American Internationalists and Vietnam - Essay Example

The Vietnam War Sixteen years have passed since that extraordinary day in Saigon ending America's longest war. The helicopters that evacuated the American embassy just ahead of onrushing North Vietnamese troops heralded a new round of conflict, no less painful: How best to understand the meaning of the war, the groups who managed, fought and opposed it, and how -- if at all -- to derive lessons from the prolonged ordeal? Americans have had problems facing these issues, mainly because of short historical memories, but also because policymakers considered these questions detrimental to rebuilding the nation's military establishment for its struggle against Soviet global expansion. Barnet argues that the United States "managed" rather than "fought" the war in Vietnam. Both Whigs and Tories sought not revolution, but reform, a far more difficult task. American purpose became revolutionary when it sought to build a nation, and when the US military proved ill-equipped to pursue this goal at the same time that it sought to pacify Vietnam through protracted warfare. As the conflict grew increasingly problematic, necessitating improvisation, Whigs and Tories alike became "extremists" in their insistence on the necessity of achieving their goal as quickly as possible. Where both groups agreed on military security as the prime goal in Vietnam, they differed on the means to achieve this. Whigs like Roger Hilsman and Henry Cabot Lodge emphasized the need to work from the top to secure political liberty --an intangible, Hatcher suggests, that bullets could neither create nor destroy. Tories like Johnson and Robert McNamara stressed the necessity of working from the bottom of society--creating a solid economic infrastructure before worrying about constitutions, elections, or political corruption. The Whigs were also minimalists in their attitude toward using force to achieve this security, while Hatcher finds the Tories willing to employ all means to keep the enemy away from South Vietnam's fixed economic assets--but not to provoke intervention by the Soviet Union and/or China. Significant overlap occurred between Whig and Tory views, but discontinuities made the war unwinnable as early as January 1, 1965. Neither Kennedy and Lodge, nor Johnson and Tory ambassador Maxwell Taylor, ever identified the major problem Americans faced in Vietnam--locating the point at which the South Vietnamese leadership connected to the peasant mass. Had Washington done so, it might have thought twice about removing support for Diem late in 1963. This decision, taken by the N.S.C. against the advice of the C.I.A., introduced chronic instability into South Vietnam's politics--along with a bewildering succession of bakufu ("tent government") leaders who looked to increase their own power and fortune, rather than to win the hearts and minds of their people--whom Hatcher (after Eric Hobsbawm) suggestively calls "primitive rebels." Conversely, Ho understood this problem. His success was reflected in his ability to reverse Clauswitz's fabled dictum: In Vietnam, war was the continuation of politics by other means. While Ho utilized the N.L.F. to convince the populace that its interests would not be served by the South Vietnamese generals and their American patrons, L.B.J. utilized the N.S.C.-- not to discover more about the "ever-changing client"--but to help him win the 1964 presidential election. Hatcher condemns this malfeasance, but finds it consistent with further presidential duplicity during and after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Moreover, the author suggests, L.B.J. missed a good chance after his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater to embrace a neutralist solution in Vietnam. Victory there was not necessary to containment. In contrast to the Vietnam-era N.S.C. managers, earlier policy-makers like George Kennan, Paul Nitze, and Clark Clifford were cautious men who minimized risks and knew how to "lose small." Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight Eisenhower shared this sense of limitation, but their successors did not. The N.S.C. during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sought victory in Vietnam on three connected fronts--military, economic, and political--and they desired it quickly. Tories especially experimented with several economic programs and achieved some success in improving living conditions. But the contradictions that characterized these efforts, and the split within the Tory camp on the question of land redistribution, proved their undoing. As one glaring contradiction, Hatcher points to the billions of dollars the Tories spent trying to construct an economic infrastructure, and the billions of dollars the military spent trying to destroy it--because the enemy was smart enough to use that structure for concealment. This the author indicates, was the prime reason for the phrase that became a prime refrain for war critics -"destroying a country in order to save it." American mismanagement is best understood in broad economic terms. Like James William Gibson, Hatcher condemns the "body count"-the military's notorious accounting procedure to gauge progress in this war of attrition. If one adds the approximately $135 billion in American military expenditures between 1965 and 1972, and another four billion in economic assistance, and divides that total ($139 billion) by the number of North Vietnam and N.L.F. deaths (400,000), the macabre cost/benefits analysis works out to each dead enemy being worth $337,500. Hatcher compares this figure to the estimated worth of a Vietnamese peasant, expressed in terms of yearly income-$42.00 (U.S.). And when Dean Rusk deemed each dead Viet Cong worth $50,000, then the cost overrun--per enemy--approached $300,000! Nation-making thus collapsed on both individual and systemic levels. Liberal-internationalists not only erred in assuming that they could bring modernization quickly to Southeast Asia; they compounded their error by seeking to redefine Vietnam's economy in American terms--conceiving of South Vietnam as if it were an integrated political community, which it was not; replacing historic family-oriented farms with larger agricultural units; and ignoring the Vietnam peasantry's historic ties with the land. Instructively, when the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was launched in 1967 to replace SEATO, the United States was not invited to join. This critique of the American effort in Southeast Asia is helpful in several ways. Like many recent writers, Barnet considers the notion of a "Vietnam War" misleading--part of the public relations effort by internationalists to define the conflict as a "limited war." In fact, from the early 1960s the conflict remains best understood as a general, Southeast-Asian war. If Hatcher condemns the Vietnam War as the most imperfect of American wars, James William Gibson asks sarcastically how the United States could lose a "perfect" war. More radical than Hatcher's analysis, though bearing interesting similarities, The