Analogies, Slogans That Led Us to War

Twenty-five years ago, the Vietnam War came to a sudden end when the North Vietnamese captured Saigon. According to news reports, Vietnam will celebrate the anniversary with fireworks and an elephant parade in Ho Chi Minh City--formerly Saigon.

The U.S. State Department, however, has instructed American diplomats not to comment on wartime events but instead focus on the reconciliation process. The American media is following a similar path, descending on the country to uncover its budding capitalists and to comment on American investments.

America’s longest war deserves better memory and recognition. The State Department, of course, has its own agenda, if not its own memory problems. The anniversary should give us pause to rethink the war, particularly the assumptions and strategic considerations that brought about our involvement.

American policy in Southeast Asia was drawn as an analogue to the European experience. But it was premised on false assumptions, empty slogans and, above all, bad history.

In Europe, we had created NATO, a treaty organization composed of mature nations that willingly joined the defensive alliance. The goal was to meet the threat of communist expansionism.

Asia was another matter. President Eisenhower’s secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, nurtured the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, a loose alliance that included emerging, unstable nations, which we never formally joined. Nevertheless, we provided protective guarantees even to such nonmember states as South Vietnam.

The immediate enemy there was “Red China,” which policymakers perceived to be a satellite of Moscow. The State Department’s mind-set was frozen in the belief that any incident, any gesture with possible anti-American connotations, had been choreographed in Beijing.

Having largely purged itself of knowledgeable China experts, thanks to McCarthyism, the department’s statements in the 1960s seemed oblivious to a millennium of virulent hostility between the Chinese and the Vietnamese--a hostility that continues to haunt relations between the two nations. Firm in the faith that Beijing controlled events in Asia, we easily swallowed whole the “domino theory”: If Laos fell, then Vietnam would. If Vietnam fell, then Malaysia and the Philippines would. Then Japan, and so on.

In May 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed any political decision to hold Southeast Asia required that U.S. forces be deployed immediately to South Vietnam. By 1962, the military had fully endorsed the domino theory, with the warm support of President Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. Rusk had served his apprenticeship in the State Department when the communists triumphed in China in 1949. Asked then if the U.S. would recognize Beijing, Rusk insisted that the regime did not pass the first test: It was not Chinese--meaning, of course, that it existed to serve the Soviets.

Rusk and his cohorts regularly invoked the “Munich analogy.” In 1938, weak, poorly armed Western nations had bowed to Adolf Hitler’s dismembering of the Czechoslovakian state; certainly, the United States was not about to intervene. Despite Winston Churchill’s denunciation of Western appeasement at the time, we generally recognized after World War II that Western resistance would not have deterred Hitler. But throughout the Vietnam War, American leaders invoked “Munich” and “appeasement” as slogans to resist any weakening of the nation’s commitment to defend its “free world” allies in Southeast Asia. They applied oversimplified lessons of the past to a quite different Cold War situation.

A quarter-century ago, the communists overran South Vietnam. But Japan, the Philippines and the beaches of La Jolla remain free of communist domination. No dominoes fell. The supreme irony is that Vietnam had very little to do with the larger conflict of the Cold War after all. Neither Moscow nor Beijing controlled events as much as we were led to believe.

Communism won its military victory in Vietnam, but in the long run, communism lost. As foreign and native capitalists permeate the country, Western consumer culture is the apparent victor. Globalization might turn out to give us what napalm failed to give us.

Twenty-five years after our withdrawal from Saigon, the meaninglessness of the war is apparent. More than 58,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese died, only to lay bare the flawed political and military goals of both sides.