by Moscow to attack South Korea as the opening move in a larger strategy to "probe for the weakness in our armor," as former President Truman put it, in order to start a process of disintegration in the entire American structure of allies and dependents throughout Europe and Asia...
...It appeared in its entirety in the United States as an appendix to The Vietnam War and International Law, Richard A. Falk, ed...
...A good general— and even a good lieutenant—assesses his own strength as objectively as that of the enemy...
...He had previously shown that these casualties had been remorselessly inflicted on the civilian population because Vietnamese civilians and enemy soldiers or agents had been stupidly, arbitrarily, and indiscriminately lumped together...
...American commanders often gave only "token compliance" to orders from above to restrain their excessive use of fire power, so that "the worst features of the traditional mode of operation persisted...
...What is involved now is confidence in American promises," he wrote in 1968, and "ending the war honorably is essential for the peace of the world...
...H II ow difficult it was to justify American intervention in Vietnam intellectually is strikingly shown by the travail of two outstanding foreign-affairs intellectuals— Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski...
...The "free-fire zone" horror was not merely officially condoned...
...The U.S...
...By 1969, Brzezinski himself must have realized that he had to find his way back to some kind of sanity about the war...
...The Vietnam war could not be put into a revolutionary any more than it could comfortably be put into a larger international framework...
...When Kissinger at long last saw the light and told his friend Professor Stoessinger that "we should never have been there at all," he was saying only part of the depressing truth...
...In the end, an "honorable" settlement came to mean the preservation of the South Vietnam regime or the frustration of a North Vietnamese victory, which amounted to the same thing...
...It had become intellectually insupportable and even unmentionable...
...Lewy also makes clear why the American armed forces were incapable of fighting a revolutionary war in Vietnam...
...Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was another proponent of the war, also sheltered from too much public notice by his inability or unwillingness to speak out very forcefully about anything...
...The villagers turned against the United States because American military doctrine called for methods that were insensitive to political and human costs...
...He is operating here on a very narrow defensive front...
...Instead, the Korean war increasingly lived a life of its own...
...In the beginning, the Truman administration injected itself into the French imbroglio in Indochina with vast amounts of financial assistance and military equipment, ostensibly to bolster French pride and stability and to gain French support for American defense plans in Europe...
...An almost unrelieved recital of mistakes and misdeeds fills pages and pages of the book...
...Here and elsewhere, Lewy undermines his own book by overreaching and overstating...
...He even quotes a statement, with which he says many agreed, that "if Thieu wants to eliminate corruption in the army he must fire himself...
...But then he goes on: Theodore Draper alleges that at the time the bombing of North Vietnam started, Hanoi had only 400 regular soldiers in the South...
...The U.S...
...The strategy of attrition was an abject failure...
...Embassy in Saigon in June 1968...
...If they could do no better than that, the job was hopeless...
...cit., p. 252...
...Without superimposing a larger framework on the Korean and Vietnam wars, American policymakers would have been forced to acknowledge that essentially they were civil wars—civil wars with outside backing but still primarily localized civil wars—and not the opening shot of the Final Conflict...
...He also describes 35 the leniency of court-martials that dealt with these "war crimes"—again in this context his term...
...This is not the only instance where he seems to flinch from the implications of his own findings...
...the South Vietnamese and Korean allies trained in that doctrine behaved even more abominably...
...His first answer tends to be highly pessimistic—"there is reason to believe that, everything else being equal, internal weaknesses on the part of the South Vietnamese armed forces alone might have been sufficient to cause defeat in 1975...
...Rereading this interview, one cannot take it seriously...
...The conduct may be illegal but it is not all that bad unless it is officially condoned...
...The second time around he merely absolves us of "gross illegality...
...Lewy has no illusions about the corruption and unpopularity of the Thieu regime...
...The paper is said to be based on a "compilation" of material, which, however, is not given...
...and if the data was provided two or three years after the event, it would be even more suspect...
...Lewy seems to hold Westmoreland most responsible for keeping to the disastrous strategy of "the bigunit war of attrition" long after it had been proven futile and self-defeating...
...It is important to be clear about what Lewy defends...
