Copyright © 1972 by Nina S. Adams
The Last Line of Defense by Nina S. Adams
The Pentagon study is very much Hke the American
operation it tries to describe—an enormous, overpowering, resourceful and
misdirected effort which could crush by its sheer weight if it failed to
convince by its arguments. Diligently rather than perceptively compiled, the
Defense Department History of U.S. Decisionmaking on Vietnam is not a sudden
revelation of truth, not a history of the war and certainly not a history of Vietnam
although it has been mistaken for a composite of all three. The study’s
significance lies in its initial impact on the public and in the future use of
its documents by historians; it is least valuable for the historical analysis
it purports to contain. The summary sections pull the reader into a maze of
indigestible detail shot through with precisely those simplistic
generalizations which should be challenged by both scholars and activists.
The raw materials, the choice of authors, the
intended Pentagon audience and the methods of research for the study determined
its hypotheses, categories and conclusions. Confined to the available documents
and guided by their own political inclinations, the authors reflect more than
they question the assumptions and biases of earlier decisionmakers. Not
surprisingly, the authors adopted the peculiar Pentagon device of seeking truth
by choosing the middle ground among absurd or badly formulated “options.” As
loyalists writing a work for policymakers to read, the authors omitted the
topics and questions which should form the core of a historical treatment of
American interference in Asia. The study fails as history for it makes no
attempt to deal with the Vietnamese reahty and isolates Vietnam policy entirely
from other American foreign policies and from American history. The result is a
tedious chronicle which makes little sense. Just like successive American
administrations, the Pentagon authors pay no attention to the character of the
Indochinese resistance organizations whose blending of political and military
concerns into revolutionary warfare has been the key to their success against
superior forces since 1945. Rejecting any notion of the United States as a
power with systemic and agency interests, the authors passively accept the
conventional rhetoric which conceals rather than exposes the roots of American
foreign policy.
The Pentagon team was not commissioned to explore the
past objectively but to answer the question “What went wrong?” The study’s
message, “Do it differently,” has been heeded by the Nixon administration,
which ignored the study itself. We are now in the Third Indochina War,
characterized by reliance on mercenaries, computerized warfare, massive
bombing, greater secrecy and intensified destruction. The new warfare, aimed at
total destruction of revolutionary movements by complete elimination of
population, differs from earlier combat in methods, not in aims. It can be
carried on without loss of American life or the damaging publicity that
hampered earlier operations. The Nixon administration escalated at the same
time and in part because the conviction was spreading that the war was winding
down. The information and analyses needed to understand the new face of war
have already appeared; we don’t have to wait for the declassification of
documents in order to knowledgably oppose what is happening now.
The Pentagon materials which have been released to
the public are useful for showing the depth of self-and public deception of
which the government is capable. But a careful reading of the entire work will
yield little information that was not published before nor will it offer any
protection for the public from future lies that cover up aggression in Asia and
elsewhere. The critiques in the study stick closely to instrumental matters
such as non-coordination among departments or the failure to analyze
intelligence reports and dissect policy proposals. The chronologies, maps and
outlines of major agreements which the study offers or reproduces from unclassified
sources are themselves too incomplete or biased to be used even in settling
cocktail-party arguments. On its own the effort is significantly incomplete,
for the writers were not able to use White House records and had only limited
access to State Department materials. The authors neither interviewed key
individuals nor examined their records. Scholarly and journalistic accounts of
events in the United States and in Indochina were rarely and selectively
consulted; the implications and substance of critics’ accounts were completely
overlooked.
The Pentagon Papers can be of value to three groups,
as much for what they omit as for what Ihey reveal. Diplomatic historians and
Washington-watchers who scrutinize the mechanisms which operate in the closed
world and uptighter minds of “security managers” will find the documents useful
to validate or inspire more rigorous examinations of the past. The naive
scholars who dream that a literate elite will accept their sophisticated advice
on how to deal with a complex world will get, hopefully, a beneficial shock at
the crudity of thought which the documents reveal. The antiwar movement will
find respectable and irrefutable backing for all that it has been saying for
the past eight years. Among these revelations are details of covert operations,
anti-Chinese fanaticism and examples of brinksmanship which very few critics
have dared to allege.
But the most important question to ask is, what use
are the papers to the citizen whose tax dollars supported both the writing of
the study and the war itself? Frankly, no one without unlimited leisure, a
scholarly background and enormous patience will get much from the study, and it
has little that could not be found elsewhere in infinitely more readable form. [Instead
of extensive footnotes and bibliography, have appended to this article a
topical list of books on Indochina, the war, and the issues have tried to
raise.] Skimming even a portion of the work will reveal to Americans what the
Indochinese, judging by actions rather than words, have known all along.
Successive administrations lied to the American
public about everything from weaponry to negotiations, POWs to potential
bloodbaths, escalation to Vietnamization and back again. Other essays in Volume
V of the Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers deal with these and related
issues. The Pentagon study does, however, succeed in emphasizing for those who
have forgotten or who never knew John Foster Dulles or the old Nixon, how
dangerously rigid the crusaders are, how much they rely on military operations
and how broadly they define “national security.” In looking at the study as a
historical account, one is struck by the extent to which it is a political work
in which a few isolatable assumptions have simplified the issues and created
gaps in both history and analysis. The Pentagon authors assume that their
readers share the same anti-Communist view that pervades the documents and thus
will accept their simple retrospective rationalizations. But communism and
conspiracy alone cannot explain why the United States is so involved in Asia or
why the United States cannot prevail in Indochina. Fervent anticommunism is not
a strong enough alibi for the American persistence in finding reasons to pursue
the battle for a “free” Vietnam.
Not surprisingly, a spinoff from publication of the
study has been a series of articles by former government loyalists debating
whether the Vietnam involvement was generated by presidential optimism or
pessimism. This limited argument on defining a “quagmire” fits neatly into the
Pentagon study’s circumscribed framework of discussion. The result is that
secondary issues, such as the accuracy of intelligence estimates, can be aired
endlessly; no man or institution is touched by guilt for war crimes; and the
main issues are again overlooked by the public, which quite sensibly ignores
the debate.
The documents and the Pentagon authors take for
granted several assumptions which are worth noting. First they repeat that the
United States was “unexpectedly pressed into world leadership” after World War
II and that the United States continues, unselfishly, to shoulder that
responsibility today. The study contends that the United States had difficulty
in amassing the knowledge and sophistication needed to deal with individual
problems such as the Vietnamese revolution. Furthermore, the authors believe
that due to American naivete and the focus on European affairs, American
policies were so ambivalent that the United States remained basically
uninvolved in most of Asia’s postwar conflicts. The Pentagon authors are most
anxious to prove that once the United States began to involve itself in Asian
affairs, its goals were altruistic and commendable, but it often chose the
wrong methods, relying too heavily on military , rather than political tools.
