March 30, 2007
Algeria, Vietnam, and Iraq II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST At John Steele Gordon’s advice, I took a look at Arthur Herman’s article “How to Win the War in Iraq.” Mr. Gordon is correct that it’s worth reading, even if you disagree with its gist (which I do). On the question of the French occupation of Algeria, I’ll defer to Fred Smoler, who knows a great deal about European military history. But I’ll try to take issue with Herman’s argument about Vietnam. On the subject of America’s war in Southeast Asia, Herman wrote: “By 1972, the American military there had broken the back of the Viet Cong insurgency, had fought the North Vietnamese army to a standstill, and had forced the government in Hanoi to the bargaining table. Here at home, meanwhile, the end of the military draft had removed the domestic antiwar movement’s most powerful wedge issue. Nevertheless, reorganizing itself, the movement began to lobby Congress vigorously to cut off support for the pro-American governments in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The refrain, exactly as in the Algerian case, was that this would both bring the killing and suffering to an end and allow the Vietnamese and Cambodians to ‘find their own solutions to their problems.’ Once Watergate destroyed the Nixon presidency, and ‘peace’ Democrats took control of Congress in the 1974 midterm elections, funding to keep South Vietnam free from communist control evaporated. Victory was turned into defeat; the ‘solution’ advanced by the antiwar Left turned out to be the crushing and disappearance of the country of South Vietnam.” A few problems stand out. First, Herman’s timeline is remarkably pat. War was won by 1972, lost by 1974. Really? The United States managed to break the back of the NLF and North Vietnamese Army, but enemy forces were able to rebound within one year (1974–75) of the cessation of American military aid to Saigon? I don’t think most historians would agree that the NLF/North Vietnamese insurgency was a dead letter by 1972. Under Nixon, American troop levels declined from over half a million in late 1968 to 24,200 in late 1972. At the same time, the administration helped build up the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN), increasing its troop levels from 850,000 to more than 1 million soldiers, providing it with over a million M-16 rifles, 12,000 M-60 machine guns, 40,000 M-79 grenade launchers, and an endless supply of planes, helicopters, and tanks. By the early 1970s South Vietnamese military academies were training 100,000 cadets each year. Taken in sum, these measures helped the government in Saigon double the portion of the South Vietnamese countryside that it controlled. But how effective was all of this? It certainly didn’t help South Vietnam withstand an invasion in 1975. In fact, Vietnamization was never as successful as its architects claimed. ARVN’s forces were larger on paper than in reality, due to the prevalence of “ghosting,” a process by which officers kept dead, wounded, and deserted soldiers on their rosters and pocketed their pay, while at the same time corruption continued to run rampant in the civilian government, thus undermining President Nguyen Van Thieu’s hold on the countryside. Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam’s chief negotiator, once asked Henry Kissinger how, if America could not drive the Communists out of South Vietnam with more than a half million well-trained combat troops, it would “succeed when you let your puppet troops do the fighting?” It was a pretty good question. Moreover, Herman is wrong to suggest that the prolonged engagement forced Hanoi to the negotiating table. After all, the U.S. had been negotiating with Hanoi since at least 1968. The terms that Nixon and Kissinger signed in early 1973 were nearly identical to what that North Vietnam had placed on the table over four years earlier. North Vietnam was in a war of attrition with the United States. While Herman’s article is provocative, one could just as easily draw the opposite conclusion: After four additional years of war, and over 20,000 more American servicemen killed, Richard Nixon got the same deal he could have accepted in early 1969.
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