Further reflectons on Uwe Siemon-Netto, Gen. Giap and recent American wars
I recently blogged on a piece by Uwe Siemon-Netto on the insight into the democratic psyche which led North Vietnam's Gen.Vo Ngyen Giap to victory over the United States in the Vietnam War. Upon further reflection, though, it seems to me that two caveats need to be added to the point that democratic societies- as demonstrated by the Vietnam debacle, the current debate over our involvement in Afghanistan, and even our apparent victory in Iraq- lack the stomach for long-term sacrifice and commitment necessary to win conflicts not obviously and immediately related to their own national survival."No matter how well we do on the battlefield, some day we're going to have to go home- and they're still going to be there."
--Unidentified junior NSA staffer to National Security Advisor Walt Rostow on why he was not cheered by "good news" from Vietnam. Cited by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest
One of my pet peeves when it comes to Vietnam is the myth- quite popular in conservative circles, both in the United States and elsewhere- that if only we somehow had summoned the will to continue our commitment, we could have won there. That view demonstrates an utter failure to appreciate the nature of both our involvement and the real reason why it failed.
We never decided to fight a war in Vietnam. There was never a "Pearl Harbor moment," a conscious summoning of the national resolve to pay a recognized price to achieve a specific and clearly-visualized result. Rather, what we signed on for was a supportive role in a struggle in which we would theoretically help others to win a victory which was, in the last analysis, theirs, and not ours, to win. In Vietnam- as proved not to be the case in Iraq, but may well be the case in Afghanistan-we set out to help someone else fight a war, and ended up fighting it ourselves. The fact that the struggle degenerated into a war between the United States on one hand (with South Vietnam playing a secondary role) and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong on the other is what doomed us. At no point did we bargain for such a struggle. Instead, the idea was always that it would be the United States which would play the secondary and supporting role, and the South Vietnamese, who- as even Lyndon Johnson at his most detached from reality was lucid enough to observe- would finally have to win or lose the war themselves.
It was advisers, and not combat troops as such , which the United States initially sent to Vietnam. Our status there morphed into the role of major combatant, rather than merely supporter of the South Vietnamese, over time and despite our own intentions. The "advisers" wound up actually waging the war. while a series of corrupt, incompetent, and less than democratic regimes in Saigon utterly failed to hold up their end of the bargain.
We never decided to fight a war in Vietnam. There was never a "Pearl Harbor moment," a conscious summoning of the national resolve to pay a recognized price to achieve a specific and clearly-visualized result. Rather, what we signed on for was a supportive role in a struggle in which we would theoretically help others to win a victory which was, in the last analysis, theirs, and not ours, to win. In Vietnam- as proved not to be the case in Iraq, but may well be the case in Afghanistan-we set out to help someone else fight a war, and ended up fighting it ourselves. The fact that the struggle degenerated into a war between the United States on one hand (with South Vietnam playing a secondary role) and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong on the other is what doomed us. At no point did we bargain for such a struggle. Instead, the idea was always that it would be the United States which would play the secondary and supporting role, and the South Vietnamese, who- as even Lyndon Johnson at his most detached from reality was lucid enough to observe- would finally have to win or lose the war themselves.
It was advisers, and not combat troops as such , which the United States initially sent to Vietnam. Our status there morphed into the role of major combatant, rather than merely supporter of the South Vietnamese, over time and despite our own intentions. The "advisers" wound up actually waging the war. while a series of corrupt, incompetent, and less than democratic regimes in Saigon utterly failed to hold up their end of the bargain.
To understand why, it is necessary to review a history with which Americans- especially on the Right- are mostly unacquainted. It's important to bear in mind that while there was precedent in the history of Indochina for Vietnam to be split into three national entities- Annam, Tonkin, and Cochin China were their traditional designations- there was no real basis for dividing it into two. Neither ethnic, historic, or political justification existed for such an entity as South Vietnam. Migrations throughout the area had so blended the ethnic, religious and cultural demography of the region that it would be hard to see any but the most arbitrary basis for treating the region as anything but that which the French had treated it as throughout their long colonial rule there: a single entity, French Indochina.
When Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Giap defeated the French at Dien Ben Phu, it is certainly the case that their ideological Communism was a major issue in the South, where a large Catholic population helped make the population less receptive to the ideology of the Viet Minh than they were north of the Seventeenth Parallel.. The 1954 Geneva Accords contemplated a plebiscite throughout the region to decide whether a truce line at the Seventeenth Parallel should become an international border, and a wholly new entity- South Vietnam- would be created, more for ideological than for ethnic or historic reasons.
It is true that the South was less populous than the North, and that a plebiscite throughout the whole Vietnamese nation would likely have been decided by the way the vote went in the North. In a totalitarian state, there was little doubt as to how the vote would go there. Despite provisions for the plebiscite to be internationally supervised, the West viewed the possibility of a fair outcome with grave suspicion. Yet one glaring fact remains, and cannot be overlooked: both President Eisenhower and President Kennedy conceded quite frankly that had the plebiscite been held, and held freely, Ho and the Viet Minh would have won a crushing majority. President Eisenhower actually estimated that majority at at least ninety percent.
The North's greater population would not have decided a fair plebiscite. The national aspirations of a third-world people long colonized by the West would have been the decisive factor. The "nation" of South Vietnam was a wholly artificial entity, finally arising out of the will, not of the South Vietnamese, but of the United States and the West, which managed to ensure that the plebiscite was never held. In the last analysis, we lost in Vietnam because the people of South Vietnam never developed the national will (or identity) to win the war even with our help. The problem was not, as the Siemon-Netto article seems to suggest, that the United States experienced a failure of the will; we never contemplated being one of the main combatants in a long-term war in the first place. Our role from the beginning was, as we saw it, to provide support to the South Vietnamese in a struggle which, in the last analysis, they never had anything resembling the requisite will to win.
