Post by mullauna on Aug 29, 2019 10:57:30 GMT
Zyobot
The war caused somewhere between 2.5 and 4 million deaths – the majority Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao civilians. It left millions more crippled or poisoned, devastated large areas of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and left a legacy of unexploded ordinance that still kills 100 people a year in Laos. The US Army came home riddled with racial conflict, drug abuse and poor discipline that took a decade to remedy. Confidence in US political and military leadership was crippled and has never fully recovered, even under sane and competent presidents, let alone under the current reign of corruption and ineptitude.
* * *
It’s one thing to say that the Vietnam War was based on false premises, misconceived from the start and incompetently conducted from beginning to end. It’s another thing to say that the war was wrong in its intent, which is what I thought in the past. I then accepted, without much hesitation but also without much examination, the dominant view on the left that Vietnam was an imperialist war, fought by “US imperialism” and its “running dogs” (such as Australia) in pursuit of the economic interests of capitalism and the US “ruling class.”
In retrospect, there’s not much evidence to support this view. Vietnam in the 1960s was a poor peasant country (which was, paradoxically, one reason why it was so hard to defeat by the industrial-military methods the US deployed). It had no natural resources of any particular interest to the US or US corporations. Even the French held onto Vietnam largely for prestige reasons, rather than because they derived much profit from it. Unlike France, the US has never been a classic imperialist power. Apart from a brief period around 1900, when it seized the Philippines from Spain, it never had any interest in acquiring a colonial empire.
Of course the sheer size and wealth of the US in the 20th century made it a dominant economic power. It was willing to use small-scale military means to assert its economic interests in Latin America. It was willing to organise coups against governments that it saw as hostile, as in Iran or Chile. But modern capitalism has no need for 19th century territorial empires. The idea that the US would wage a hugely expensive land and air war in a country like Vietnam, in which it had no economic interest at all, for imperialistic reasons, is to my mind absurd. (And yes, I think the idea that US fought the Gulf War or the Iraq War for economic reasons, namely to seize Iraq’s oil, is also absurd. If the US wants Iraqi oil, all it has to do is buy it, as it did both before and after the invasion of Iraq.)
So why did the US fight the Vietnam War? The misconceptions that led successive US administrations to believe that vital political and military (but not economic) interests were at stake in Vietnam. The dominant assumption of the Cold War was that the Soviet Union and China were leading and directing a world-wide communist movement, intent on seizing power and imposing communist dictatorships wherever it could, and that Vietnam, a poor and weak post-colonial state on China’s southern border, was obviously vulnerable to such an expansionist movement.
It’s important to state that while this was an exaggerated and simplistic analysis of both the intentions and the capacity of the Soviet-Chinese bloc (as it then was), it was not an entirely false one. After all, the Soviet Union and China both openly said that they were leading a worldwide revolutionary movement whose victory over capitalism was both inevitable and imminent. In the decades before Vietnam, the communist bloc had given plenty of evidence for this analysis, from the imposition of Soviet rule in eastern Europe to the invasion of South Korea and the communist insurgencies in Malaya and the Philippines, to the successive crises in Berlin, Laos and Cuba. The Vietnamese communists loudly proclaimed their intention of carrying their revolution to the south and imposing communism on the whole country.
It’s also important to acknowledge that although the Americans didn’t know much about Vietnam when they blundered into its war, they were not entirely ignorant. They knew that the communists had imposed a Soviet-style one-party state in the North, complete with labour camps and forced collectivisation. They knew that when the country was partitioned in 1956, over a million people had fled to the South in fear of their lives. The exodus included about 600,000 Catholics, most of the ethnic Chinese and many of the Buddhists, plus those with private property, anyone who held French citizenship, anyone who had worked for the French or served in their army, or anyone who had belonged to a non-communist political party. The US knew that if the communist insurgency in the South succeeded, all these people, and many more besides, would again be in mortal peril. These were not Cold War fantasies, but observable realities.
So even though the Domino Theory and the belief that the Vietnamese communists were simply agents of the Soviets and/or the Chinese were misconceptions, the desire to stop the communists taking over the rest of Vietnam (and also Cambodia and Laos, which were closely linked to it) was a perfectly legitimate and honourable one. A similar objective had after all been successfully achieved in Korea, which is why South Korea today is a prosperous democracy while North Korea is a starving despotism. The fact that in Vietnam this objective was pursued by deeply flawed means, both politically and militarily, resulting in spectacular and very costly failure, does not necessarily invalidate the objective.
