A Case For Intervention

...Vietnamese feel that they must pay back those who created and preserved a unique Karma for the Vietnamese people by defending what is distinctive about their heritage from foreign intrusions...

...When they took the palm of state power, they split Vietnam into fratricide...

...To Send Our Lord Bvrons Well then...

...Good deeds will tilt fortune towards happiness and bad deeds will have the reverse effect...

...Our good and bad deeds are believed to be small movements of cosmic energy...

...Beyond the debt to one’s ancestors lies a debt to the nation...

...But under phuc duc, material prosperity indicates to a Vietnamese that either he or his forebears were moral people of good Karma...

...French-trained South Vietnamese generals who were careless with their men’s lives usually had bad morale in their units...

...After their conquest, economic conditions for South Vietnamese plummeted...

...And that could mean that we would be incinerated...

...A large force secures the heartland of the Hoa Ha0 people...

...Their reaction has been to oppose a government that robbed them of the evidence of their virtue...

...The antagonism between Communism and Vietnamese culture arises from contrasting views of the individual...

...It shows up in their word for freedom-tu do...

...When David Halberstam noted that the succession of leaders in Saigon seemed collectively unable to rally popular sympathy, he was observing the consequences of leadership without phuc due...

...Generally, Vietnamese resent authority and have a very sensitive sense of self...

...Yet in the average Vietnamese family it is the mother who rules...

...It is a fact, however, that South Vietnam did not collapse when American combat troops went home in 1972...

...What do we do then...

...Under phuc duc, a society should be organized to allow each individual room to maximize his or her potential according to the rules of Buddhist Karma, as modified by the Vietnamese...

...We have to intervene, and, instead of intervening in the wrong way, as we did in Vietnam, we have to do it right...

...Many Vietnamese are less than enthusiastic in commemorating forebears of marginal or negative Karma...

...This information does not come from Thieu or Ky but from Hanoi’s General Van Tien Dung, who has described the last offensive in great detail...

...According to him, the offensive was planned and executed entirely by the North Vietnamese Communist leadership, using the regular army of North Vietnam...

...We could have sent arms and economic aid to balance the external contributions from the Communist world...

...In the 1930s a series of very important novels was written by a group of young Vietnamese intellectuals in Hanoi who had broken with the Confucian elite, which was generally supportive of French rule, to rediscover the more personal ethnic tradition of fate and the self that had survived in the villages...

...Contrary to what has been written, there has long been a profound core of nationalist strength in Vietnam...

...We could have sent volunteers who were trained in the language and the culture, who could have helped in the ways most of the Vietnamese wanted to be helped...

...To the simple Buddhist notion of Karma, which applies only to individuals, the Vietnamese have injected a Confucian element, so that families and lineages as well as individuals are receptacles of good and bad Karma...

...I realize that this view is not likely to be instantly persuasive to the readers of this magazine...

...Vietnamese believe in a universe created by the ceaseless flows of positive and negative cosmic energy...

...A large group of followers of the Cao Dai religion have taken over the old Communist base area of Zone D. In the Delta, small groups operate everywhere...

...FitzGerald uses as a centerpiece of her theory the figure of strong paternal authority in the family leading to rebellion in the son and the replacement of the father’s mandate with the son’s...

...First, it says we weke justified in seeking to help the South Vietnamese...

...The same forces that traditionally pulled Vietnamese towards the Confucian pattern of social organization are pulling them inevitably towards the Communists now...

...The father may reign but his authority is hollow...

...The Vietnamese ethnic tradition centers on a concept called phuc duc, which intertwines personal destiny with social morality...

...The ease with which Communist commanders could send wave after wave of men into battle and near-certain death contrasts with the reluctant attitude toward fierce combat taken by most noncommunist officers...

...North Vietnamese ammunition dumps in Go Vap and Bien Hoa have been destroyed...

...This is explicitly recognized, for example, in the Vietnamese Buddhist sect of the Hoa Hao, which places the debt of gratitude to the ancestors and the nation before the debt to the Buddha...

...Most Communist leaders in fact have come from mandarin families...

...Vietnamese away from the Communists into a form of nationalism that one can trace through centuries of Vietnamese history, including four victories over the Chinese and one over the Mongols...

...Even though phuc due places the individual in a family and national context, it rests on a notion of individual destiny...

...The differences between this popular culture and the elite attitudes used by FitzGerald are substantial...

...The reason is that one of the lessons the Left has learned from Vietnam is that because our intervention did not turn out well there, we should not intervene anywhere...

...Two large units commanded by Colonel Luan control the highlands between Ban Me Thuat and Pleiku, from the Lao border to the seacoast...

...Later, as they passed by, Vietnamese would carry stones over to the column to secure its base and prevent its collapse...

...Cho Gao in My Tho was also attacked in a two-day battle...

...Those novels revolved around the problem of freedom for the individual...