Perfect War builds on recent studies by Gabriel Kolko and Loren Baritz, utilizes cultural insights of Michel Foucault and Frances FitzGerald, and is situated clearly within the tradition of C. Wright Mills. Gibson levels a relentless critique at "the double reality" of the Vietnam War--the real war fought in Southeast Asia, and the war that appeared on paper in Washington. The author seeks to clarify this difference according to what he terms the tensions between power and knowledge at a deep structural level of logic Here he stresses what Foucault calls "regimes" of power and knowledge, and though he remains vague on defining the United States "power structure," Gibson leaves no doubt that the scientific-technological "managers" who came to Washington with Kennedy defined the parameters in which the war was fought. Barnet assumptions guiding these elite dated from before the Second World War, when the federal government intervened radically in the nation's economy. The state's reorganization of production facilities to carry on total war continued into the Cold War and absorbed corporate America with its emphasis upon scientific management and statistical technique. Since 1945, policymakers assumed that technology and managerial skills could restructure the world and transform emerging nations. By the early 1950s American security managers defined foreign relations increasingly in terms derived from the physical sciences, economics, and management. As a "regime" of knowledge and power, unfortunately, this view of reality constituted a closed set of references that could not measure the enemy's war system with its primitive agriculture and scant industrial base. Jungle trails, tunnels, bicycles, and, above all, the peasant social relationships that served the enemy so well did not fit within the system of American "Techno-war." Throughout the 1950s American policy makers rejected cultural pluralism and explained Vietnam through metaphors like the "domino theory," "cork in the bottle," or "chain reaction." They failed to see that Vietnam was not a great laboratory for social scientists like Professor Wesley Fishel of Michigan State, who tried to reorganize Vietnamese public and policy administration, or like Kennedy advisers McNamara and Walt W. Rostow, who believed that the transformation of Vietnamese into consumers would integrate that country into the global marketplace and provide immunity against communism. Ironically, quantification proved the undoing of the American war effort. The United States' huge technological superiority, especially its bombing, never weakened Ho's resolve to fight until independence. American helicopters, the most prestigious of martial artifacts, did not decide the ground war. Nor did super-sophisticated American communications technology prevent the enemy from using its own simple surveillance to nullify U.S. plans. Three-quarters of all ground encounters in the war came at the instigation of the N.L.F. or North Vietnamese. American and A.R.V.N. small unit operations resulted in a minute percentage of contacts. If the United States defined progress as the conquest of nature by technology, its foe reversed that definition: advancement signified nature's triumph over technology. The N.L.F.'s close relationship with the earth ensured its success, a point the "business managers" who directed the war and the "migrant labour force" that fought it never understood. From the start the managers depended upon inferential statistics, and in the process recalled Mark Twain's condemnation of "lies, damn lies, and statistics." There were too few internal critics like Thomas Thayer of the Army's Office of Systems Analysis, who suggested in 1968 that the body count was a fraud and that the adversary might fight for thirty more years before its manpower evaporated. In fact, Gibson shows, the Army created bodies the way Tammany Hall delivered votes to the Democratic Party in the late-nineteenth century. The difference between the real war and the paper edifice in Washington and Saigon produced false reports, introduced an Orwellian "doublespeak," and created pervasive disenchantment among American soldiers. Black market corruption (which led so much U.S. war materiel to end up in V.C. hands), useless weapons (the M-16 was called the "Mattel" for its unreliability), and widespread self-mutilation, drug use, and fragging at the front all attest to internal contradictions, not external forces, that undercut the military. Like Hatcher--but with far more vitriol--Gibson criticizes the American effort at pacification and nation-building. This "other" war tried to transform Vietnam into an urbanized consumer culture, but proved as disastrous as the military conflict it accompanied. The introduction of American materiel. techniques, and attitudes only accelerated the destruction. Crime proved the common denominator of most aid programs, with pilferage, budget padding, and black market activity all fuelling the growth of the Commodities Import "Program budget--from $95 million in 1964, to $350 million in 1966, and to $750 million in 1970. Gibson's evidence shows that the United States had to "buy" leading Vietnamese civilians and generals to continue the war; that corruption was the cost of Washington's need to maintain the fiction of a "sovereign" South Vietnam government; and that Americans as well as Vietnamese participated in wholesale theft of all sorts of goods intended for use in the war. By 1970, for example, the amount of stolen American rice would have supplied 50,000 ten-ton trucks stretching 238 miles. Barnet criticizes that after the degrading memories of Vietnam were rinsed away in the smolder and blood of the Gulf War and clearly aggressive behavior returned to United States foreign policy the questions once again are commendable of answers. Given Washington's unwillingness to deal constructively on a diplomatic plane with either Vietnam or Cambodia (Kampuchea) in the war's aftermath, and given the choice by the United States to embark on a new globalism-- as evidenced by recent policy toward Central America and the Persian Gulf -- one must conclude on a sombre note. Because of solid work by journalists and historians, the light at the end of the Vietnamese tunnel may burn more brightly. But the message it reveals is that which cartoonist Al Capp penned years ago: "We have met the enemy, and it is us." If scholars have underlined this point, most Americans choose not to confront it. The desire to project anew unlimited American power indicates that ethnocentrism and hubris will cloud memories of the war as they did the war itself. Works Cited Barnet, Richard J., 1973. Roots of War, E Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.A.: Penguin USA, Paperback. James William Gibson, 1988. The Perfect War: The War We Couldn't Lose and How We Did. New York, Random House, x, 523 pp. Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, 1990. The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists and Vietnam. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, ix, 429 pp. Read More