No More Learning

In a derisive account of Vietnamese "laments" over the failure of the United States to improve relations with them, Barbara Crossette re- ports their "continuing exaggeration of Vietnam's importance to Americans" under the headline: "For Vietnamese, Realism Is in Short Supply. " The Vietnamese do not comprehend their "irrelevance," she
explains with proper imperial contempt. U. S. interest in Vietnam, she continues, is limited to the natural American outrage over Hanoi's invasion of Cambodia (to overthrow our current ally Pol Pot), and its failure to be sufficiently forthcoming "on the issue of American service- men missing since the end of the war. " She cites a Pentagon statement noting that Vietnam "has agreed to return the remains of 20 more servicemen" and expressing the hope that the Communists will proceed "to resolve this long-standing humanitarian issue. " She quotes an "Asian official" as saying that "We all know they have the bones some- where. . . . I f Hanoi's leaders are serious about building their country, the Vietnamese will have to deal fairly with the United States. " When a Vietnamese official suggested that the U. S. send food aid to regions where starving villagers are being asked to spend their time and energy searching for the remains of American pilots killed while destroying their country, State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley reacted with great anger: "W eare outraged at any suggestion of linking food assistance with the return of remains/' she declaimed. So profound is the U. S. commitment to humanitarian imperatives and moral values that it cannot permit these lofty ideals to be tainted by associating them with such trivial concerns and indecent requests. 166 It is difficult to know how to react to a cultural climate in which such words can be
spoken, evoking no reaction.
According to standard state and media doctrine, South Vietnam (i. e. ,
the client regime that we established) lost the war to North Vietnam- the official enemy, since the U. S. attack against the South cannot be conceded. "North Vietnam, not the Vietcong, was always the enemy," John Corry proclaims in reporting the basic message of an NBC white paper on the war,I67 a stance that is conventional in the mainstream. Corry is indignant that anyone should question this higher truth. As
242 MANUfACTURING CONSI! NT
proof of the absurdity of such "liberal mythology," he cites the battle of Ia Drang Valley in November 1965:
It was clear then that North Vietnam was in the war. Nonetheless, liberal mythology insisted that the war was being waged only by the Vietcong, mostly righteous peasants.
Corry presents no example of liberals who described the Viet Cong as "righteous peasants," there being none, and no example of anyone who denied that North Vietnamese troops had entered the South by No- vember 1965, since, again, there were none. Furthermore, opponents of the war at that time and for several years after included few representa- tives of mainstream liberalism. Corry's argument for North Vietnamese aggression, however, is as impressive as any that have been presented.
The NBC white paper was one of a rash of retrospectives on the tenth anniversary of the war's end, devoted to "The War that Went Wrong, The Lessons It Taught. "168 These retrospective assessments provide considerable insight into the prevailing intellectual culture. Their most striking feature is what is missing: the American wars in Indochina. It is a classic enmple of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Apart from a few scattered sentences, the rare allusions to the war in these lengthy presentations-as in postwar commentary rather generally, including cinema and literature as well as the media- are devoted to the suffering of the American invaders. The Wall Street
Journa~ for example, refers to "the $180 million in chemical companies' compensation to Agent Orange victims"-U. S. soldiers, not the South Vietnamese victims whose suffering was and remains vastly greater. 169 It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of these startling facts.
There is an occasional glimpse of reality. Time open:; its inquiry by recalling the trauma of the American soldiers, facing an enemy that
dissolved by day into the villages, into the other Vietnamese. They maddened the Americans with the mystery of who they were-the unseen man who shot from the tree line, or laid a wire across the trail with a Claymore mine at the other end, the mama-san who did the wash, the child concealing a grenade.
No doubt one could find similar complaints in the Nazi press about the Balkans.