Even so, the Pentagon writers feel that American aid and counterinsurgency
programs, particularly those of the 1950s, would have been successful except
for the stubbornness of first the French and later Ngo , Dinh Diem, both of
whom took advantage of American generosity, bureaucratic confusion and blind
anti-Communist reflexes.
In summarizing the sad history of Vietnam in the late
1940s, the Pentagon authors offer a set of hindsight questions that reveal both
their biases and their limits as historical analysts.
For example, the U.S. could have asked itself—”Did we
really have to support France in Southeast Asia in order to support a
noncommunist France internally and in Europe?” Another question we could have
asked ourselves was—”If the U.S. choice in Vietnam really came down to either French
colonialism or Ho Chi Minh, should Ho automatically be excluded?” Again, “If
the U.S. choice was to be France, did France have any real chance of
succeeding, and if so, at what cost?” (Gravel edition, I:51).
Apart from the major unasked question, “Why couldn’t
the Pentagon authors see the many other questions which should be asked?” the
questions themselves make sense only in the fantasy world created by the study.
In that world, the United States, unlike other powers, had no systemic
interests, no desire to expand its power, no domestic or foreign restraints on
its thinking or its options. The Pentagon authors, dealing solely with specific
memoranda rather than contemporary American conceptions of the world, see no
link between the foreignpolicy decisions they regret and the factors which
determined them from 1940 to 1968. American opposition to communism in Europe
is neither explained nor placed in its historical setting. While the study
deals at length with President Roosevelt’s vague ideas about the future of the
French colonies, it ignores, among many other things, the American wartime
decision to oppose communism in Europe by supporting the Sicilian and Corsican
Mafias against anti-German resistance groups in Italy and France. In recounting
what some high-level decisionmakers were pontificating rather than what
lower-level officials were doing, the study retains the same level of ignorance
as the worst of the documents.
Hoping to prove the case for American “ambivalence”
the study ignores contemporary accounts, Office of Strategic Services
evaluations and historians’ treatments of the complex and explosive Indochinese
situation after World War II. Since the writers pay little attention to either
the French or the Vietnamese postures from 1945 to 1950, the reader has no way
of judging the realism of American decisions to permit the British to reoccupy
Saigon for the French, to ignore appeals for recognition from the Ho Chi Minh
government, or to offer France the aid which freed her to begin colonial
reconquest. The study seems to reaffirm the correctness of these decisions by
summarizing events incompletely from a more sophisticated but still
unmistakably anti-Communist point of view. Thus the authors submit their study
of “Ho Chi Minh: Asian Tito?” and regretfully conclude that he never would have
panned out in that role. Unlike most histories of the period, the Pentagon
study contends that American actions and refusals to take action did not
influence events in Asia; in fact they did, although America was indeed far
from preoccupied with the region. For the Pentagon authors, America was “neutral”
because in Indochina “it regarded the war as fundamentally a matter for French
resolution” (Gravel ed., I:28). To most observers, this was a pro-French stand.
Examining the Vietnamese situation from 1950 (when
the study mistakenly assumes American involvement to have begun) to 1954, the
Pentagon authors distort the history of the period and focus their attention
again on American assumptions of omnipotence and international guardianship.
It has been argued that even as the U.S. began
supporting the French in Indochina, the U.S. missed opportunities to bring
peace, stability and independence to Vietnam. The issues arise [sic] from the
belief on the part of some critics that (a) the U.S. made no attempt to seek
out and support a democratic-nationalist alternative in Vietnam; and (b) the
U.S. commanded, but did not use, leverage to move the French toward granting
genuine Vietnamese independence (Gravel ed., I:53. Emphasis added).
At no time did the United States have the power or
the knowledge to force any solution which the Vietnamese found unacceptable.
The Pentagon fantasy embodied in this passage is significant for the implicit
racism which then and later characterized American decisionmaking on Vietnam;
neither the documents nor, the study can accept that the Vietnamese themselves,
or for that matter the French themselves, could know, judge, and act intelligently
to preserve their interests. Having used none of the available histories of the
French colonial war, the Vietnamese armed struggle or the background to either,
the Pentagon authors simplify the issues down to supposed American failures to
force accommodation to our guidance and ideas. In the retrospective Pentagon
study, the defeat of American allies—who, through an inexplicable lack of
vision insisted on doing much of their own planning—was no surprise except
insofar as the Americans had been hoodwinked into accepting falsely optimistic
reports of forthcoming victories.
The problems raised by the Pentagon study’s narrow
focus can be seen again in the analysis of “the policy context” in 1950.
Events in China of 1948 and 1949 brought the United
States to a new Ij awareness of the vigor of communism in Asia, and to a sense
of urgency over its containment. U.S. policy instruments developed to meet
unequivocal communist challenges in Europe were applied to the problem of the
Far East. Concurrent with the development of NATO, a U.S. search began for collective
security in Asia; economic and military assistance programs were inaugurated;
and the Truman Doctrine acquired wholly new dimensions by extension into
regions where the European empires were being dismantled (Gravel ed., I:34-35).
It is true that the victory of Mao Tse-tung’s
revolutionary forces in the final Chinese civil war of 1945 to 1949 showed the
strength of an armed Communist movement in Asia. But certainly the U.S. State
Department, with excellent reports at its disposal, knew that Chiang Kai-shek’s
government had lost because of its own corruption, inefficiency and brutality.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson, for example, explained at a press conference
on January 20, 1950, “What has happened is ... that the patience of the Chinese
people in their misery has ended. They did not bother to overthrow this
government. There was simply nothing to overthrow. They simply ignored it
throughout the country.”
There exist innumerable excellent discussions of the
period by eyewitnesses, those who studied the official U.S. documents, and by
the State Department itself, which issued The China White Paper of 1950
analyzing carefully why U.S. support could not have saved Chiang’s regime. All
of these accounts have been ignored by the Pentagon authors, who seem totally
unaware of the American experience in China and how it might have been weighed
against the later intervention in Vietnam.
