Here’s a novel idea for John Kerry and all those who gravitate
comfortably toward the notion that Iraq is going to be “another
Vietnam.”
Who says we lost the Vietnam War in the first place?
America considers itself the “loser” in Vietnam because, after
nearly two decades of engagement, we pulled out all our troops in
1973, only to see the North Vietnamese overrun the South. True
enough, we “lost” in the sense that the followers of Ho Chi Minh
achieved their long-sought goal of unifying the country under
Communism.
But that only considers short-term objectives. What was our
overall goal in Vietnam? It was to block the advance of Communism
in Southeast Asia and halt the spread of Marxism all over the
world. We won that war hands down. And we won in large part
because we resisted North Vietnam’s takeover of the South
for so long. We showed other Asian countries that Communism could
be resisted and gave them time to shore up their defenses. Except
for Cambodia, which represented the last, ghoulish expiration of
Asian Marxism, no other country fell to guerrillas.
Look at the map today. Vietnam is an island of poverty in a sea
of rising free-market countries. The Vietnamese themselves are
trying to join the world trading economy as fast as they can. Their
handicap is that they spent 40 years building a totalitarian
dictatorship that they still find difficult to dismantle. Far from
being the “vanguard” of Southeast Asia, Vietnam is now the rear
guard.
Other Asian countries are prospering precisely to the degree
they resisted Communism in the 1960s. The domino theory — forever
derided by the intelligentsia of the era — was absolutely correct.
Because they produce so little material satisfaction at home,
Communist societies were always geared for conquest. Had the North
Vietnamese marched into Saigon in 1965, they would have quickly
spread their minions into Thailand, Burma, and Malaysia. A large
Communist guerrilla movement was already operating in Thailand
during the Vietnam War and that country would have been the next
domino to fall.
Instead, because we stood our ground for ten years, these
countries were able to stabilize themselves. The turning point came
in 1966, when Indonesian’s PKI, the largest Communist party in the
world outside Russian and China, tried to engineer a coup against
President Sukarno. With American support, General Suharto, a leader
of the military, beat back the attempt in the “Year of Living
Dangerously.” The bloodshed was appalling — an estimated 500,000
to 1 million killed — and General Suharto turned out to be just
another right-wing authoritarian. But freedom was set in
motion.Today Indonesia is the world’s largest Islamic
democracy.
The important thing is that the Communist tide was stemmed.
Before Suharto’s coup, Indonesian soldiers were already engaging
British and Malaysian soldiers in a contest for Singapore. Had
Communism won the day in Indonesia, it is doubtful that any of the
“Asian tigers” would exist today.
The Vietnam War, of course, was fought in the shadow of the Cold
War. Half the world’s people were already under Communism. The
Soviet Union had enough nuclear arms to destroy us seven times over
and China was poised with millions of foot soldiers waiting to
cross the border as they had in Korea. Those who think we could
have won the war if we had just bombed Hanoi a little harder
consistently ignore the threat of a wider war.
As it happened, President Nixon initiated his rapprochement with
China well before we left Vietnam. This severely curtailed the
chances of any Long March through Southeast Asia. The only domino
that fell was Cambodian, where the Khmer Rouge created such hell on
earth that the Vietnamese felt compelled to expel them in 1978.
Meantime, Vietnam was purging the Boat People, the
more-than-a-million ethnic Chinese whose mistreatment so angered
the Chinese that they invaded North Vietnam in 1979. Southeast
Asian Communism eventually choked on its own vomit.
So we did not “win” the Vietnam War in the sense that we ended
up taking control of the region. Nor did we prevent another of the
holocausts that were such a normal part of Communism. (The Chinese
and Russians killed countless more in subjecting their own
peasantries.) But we did prevent Communism from spreading beyond
the old French Indo-China. That was our objective. Having been
stalled, Communism was set up for the knockout blow when President
Ronald Reagan went on the offensive in the 1980s.
It’s an important lesson to remember in Iraq. We’re not there to
kill Mujahedin or take Fallujah or secure oil fields — although
any of those might surely help. We are there to set up stable
democratic systems in the Middle East.
We held the line against militant Communism and we can do the
same against militant Islam. Presidential nominee John Kerry was
part of it. He can feel proud of his country.