The meaning of these facts is almost never perceived. Time goes so far as to claim that the "subversion" was "orchestrated" by Moscow, so that the United States had to send troops to "defend" South Viet-
THE INDOCHISA WARS (I): VIETNAM 243
nam, echoing the fantasies concocted in scholarship-for example, by Walt Rostow, who maintains that in his effort "to gain the balance of power in Eurasia," Stalin turned "to the East, to back Mao and to entlame the North Korean and Indochinese Communists. "I70
Throughout the war, elite groups remained loyal to the cause, apart from expressing qualms about the bombing of North Vietnam, which was regarded as problematic since it might lead to a broader conflict, drawing in China and the USSR, from which the United States might not be immune. This was the "toughest" question, according to the McNamara memo cited earlier, and the only serious question among "respectable" critics of the war. The massacre of innocents is a problem only among emotional or irresponsible types, or among the "aging adolescents on college faculties who found it rejuvenating to play 'revo- lution. ' " I 7 l Decent and respectable people remain silent and obedient, devoting themselves to personal gain, concerned only that we too might ultimately face unacceptable threat-a stance not without historical precedent. In contrast to the war protestors, two commentators explain, "decent, patriotic Americans demanded-and in the person of Ronald Reagan have apparently achieved-a return to pride and patriotism, a reaffirmation of the values and virtues that had been trampled upon by the Vietnam-spawned counterculture"I72-most crucially, the virtues of marching in parades chanting praises for their leaders as they con- duct their necessary chores, as in Indochina and El Salvador.
The extent of this servility is revealed throughout the tenth-anniver- sary retrospectives, not only by the omission of the war itself but also by the interpretation provided. The New York Times writes sardonically of the "ignorance" of the American people) only 60 percent of whom are aware that the United States "sided with South Vietnam"-as Nazi Germany sided with France) as the USSR now sides with Afghanistan. Given that we were engaged in "a defense of freedom" in South Viet- nam (Charles Krauthammer), it must be that the critics of this noble if flawed enterprise sided with Hanoi, and that is indeed what standard doctrine maintains; the fact that opposition to American aggression in South Vietnam, or even against the North, entails no such support, just as opposition to Soviet aggression entails no support for either the feudalist forces of the Afghan resistance or Pakistan or the United
States, is an elementary point that inevitably escapes the mind of the well-indoctrinated intellectual. The Times retrospective alleges that North Vietnam was "portrayed by some American intellectuals as the repository of moral rectitude. " No examples are given, nor is evidence presented to support these charges, and the actual record is, as always, scrupulously ignored. Critics of the peace movement are quoted ex-
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pounding on its "moral failure of terrifying proportions," and several <<former peace activists who had leaped across the ideological divide" and now "are taking their stand with conservative Christians" of the Reaganite variety are quoted at length. But those who are allegedly guilty of these "terrifying" crimes are given no opportunity to explain the basis for their opposition to U. S. aggression and massacre. Nor are they permitted to assign to their proper place in history those who condemn the "moral failure" of opposing U. S. aggression or those who praise themselves for their occasional twitters of protest when the cost to us became too great. We read that the opponents of the war "bran- dished moral principles and brushed aside complexity" but nothing of what they had to say-as was the case throughout the war. 173 A current pretense is that principled critics of the war had access to the main- stream media during these years. In fact, they were almost entirely excluded, and now we are regaled with accounts of their alleged crimes
but are almost never permitted to hear their actual words, exactly as one would expect in a properly functioning system of indoctrination with the task of preserving privilege and authority from critical analysis.
The Times informs us that Vietnam "now stands exposed as the Prussia of Southeast Asia," because since 1975 they have "unleashed a series of pitiless attacks against their neighbors," referring to the Viet- namese invasion that overthrew the Pol Pot regime (after two years of border attacks from Cambodia), the regime that we now support despite pretenses to the contrary, Although the Times is outraged at the Prus-
sian-style aggression that overthrew our current Khmer Rouge ally, and at the Vietnamese insistence that a political settlement must exclude Pol Pot, the reader of its pages will find little factual material abou( any of these matters. There are, incidentally, coumries that have "un- leashed a series of pitiless attacks against their neighbors" in these years-for example, Israel, with its invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982-bm as an American client state, Israel inherits the right of aggres- sion, so it does not meri( the bitter criticism Vietnam deserves for overthrowing Pol POt; and in any evem, Israel's invasion of Lebanon was a <<liberation," as the Times explained at the time, always carefully excluding Lebanese opinion on the matter as obviously irrelevant. 174
The Times recognizes (ha( the Uniled States did suffer "shame" during its Indochina wan;: "the shame of defeat. " Victory, we are to assume, would not have been shameful, and the record of aggression and atrocities generally supported by the Times evokes no shame. Ra(her, the United States (hought it was "resisting" Communis(s "when it imervened in Indochina"; how we "resist" the na(ives defend- ing their homes from our attack, the Times does not explain.