While the study implies that the United States had
stayed aloof from the Chinese conflict, almost as “neutral” as in Vietnam in
the same years, American support prolonged Chiang’s hopeless effort to redeem
his politically bankrupt regime. Reports from Americans, including military
observers, that the Chinese Communists, like the Viet Minh, were honest,
popular and effective leaders, were disregarded. More than sheeplike
anticommunism was operating here. American interest in China had never been one
of benevolence alone. In 1945 the Americans were still hoping for internal reforms
promoting liberal capitalism which would sustain a state where American
business could profit and expand. In China in the 1940s as in Vietnam in the
1950s the United States chose to bolster a client leadership which compromised
its nationalism by allowing American access; the alternative, never seriously
considered, was to risk dealing with a revolutionary force which would soon
reject American businessmen, missionaries and political advisers.
The Pentagon study fails most strikingly to deal with
the facts and dynamics of American history. The United States did not begin a
search for collective security in Asia in 1948; the Open Door and tutelage of
China in uneasy alliance with Japan had been American policies since the end of
the nineteenth century. The Truman Doctrine was expanding naturally as
opportunities opened in previously restricted colonial areas. Compared to the
other nations involved, the United States emerged from the Second World War
untouched and even strengthl ened, knowing itself to be the strongest power in
the world. The American military, having allied with private industry,
scientists and scholars, resisted being dismantled and instead found threats to
justify its continued expansion at home and abroad. The Pentagon’s greatest achievement
was in public relations, for it convinced a largely willing Congress that a war
machine could be purely defensive and subject to control. The self-interest of
military and civilian groups seeking to maximize influence and profits was covered
by an ideological gloss of defensive anticommunism.
Although the study sees the Korean War as the major
turning point in American Far Eastern policy, it can be argued that American
actions in Asia follow a . consistent line from the early 1800s through the 1970s.
The United States was always concerned with the free movement of American
capital overseas, the sustenance of the domestic economy by making profits
abroad, and the expansion of markets. Government acquiescence to and support of
these goals, if necessary by military force, was confirmed again as policy but
dubbed with a new title after 1945. National Security Council memorandum 68
(not included in any , edition of the Pentagon study), which was approved in
April 1950 by President Truman before the outbreak of the Korean War, “envisioned
quadrupling the Defense budget to an unprecedented peacetime figure of 10% of
the Gross National Product or about $50 billion.” (1)
Colonialism had become costly and obsolete because of
the changes which had been climaxed by the Second World War. The American
method was that of indirect political and economic manipulation. The meaning
and uses of tools like the Agency for International Development, the
International Monetary Fund and the CIA were concealed behind a screen of rhetoric
which worked quite well in the United States; it never deceived those opposing
the recolonization of their countries.
With the United States embarked on this international
course, all threats to American access if not hegemony became “Communist
subversion,” and America’s original pragmatic interests disappeared into a
crusade so overladen with emotionalism that far too many people, including the
policymakers, forgot where it all had started. In reading the documents, one
finds only scattered references to America’s fundamental interests in Southeast
Asia. But one does find sufficient acknowledgment that the United States,
rather than taking a belatedly defensive stand against communism in Indochina,
was thinking in terms of the global economy and the need to protect economic
interests. In reading the study based on the documents, it is clear that the
Pentagon authors accept both the notion of American “rights” and the legitimacy
of the rhetoric which extends them.
Occasionally one has to unravel American projections
and read backwards from statements of the motives they attribute to the
Russians, Chinese and nationalist movements. For example, the National Security
Council study completed in the fall of 1949 asserted that while almost no
Southeast Asian nation “is fit to govern itself,” most would soon do so. The
resulting problem of “instability” would have to be solved “on a
non-imperialist plane.” The memorandum continued:
In any event, colonial-nationalist conflict provides
a fertile field for subversive communist activities, and it is now clear that
southeast Asia is the target of a coordinated off’ensive directed by the
Kremlin. In seeking to gain control of southeast Asia, the Kremlin is motivated
in part by a desire to acquire southeast Asia’s resources and communications
lines, and to deny them to us (Gravel ed., I:37).
Having accepted that America had certain “rights” in
the world, signs of opposition were taken as offensive threats stemming from a
conspiratorial base. It then became easy for the United States to plan “forward
deployment containment” while honestly viewing it as a solely defensive measure
having little to do with the original decision to expand. Only once having
postulated the need for an American empire in the Pacific Basin could the Joint
Chiefs of Staff define the situation in April 1950 as follows:
1. In light of U.S. strategic concepts, the integrity
of the offshore island chain from Japan to Indochina is of critical strategic
importance to the United States.
2. The mainland states of Southeast Asia also are at
present of critical strategic importance to the United States because:
a. They are the major sources of certain strategic
materials required for the completion of United States stock pile projects.
b. The area is a crossroad of communications (Gravel
ed., I:364).
The National Security Council staff study dated
February 13, 1952, went into greater detail about Southeast Asia’s role as the
principal supplier of rubber, tin and petroleum for the United States and
Europe. Strategically, and of course thinking only in purely defensive terms,
Communist domination of mainland Southeast Asia would
place unfriendly forces astride the most direct and best-developed sea and air
routes between the Western Pacific and India and the Near East.... Besides
disrupting established lines of communication in the area, the denial of actual
military facilities in mainland Southeast Asia ... would compel the utilization
of less desirable peripheral bases (Gravel ed., I:376).
I am not attempting to argue simplistically that an
American hunger for raw materials or air routes led the United States to
underwrite 80 percent of the costs of the Vietnam war after 1950. Like the
Pentagon authors, note in most of the pre-1950 documents included in the study
very little direct mention of Vietnam. But what find, and the Pentagon authors
choose to misunderstand, is the expansionist tone and international focus, the
drive to contain communism but for reasons which go beyond simple ideological
fervor.
So little have the Pentagon authors studied Indochina
that they even accept the totally false statement of General Jean de Lattre de
Tassigny in 1951, who asserted that the French were no longer making profits in
Vietnam and that they had no interests to safeguard there except Western
civilization, which was under attack by communism (Gravel ed., I:67). De Lattre
spoke at a time when both the French and the Americans had a strong economic
stake in Indochina; both continued to make money, for example, from the
Cochin-Chinese plantations into which the Viet Minh did not seriously penetrate
until very late 1953. Although the war cost the French and American taxpayers
ten times the value of French investments in Indochina, the private interests
which had made most of the investments kept reaping profits right to the bitter
end. Many French colons, banks, and backers in metropolitan France made their
fortunes from the piaster exchange racket and from loopholes in aid arrangements.