...It resulted in over 210,000 American casualties, including almost 57,000 dead and over 150,000 wounded...
...Then he turns around, belies his own work, and makes the historical record no more likely to have happened than the conveniently early breakup of OPEC...
...This presentation may be enough to arouse curiosity but it does an injustice to the book as a whole...
...The single American who comes off worst in Lewy's book is no ordinary officer or soldier...
...The author, his admirers, and his publishers may have made a mistake in presenting the book as if it were a wholesale apology for the war...
...The "working paper" itself alluded to the "relatively slow pace of the [North Vietnamese] buildup" in all of 1965...
...These terrible consequences were supposed to have beset the United States in the world at large, not in Vietnam, and all the world did when we got out was to heave a sigh of relief...
...Estimable as the latter may be, they were not worth the price that had to be paid for them in real assets...
...cit., pp...
...News & World Report of February 26, 1968, that he wanted the United States to make it clear that it was willing to continue to fight in Vietnam for 30 years in order to prove to the enemy that "we have the staying power" and "happen to be richer and more powerful...
...The problem arose because Secretary Rusk was controverted by Secretary of Defense McNamara and Senator Mansfield...
...As for the havoc inflicted on North and South Vietnam, it belongs to a different order of magnitude...
...Can my treatment be fairly described as an "allegation," as if I had picked out a number without reason, or as a "canard," as if I had spread a demonstrably false, unfounded rumor...
...There may be justifiable guilt about some things and not about others...
...That is what the argument over this book is likely to be about...
...It was wrong for the United States to "chicken out," he said, because "the consequences of getting out would be far more costly than the expense of staying in...
...Again he was disappointed...
...On the other hand, he told the U.S...
...On one page, Lewy's apologia reveals its essential hollowness and heartlessness...
...It lasted longer than any other war and ended in the most humiliating failure in American history...
...Lewy's comment is: "Needless to say, Johnson here was being less than candid...
...Other evidence pointed in the same direction...
...they were interested in the end...
...What if Russia and China themselves were to work at cross purposes in Vietnam and elsewhere...
...foreign policy" after only four months on the job...
...In effect, the United States could not have made it a revolutionary war even if it had wanted to do so...
...Sometimes Lewy likes to have it both ways...
...His friend Professor John G. Stoessinger tells us that it took Kissinger until the fall of 1971, all of three long, bloodstained Nixonian years, to realize that "Hanoi would not compromise...
...My book Abuse of Power was published in 1967...
...bombing campaign in the North...
...122 The footnote goes even further and changes the "allegation" into a "canard...
...if South Vietnamese nationalists and antiCommunist sects had been able to overthrow the Thieu regime...
...they defend it only from the most extreme accusations of such conduct...
...How far up in the military hierarchy did illegal conduct have to go in order to be officially condoned...
...If President Nixon had been able to dissociate himself from the Watergate burglars and had been able to reintroduce American military power in Vietnam as he had promised...
...force increased from 23,000 at the end of 1964 to about 125,000 in the summer of 1965...
...if the North Vietnamese had made a few major mistakes...
...To justify this momentous step, the State Department issued later that month a White Paper entitled Aggression from the North: The Record of North Viet-Nam's Campaign to Conquer South Viet-Nam...
...His problem is to explain the American failure in Vietnam, not to prevent it...
...VI The main reason for the predicament of Kissinger and Brzezinski in the past and Lewy in the present is that they had difficulty fitting the Vietnam war into a larger framework...
...combat force in South Vietnam was already far greater...
...What in these circumstances is the meaning of "not intentionally...
...it may be immoral but not anything to feel guilty about unless it is grossly immoral...
...He is willing to admit that "the rather free use of napalm and attacks upon fortified hamlets with artillery and air strikes can be criticized on humanitarian grounds"—to put it mildly in view of his own account of the ruthless, senseless devastation wrought by the "freefire zones...
...The monetary cost has been officially estimated at from $180 billion to $210 billion...
...We could not be sure even if Secretaries Rusk and McNamara agreed, and their disagreement adds a dash of farce to what was otherwise one of the most grievous moments of the war...
...Kissinger's reason for going on with the war made the entire American position in world affairs and even world peace depend on an "honorable" ending...
