In the past week, the criticisms swirling around the President’s
VFW speech have provided much less insight into the President or
the speech than into the critics. Rather than address the speech’s
central issue — the 1975 debate over the ramifications of
abandoning Vietnam — these individuals have tried to push their
own views on Iraq by mentioning other aspects of Vietnam.
Emblematic of the attackers was Senator John Kerry, who said that
the President’s comparison of Vietnam with Iraq was “irresponsible”
and “ignorant of the realities of both of those wars.” Kerry
explained that in Iraq, as in Vietnam, “more American soldiers are
being sent to fight and die in a civil war we can’t stop and an
insurgency we can’t bomb into submission.” Senator Ted Kennedy,
another opponent of both wars, backed this interpretation with the
comment that the United States lost the Vietnam War because the
South Vietnamese government “lacked sufficient legitimacy with its
people.”
Kerry and Kennedy missed key facts about Vietnam, some of them
long obvious, others newly emerged from historical studies. The
New York Times and NBC News and CNN and so on missed them,
too, because they chose to rely on outdated historians or their own
prejudices. The insurgency in Vietnam was dead by 1971, thanks to
South Vietnam’s armed forces, America’s forces, and a South
Vietnamese civilian population that overwhelmingly viewed the South
Vietnamese government as legitimate. During 1972, after all
American combat units had departed, South Vietnamese forces
defeated a massive North Vietnamese invasion with the help of
American air power. The so-called Christmas bombing of 1972 bombed
North Vietnam into submission, resulting in a peace treaty. Had the
antiwar Congress not slashed aid to South Vietnam and prohibited
the use of American aircraft over Vietnamese skies, the South
Vietnamese probably could have repulsed the North Vietnamese when
they violated the peace treaty in 1975.
The statements of Kerry and Kennedy lure the public’s gaze away
from the speech’s main point — that antiwar Americans believed
that the Vietnamese and Cambodian people would stop suffering if
America stopped supporting the anti-Communist forces. It is very
much in the Senators’ interests, for both espoused this view during
the war. In his famous Dick Cavett Show appearance, Kerry said,
“There is no interest on the part of the North Vietnamese to try to
massacre the people once people have agreed to withdraw.” In early
1975, Kennedy objected to President Ford’s request of $300 million
in military aid for South Vietnam and $220 million for Cambodia by
arguing that this aid would “fuel the war.”
Another scathing critic of the VFW speech who held such views in
1975 is Stanley Karnow, author of an outdated but still widely read
history of the Vietnam War. “The ‘loss’ of Cambodia,” Karnow said,
would be “the salvation of the Cambodians.” Senator Christopher
Dodd, then a member of the House, claimed in 1975, “The greatest
gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not
guns. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending
military aid now.”
Similar comments have recently been heard on Iraq from John
Murtha and Bill Richardson and other Democrats. Until recently,
they were heard from many more, but some Party leaders have had the
sense to recognize that hasty withdrawal would entail exorbitant
human and strategic costs and that cutting aid to besieged allies
would put blame for the disaster onto the cutters.
Today’s Congressional Democrats are relying heavily on another
talking point of their Vietnam-era predecessors — that if they
controlled the White House, they could quickly negotiate an end to
the war. Democrats then and now believed they would succeed on
account of their diplomatic skills, their goodwill, and their
recognition that aggressive U.S. military action discourages the
enemy from negotiating. Recent revelations from the Vietnamese
Communist side have done grievous injury to these notions. When
America shied from tough military action — in 1964, 1968, and 1975
— Hanoi tried to win the war rapidly by military means. When
America and South Vietnam employed their military power effectively
— in 1963 and 1972 — the North Vietnamese developed a serious
interest in negotiations.
In response to the President’s comments about abandoning
Vietnam, some have argued that abandonment was not that important
because Vietnam is now a nice capitalist country. This argument
shows a callousness toward the loss of human life (in the late
1970s) and the harsh repression of political dissent (from 1975 to
today) that is thoroughly out of keeping with how these people
normally view international affairs. Hysterical hatred of the Iraq
War and President Bush seems the only possible explanation for such
an inconsistency. The present-day capitalist economy of Vietnam,
moreover, is not reason to doubt the wisdom of U.S. involvement.
Instead, it is reason to doubt the wisdom of North Vietnamese
involvement. While America was fighting for capitalism in South
Vietnam, North Vietnam was fighting to destroy it.
It is also a mistake to assert, as many have asserted in recent
days, that the United States never should have intervened in
Vietnam in the first place because Vietnam was predestined to
become capitalist. In my research, I found that American
intervention in Vietnam saved Indonesia from going Communist in
1965. It probably also prevented countries such as Thailand, Japan,
the Philippines, and Malaysia from becoming Communist or
pro-Communist. Furthermore, American intervention fractured the
Sino-North Vietnamese alliance and tamed China. In the absence of
these developments, socialism might well have persisted in Vietnam
and other Asian countries to this day.
President Bush has shown that he is up to speed on the latest
historical discoveries on Vietnam. Those who are inclined to
disagree should first get up to speed themselves.