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIET:-JAM 245
That the United States lost the war in Indochina is "an inescapable fact" (Wall StreetJourna. l)~ repeated without question throughout the retrospectives and in American commentary generally. The truth is more complex, although to see why, it is necessary to escape the con- fines of the propaganda system and to investigate the rich documentary record that lays out the planning and motives for the American wars in Indochina over thirty years. This record shows that a rather different conclusion is in order, an important fact to understand.
The United States did not achieve its maximal goals in Indochina, but it did gain a partial victory. Despite talk by Eisenhower and others about Vietnamese raw materials, the primary U. S. concern was not Indochina but rather the "domino effect," the demonstration effect of independent development that might cause "the rot to spread" to Thai- land and beyond, perhaps ultimately drawing Japan into a "New Order" from which the United States would be excluded. I75 This threat was averted as the United States proceeded to teach the lesson that a " 'war of liberation' . . . is costly, dangerous and doomed to failure" (Kennedy adviser General Maxwell Taylor, testifying to Congress). 176 The countries of Indochina will be lucky to survive; they will not endanger global order by social and economic success in a framework that denies the West the freedom to exploit, infecting regions beyond, as had been feared. It might parenthetically be noted that although this interpretation of the American aggression is supported by substantial evidence,I 77 there is no hint of its existence in the popular histories or the retrospectives, for such ideas do not conform to the required image of aggrieved benevolence. Again, we see here the operation of the
Orwellian principle that ignorance is strength.
While proceeding to extirpate the "rot" of successful independent
development in Indochina, the United States moved forcefully to but- tress the second line of defense. In 1965, the United States backed a military coup in Indonesia (the most important "domino," short of Japan), while American liberals and Freedom House lauded the "dra- matic changes" that took place there-the most dramatic being the massacre of hundreds of thousands of landless peasants and the de- struction of the only mass-based political party-as a proof that we were right to defend South Vietnam by demolishing it, thus encourag- ing the Indonesian generals to prevent any rot from spreading there. In 1972, the United States backed the overthrow of Philippine democracy, thus averting the threat of national capitalism there with a terror-and- torture state on the preferred Latin American model. A move toward democracy in Thailand in 1973 evoked some concern, prompting a reduction in economic aid and increase in military aid in preparation
246 MANUP ACTURING CONSENT
for the military coup that took place with U. S. support in 1976. Thai- land has had a particularly important rote in the U. S. regional system since 1954, when the National Security Council laid out a plan for subversion and eventual aggression throughout Southeast Asia, in re- sponse to the Geneva Accords, with Thailand serving as its "focal point" and, subsequently, as a major base for the U. S. attacks on Vietnam and Laos. 17li In his personal Times retrospective, Penzagon Papers director Leslie Gelb observes that ten years after the war ended, "the position of the United States in Asia is stronger" than at any time since World War II, despite "the defeat of South Vietnam," quoting "policy analysts" from government and scholarship who observe that "Thailand and Indonesia , . . were able to get themselves together politically, economically and militarily to beat down Communist insur- gencies," in the manner just indicated, as were the Philippines and South Korea, also graced with a U. S. -backed military coup in 1972. 179 The business press had drawn the same conclusions years earlier, dur- ing the latter stages of the war. ISO