...One was that the war could not be won by military means...
...few refugees were males of military age...
...The fatuous policy of "body counts" encouraged the indiscriminate lumping of combatants and noncombatants, with the result that the killing of villagers could give as much credit as the killing of enemy soldiers, and the only ones really deceived were the Americans themselves...
...It would be a mistake, therefore, for critics of the Vietnam war to reject Lewy's work in toto because he betrays a special animus against them, sometimes unfairly, or for hardcore supporters of the war to accept it with glee because he seems to favor them from time to time...
...Brzezinski's bravado was thus the reductio ad absurdum of the Vietnam war...
...Richard M. Pfeffer, ed...
...Even so, the battlefield was not cleared, because refugees persisted in returning to their hamlets...
...The implication that his own people had failed him suggests that Kissinger's understanding of warfare left something to be desired...
...In an article in Foreign Affairs of July 1966, he put 32 them down as "a manifestation of a psychological crisis inherent in modern society...
...Lewy's comment is that "this level of familiarity was obviously less than satisfactory...
...the other wants to give the United States a clean bill of health or at least the benefit of the doubt...
...Has Lewy succeeded where Kissinger and Brzezinski failed...
...The war in Vietnam was not just another crisis in 30 years of successive crises...
...The American people were not interested in an "honorable" end, whatever that might have been...
...They were more fortunate than Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski and his predecessor as national security adviser, Dr...
...The war was never worth fighting for Vietnam alone...
...I had already made known similar claims by Secretary of State Rusk in 1965...
...it was by far the most costly and most stultifying...
...In this statement to the New York Times of October 17, 1969, Brzezinski forgot about the 30-years war and neglected to make clear why it was better to "chicken out" in two years rather than immediately...
...Could my treatment of the issue fairly be described as either a mere allegation or an outright canard...
...3 By this time, the United States in essence had no other stake in Vietnam than its "honor...
...We can now see why Lewy italicized two words in his formulation of unwarranted charges of "officially condoned illegal and grossly immoral conduct...
...Only in 1968, after over two years of this practice, were commanders in the field advised that they should not generate refugees "needlessly and heedlessly," with little effect on the actual tactics employed...
...He does not defend the American way of war in Vietnam...
...All that he affirms is that these were not the result of "culpable negligence...
...It was the very nature of the war—a hopeless war in a land where we should never have been at all—that made its continuation so intolerable and its end so ignominious...
...it may make some readers feel better...
...By 1968, Brzezinski's attitude toward the war showed signs of unbearable strain...
...The political madness of the policy comes out in his words: "Not surprisingly, attitude surveys showed a high degree of correlation between forcible evacuation and pro-Communist attitudes...
...When the war ended as badly as a war could possibly end, at least for the South Vietnamese, the popular American reaction was one of relief and fatigue...
...Whatever was the number of North Vietnamese regular troops in the South in 1965, the U.S...
...In this period, Brzezinski had little sympathy with antiwar demonstrators...
...For example, President Johnson told reporters after the decision was made to use American troops in Vietnam that he knew of "no far-reaching strategy that is being suggested or promulgated...
...In effect, Lewy's book sometimes suffers from an excess of zeal, especially in his frequently intemperate dismissal of premature critics of the Vietnam war...
...It had to be arrived at in such a way that it did not shake "confidence in American promises" or compromise American "credibility," "prestige," or "steadiness...
...An American commander would simply decide to designate an area, often a huge one, as such a zone so that anyone who remained in it was arbitrarily considered an enemy and thereby subject to annihilating artillery or air bombardment...
...State Department on the North Vietnamese Role in the War in South Vietnam," issued in May 1968...
...It was violation of this cardinal rule of warfare, not failure of nerve, that brought about the dishonorable end of the Vietnam war...
...After the outbreak of the Korean war, the struggle in Indochina took on a wider connotation as part of a worldwide Communist "conspiracy...
...Since Lewy's book has come out in 1978, 11 years later, it would be odd if he had not consulted material not available to me or to other critics a decade ago...