As for the Americans, they soon began to take over
the predominant economic role from the French, who kept a close and unfriendly
eye on American information-gathering, investment, and use of the aid program
(60 percent of whose funds were devoted to importing commodities to generate
counterpart funds). Imports into Indochina from the United States went from 2
million piasters in 1936 to 298 million piasters in 1948. In that year the
United States supplied 42 percent of the imports coming into the Far East.
American investment in Indochina shot up from $8,854,000 in 1946 to $13,550,000
in 1950. (2) The United States did not see a specific economic stake in
Indochina and thus move in to support the French. But by a happy coincidence
that has been noted in every other similar situation, the decision to resist
communism brought other benefits in its wake.
Neither the documents nor the commentary deal with
the attitudes and organization of the allied French or opposing Viet Minh, both
of whom noted and feared the gradual insinuation of America into Vietnam. The
Pentagon study, which postulates and accepts anticommunism as an impetus for
action, does not include any later reassessment of the 1948 State Department
analysis which found “evidence of Kremlin-directed conspiracy ... in virtually
all countries except Vietnam....” The State Department then evaluated the
situation in a way whose defiance of common sense leave to others to explain.
Evaluation. If there is a Moscow-directed conspiracy
in Southeast Asia, Indochina is an anomaly so far. Possible explanations are:
1 . No rigid directives have been issued by Moscow.
2. The Vietnam government considers that it has no
rightist elements that must be purged.
3. The Vietnam Communists are not subservient to the
foreign policies pursued by Moscow.
4. A special dispensation for the Vietnam government
has been arranged in Moscow.
Of these possibilities, the first and the fourth seem
most likely (Gravel ed., I:34).
While the Pentagon authors strongly criticize (but
never probe the reasons for) Dulles’ virulent anticommunism, they fail to
explain the peculiar Franco-American minuet of the early 1950s. France forever
promised more independence to the Associated States of Indochina and the United
States accepted each declaration as a reason to offer more aid to an
anti-Communist rather than colonial war. Here the Pentagon study discusses
America’s poor bargaining behavior and misuse of leverage but fails to realize
that American policy could not have been changed without a major shift in
American thinking about the nature of the world. What eventually altered the
French posture was the course of events in Vietnam, where the French lost to an
opponent whose ideas and ideals they never understood.
The section of the Pentagon study dealing with the
Geneva conference and the diplomatic activities surrounding it concentrates not
on what was occurring but rather on what the documents try to reflect. The
authors wonder if fulfillment of the final settlement might not have been a
good thing, then criticize the Geneva Accords because they “countenanced the
dissociation of the U.S. and of South Vietnam,” and depended on France to
guarantee enforcement. What has struck other historians most about this period
is the stubborn American preparation to continue the war, with help or alone,
in some form or other. The Pentagon study sees only a minimal connection
between the U.S. activities planned and then abandoned, and the difficulties
which the Geneva conference faced.
Buried amid the documents is a highly significant one
which does not appear in the New York Times or U.S. government editions of the
Pentagon Papers. On July 14, 1954, the American, French and English governments
agreed on a secret position paper outlining seven points which would make any
Geneva settlement into one which could be “respected.” The position paper
(which had been discussed by several historians before it appeared in full in
the Gravel edition) specified that the Viet Minh must withdraw from Laos and
Cambodia, that at least southern Vietnam and hopefully an enclave in the
northern deltas should be kept, and that the Indochinese states not accept any
restrictions “materially impairing their capacity to maintain stable
non-communist regimes; and especially restrictions impairing their right to
maintain adequate forces for internal security, to import arms, and to employ
foreign advisers.” Point 4 of the same document stipulated that an agreement
could be “respected” only if it “Does not (repeat } not) contain political
provisions which would risk the loss of the retained area to Communist control”
(Gravel ed., I:555).
The American negotiators at Geneva never grasped the
crux of the matter, which was the continual military setbacks and the total
political defeat which the French were experiencing in Indochina. The Pentagon
authors do not understand it either, which enables them to comment, “The French
had cleverly exploited i| the American assistance program without having
brought in the Americans in full force, yet had also been unable to save Dien
Bien Phu from being overrun on May 7, [1954]” (Gravel ed., I:109). To the
Americans, the French desire to negotiate was evidence solely of a deplorable
lack of backbone. In retrospect the Pentagon authors seem to agree and move
even further into absurdity by allowj ing themselves and the reader to assume
that the South Vietnamese government was then not only independent but also
capable of carrying on the civil war. One of the best Western analysts of the
French Indochina War, the late Bernard Fall, saw the key to France’s defeat in
the loss of almost the entire northern half of North Vietnam in the fall of
1950 and the subsequent French failure to offer a viable political alternative
to the Viet Minh.
For the French, the Indochina War was lost then and
there. That it was allowed to drag on inconclusively for another four years is
a testimony to the shortsightedness of the civilian authorities who were
charged with drawing the political conclusions from the hopeless military
situation. American aid ... was to make no difference whatsoever to the
eventual outcome of the war. (3)
The political and military lessons which Fall and
others, French and Vietnamese, drew from the French experience did not
influence the Americans, who repeated all the French errors more expensively,
extensively and hopelessly. By 1968 neither the American policymakers nor the
Pentagon authors had learned much at all.
The Pentagon study is very coy on the implications of
the American plans to establish SEATO, on the American selection and support of
Ngo Dinh Diem and on the role of the CIA in Saigon during and after the Geneva
conference. Work which has been done on the first two issues and the
revelations in the documents about the third go far to contradict the Pentagon
study’s contention that the United States was merely dubious about, rather than
completely opposed to, not only the conference but its outcome as well. The
only value of the Pentagon study of Geneva is to make even clearer than earlier
accounts why the Viet Minh, who were aware of the real U.S. posture, then and
later doubted the value of negotiated settlements involving the United States
and implemented solely through the good faith of the parties.
The Pentagon account of the immediate post-Geneva
period shows the speed with which the United States forced the French out of
Indochina and the diligence with which they torpedoed the French attempts to
fulfill the accords. By the end of the conference, the first of what was to be
an endless flow of American advisers, researchers and intelHgence agents had
reached Saigon. There they began the process of “nationbuilding,” disregarding
Vietnamese history, culture and political heritages. Vietnam was to become a
living laboratory for social scientists imbued with Cold War liberalism and
fortified by a new vocabulary of social engineering. The few restrictions the
new colonialists faced in Vietnam were not duplicated in Laos, which became
completely an American sphere of influence and a testing ground for new forms
of counterrevolution. The American military arrived in Laos and Vietnam to
build the army and police forces needed to sustain unpopular governments and to
create the “bastions” from which to reconquer northern Vietnam. The Vietnamization
idea of the French, and the further division of ethnic minorities by organizing
special forces and CIA armies from among the Montagnards, were significant
policies in the 1950s although they are not treated at all in the Pentagon
study.