In short, the United States won a regional victory, and even a sub- stantiallocal victory in Indochina, left in ruins. The U. S. victory was particularly significant within South Vietnam, where the peasant-based revolutionary forces were decimated and the rural society was demol- ished. "One hard-core revolutionary district just outside Saigon, CU Chi," Paul Quinn-Judge observes, "sent 16,000 men and women to fight for the National Liberation Front. Some 9,900 did not return. " Much the same was true throughout the South. "The deaths left a major pOlitical gap for the new Tegime," he adds. "The south was stripped of the trained, disciplined and presumably committed young cadres who would have formed the backbone of the present administration. In many areas the losses were near complete. . . . And the casualties put further strains on the state's limited financial and organisation capaci- ties. "181 The U. S. victory over the overwhelmingly rural society of South Vietnam, always the primary enemy, laid the basis for the take- over by North Vietnam (as anticipated years earlier in the much- derided peace-movement literature),182 allowing American hypocrites to "prove" that this predictable consequence of the war they supported shows that it was a just "defense of South Vietnam" against northern aggressors. In the cities, swollen with millions of refugees, the lucky and
the more corrupt survived on an American dole at a level that had no relation to the now-demolished productive capacity of the country, leaving another near-insoluble problem that can conveniently be blamed on the Communists. The revolutionary forces had gained vic~ tory in many rural areas by the time of the outright U. S. invasion,
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 247
largely through their appeal to the peasantry, as documented in the more serious scholarly work from sources in or close to the U. S. gov- ernment ("The Early Stages," p. 186). But "many ofthe conclusions [of this work] have been invalidated by the events after Tet," New York Times Asia correspondent Fox Butterfield observes, a coy reference to the fact that this political success was overturned by the U. S. outburst of savagery in the post-Tet mass murder operations. 183
That the United States suffered a "defeat" in Indochina is a natural perception on the part of those of limitless ambition, who understand "defeat" to mean the achievement only of major goals, while certain minor ones remain beyond our grasp. The perception of an unqualified U. S. "defeat" in the media retrospectives and similar commentary is understandable in part in these terms, in part in terms of the alleged goal of "defending freedom" developed in official propaganda and relayed by the ideological institutions.
Postwar U. S. policy has been designed to ensure that the victory is maintained by maximizing suffering and oppression in Indochina, which then evokes further gloating here. Since "the destruction is mutual," as is readily demonstrated by a stroll through New York, Boston, Vinh, Quang Ngai Province, and the Plain of Jars, we are entitled to deny reparations, aid, and trade, and to block development funds. The extent of U. S. sadism is noteworthy, as is the (null) reaction to it. In 1977, when India tried to send a hundred buffalo to Vietnam to replenish the herds destroyed by U. S. violence, the United States threatened to cancel "food-for-peace" aid, while the press featured photographs of peasants in Cambodia pulling plows as proof of Com- munist barbarity; the photographs in this case were probable fabrica- tions of Thai intelligence, but authentic ones could, no doubt, have been obtained throughout Indochina. The Carter administration even denied rice to Laos (despite a cynical pretense to the contrary), where the agricultural system was destroyed by U. S. terror bombing. Oxfam America was not permitted to send ten solar pumps to Cambodia for
irrigation in 1983; in 1981, the U. S. government sought to block a ship- ment of school supplies and educational kits to Cambodia by the Men- nonite Church. 184
A tiny report in the Christian Science Monitor observes that the United States is blocking international shipments of food to Vietnam during a postwar famine, using the food weapon "to punish Vietnam for its occupation ofCambodia," according to diplomatic sources. Two days later, Times correspondent Henry Kamm concluded his tour of duty as chief Asian diplomatic correspondent with a long article in which he comments "sadly" on the "considerably reduced quality of
248 MANUFAC'tU1UNG CONSENT
life" in Indochina, where in Vietnam "even working animals 3re rare," for unexplained reasons, in contrast to "the continuing rise, however uneven in many aspects, of the standard of living" elsewhere in the region. In thirty-five paragraphs, he manages to produce not one word on the effects of the U. S. war or the postwar policy of "bleeding Vietnam," as the Far Eastern Economic Review accurately terms it. 18S
The major television retrospective on the war was the award-winning thirteen-part PBS "Television History" of 1983, produced with the cooperation of British and French television, followed by a "Vietnam Op/Ed" in 1985 that included the Accuracy in Media critique and discussion of the two documentaries by a group tilted heavily toward the hawks. 186 The controversy had well-defined bounds. At one ex- treme, there were those who defended the PBS series as fair and accu- rate; at the other, critics who claimed that it presented "a war of the