The war caused somewhere between 2.5 and 4 million deaths – the majority Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao civilians. It left millions more crippled or poisoned, devastated large areas of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and left a legacy of unexploded ordinance that still kills 100 people a year in Laos. The US Army came home riddled with racial conflict, drug abuse and poor discipline that took a decade to remedy. Confidence in US political and military leadership was crippled and has never fully recovered, even under sane and competent presidents, let alone under the current reign of corruption and ineptitude.
* * *
It’s one thing to say that the Vietnam War was based on false premises, misconceived from the start and incompetently conducted from beginning to end. It’s another thing to say that the war was wrong in its intent, which is what I thought in the past. I then accepted, without much hesitation but also without much examination, the dominant view on the left that Vietnam was an imperialist war, fought by “US imperialism” and its “running dogs” (such as Australia) in pursuit of the economic interests of capitalism and the US “ruling class.”
In retrospect, there’s not much evidence to support this view. Vietnam in the 1960s was a poor peasant country (which was, paradoxically, one reason why it was so hard to defeat by the industrial-military methods the US deployed). It had no natural resources of any particular interest to the US or US corporations. Even the French held onto Vietnam largely for prestige reasons, rather than because they derived much profit from it. Unlike France, the US has never been a classic imperialist power. Apart from a brief period around 1900, when it seized the Philippines from Spain, it never had any interest in acquiring a colonial empire.
Of course the sheer size and wealth of the US in the 20th century made it a dominant economic power. It was willing to use small-scale military means to assert its economic interests in Latin America. It was willing to organise coups against governments that it saw as hostile, as in Iran or Chile. But modern capitalism has no need for 19th century territorial empires. The idea that the US would wage a hugely expensive land and air war in a country like Vietnam, in which it had no economic interest at all, for imperialistic reasons, is to my mind absurd. (And yes, I think the idea that US fought the Gulf War or the Iraq War for economic reasons, namely to seize Iraq’s oil, is also absurd. If the US wants Iraqi oil, all it has to do is buy it, as it did both before and after the invasion of Iraq.)
So why did the US fight the Vietnam War? The misconceptions that led successive US administrations to believe that vital political and military (but not economic) interests were at stake in Vietnam. The dominant assumption of the Cold War was that the Soviet Union and China were leading and directing a world-wide communist movement, intent on seizing power and imposing communist dictatorships wherever it could, and that Vietnam, a poor and weak post-colonial state on China’s southern border, was obviously vulnerable to such an expansionist movement.
It’s important to state that while this was an exaggerated and simplistic analysis of both the intentions and the capacity of the Soviet-Chinese bloc (as it then was), it was not an entirely false one. After all, the Soviet Union and China both openly said that they were leading a worldwide revolutionary movement whose victory over capitalism was both inevitable and imminent. In the decades before Vietnam, the communist bloc had given plenty of evidence for this analysis, from the imposition of Soviet rule in eastern Europe to the invasion of South Korea and the communist insurgencies in Malaya and the Philippines, to the successive crises in Berlin, Laos and Cuba. The Vietnamese communists loudly proclaimed their intention of carrying their revolution to the south and imposing communism on the whole country.
It’s also important to acknowledge that although the Americans didn’t know much about Vietnam when they blundered into its war, they were not entirely ignorant. They knew that the communists had imposed a Soviet-style one-party state in the North, complete with labour camps and forced collectivisation. They knew that when the country was partitioned in 1956, over a million people had fled to the South in fear of their lives. The exodus included about 600,000 Catholics, most of the ethnic Chinese and many of the Buddhists, plus those with private property, anyone who held French citizenship, anyone who had worked for the French or served in their army, or anyone who had belonged to a non-communist political party. The US knew that if the communist insurgency in the South succeeded, all these people, and many more besides, would again be in mortal peril. These were not Cold War fantasies, but observable realities.
So even though the Domino Theory and the belief that the Vietnamese communists were simply agents of the Soviets and/or the Chinese were misconceptions, the desire to stop the communists taking over the rest of Vietnam (and also Cambodia and Laos, which were closely linked to it) was a perfectly legitimate and honourable one. A similar objective had after all been successfully achieved in Korea, which is why South Korea today is a prosperous democracy while North Korea is a starving despotism. The fact that in Vietnam this objective was pursued by deeply flawed means, both politically and militarily, resulting in spectacular and very costly failure, does not necessarily invalidate the objective.