April 5, 2007
Arthur Herman's Vietnam Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:50 PM EST On March 30, Josh Zeitz posted a comment on Arthur Herman’s article “How to Win the War in Iraq,” which John Steele Gordon had linked to the day before. Josh takes issue with Herman’s argument about Vietnam. Herman had written that “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.” Josh wrote that “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.” While I have some disagreements with Herman’s analyses of the three wars he discusses, I don’t think the above sentences necessarily contradict Herman’s statement quoted above. Herman says that the United States had fought the North Vietnamese regulars to a standstill—and the U.S. had. The North Vietnamese government and army clearly retained the will to fight after 1972, but the threat to Saigon was no longer an insurgency. The NLF’s main-force units had been shattered in the Tet offensive, and Saigon did not fall to insurgents, it fell to North Vietnamese regular divisions, led by tanks. We know that the South Vietnamese Army backed by American air power could stop regular North Vietnamese units, because it did, most famously at An Loc, in 1973, in a campaign that saw 150,000 casualties, and was a clear South Vietnamese victory. Deprived of American air support, the South Vietnamese Army failed to stop the North Vietnamese offensive in 1975. I’ll make one tepid gesture of agreement with the North Vietnamese official Le Duc Tho: I don’t think the South Vietnamese Army, backed by U.S. tactical air power, could have driven the North Vietnamese Army out of the less accessible parts of South Vietnam (where relatively few people lived). On the other hand, I do think that with continued U.S. air support, it could probably have held the cities of South Vietnam and much of the rest of the country, for the foreseeable future. I do not think South Vietnam could have for the foreseeable future defended itself unassisted, but neither South Korea nor West Germany were ever expected to defend themselves unassisted. We still have troops in South Korea, and we kept troops in West Germany until East Germany collapsed. Securing those countries from Communist conquest is normally considered a success. Had we achieved as much in South Vietnam, such a feat might by now be counted a comparable success. I know no reason to assume that while the brutal and corrupt South Korean dictatorship could over decades evolve into a prosperous democracy, the South Vietnamese could never have done the same. Such an outcome, if possible, would have required American support for a very long time. I am not sure why giving that support would not have been preferable to permitting what actually happened. Why did the South Vietnamese collapse in 1975? For a lot of reasons, but being deprived of U.S. tactical air support and suffering significantly reduced military aid surely helped. At the time, and for that matter ever since, many said that people who cannot defend themselves cannot expect others to defend them forever. As political morality, I find this a curious doctrine. People who cannot defend themselves unaided do not on that account alone deserve to be conquered, for on such a theory justice triumphed at Sedan in 1940. To refine the point, I’ll add that people with unattractive authoritarian governments do not on that account deserve to be conquered by more militarily formidable totalitarian governments; if they did, justice triumphed in Warsaw in 1939. The North Vietnamese Communists were not, of course, as bad as the Nazis—but Pol Pot was, and Congress also allowed his victory in 1975.
For various reasons, I am not sure Algeria is a parallel case, and the case of Iraq differs in at least as many respects. For one thing, unlike the North Vietnamese Army or the Algerian FLN, I do not see how the Sunni insurgents of Iraq can possibly win; they are vastly outnumbered. While they may be able to secure Turkish aid against the Kurds, some of their other enemies, the Shiite Arab majority, while split among themselves, will probably be able to call on Iranian support, and Iranian support is likely to massively outweigh any support Sunni Arab states give the insurgents. One part of Herman’s parallel does make sense to me, though. If the antiwar movement forces the early end of all U.S. support for the Iraqi government, even worse things are likely to happen to the Iraqis than are happening now.
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