good nationalists, represented by Ho Chi Minh, versus the evil imperi- alist Americans who are trying to quash, sit on, the legitimate aspira- tions of the South Vietnamese people" (AIM chairman Reed Irvine). The moderator, "the man in the middle," concluded the discussion by stressing the importance of allowing "conflicting views about the Viet- nam war to be presented at a time when the nation as a whole is finally allowing itself a close look at the only war we have ever lost. " We will not review the AIM critique187 or the "debate," which reiterates many of the charges we have already discussed (for example, Irvine's sole example of how "the enemy was able to use our free, uncontrolled media to achieve their own objectives," namely, via the media's por- trayal of the Tet offensive "as a defeat for our side, even though it was actually a very outstanding military victory"). More to the point here are the contents of the PBS series itself, and the fact that it sets the bounds on critical analysis of the "failed crusade" undertaken for mo-
tives that were "noble," although "illusory," as the PBS companion volume describes the U. S. effort "to defend South Vietnam's indepen- dence. "Iss
With regard to the American war, the PBS series makes a conscious effort to be balanced, to present all sides, to take no side. The French, in contrast, are treated far more harshly, as brutal colonialists, with no pretense of balance. Peter Biskind comments:
Whereas the narrator referred to Ho Chi Minh and his followers as "rebels," "nationalists," or "the Vietnamese resistance," as long as they were fighting the French, once the Americans arrive they are invariably "Communists" or just "the enemy. " Whereas Bao Dai is the "playboy emperor picked by the French," Nguyen Cao
i
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 249
Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu are simply the "government. " Whereas French troops just released from japanese prison camps go "on a rampage, arresting and attacking Vietnamese," American troops engage in the was-it-or-wasn't-it massacre at Thuy Bo.
The effort to maintain balance is illustrated, for example, in the nana- tor's concluding words to episode 4, covering johnson's escalation of the war in 1964--65 and the first appearance of North Vietnamese units in the South in mid-1965. After presenting Lyndon Johnson and other U. S. government spokesmen, the narrator states:
johnson called it invasion. Hanoi called it liberation. In the fall of1965, three North Vietnamese regiments massed in the Central Highlands. Nearly two years had passed since johnson renewed the U. S. commitment to defend South Vietnam. Nearly two years had passed since Ho Chi Minh renewed his commitment to liber- ate the South. Now their two armies braced for battle. . . . For the first time, in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, Americans fought the North Vietnamese-face to face. For the first time, B-52s supported troops in the field. And for the first time, to Americans, Vietnam meant a major new war.
Here we have "balance," but of a special kind. One may believe, with johnson, that North Vietnam is invading the South, or, with Ho, that North Vietnam is fighting to liberate the South. We may not believe, however, that the United States is invading South Vietnam, which, we learn two episodes later, it had been bombing since 1961. Rather, we must assume, as a given fact not subject to debate, that the U. S. com- mitment was "to defend South Vietnam. "
T o evaluate this effort at "balance," we may observe that during the preceding summer (1965), five months after the United States began the regular bombing of North Vietnam, the Pentagon estimated that the 60,000 U. S. troops then deployed fa. ced an enemy combat force of
48,500,97 percent of them South Vietnamese guerrillas ("Viet Cong"). A few months after the Ia Drang Valley battle, in March 1966, the Pentagon reported 13,100 North Vietnamese forces in the South, along with 225,000 Viet Cong, facing 216,400 U. S. troops and 23,000 third- country troops (mostly South Korean), in addition to 690,000 ARVN troops. 189 Considering these facts, and the earlier history, it would seem possible to imagine a point of view that departs from the framework established here, one that is, furthermore, plainly accurate: the United States was stepping up its attack against South Vietnam. But that goes
250 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
beyond "balance," which is construed similarly throughout, thus con- signing the series to the familiar system of state propaganda on the most crucial and essential point.