...In his most scathing indictment of Westmoreland, Lewy goes so far as to doubt that the general could defend himself against the charge that he was guilty of "dereliction of duty," because he should have known that American "violations of the law of war" were bound to take place in the circumstances of Vietnam and should have taken the necessary measures to prevent them...
...In large part, it made me writhe all over again at the willful stupidity and obdurate delusions with which the war was prosecuted...
...I related that Secretary of State Rusk had claimed that the entire 325th Division had been moved into South Vietnam by January 1965...
...The scholar and the advocate struggle for supremacy...
...Somehow, a mere "allegation" and an outright "canard" had enabled me to reach the right conclusion...
...I devoted almost eight pages to the question of the North Vietnamese infiltration southward...
...he does not go into battle without taking into account what his own forces are capable of 33 accomplishing and, in the particular case of the American people, what they are willing to fight for and at what cost...
...One cannot tell from the paper itself how "carefully researched and documented" it is, despite Lewy's touching assurance...
...279-80...
...it always had to be made subsidiary to a larger purpose...
...if the OPEC nations had suffered an early breakup and oil had continued to be cheap...
...It is a schizophrenic book...
...He reveals that the American crop-destruction missions were disguised as South Vietnamese activity because the damage obviously could not be limited to the enemy forces to conform with the Army's own manual of land warfare...
...According to this reasoning, the Soviets should have taken advantage of their success in bogging down the bulk of American armed forces in Korea for three years, particularly at the time of the crushing defeat of General 30 MacArthur's forces by Chinese armies across the Yalu River at the end of 1950, which was presumably what the wire-pullers in the Kremlin had been waiting for...
...Thirty years of war was so breathtakingly long that Brzezinski might as well have said "forever...
...I rather emphasized the official disparities, which at that time would have led any fairminded observer not to know what to believe...
...Lewy documents more of the same...
...4 As an epitaph on this war, "We should never have been there at all" may never be excelled...
...I have gone into this example of Lewy's polemics against the "polemicists" because it shows how lacking in sobriety and objectivity he can be...
...5 If the ultimate source was South Vietnamese, Lewy himself, in other connections, tells us how unreliable this source was...
...Johnson knew that a far-reaching strategic change had been initiated and had deliberately misled the reporters and the American people...
...All the paper gives is the number of prisoners and captured documents on which the data is based, but not their provenance or anything else about them...
...3The article on "The Vietnam Negotiations" in Foreign Affairs of January 1969, written in the late summer and early autumn of 1968, was reprinted in American Foreign Policy (Norton, 1969...
...An enquiring reporter had subsequently learned that Senator Mansfield had obtained his figure from the Pentagon...
...The trouble was that it did not quite fit any of those imposed on it...
...Kissinger managed to find bad reasons to support what he knew was a bad war...
...He lists seven "inherent weaknesses," including the fact that it was militarily useless and even played into the hands of the enemy...
...One might well assume that the present custodians of American foreign policy had been chosen because they were proven right in their judgment of the war...
...It is a vain, selfdefeating effort...
...Thus the survival of a regime that almost all Americans in positions of authority regarded as hopelessly corrupt and hopelessly weak was endowed with a value and importance out of all proportion to what it could bear...
...Lewy also recognizes: "The war not only had to be won in South Vietnam, but it had to be won by the South Vietnamese...
...But now it's history...
...He is General William C. Westmoreland, chief of U.S...
...Nevertheless, he had previously shown that, year after year, almost all the casualties brought about by these tactics were inflicted on the civilian population...
...A "revolutionary war," then, was and is a political pipe dream...
...F III or we have just been offered a book that promises to relieve the American people of a sense of guilt for the Vietnam war and to absolve the United States of "officially condoned illegal and immoral conduct...
...This policy was pursued on a large scale for at least five years...
...He conceived of doing so by means of a U.S.-Soviet-China "subtle triangle," whereby the United States would improve its relations with the two leading Communist powers and thereby achieve or at least advance an honorable settlement in Vietnam through them...
...In an article written after he had made two trips to Vietnam at the invitation of then Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Kissinger set forth two principal propositions...
...Second, the 1968 paper originated in the Department of State, not in the Department of Defense...
Vol. 26 • January 1979 • No. 1
