COMMENTS: Were We Wrong About Vietnam?
Howe, Irving & Walzer, Michael
This article first appeared in the New Republic, August 18, 1979, at a moment when the conservative backlash regarding Vietnam had begun to make itself felt. We tried to argue, briefly, the...
...We tried to argue, briefly, the cogency of our opposition to the Vietnam War and why we thought we had been basically right...
...A point of view that almost all opponents of the war except the most rigid ideologues shared to some extent, or resorted to on occasion, was: (2) The war was morally wrong, since American intervention constituted an effort by a great power to impose its imperial will upon a people that had long been struggling to determine its own fate...
...Or only American intervention...
...This political analysis, merely sketched here, lent weight and cogency to the moral and pragmatic arguments against the war, since it helped explain why the American intruders, neither more nor less moral than other people, behaved so badly in Vietnam...
...THE REMAINING POINTS OF VIEW in the antiwar movement differed sharply, differed in kind, from the first one, though in the heat of the antiwar struggle this may not always have been clear...
...Others, including some intellectuals, supported Hanoi not out of principle, for they were not Communists, but because they were swept away by sentiment and indignation...
...But the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were brutal enough when brutality served their purposes...
...There was much truth in this position, but it could not by itself provide a sufficient analysis of the Vietnam War...
...But even some conservatives came to recognize that Vietnam might not be the best place to show it— indeed, was probably the worst—and that the Vietnam War was draining energies that could be better applied elsewhere...
...must show firmness in opposing communism...
...If what troubled antiwar people was the fact of American intervention in a far-off conflict, this was indeed a consideration of substance...
...allied itself with a series of corrupt, unpopular, and authoritarian regimes (Diem, Ky, Thieu) fighting against a Communist government and a Communist-led guerrilla movement that, together, unfortunately had succeeded in appropriating the historic energies of Vietnamese nationalism...
...Or at the least they provide a reason for reconsidering our views...
...Perhaps the simplest, and the one that with the growing bitterness in the country gained increasing support within the antiwar movement, was: (1) The victory of Hanoi and the Viet Cong was desirable because it would further the "progressive cause" (that is, communism...
...Eos...
...or that "our" side could seriously be said to be fighting for freedom...
...By the Kennedy years, perhaps earlier, it was clear that the Saigon government would remain in the hands of mandarin authoritarians who could not understand the revolutionary sentiments sweeping portions of the country and who were hostile even to mild reforms...
...This, in turn, made it virtually certain that the liberal and socialist tendencies among these nationalists would be rendered helpless and that the betterorganized, more combative Communists would be assured of domination within the nationalist movement...
...These questions are not easy to answer, but they persist as a heritage of certain kinds of opposition to the Vietnam War: good-hearted but not always carefully thought out...
...In doing so, the United States used increasingly brutal methods: mass bombings with B-52s, the destruction of peasant villages, the violation of Cambodia...
...IT NEVER WAS NECESSARY to defend the Communist regime in Hanoi or the Viet Gong guerrillas in order to oppose American intervention...
...Our views were largely swept aside within the antiwar movement, though there were people involved in the campaign for Eugene McCarthy and the moratorium of 1969 who shared these views at least in part...
...Are the partisans of persistence prepared to offer some estimate of the costs of persisting...
...Nor did they particularly care...
...These are people who would have supported Hanoi whether or not it spoke for a majority of the Vietnamese people, whether or not the opposing Saigon regime was democratic, whether or not the United States had a genuine national interest in Southeast Asia...
...We were right in refusing to give credence either to Saigon or Hanoi, in refusing to support the imperial backers of both...
...But who can say what the magnitude of death and destruction would have been if we had fought our way to victory...
...They can still have no reason to change their minds (William Kunstler has not), for they never were so naive as to suppose a Viet Cong victory would bring democratic liberties to Vietnam...
...Nonintervention is an important moral principle...
...THERE REMAINS, FINALLY, the position of many socialists and liberals, in outline something like: (4) The war in Vietnam was partly an inherited colonial war, with the U.S...
...On the contrary...
...Working for a bit of freedom in Third World countries does not strike us as futile, even though both left-authoritarian and realpolitik analysts join in sneering at the idea...
...A dismal choice...
...IT IS IMPORTANT TO RECALL that opponents of the war did not share a common point of view...
...or that the majority of Vietnamese supported either the Saigon government or American intervention...
...had been able to gain the support of the peasants in the countryside and the educated middle classes in the cities, the Americans would probably not have resorted to some of the methods that were used...
...might still have achieved a result that it could call winning, but at a price—political, moral, human—so high that winning would constitute a greater disaster than not winning...
...Those who now bemoan our failure to "persist" in Vietnam ignore the fact that the U.S...
...and partly a battleground in the worldwide conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...It is a question now being insistently put to those of us who opposed the Vietnam War...
...We still think so...
...already had more than half a million men there, vast quantities of weapons, and a large fleet of giant bombers...
...were (improbably) to intervene on behalf of political forces they favored, say, the dissident blacks of Rhodesia, would they oppose that intervention...
...But there was no such national interest in Vietnam, and no hope of such a victory...
...Had we not used every other kind...
...Through a sheer massing of military power, the U.S...
...Had there been some crucial national interest in the Vietnam outcome, as there was in Berlin, then it would have made sense to continue the fighting so long as there was a reasonable hope of a victory that would serve that interest...
