During his presidential debate performances and in subsequent TV interviews, Ron Paul has repeatedly used the unpopular Vietnam war as an example of how much better it is to disengage militarily with other countries and to trade with them, rather than intervene in their internal affairs with military force.
In doing so, he has created the impression that all the bad things of the Vietnam-era only happened while US troops were over there, and that after the withdrawal everything was just fine and dandy.
That, combined with the notoriously short memory of Americans, can lead to a perception that is (a) entirely unfounded, that (b) unnecessarily alienates the considerable Vietnamese refugee population in the United States, and that (c) may end up stifling his - so far meteoric - rise in public recognition during the very early stages of his campaign.
His mistake is, however, not one of endorsing a wrong policy (i.e., non-interventionism), but rather one of failing to point out how horrible the unintended consequences of misguided interventionism really are.
During the Vietnam war, our unprincipled leaders tried to use Vietnam as a staging ground for what they claimed to be a policy designed to halt the “domino effect” of one country after another falling to communist take-overs. However, just like our current leadership’s policy in Iraq, the Vietnam-era policy was not only fundamentally flawed but actually shows itself to be a ruse.
Our current supposed “strategy” of attacking Iraq in order to ostensibly “go on the offensive” against terrorism rather than fighting it at home is immediately exposed as propagandistic garbage by the fact that we are simultaneously leaving the Mexican border open to unimpeded terrorist infiltration.
Likewise, the Vietnam era policy of fighting communism abroad rather than wait until it got here was exposed as a ruse by the fact that the US leadership under JFK had to resort to getting Vietnam’s then-current leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated by Duong Van Minh, the very man whom the US subsequently installed as his successor.
President Diem did not want US troops to be stationed in Vietnam. He only wanted a few military advisors - but that did not coincide with the CFR/Henry Cabot Lodge directed plans our leadership had for his country.
ubsequently, we sent division after division into Vietnam to “fight communism” but prohibited them from seeking out and attacking their Vietcong enemy. Our troops were under orders not to attack but to only retaliate after first drawing enemy fire.
The result are the more than sixty thousand dead US soldiers whom we now annuallycommemorate on Memorial Day.
US even forbade the South Vietnamese Army to ambush and bomb the Ho Chih Minh trail on pains of withholding all further military and financial support if they did.
Had the South Vietnamese military been allowed to do this, they could have successfullydefended the 17st parallel as their border to North Vietnam, and 50,000 US troops and in excess of 500,000 Vietnamese “boat people” killed at sea in the post-war years would still be alive today. They would also very likely still be able to live in freedom, instead of under the brutal communist yoke that still muzzles all opposition today.
Communist Vietnamese military stifles a catholic priest's cries for freedom
For this reason, using Vietnam as an example of how much more beneficial withdrawal from Iraqwill be, rather than letting the country sort out its own internal problems and then trading with it, could be a flawed strategy on Congressman Paul’s part. It gives his interventionist opponents the chance to say “see, I told you he’s wrong. Look what happened to the poor South Vietnamese when we 'cut and ran', back then.”
Because our memories are so short, Americans will not remember what actually happened in Vietnam, and how the very misguided interventionism the neocons are trying to defend today was the root cause of all that gut-wrenching human drama and the horrendous loss of life experienced by all parties.
In other words, Ron Paul is dead-on correct when he points out that we never should have been in Iraq because Al Quaida simply wasn’t there when we attacked. He is dead-on correct when he shows that staying there now will only make things worse, not better, because we have no real enemy over there that can be defeated.
Alex Wallenwein, J.D., is a former attorney in Houston, Texas, and a grass-roots activist for the rule of law and American liberty. He organizes the Houston 4 Ron Paul 2008 Meetup.
To argue that the South Vietnamese Army would have succeeded if only US politicians allowed them to do so is fallacious.
When I returned to the National Security Agency after college (had been there three years while in the Air Force) I was told by an Army major, who had been one of those advisors in the early days of the war, that the South Vietnamese Army didn't have the will to win.
He said that a Vietnamese officer would say (I'm paraphrasing here) that "it is too hot to go on patrol today." Next day: "it isn't hot enough" to go out. Then it would be "that patrol is too close to the river" for safety only to be followed the next day that it was "too far away from the river". Because the South had no interest in winning, US political leaders replaced the advisors with combat troops.
The US went into Vietnam because of our participation in the (now defunct) Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (legal participation, as opposed to Iraq) but for the wrong reason. Treaty called for US to help defend territory of other treaty partners (France was a treaty partner and Vietnam was its "possession") but to intervene in what began as basically a civil war was wrong.
Truman made the treaty, Eisenhower started enforcement with the first advisors and everything got out of hand from then on.
What Americans don't understand is that the Viet Cong were basically South Vietnamese peasants who resented a foreign nation imposing a puppet government on them. They had the backing or acceptance of the majority of the South Vietnamese population, including many in the Army, who basically wanted the foreigners gone and to be reunited with North Vietnam again. They were supported by the North Vietnamese government, but not militarily until near the end.
Only a small portion of the population ~ the ruling-class elites who controlled much of the nation's wealth ~ welcomed us there. That is the same situation we find ourselves in in Iraq. It seems nothing was learned.
by
tabonsell (29 articles, 0 quicklinks, 24 diaries, 261 comments)
on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 6:28:44 PM
If theVietcong were all South Vietnamese peasants and only the "ruling elite" opposed them, then who were the more than 500,000 people who died trying to escape, who risked their very lives, saw their wives and daughters raped and murdered, and then died themselves? All "ruling class elites" I presume, right?