In looking at the years of Ngo Dinh Diem’s presidency
the Pentagon study focuses exclusively on the weaknesses of specific programs
such as pacification (in various guises), which fell apart, in their view,
because America’s “limited partnership” with the Vietnamese took no account of
the difficulties of coordination and the problems of reconciling opposing
objectives. The study does not consider the question of how a nation could be
built from the outside and who the beneficiaries of such a process could be.
Neither the policymakers nor the Pentagon authors choose to recognize that a
neocolonial effort was under way; little was built in Vietnam although specific
industries in the United States profited by supplying commodities for the
import program, arms for the military, and banking facilities to help the
exchanges.
In the Pentagon study, America’s error is seen to
have been solely the selection of the wrong individual, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the
failure after 1963 to find an adequate substitute for that flawed and fallen
protege. Vietnamese and observers from the West have seen instead America’s
role in creating a fatal cycle of dependence. Just as foreign support of a weak
regime could not be sustained in China—where the greater the foreign support
and presence, the weaker the ruling clique became—outside manipulation soon
made the postcolonial state of Vietnam unviable as a nationalist entity. The
greater the foreign support, the less the popular support; the less the ruler’s
feeling of responsibility to his own people, the less he could govern and the
more he needed foreign assistance. At the same time, the foreigners were
trapped into a cycle of frustration and escalation. Each time a program failed
to influence hearts and minds or to fulfifl a given aim, the Americans reached
further into their pocketbooks and bags of tricks to force the result they
desired. When all efforts to win minds failed, the liberal Americans moved
naturally to dominate behavior. In practice this meant the adoption of a genocidal
strategy.
The American preoccupation with dominance in the area
and the tactics chosen to pursue limited and long-term aims were no secret to
the Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians who watched and suffered American
maneuvers. As early as 1958, the Press and Information Department of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hanoi had published, in several languages, a
96-page booklet replete with maps and charts, outlining what they argued was a
longstanding American desire to use Vietnam to protect strategic interests in
and along the coast of Asia. The Vietnamese authors quoted John Foster Dulles,
members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a succession of American generals “advising”
the new anti-Communist armed forces in Saigon. The Vietnamese found ample
documentation in Western journalists’ reports, Saigon newspapers and the
reports of the International Control Commission, which had been established by
the Geneva Accords.
The Vietnamese, because of America’s military focus
in their country, were most aware of the complex group of advisory
organizations which controlled the police, the militia, the air force, the
navy, the army and the paratroops. They followed with close attention as the
Americans built bases, increased arms shipments, and demonstrated their contempt
for the Geneva Accords, which had sought to limit these and to neutralize the
area. The Vietnamese were also aware that the economy in the south was becoming
so closely tied to that of the United States and so dependent on various forms
of aid that self-sufficiency was impossible.
The Pentagon study says little about either the
substance or the implication of this type of “nationbuilding,” even when
discussing “the origins of insurgency in the south.” At the beginning of the
long section concerning 1954 to 1960, the Pentagon authors set the stage for
subsequent distortions of Vietnamese history and continual omission of more
complex analyses.
From the perspective of the United States, the
origins of the insurgency in South Vietnam raise four principal questions:
1. Was the breakdown of the peace of 1954 the fault
of the U.S., or of the ambiguities and loopholes of the Geneva Accords?
2. Was the insurgency in essence an indigenous
rebellion against Ngo Dinh Diem’s oppressive government, transformed by the
intervention of first the U.S., and then the DRV?
3. Or was it, rather, instigated, controlled, and
supported from its inception by Hanoi?
4. When did the U.S. become aware of the Viet Cong
threat to South Vietnam’s internal security, and did it attempt to counter it
with its aid? (Gravel ed., I:242)
The Pentagon analysts, typically, formulate “options”
as interpretations of available evidence; that the DRV intervened in response
to escalation by President Kennedy of attacks on southern resistance forces;
that “the DRV manipulated the entire war. This is the official U.S. position,
and can be supported. Nonetheless, the case is not wholly compelling,
especially for the years 1955-1959”; or that “the DRV seized an opportunity to
enter an ongoing internal war in 1959 prior to, and independent of, U.S.
escalation” (Gravel ed., I:243).
The analyst, having dealt with caution with the
second option to which his boss had always publicly subscribed, then
predictably concludes that the truth lies somewhere between the second and
third options. So much has been written about these issues that it seems
pointless to start balancing evidence again here. But one should note that the
Pentagon questions do not ask what was happening, why the United States felt
compelled to intervene, or how the United States could have acted differently
or not at all.
Constant attention to secondary operational issues is
the hallmark of the Penta-gon study. The authors do not and cannot examine the
unworkability of a situa tion in which the United States chose the political
leader, ran his campaigns, provided his backstairs CIA advisers, staffed his
ministries, armed and trained his troops, set his budget requirements and
income, coordinated his land and industrial policies, developed his factories,
devised his tax schedules, educated his people abroad, wrote his textbooks from
primary school through teachers college, manipulated his currency, and arranged
his relations with neighboring states. The Pentagon authors also cannot grasp
that such a state of affairs could arouse a politically conscious population to
oppose outside manipulation and to struggle for social justice without planning
to launch an attack on Hawaii. The Pentagon study would have been a far more
rewarding work if it had dealt with any of these issues, and a far less
frightening one if the reader had a sense that at least the authors if not the
policymakers were aware of more than trivial implications.
For example, in assessing the reasons for the failure
of pacification, the Pentagon authors tread a thin line between criticizing the
Diem regime and wondering if a well-executed program might have had some
success.
This inconclusive finding, in turn, suggests that the
sequential phases embodied in the doctrine of counterinsurgency may slight some
very important problem areas. The evidence is not sufficient for an indictment;
still less is one able to validate [sic] the counterinsurgent [sic] doctrine
with reference , to a program that failed. The only verdict that may be given at
this time with respect to the validity of the doctrine is that used by Scots
courts—“case not proved” (Gravel ed., II:131).
The chicken-and-egg problem of whether loyalty
precedes security or vice versa, in someone else’s country, is still
unresolved. The unmistakable implication is that experimentation should and
will continue. And that is a lot of the problem : not only with the study but
with the Pentagon.
