Vietnam

Being an amateur historian and given the current rise in media attention being paid to the Vietnam war, mainly due to analogies to the Iraq war, I would like to take a minute to review that war and people’s perception of it. The Vietnam war is one of the most well documented wars, so it is difficult to get a sordid perception of it without acknowledging some kind of overt perceptual bias is at play. That bias is what leads most Americans took look back at the Vietnam war with shame, thinking things like we shouldn’t have been there, it was none of our business, that we were interfering with a people’s right to self determination, that all we did was shoot up villagers and farmers, etc etc. The Vietnam war, as most of us know, saw 57,000 Americans killed. A few people might know that the war killed about 1.5 million people, mostly soldiers of North Vietnam. But fewer still know the horrible price the people of Indochina paid eventually. If we are going to learn lessons from our past, it is important to know the reality of the past, to have a set of facts that are empirically verifiable and accurate. America was not defeated by ‘farmers with sticks on bicycles’ as I overheard one visitor to the Vietnam war memorial last summer mention, instead the people of South Vietnam were defeated by the Soviet Union and narrow sightedness and moral relativism by the American people.

America did not lose the Vietnam war.
Any cursory examination of the Vietnam War will reveal this. The last US combat troops left Vietnam in March of 1973, (go ahead, look it up) and the numbers deployed had been continually declining before that point under Nixon’s Vietnamization program. However, Siagon fell to the communists on April 30 1975, almost two years later, and this was with no help from America at all. The real losers of the Vietnam War were the millions and millions of people who lived in South Vietnam. America’s part in that fate was depraved indifference.

The Vietnam war and the Korean War
People who despised the Vietnam War hate to think how similar these two wars war, because in the later our cause was successful and it became a clear example of what would have happened had we stuck it through with the Vietnamese people instead of abandoning them in their darkest hour. Consider that both cultures were very different to us, but in both the cultures of the North and the South were very similar. In both cases the communist aggressors were backed by a major communist power and they were invading and attempting to forcible convert their southern counterpart to communism. In both cases the west helped to defend a much more legitimate nation from a much less legitimate one. Both southern countries were ruled by crappy dictators (Sigmen Rhee in South Korea and Diem in South Vietnam) but in both cases those dictators were orders of magnitude more civil than their northern counterparts, who killed millions (Kim Il Sung in North Korea and Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam) In the Korean war, the cause of freedom, capitalism, and democracy won, and today South Korea is a progressive liberal democracy with one of the fastest growing economies in the world and with the 11th largest economy in the world. In Vietnam, our cause lost, and freedom, democracy, and capitalism lost out to communism, murder, and oppression. Vietnam is still a brutally poor country and has one of the most repressive governments in the world. North Korea is probably *the worst* country on this planet. But the outcome of the Korean War tells a chilling tale, with very little continual military support the Communist northern aggressors have been held back for 50 years. In South Vietnam, much the same could have happened, since with NO support, South Vietnam fended off the soviet backed North for two years. One can only sadly wonder how much a little bit of material aide would have gone in protecting South Vietnam from the North.

Iraq is not Vietnam
The Iraq war bears little resemblance to Vietnam if you actually know anything about either. In the sense that they are a different country that we went to and fought a battle, they are the same, but that is about where the similarities end. North Vietnam was backed by the Soviet Union, who supplied tanks, Ak47’s, anti aircraft guns, artillery, grenades, millions of land mines, etc etc. At the height of the Vietnam War records disclosed since the collapse of the Soviet Union reveal that the USSR was spending more on Vietnam than every other soviet client state combined. Estimates suggest as much as 10% of its GDP was going to support North Vietnam. By contrast, WWII saw the United States expend 6% of it’s GDP on the war effort at its height. North Vietnam was an aggressive expansionist murderous communist state, all clearly evidenced by the large numbers of people killed in the North under it’s rule, in the South after the fall of Saigon, and in its subsequent aggressions against Laos and Cambodia, where the North Vietnamese helped the most murderous leader in the history of the world, Pol Pot, come to power. None of this would have probably happened had the US continued to back Vietnam, even only with material aide. Iraq, by contrast, was ruled by an isolated murderous tyrant, it is not backed by a world super power. If there is a lesson to learn from Vietnam applicable to the current situation in Iraq, it is to clearly understand the consequences of abandonment. In Vietnam it led to the murder of 7.5 million people. In Iraq? Hopefully we will not find out.

We were not infringing on self determination
Many people assert that our involvement in South Vietnam was blocking a people’s right to self determination. However, this is far from what was going on and what happened. Since the Soviet Union provided the primary military backing to Ho Chi Minh’s communists, there was little self determination going on. The people of South Vietnam clearly demonstrated this when they had an 80% voter turnout in 1978. In fact, we were helping a people defend a country they loved. More South Vietnamese soldiers died defending South Vietnam than French soldiers died defending France in WWII. To suggest that the North, which had a larger population, and the South, which had a smaller population, engage in a vote to determine the future of the South and whether they would be communist is a disgusting corruption of the concept of voting and certainly not ‘self determination’ if you give any meaning to the word self. You can not vote away people’s rights, no matter what the majority is. Never mind the notorious 100% voter turnouts in communist elections (where, amazingly, everyone votes communist!)

After the fall of Saigon
The most important part of the story lost on the mainstream is what happened in Indochina after the fall of Saigon. The North Vietnamese instilled a brutal government on the people of the South, executing anyone who fought for the South and making it illegal to even portray them in a positive light. The brutal oppression of the people of the North continued, with the government even establishing ‘death quotas’ where 10% of the population had to be executed as ‘counter revolutionaries’ 1.5 million South Vietnamese people fled, fearing that communist onslaught. Probably over 1 million of them were lost at sea, and these ‘boat people’ were harassed and rejected on every shore they tried to land. Eventually the UN pulled their refugee status and sent many back to the murderous country they fled. While revisionists in the west were still making fun of the ‘domino theory’ the people of Laos fell to communist expansionism and then the North Vietnamese turned their Soviet armament over to Pol Pot and his ‘red Cambodians’ (The Khmere rouge) This rag tag group, now well armed and funded, overthrew the pro-western Lon Nol who had recently been abandoned by the US under congressional decree, which made it illegal to give material aide to any nation in southeast Asia. The people of Cambodia would fare much worse than those of Vietnam. Pol Pot tried to enact his communist utopia by destroying cities, killing anyone who had western influence, could speak multiple languages, had any kind of an education, or had any money. In all nearly 3 million people would be killed out of a population of 7 million. All with North Vietnamese arms, tanks, and supplies, which came from the Soviet Union. Eventually the North Vietnamese overthrew Pol Pot and instilled a slightly less murderous regime in his place. In all some 7.5 million people would be killed directly or indirectly by the North Vietnamese government.

“For the South Vietnamese, our precipitate withdrawal would inevitably allow the Communists to repeat the massacres which followed their takeover in the North 15 years before; They then murdered more than 50,000 people and hundreds of thousands more died in slave labor camps. We saw a prelude of what would happen in South Vietnam when the Communists entered the city of Hue last year. During their brief rule there, there was a bloody reign of terror in which 3,000 civilians were clubbed, shot to death, and buried in mass graves. With the sudden collapse of our support, these atrocities of Hue would become the nightmare of the entire nation “ – President Richard Nixon, 1969
Regards,

Michael