What is your definition of "ruling class elite"? Anyone above a day laborer? Your "facts" betray you.
Alex
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Alex Wallenwein (17 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 15 comments)
on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 9:21:31 PM
The Viet Cong Was A Coalition, not the Evil Commies
The Viet Cong was the military arm of the National Liberation Front, a broad coalition of anti-US and anti-Government forces dominated by the Communists, who, after all, had been the driving force behind the defeat of French colonialism in Vietnam. The Viet Cong always enjoyed strong peasant support overall, while the US Government always conveniently typecast the Viet Cong as the diabolical commies, a projection of pure evil, just as they project the same against "Islamists", or whatever the Hell they call Muslims each week.
Those siding with the Pro-American government were largely from the Catholic minority in Vietnam and that class of entrepreneurs and government workers who were making profits, often obscenely, off the war and/or collaborating with the Americans, as well as certain ethnic groups that the Americans talked into fighting for them. They were all prime candidates to become boat people to avoid being confronted with questioning, arrest and possible incarceration for collaboration, which is a pretty routine consequence of any successful liberation struggle. It sounds better to say you were fleeing tyranny than to say you were fleeing from righteous indignation, which was certainly the case for some of them. Some were genuinely anti-Communist and took principled positions, which should be respected, while many others were just trying to drag their filthy lucre out of Vietnam in the nick of time.
by
Mac McKinney (47 articles, 75 quicklinks, 176 diaries, 1128 comments)
on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 10:06:31 PM
By the way, here is an anecdote about Vietnam. When I was about 16, my Cousin Clarkie from Oklahoma came to visit my family in San Francisco. Actually he was on his way back home from Vietnam. He had been serving there as a Green Beret. When I asked him about the war, expecting him to start speaking with John Wayne-like rhetorical flourishes about the heroic struggle against evil communism, I was utterly surprised when he calmly said we are backing the wrong side, that he respected the Viet Cong as soldiers and personally hated the South Vietnamese Army, explaining that they were so corrupt where he was stationed that when his commanding officer found out about it, they conveniently dropped a mortar on his head, murdering him. This was around 1966-67, before things got much worse.
The Diem government, before Diem was assassinated, was brutally dictatorial and repressive, obsessed with eliminating all opposition, not just the Communists, and literally drove thousands of Vietnamese into the arms of the Viet Cong. Diem also grew increasingly dependent on the Americans as his dubious popularity all but disappeared. The US itself, with its typical racist, zenophobic and brutal aplomb, alienated countless more Vietnamese (the Gooks), perhaps even wondering why so many peasants should turn against such wonderful benefactors who were killing, forcibly relocating or imprisoning tens of thousands of them for their own good.
The American Military had one arm tied behind its back with at worst an invisible thread, because we in reality dropped more tonnage on Vietnam than we did in all of WWII, slaughtered some two to three million people, created vast free-fire zones where anything moving could be slain, and routinely massacred villagers, Lieutenant Calley being but the tip of the iceberg. Meanwhile, Special Forces often raided North Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia. Some kind of restraint when you are carrying on secret wars in two other countries!
The only restraints were pragmatic ones in the face of tit for tat escalation by the Russians and the Chinese. From what I was told in the Marine Corps or read elsewhere, tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers were sent to North Vietnam as support troops, and volunteers were fighting alongside the North Vietnamese army in the south. An out and out invasion of the North would have likely meant a direct confrontation with Chinese troops. Can you imagine yet another war with China, not to mention the Russian military presence in tne North? This is what the White House had to think about, when they were actually thinking.
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Mac McKinney (47 articles, 75 quicklinks, 176 diaries, 1128 comments)
on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 at 11:34:00 PM
Americans' knowledge of the Vietnam era is widely ignorant. Some of what I read here is true, some is not.
Whenever a people try to extricate themselves from the oppression of a ruling elite (and the government bureaucrats who work for the elite) they are denounced in America as "communists." If our Founders were alive today and seeking the revolution they had in the 18th century, they would be labeled "communist."
My knowledge and "facts" about the Vietnam War era came from years of direct involvement with the intelligence effort of that period.
When I worked at the National Security Agency, I wrote a weekly report to the assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon detailing recent activities in the war. When I questioned one analyst about "any direct" involvement of the Chinese in South Vietnam, he curly replied that there "was no Chinese involvement". Since that was his job, I had no reason to question his knowledge. And, it is well known that China and Vietnam were ancient enemies, despite them having similar types of government in the eyes of Americans. China would, of course, endorse the Vietnamese effort because of Western involvement in their part of the world and because the US was blindly "anti-communist" without really knowing what communism was.
What most Americans knew about the "Marxist" world is what American propagandists told them and what most people in the Marxist world knew about the West is what Marxist propagandists told them. People in the West may have had a slight advantage because we still had an independent press back then that sometimes worked around the propaganda, but it was still up to the people to read the press and not just listen to government propaganda.
by
tabonsell (29 articles, 0 quicklinks, 24 diaries, 261 comments)
on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 at 5:23:25 PM
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