As the Pentagon study moves through the years, it
becomes more cautious and jargon laden, ending with a total paralysis of the
will to analyze. The short-run, parochial thinking of the Pentagon authors fits
well into the definition C. Wright Mills gave for “crackpot realism,” that is,
the warped self-sustaining logic which keeps catastrophic policies in operation
because they have been in operation. The Pentagon study defends rather than
analyzes how the American system works and reinforces the fallacious belief
that the foreign-policy apparatus was functioning well in the service of noble
causes. Many critics and more and more of the public are beginning to realize
that, on the contrary,
... American foreign policy is all too readily out of
control and aggressive while it defines itself as responsible and defensive.
The other side sees the reality and responds. Failing to recognize this
reality, Americans see the response of others as provocations. (4)
Those who wonder if this is true should look not only
at the wars in Korea and Vietnam, but now in Thailand as well. Since the
American takeover from the British in that traditionally “independent” state,
there has been an increase in the use of Thailand as a base for the war in
Indochina and for the growing American air war in response, it is alleged, to
the provocations of the Thai liberation movement, which seeks to oust a corrupt
and repressive regime.
The Pentagon study, by its emphasis on the technical
knowhow and alleged highmindedness of the American efforts in Vietnam since
1940, contributes directly to an increased American paranoia; if noble,
intelligent programs failed, one must look for enemies and incompetents at home
and abroad who thwarted what would have benefited all. At the same time, in its
massive unreadability, the study strengthens the belief that issues of war and
peace are too complex for common folk to understand. If one survives through
the first two volumes, the glossary needed to cope with the later ones
convinces the reader that only the “experts” can and should determine vital
policies. The study contributes to the view that only those who are “experts”
can criticize the government and, even more dangerously, that the words of “experts”
are the only levers to change society. The Pentagon Papers should on the
contrary be used as evidence to destroy the myth of “expertise.” The contents
of the study make clear that the policymakers, with very little information
that was not available to the public, read little and thought less. Those who
seek to end the war and to change America have thought carefully and read
extensively; but they will not and need not read the Pentagon study.
The bureaucrats who find meaning in the study and
accept its facile excuses for deliberate and destructive policies can in truth
claim to believe what they read. The victims of poverty and racism in America
have heard all the excuses, if not the details, before. Citizens who are
concerned with America’s role in the world need more understanding of the
connections between aggressive foreign policy and domestic repression, between
adventures undertaken to help American capital overseas and neglect of
Americans at home. None of this is to be found in the Pentagon study, which
still does not explain what America did in Asia and why it went so wrong.
The GIs in Vietnam, anxious to leave, are face to
face with what intellectuals only write about. They neither know nor care about
the history of upper-level decisionmaking. Many of them strongly suspect that
what they were fighting for was never worth it. So many of them are responsible
for “war crimes” that the i; term has no meaning. But they have grasped what
most Americans, and particui larly the Pentagon authors, still cannot see; the
whole war is a crime, against them and against the Indochinese people. Why should
it be necessary to experience total immersion in the minutiae of decisionmaking
in order to function as a citizen? Reading the materials which helped trap
Washington into a war that seems as endless as it is destructive seems a poor
way to begin changing policy t or processes.
Appendix
A great many excellent bibliographies on Indochina,
the war, and American foreign policy have appeared in the past few years. am
therefore not attempting here to give more than an outline of the sources on
which rely and the books which will be more valuable to read than the Pentagon
study, regardless of what one has already read.
On Vietnamese history, with attention to indigenous
sources and scholarly criteria, the best works for the period up to 1954 are Le
Thanh Khoi, Le Vietnam: Histoire et Civilisation (Paris: Les Editions de
Minuit, 1955); David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971); Jean Chesneaux, Contribution a I’histoire de la
nation vietnamienne (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1955); and Truong Buu Lam,
Patterns of Vietnamese Response to Foreign Intervention, 1858 to 1900 (New
Haven: Yale Monograph Series #11, 1969). One will also gain a sympathetic understanding
of how the Vietnamese view their own past and use it to build the present in
Nguyen Khac Vien, Experiences Vietnameins (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1968); and
Truong Chinh, The August Revolution (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Press, 1958).
On the roots and history of American foreign policy,
particularly after World War II, the collection edited by William Appleman Williams,
The Shaping of American Diplomacy, and his volume The Contours of American
History are excellent. have also used The Politics of War: The World and United
States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, by Gabriel Kolko (New York: Random House,
1968); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War; and David Horowitz,
From Yalta to Vietnam. One can obtain further background on economic issues
from, among other works, Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1968); and Sidney Lens, The Military-Industrial Complex
(Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1971). A revealing set of discussions and debates on
America’s past and current foreign-policy assumptions appears in Richard
Pfeffer, editor, No More Vietnams? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
Material on the American decision to oppose communism
in Europe and to work through various Mafia groups will be found in Kolko’s The
Politics of War. The connection between Cold War politics, the American heroin
problem and the war in Vietnam is examined and documented in Alfred W. McCoy,
Cathleen Reade McCoy and Leonard P. Adams II, The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia (New York: Harper &Row, 1972).
The best general summary which treats the Vietnamese
issues, French policies and the growth of American intervention is George
McTurnan Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (New York:
Delta, 1969, second edition). For background on Laos and the American war
there, Nina S. Adams and Alfred W. McCoy, editors, Laos: War and Revolution
(New York: Harper & Row, 1970); on Cambodian events, Jonathan S. Grant,
Laurence A. G. Moss and Jonathan Unger, editors, Cambodia: The Widening War in
Indochina (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). The most readable and concise
coverage of the issues is The Indochina Story, by the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (New York: Bantam, 1970).
For the many topics which the Pentagon study omits in
its discussion of the period 1945 to 1954, all the following books (or any one
of them) are highly recommended: Bernard Fall, The Two Vietnams (New York:
Praeger, 1963); Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography (New York:
Random House, 1967); Lucien Bodard, The Quicksand War (Boston: Little, Brown,
1967); Philippe Devillers, Histoire du Vietnam de 1940 a 1952 (Paris: Editions
de Seuil, 1952); Jean Chesneaux, editor. Tradition et revolution au Vietnam
(Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1971).
On French military and political problems in Vietnam,
the works by Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy (Harrisburg: The Stackpole
Company, 1961) and Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (New
York: Vintage, 1966), are fascinating, readable and superbly documented
analyses of what happened and what failed. Another account is by Jules Roy, The
Battle of Dien Bien Phu (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Vietnamese strategy
and military-political thinking are discussed carefully by Georges Boudarel in
the Chesneaux volume mentioned above.