Could the South have finally triumphed if only we had held out a year or two longer, and not cut off our support? Perhaps. But I see no convincing evidence to that effect. We will never know whether the South would have summoned the will to win the war had our support for them continued at previous levels for a few years more. One thing is sure, though: the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong would still have been there no matter when we left, and unless the South Vietnamese as a people cared enough to alter it by their own efforts, the result of the war would have been the same.
To assume that for some reason this would suddenly and miraculously have happened if only we had stuck around a little longer smacks of the kind of rationalization which defeated nations often find- if necessary creating them out of whole cloth- in the face of humiliating defeats. Which brings us to the second caveat: the conservative myth to the contrary, the defeat of the United States in Vietnam was no more than Germany's defeat in World War I the result of being "stabbed in the back" at home. It was finally due to the failure of the Saigon regime to rally the people of South Vietnam behind it strongly enough to make South Vietnam- from the beginning an artificial state- a viable nation.
We need to be very clear about this: in Iraq and Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, the United States went to war, not to fight as a major combatant, but rather to provide support for indigenous forces which would finally have to create a national government with our help, and rally the nation's people to victory. Our apparent victory in Iraq is due to the fact that, against all odds and despite the predictions of practically everyone when the war began, the Iraqi people have apparently succeeded- enabling us, in turn, to succeed in the mission we originally signed on for. Our stomach for a protracted conflict was beside the point: the point is that our engagement in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Vietnam was predicated on the assumption that such a conflict would be unnecessary; that our presence, rather than being required to actually win the war, would merely create the conditions under which our allies could win it. Our defeat in Vietnam- and the currently dubious state of affair in Afghanistan- both came out of situations in which native governments were not able to achieve what the people and the new, democratic government of Iraq achieved: the creation of a stable and competent national authority able to rally the nation behind it and assume the major responsibility for the final outcome which the initial American involvement was intended, not to achieve, but merely to enable. We were defeated in Vietnam, as we well may be in Iraq, by having as our ally a regime (or series of regimes) more dedicated to personal enrichment than the development of national institutions, and animated not by idealism but by pervasive and cynical corruption.
The late Chicago columnist Mike Royko once suggested that the city motto of my home town- Urbs in horto ("City in a Garden") should be changed to Ubi est mea? ("Where's mine?"). The latter was the E pluribus unam of South Vietnam, just as it shows depressing signs of having become that of Afghanistan.
I think that there remains a lesson to be learned from Gen. Giap's observation about democracies lacking the stomach for long, drawn-out wars in which their national security is not in dramatic and immediate danger- but not, perhaps, exactly the lesson Uwe Siemon-Netto draws from it. True enough, our enemies, from the Taliban to Osama bin Laden, have made no secret of the fact that they are counting on precisely the weakness in the democratic will to which Gen. Giap pointed to enable them to triumph over us. The larger picture- the ongoing struggle against Islamofascism over the decades, as contrasted with the immediate military situation in Afghanistan or any other specific theatre of that struggle- demands that we ourselves be aware of the tendency of democratic societies to lose their stomach for what can come to seem individually to be mere brush fire wars, fought on the opposite side of the globe to no end which immediately seems to affect us either way back home. That tendency is a grievous danger. Well does Siemon-Netto warn us that unless we combat it, it may well prove our undoing in the long-term struggle with the enemies of freedom and American values which, the siren song of isolationism to the contrary, is simply not a struggle we can forgo.
But the real danger the Vietnam experience should warn us against is that of "mission creep." It is one thing to support a viable potential democratic nation in its struggle for freedom, if only as a hard-headed measure to counteract the global machinations of our adversaries. But "nation-building" is a dicey enterprise. It seems to have succeeded in Iraq. It failed in Vietnam, and its success or failure in Afghanistan remains open to question.
We need to count the cost before going to war, to have our goals clear in our own minds, and be absolutely certain that they are modest enough to be achievable before the phenomenon Gen. Giap wrote about can set in. Given the cost our nation selflessly paid in Vietnam for the sake of those who simply did not value their own cause as strongly as we did, to accuse the United States of having not done enough is not merely wrong-headed. It is not merely silly. It borders on the obscene. It is an insult to the cost we did pay, and can only come of a skewed, revisionist, and fundamentally unjust reading of history.
The fundamental lesson of Vietnam- and of Iraq and perhaps Afghanistan as well- is not that we are psychologically unfit to wage geopolitical war against the enemies of freedom and of our own national interest, suffering from a kind of national ADHD which deprives us of the ability to see our military efforts through. It is that that our decision to involve ourselves in such wars needs at every stage to involve what the war in Vietnam classically did not involve: a conscious, thoughtful commitment rooted in a realistic and pragmatic assessment of what the cost is going to be, a conscious and lucid national decision to pay that cost- and a judicious assessment of whether the will and the institutions of those on whose behalf we send our young men and women into harms way are sufficient to enable them to achieve with our help a victory which it is finally theirs, and not ours, to win.
The fundamental lesson of Vietnam- and of Iraq and perhaps Afghanistan as well- is not that we are psychologically unfit to wage geopolitical war against the enemies of freedom and of our own national interest, suffering from a kind of national ADHD which deprives us of the ability to see our military efforts through. It is that that our decision to involve ourselves in such wars needs at every stage to involve what the war in Vietnam classically did not involve: a conscious, thoughtful commitment rooted in a realistic and pragmatic assessment of what the cost is going to be, a conscious and lucid national decision to pay that cost- and a judicious assessment of whether the will and the institutions of those on whose behalf we send our young men and women into harms way are sufficient to enable them to achieve with our help a victory which it is finally theirs, and not ours, to win.
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