...The indigenous guerrilla forces of the Viet Cong were not in evidence as Soviet tanks rolled into Thieu’s presidential palace at the moment of victory...

...We did not have to take over the war from the Vietnamese...

...This controllable part of the destiny equation was borrowed from the Indian doctrine of reincarnation and Karma...

...Relying on the work of the French scholar Paul Mus, FitzGerald postulated that modem times had triggered a revolutionary disequilibrium among Vietnam’s people, who consequently demanded a new mandate of heaven to restore the wholeness of the social order...

...geomancy, or the cosmic energy in the land on which we are born and live...

...So, if we’re faced with something far more dangerous than Vietnam in the future, the probability is that, regardless of what is really needed to deal with it, the Navy will dust the mothballs off some old carriers, the Army will ready its divisions, and the Left will virtuously oppose any intervention...

...The ethic of phuc duc has led the Vietnamese to oppose Communism for three reasons relating to individual freedom, private property, and selfless leadership...

...This energy triad gives destiny a deterministic face, making it the end product of spinning primordial forces...

...They are not his by the workings of phuc due but by his selfishness and by his manipulation of power to shortcircuit phuc duc...

...The trouble with Saigon’s rulers was that they were generally too greedy in their use of power and in their accumulation of personal wealth, when both in turn also depended on manipulation of first the French and then the Americans...

...The American- support e d government would collapse immediately-within 72 hours, according to George McGovern-upon the withdrawal of American combat troops...

...In the villages it is said that the Communists vat chanh bo vo“squeeze the lemon and throw away the rind...

...They assumed leadership of the war against the French by murdering the other nationalist leaders...

...I acknowledge that many of the ways we intervened were stupid and callous, and that there are lessons to be learned from what we did wrong in Vietnam that we must never forget...

...Leadership that is respected and appreciated brings prosperity and good fortune to the many...

...Belief in one of these forces, geomancy, helped the Vietnamese develop a kind of national loyalty long before it was fashionable in the West...

...Vietnamese like material well-being, but they do not like avarice and self-seeking...

...A Mandate of Heaven The Left’s expectation that a Communist victory in Vietnam would enjoy widespread popular support in the South grew out of the work of writers like Frances FitzGerald...

...However, property must, in the phuc duc scheme, be deserved to be rightfully owned...

...If a morally unfit person, too greedy in seeking immediate wealth or making money through corruption and foreign influence, should come into property, then it is just to strip him of his goods...

...Where does all this leave us...

...Constructive criticism is needed, not only of the morality of foreign involvement, but of its techniques as well...

...The way we went about it may have been wrong-terribly SO in the case of the indiscriminate slaughter of Westmoreland’s search-and-destroy missions and in Johnson’s cruel sacrifice of lower-class draftees to keep influential Americans from experiencing the human cost of his massive escalation -but we didn’t have to help in those ways...

...It did not collapse when American airpower was withdrawn in 1973...

...My old district town of Tam Binh in Vinh Long was attacked...

...Second, Communism does not allow an individual to own personal property...

...Around Saigon, roads north are cut at dusk...

...The result in all probability will be either too much or too little response...

...Had they done so, the people who had volunteered to follow them in the streets would have deserted, fearing that the monks were really more interested in personal achievement than the national weal, If the Communists were genuinely interested in serving the people, they would, in the eyes of the Vietnamese, be willing to consult others and share power...

...Nuclear proliferation and the law of averages governing the percentage of lunatics likely to become rulers mean that we are going at some point to be confronted with an Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, or Papa Doc Duvalier, who either has a big bomb or will soon have the power to make one...

...The se contradictions between Communism and Vietnam’s ethnic tradition explain why South Vietnam held on until there was no hope, why the Viet Cong could be defeated, why Vietnamese fled Communist rule, and why there is continuing resistance to Communist authorities...

...They looked upon the individual Vietnamese, released from excessive Confucian formality, as the means by which Vietnam could be at once Vietnamese and dynamic and modern...

...None of these works has been translated into English or French, so they were unknown to Frances FitzGerald and the other writers who have told us about the Vietnamese culture...

...After a Chinese general had put down a Vietnamese revolt in 39 A. D., he set up a bronze column inscribed with the words: “When this column falls, the state of Ciao Chi (the old Chinese name for Vietnam) will perish...

...If our belated and ill-organized rescue effort was able to save 130,000, imagine how many more who wanted to leave were left behind...

...His current good fortune is therefore rightfully his...

...Instead, they are committed to their own bureaucratic survival and receive almost no constructive criticism from the Left...

...It is too totalitarian for Vietnamese tastes...

...Along with geomancy this facet of phuc duc provided a basis for Vietnam’s traditional peasant nationalism...

...The Vietnamese call this powerful sense of self tu...

...FitzGerald is right about the Confucian mandarins but not about the village culture of the masses...