For a balanced account of the Geneva Conference and
the important events which followed: Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacouture, End
of a War: Geneva 1954 (New York: Praeger, 1969). One gets more of a sense of
the conference from the memoirs of Chester Cooper, The Last Crusade, than one
does from the Pentagon account. Reference to the importance of the July 14,
1954, position paper is found in Marek Thee, “Background Notes on the 1954
Geneva Agreements on Laos and the Vientiane Agreements of 1956-1957” in the
volume edited by Adams and McCoy listed above.
My own feeling is that the best book on China, the
events of the 1940s and the American role is Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time
(Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1950) which is the most readable and illuminating
eyewitness report published. Jack Belden’s China Shakes the World explains
clearly why the Chinese Communists operated as they did and why they were
accepted by the population. The period from 1940 to 1948 is dealt with
carefully in Barbara Tuchmann, Stilwell and the American Experience in China.
Herbert Feis, writing from government records as an ex-government official provides
a detailed and useful account of American-Chinese relations in The China Tangle.
One gets a realistic and human account of the meaning of the Chinese revolution
in William Hinton, Fan Shen: Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1969), while America’s perceptions of China are evaluated in the
book America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on American-Asian Relations (New York: Pantheon,
1970).
The growth of the National Liberation Front in
Vietnam has seldom been studied from other than the perspective of the
counterinsurgency expert who inevitably misses the meaning and achievements of
an organized revolutionary movement. Several excellent studies in sympathy with
the Vietnamese and based on accurate reporting and good research have been
written by Wilfred Burchett: The Second Indochina War (New York: International
Publishers, 1970), The Furtive War (New York: Internaj tional Publishers,
1963), and one of the first accounts to appear in English, Mekong Upstream (1957).
There are many excellent works in French, including those already il mentioned.
The Cambodian United National Front of Campuchea was
formed after the American-South Vietnamese invasion of that country in 1970.
Although there are few materials dealing with Cambodia in print, articles
appear frequently in periodicals such as The Guardian (32 West 22 Street, New
York, N.Y. 10010) and The Indochina Chronicle (1332 18 Street N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036). A new and fascinating book on all aspects of Cambodia, with
emphasis on the period after the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, is
Charles Meyer, Derriere le Sourire Khmer (Paris: Plon, 1972). Very few books
have appeared on the current Thai situation, but an excellent background is
Frank C. Darhng, The United States and Thailand (Washington, D.C: Public
Affairs Press, 1966), and articles appear frequently in Asian Releases, the bij
weekly publication of Dispatch News Service (1826 R Street N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20009). Issues in Southeast Asian history and politics appear regularly in
the Bulletin of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (9 Sutter Street, San
Francisco, 94104). The history of American interference in Asia with special
reference to the Philippines is treated well in William Pomeroy, American
Neo-Colonialism in the Philippines (New York: International Publishers, 1969).
The Vietnam Courier and Vietnamese Studies, published
in English in Hanoi, offer readable articles on a wide variety of things
Vietnamese and an important means of learning about past and present events in
all of Vietnam. Both publications are available at university bookstores or
from China Books and Periodicals (2929 24 Street, San Francisco, California
94110). The Foreign Language Publishing House in Hanoi has printed, in French
and in English, The Real and the False Secrets of the Pentagon (Hanoi, Le
Courrier du Viet Nam, 1971), matching revelations from the study with quotations
from Vietnamese leaders speaking soon after the events described in the study,
and long before publication of classified information.
Information on the brutality of the war has long been
available in the United States and much of it has been offered by non-antiwar
writers. Air War, by Frank Harvey, and Gecocide in Indochina, edited by Barry
Weisberg (San Francisco, Canfield Press, 1970), are two of the most convincing
accounts. Vietnamese reports of the suffering caused by the war appear in many
periodicals cited above; in addition, Americans who have worked in Vietnam have
written about what they observed. The best of these IP books is by Don Luce and
John Somer, Vietnam: The Unheard Voices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1969). Discussions of American policies in warfare and strategic aims can be
found in Vietnamese publications such as the DRV Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
La politique d’intervention et d’aggression des Etats-Unis au Sud Vietnam (Hanoi,
1962) and in Neo Lao Hak Sat writings such as Twelve Years of U.S. Imperialist Intervention
and Aggression in Laos (1966). One often learns more details from these than
from Western publications.
Appendix
A great many excellent bibliographies on Indochina,
the war, and American foreign policy have appeared in the past few years. I am
therefore not attempting here to give more than an outline of the sources on
which I rely and the books which will be more valuable to read than the
Pentagon study, regardless of what one has already read.
On Vietnamese history, with attention to indigenous
sources and scholarly criteria, the best works for the period up to 1954 are Le
Thanh Khoi, Le Vietnam: Histoire et Civilisation (Paris: Les Editions de
Minuit, 1955); David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971); Jean Chesneaux, Contribution a I'histoire de la nation
vietnamienne (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1955); and Truong Buu Lam, Patterns of
Vietnamese Response to Foreign Intervention, 1858 to 1900 (New Haven: Yale
Monograph Series #11, 1969). One will also gain a sympathetic understanding of
how the Vietnamese view their own past and use it to build the present in
Nguyen Khac Vien, Experiences Vietnameins (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1968); and
Truong Chinh, The August Revolution (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Press, 1958).
On the roots and history of American foreign policy,
particularly after World War II, the collection edited by William Appleman
Williams, The Shaping of American Diplomacy, and his volume The Contours of
American History are excellent. I have also used The Politics of War: The World
and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, by Gabriel Kolko (New York: Random
House, 1968); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War; and David
Horowitz, From Yalta to Vietnam. One can obtain further background on economic
issues from, among other works, Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1968); and Sidney Lens, The Military-Industrial
Complex (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1971). A revealing set of discussions and
debates on America's past and current foreign-policy assumptions appears in
Richard Pfeffer, editor, No More Vietnams? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
Material on the American decision to oppose communism
in Europe and to work through various Mafia groups will be found in Kolko's The
Politics of War. The connection between Cold War politics, the American heroin
problem and the war in Vietnam is examined and documented in Alfred W. McCoy,
Cathleen Reade McCoy and Leonard P. Adams II, The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia (New York: Harper &Row, 1972).
The best general summary which treats the Vietnamese
issues, French policies and the growth of American intervention is George
McTurnan Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (New York:
Delta, 1969, second edition). For background on Laos and the American war there,
Nina S. Adams and Alfred W. McCoy, editors, Laos: War and Revolution (New York:
Harper & Row, 1970); on Cambodian events, Jonathan S. Grant, Laurence A. G.
