Wrong War, Wrong Lesson

Newsweek Magazine quotes John McCain, in a 2003 speech, as saying: “We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal.”
It’s amazing how something can be so true and so wrong. Yeah, we had the power to win in Vietnam – it would have taken at least another million men, huge expenditures of blood and treasure, risked a shooting war with China’s human sea armies, and won us – what? So we finally said, “Nuts”, and went home.
Let’s face it, there aren’t that many countries we couldn’t beat if we made an all-out effort. But that’s not the issue. Especially not in Vietnam. Let’s take a quick look at the history of the area we call Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Historically it is an area China has dominated when it felt militarily strong. The people of these modern nations have deep suspicion and fear of China, Communist or not. Looking at America’s long view after China fell to Mao in 1949, Vietnam would make a logical Titoist ally – with China as the common enemy.
Like the Serbs under Tito, the Vietnamese are dangerous fighters. They fought the Japanese for over three years during World War II. They fought and whipped the French from 1948 to 1954. When the French artillery commander at Dien Bien Phu realized Vietnamese capabilities as the battle began, he went into his tent and blew his brains out.
The Geneva Accords of 1954 divided Vietnam into North and South to save face for the French. Ho Chi Minh got the North; he was promised free elections in the South by 1956 (which everyone knew he would win hands down, being the George Washington of his country).
The Americans watched wrathfully and fearfully. Far from thinking of an alliance with the more nationalistic than communistic Ho Chi Minh, we saw RussiaChinaVietnam as one huge block of evil that had to be stopped – or all the dominoes might fall.
We had reason to think Ho might be favorably inclined. He approached Woodrow Wilson in Paris in 1919 and asked for help liberating his country from the French. When a war for independence from France broke out in 1948, he approached Truman for help. He even based his revolution on the American Declaration of Independence.
We had other fish to fry. French Catholic Vietnamese fled south from Hanoi – where some of them had worked in the colonial government for generations – in late 1954. Life magazine publicized their plight. More than that, the most powerful Catholic prelate in the world at the time, Cardinal Spellman of New York (along with Joe Kennedy) got on the phone to President Eisenhower.
“We must create a homeland for these two million Catholic refugees!” Eisenhower agreed. He located a Vietnamese national living in a monastery in upstate New York (who was tutoring pupils of my mentor at Georgetown University in French) and made him “president” of a brand new country, South Vietnam.
American aid and advisors poured in. Ho Chi Minh kept waiting for his election. It never came, it never would come. By the late 1950s, Ho began sending guerillas south. He had as allies nearly the entire 15 million South Vietnamese natives. The Americans had only the two million Catholics from the North.
More guerillas. More American advisors. Still no elections. Ho gave up and sent still more guerillas; the Americans were authorized to return fire. The South Vietnamese Army, dominated by Northerners, was no match for the guerillas (who had already licked the Japanese and the French).
By 1965, we sent in thousands of infantry to fight them ourselves. We transported by helicopter and truck; they used bikes, loading each with 500 pounds of gear and walking it south. We had masses of artillery and bombers (dropping more tonnage of bombs on Vietnam then we dropped in all of World War II); they dug tunnels and owned the roads at night.
We fought them until 1973. Nearly 60,000 dead Americans, who knows how many dead Vietnamese – and finally we just quit. Needless to say the once possible anti-Chinese working alliance never happened – there’s something about bombing people that makes them less friendly.
Ho was forced into the Communist camp – after all if you are going to fight for your countries and there are only two sources of what you need, and one won’t sell to you (us) you have to go to the other hardware store (the Soviets), and he did.
McCain is right. We could have won in Vietnam, just like we won in Iraq – at enormous cost and with an everlasting guerilla war on our hands. But he’s wrong. We never should have gone in. He must not let all the horrors of the Hanoi Hilton obscure this fact.
Sixty thousand dead – McCain’s own horrifying story – all to prevent an election that would not, in any case, have hurt us. Not if you take the long view.