...What I am saying-as one who worked with the Vietnamese, studied their culture, and learned their language-is that there were large numbers of people in South Vietnam who wanted and deserved our help...

...It did not collapse when Congress severely cut military aid in 1974...

...We need a CIA and a military that are capable of pulling off an Entebbe if they have to...

...The trouble with this view is that it denies us the opportunity to help others as the French helped us in 178 1 , to send our Lord Byrons to tomorrow’s equivalent of the Greece of 1824.‘ More critically, it denies us the right to intervene where intervention may be vital to our survival, which it was not in Vietnam...

...The South Vietnamese who fled before the victorious North were not just a handful of corrupt leaders but hundreds of thousands of people who did not want to live under the Communists...

...Many of those who stayed behind are still resisting the Communists...

...Those parts of the Pike Report that focused on the CIA’S failure to do the things it should be doing were largely ignored by the liberal press...

...Thus to say that rural Vietnamese have no concern for the differences between democracy and totalitarianism is to distort their values...

...In addition to its deterministic aspects, the concept of phuc duc posits another dimension of fate, a capacity, within ourselves to influence the final outcome...

...But because the Left has decided we should never intervene, it has lost interest in how to intervene effectively...

...Let’s accept the fact that intervention can be necessary and concentrate our efforts on turning the military and the CIA into organizations that can deal with threatened danger sensibly and effectively...

...So was the military’s penchant for landing at the wrong place in the case of the Mayaguez and Son Tay...

...Neither the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam nor the related Provisional Revolutionary Government played any role...

...Stephen Young practices law in New York...

...Like the Jews, Vietnamese believe they have a special relationship with a specific homeland sanctified by the highest power in the universe...

...The rural Hoa Hao have always been among the most unconditional antiCommunists...

...The merit of one generation can improve the fortune of succeeding ones, Thus veneration of ancestors in Vietnam arises not so much from authoritarian Chinese notions of blind filial piety, but from a sense of obligation to those whose deeds have brought about one’s present circumstances...

...FitzGerald wrote that the National Liberation Front was a natural extension of an internal dynamic peculiar to the people of South Vietnam...

...The good nationalist officer tried to achieve his objectives without losing a man if he could, preferably by waiting until the enemy had moved on...

...Old money is more correct than new...

...The handful of corrupt lackeys at the top would flee, and the masses, almost all of whom were either members or supporters of the Viet Cong, would seize power...

...Selfish people accumulate only bad Karma...

...Accumulated deeds have the power to set in motion larger movements for the future...

...To deny him his wealth would be to deny virtue itself, but this is what the Communists do...

...The Viet Cong, instead of leading the victorious forces in April 1975, played no role at all...

...This tradition pushes most...

...Plastique is set off in Saigon...

...Communism is an imported western ideology that subjects individuals to the total dominion of the party’s leadership...

...The Buddhist monks who led the movement to overthrow Diem did not seek to convert their street power into political office...

...A Montagnard force is to the north of them...

...Vietnamese tend to resist politicians whom they perceive to be interested in self-aggrandizement...

...Bad Karma in national leadership brings future hardships for the people...

...Geomancy, by giving a collective similarity to the fates of all in a certain territory, creates a distinct homeland for a people...

...Each person has a unique destiny produced by the interaction of three variables: astrology, or the cosmic energy of time...

...In the eleventh century, a Vietnamese prince called on his soldiers not to despair and to fight on against the Chinese because fate had given the Vietnamese a separate territory for their own and would not let the Chinese defeat them...

...It did collapse in 1975 when the hope of future American aid was lost...

...He has no “right” to the property he has acquired...

...The most telling flaw of the Communists is their willingness to shed blood to gain their way...

...Wealth must come on its own accord to be really deserved...

...Of all the political forces loose in South Vietnam, she believed that only the Viet Cong had such a mandate...

...Major bridges south of Saigon have been blown...

...Remember how the American Left predicted the fall would occur...

...The mother is the noi tuong or the “boss of the within...

...His account was published this year in several American newspapers including The New York Times and The Washington Post...

...and tuong so, or the cosmic energy of our bodies...

...All of this has been acknowleged indirectly by Saigon radio...

...But because she did not speak Vietnamese or use original Vietnamese materials in her research, FitzGerald failed to take into account Vietnamese popular culture...

...Their cash assets were confiscated through an exchange of currency...

...FitzGerald’s vision of Vietnam gives a central role to the Confucian mandarin tradition...

...Throw Awav the Rind Finally, Communism dictates that everyone follow the orders of the party’s leaders, while phuc due demands that true moral authority allows each person to achieve his own private ends...

...But granted that we could have helped and helped effectively in Vietnam, why bother to make the point now...

...First, Communism leaves no room for free expression of the self...

...Curiously enough, there is some interesting evidence for my view in the way the South fell...

...Sit back and wait for the blast...

...In effect, FitzGerald argues that the Communists are modem Confucians...