Moss and Jonathan Unger, editors, Cambodia: The Widening War in Indochina (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). The most readable and concise coverage of the
issues is The Indochina Story, by the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars
(New York: Bantam, 1970).
For the many topics which the Pentagon study omits in
its discussion of the period 1945 to 1954, all the following books (or any one
of them) are highly recommended: Bernard Fall, The Two Vietnams (New York:
Praeger, 1963); Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography (New York:
Random House, 1967); Lucien Bodard, The Quicksand War (Boston: Little, Brown,
1967); Philippe Devillers, Histoire du Vietnam de 1940 a 1952 (Paris: Editions
de Seuil, 1952); Jean Chesneaux, editor. Tradition et revolution au Vietnam
(Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1971).
On French military and political problems in Vietnam,
the works by Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy (Harrisburg: The Stackpole
Company, 1961) and Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (New
York: Vintage, 1966), are fascinating, readable and superbly documented
analyses of what happened and what failed. Another account is by Jules Roy, The
Battle of Dien Bien Phu (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Vietnamese strategy
and military-political thinking are discussed carefully by Georges Boudarel in
the Chesneaux volume mentioned above.
For a balanced account of the Geneva Conference and
the important events which followed: Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacouture, End
of a War: Geneva 1954 (New York: Praeger, 1969). One gets more of a sense of
the conference from the memoirs of Chester Cooper, The Last Crusade, than one
does from the Pentagon account. Reference to the importance of the July 14,
1954, position paper is found in Marek Thee, "Background Notes on the 1954
Geneva Agreements on Laos and the Vientiane Agreements of 1956-1957" in
the volume edited by Adams and McCoy listed above.
My own feeling is that the best book on China, the
events of the 1940s and the American role is Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time
(Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1950) which is the most readable and illuminating
eyewitness report published. Jack Belden's China Shakes the World explains
clearly why the Chinese Communists operated as they did and why they were
accepted by the population. The period from 1940 to 1948 is dealt with
carefully in Barbara Tuchmann, Stilwell and the American Experience in China.
Herbert Feis, writing from government records as an ex-government official
provides a detailed and useful account of American-Chinese relations in The
China Tangle. One gets a realistic and human account of the meaning of the Chinese
revolution in William Hinton, Fan Shen: Revolution in a Chinese Village (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), while America's perceptions of China are
evaluated in the book America's Asia: Dissenting Essays on American-Asian
Relations (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
The growth of the National Liberation Front in
Vietnam has seldom been studied from other than the perspective of the
counterinsurgency expert who inevitably misses the meaning and achievements of
an organized revolutionary movement. Several excellent studies in sympathy with
the Vietnamese and based on accurate reporting and good research have been
written by Wilfred Burchett: The Second Indochina War (New York: International
Publishers, 1970), The Furtive War (New York: International Publishers, 1963),
and one of the first accounts to appear in English, Mekong Upstream (1957).
There are many excellent works in French, including those already mentioned.
The Cambodian United National Front of Campuchea was
formed after the American-South Vietnamese invasion of that country in 1970.
Although there are few materials dealing with Cambodia in print, articles
appear frequently in periodicals such as The Guardian (32 West 22 Street, New
York, N.Y. 10010) and The Indochina Chronicle (1332 18 Street N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036). A new and fascinating book on all aspects of Cambodia, with
emphasis on the period after the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, is
Charles Meyer, Derriere le Sourire Khmer (Paris: Plon, 1972). Very few books
have appeared on the current Thai situation, but an excellent background is
Frank C. Darhng, The United States and Thailand (Washington, D.C: Public
Affairs Press, 1966), and articles appear frequently in Asian Releases, the biweekly
publication of Dispatch News Service (1826 R Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009).
Issues in Southeast Asian history and politics appear regularly in the Bulletin
of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (9 Sutter Street, San Francisco,
94104). The history of American interference in Asia with special reference to
the Philippines is treated well in William Pomeroy, American Neo-Colonialism in
the Philippines (New York: International Publishers, 1969).
The Vietnam Courier and Vietnamese Studies, published
in English in Hanoi, offer readable articles on a wide variety of things
Vietnamese and an important means of learning about past and present events in
all of Vietnam. Both publications are available at university bookstores or
from China Books and Periodicals (2929 24 Street, San Francisco, California
94110). The Foreign Language Publishing House in Hanoi has printed, in French
and in English, The Real and the False Secrets of the Pentagon (Hanoi, Le
Courrier du Viet Nam, 1971), matching revelations from the study with
quotations from Vietnamese leaders speaking soon after the events described in
the study, and long before publication of classified information.
Information on the brutality of the war has long been
available in the United States and much of it has been offered by non-antiwar
writers. Air War, by Frank Harvey, and Ecocide in Indochina, edited by Barry
Weisberg (San Francisco, Canfield Press, 1970), are two of the most convincing
accounts. Vietnamese reports of the suffering caused by the war appear in many
periodicals cited above; in addition, Americans who have worked in Vietnam have
written about what they observed. The best of these IP books is by Don Luce and
John Somer, Vietnam: The Unheard Voices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1969). Discussions of American policies in warfare and strategic aims can be
found in Vietnamese publications such as the DRV Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
La politique d'intervention et d'aggression des Etats-Unis au Sud Vietnam
(Hanoi, 1962) and in Neo Lao Hak Sat writings such as Twelve Years of U.S.
Imperialist Intervention and Aggression in Laos (1966). One often learns more
details from these than from Western publications.
1.
David Welsh with David Horowitz, “Attorney at
War—Clark Clifford.” Ramparts, 1968, p. 138.
2.
This information comes from the article by Henri
Lanoue, “L’emprise economique des Etats-Unis sur I’lndochine avant 1950,” pages
292-327 of Jean Chesneaux, ed., Tradition et Revolution au Vietnam. Paris:
Anthropos, 1971. The statistics Lanoue offers are taken from L’Annuaire Statistique
de I’lndochine, 1943-1946, and 1948, published by the French colonial
government.
3.
Bernard Fall, The Two Vietnams: A Political and
Military Analysis, 2nd edition. New York: Praeger, 1963, p. 111.
4.
Edward Friedman, “Problems of Dealing with an
Irrational Power: America Declares War on China” in Edward Friedman and Mark
Selden, eds., America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on American-Asian Relations.
New York: Pantheon, 1970, p. 208.
No comments:
Post a Comment