...But it is very difficult...
...Since there's a lot of talk these days about Vietnam, and since many Dissent readers have probably not seen this piece, we reprint it here, as a reaffirmation of our views...
...As it turned out, the U.S...
...There is no reason whatever to change that conviction...
...But on the basic issue we firmly believe we were right...
...intervention but felt it would be good if Hanoi won the war...
...Or less bluntly, it was desirable because only a left-authoritarian government could be both revolutionary and ruthless enough to cope with the problems of the Third World...
...Whatever small chance there may have been for a nonauthoritarian solution in Vietnam was effectively destroyed by the tacit collaboration of all the great powers...
...The United States sent its troops into Vietnam to reverse the verdict of a local struggle, which meant, in turn, imposing a ghastly cost in death and suffering upon the Vietnamese...
...Some intellectuals journeyed to Hanoi and came back with statements of feckless admiration for its society, suggesting they did not just oppose U.S...
...taking over from France...
...Many of the people holding such opinions were not ideological at all...
...Even if one judged the authoritarian government to be the lesser evil," the reality was that giving that government support meant enabling the victory of its totalitarian opponent...
...The pragmatic argument was advanced primarily by people without a hint of rebelliousness, but it was used, when convenient, by many of the antiwar protesters...
...The pragmatists generally accepted that the U.S...
...Were these people against all interventions...
...This meant the war would now settle into a struggle between a totalitarian government (Hanoi) exploiting the nationalist tradition and peasant demands, and an authoritarian government (Saigon) precariously kept in power by foreign money, arms, and troops...
...But is it an absolute principle...
...Perhaps these people will now publicly reconsider what they said about Hanoi and the Viet Cong, as the influential French writer Jean Lacouture recently has done...
...Suppose the U.S...
...Only fellow travelers and fools would deny that...
...The U.S...
...With atomic weapons...
...By about the mid-1950s it became evident that the conflict in Vietnam had taken on a decisive and probably irreversible political character that precluded the Saigon government from winning mass support among the Vietnamese people, or undertaking the kind of social-political measures that might enable it to do so...
...Some of them have endorsed far worse things than what Hanoi has been doing to the boat people...
...It became highly unlikely, therefore, that the war could be "won...
...No question that human beings can ask themselves is more attractive morally than "Were we wrong...
...Even if the good faith of those who put this question may sometimes be doubted, there can be little harm, perhaps some good, in looking back and reconsidering...
...And the policies of the United States, largely tilted toward the support of two-bit autocrats, constitute a major reason for the difficulty...
...Vietnam had been fiercely polarized by the French colonialists who, unlike the British in India, allowed almost no freedom for the early Vietnamese nationalists...
...Communist leadership of Vietnamese nationalism was the single decisive factor of recent Vietnamese history—something probably without parallel elsewhere in the world...
...None of this, to be sure, is to say the liberal and socialist wing of the antiwar movement made no mistakes...
...could not reverse that verdict finally...
...THOSE OF US who opposed American intervention yet did not want a Communist victory were in the difficult position of having no happy ending to offer—for the sad reason that no happy ending was possible any longer, if ever it had been...
...Some of us around Dissent hoped for the emergence of a Vietnamese "third force," capable of rallying the people in a progressive direction by enacting land reforms and defending civil liberties...
...Those who gave "principled" support to Vietnamese communism were and remain consistent, if not always candid...
...If the methods used by the United States were what troubled opponents of the war, then what would these opponents make of the methods used by the other side...
...In any case, the moral argument against the Vietnam War, which it was essential to make, could only be rendered secure when tied to a political analysis...
...In retrospect this hope of the early 1950s may seem a vain one...
...Those who prevailed, or at least those most likely to be heard above the din, were the William Kunstlers, the David Dellingers, the Tom Haydens, tacit or open supporters of Hanoi, the very people who recently refused to sign Joan Baez's statement criticizing the Hanoi government for its treatment of refugees...
...Coming to oppose the war somewhat tardily, they used a pragmatic argument such as: (3) Whatever the original rationale for intervening in Vietnam, it soon became clear that the costs of winning the war (to say nothing of figuring out what "winning" might mean) had become so enormous that it would be a mistake to carry the war to a triumphant conclusion even if that were possible...
...BUT THERE WERE MANY PEOPLE, especially the more realistic members of the Washington establishment, who cared little about either the moral issue or the political analysis...
...People holding such views ranged from a cluster of old Stalinists to a large number of new leftists...
...Still we could not win...
...partly a civil war between two Vietnamese camps...
...American methods undoubtedly were more destructive, partly because of our advanced military technology and the sheer firepower that we were able to employ, partly for reasons that require a political analysis of the war...
...And we were in the difficult position of urging a relatively complex argument at a moment when most Americans, pro- and antiwar, wanted blinding simplicities...
...we made a lot of them...
...If the U.S...
...There were divergent, even conflicting opinions among those who attacked American intervention in the war...
...In a world where the opponent great power, the totalitarian Soviet Union, clearly did not hesitate to intervene in the affairs of small countries, would these people support counterinterventions...
...The consequences of the Communist victory, as some of us did suggest a decade ago, have been dreadful...
...The Cambodian horrors and the shameful Hanoi policy toward refugees are evidence, we are told, that we were wrong...
...it could only delay its culmination...
Vol. 32 • September 1985 • No. 4