A position critical offoreign aggression (that is, the U. S. aggression that was plainly the central element of the war) is excluded as unthinkable, although it may be conceded that "To the Communists in Hanoi, America's presence in the South was yet another act offoreign aggression" (episode 4). The NLF in the South is granted no opinion on the matter, and the episode ends with a ringing declara- tion by LBJYXl
It is not that the facts are entirely hidden. Thus episode 5 ("America Takes Charge") opens with a description by a GI of how "the ARVN and the VC are the same people, the same race, the same culture, and yet one side seems to be chicken and the other side seems to fight in the face of overwhelming disadvantages" in what is clearly "their coun- try. " A U. S. major discusses the problem in Binh Dinh Province, which "had never been really in friendly hands" since I946 but rather "under VC control" throughout, compelling the United States to resort to "awesome fire power" that turns heavy jungle into a "moonscape. " But the plain truth that such facts entail cannot be expressed, or perceived.
Balance is also preserved in an "account from both sides" of what happened in the village of Thuy Bo, in January 1967, where British producer Martin Smith had been shown the site of what villagers claimed to be a My Lai-style massacre, one of many they alleged, with a hundred women and children killed. Fox Butterfield reports that in contrast to the "balanced" picture actually presented by PBS, the British participants in the series argued that "the Marine attack on [Thuy Bo] should be labeled a war crime. " This failure to maintain "balance" was in keeping with what a filmmaker involved in the project termed their "more moralistic stance, anxious to accentuate the aspects of the war that were immoral at the expense of looking at it afresh," which would apparently exclude the "more moralistic stance. "191 In this episode, the marines tell their story of an assault on a VC-defended village and then the villagers (given thirty-five lines of the transcript, to ninety for the marines) tell their conflicting version of a marine massacre of wounded and captured civilians. The sequence ends with
a marine describing what took place as a "normal procedure," with "burning them hootches down and digging them Vietnamese people out of holes [with grenades and rifle fire] and scattering animals, pigs and chickens around like we normally do," especially after three days in the field under brutal conditions.
The account continues in the same vein. We hear that "American
'l.
THE INDOCH1:>iA W ARS (I): VIETNAM 251
aircraft dropped six times more bombs on South Vietnam than on the Communist North," and that "most of the enemy troops were native southerners" (episode 8). But no conclusion is suggested, except that the purpose of the U. S. bombing of Vietnam, distributed in this curious manner and at "twice the tonnage dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II," was to try "to stop North Vietnam from sending soldiers and supplies to the South. " Nevertheless, 140,000 made it through 1967 according to the U. S. government (episode 7), about half the number of South Korean mercenaries and a small fraction of the Americans who were destroying South Vietnam.
The Phoenix program of political assassination is justified at length by its director, William Colby, who denies that it was what it was, and, for balance, some comments are added by critics in the military and by a civilian aide worker, describing apparent random killing and torture. The post-T et military operations are passed over in total silence. After Nixon's election in 1968, when these wholesale U. S. massacres began in full force, "the war continued," we learn: "The weapons were Viet- cong rockets, the victims were Danang civilians" killed by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.
After the breakdown of negotiations in October 1972, "The North was again intransigent," we learn-namely, in demanding that the agreements be signed, a fact ignored; and "In South Vietnam, too, the agreement was still unacceptable," the familiar evasion of U. S. respon- sibility (see "The Paris Peace Agreements, p. 228). The terms of the January 1973 agreement are given, but with no indication that the U. S. government announced at once its intent to disregard them, as it did. Rather, we hear that "to the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, the struggle had not ended," because "Vietnam was still divided. " The facts are quite different, as we have seen. They are indeed more accurately stated, although briefly, two episodes later (episode 12), although the U. S. role is suppressed except by implication: "America was still com- mitted to South Vietnam," the narrator says, without noting that this commitment to the GVN, identified with South Vietnam by the U. S. government and by PBS, is in explicit violation of the agreements signed in Paris.
"Whatever their views of the war," the narrator adds, "most Ameri- cans now believed that the cost had been too great," particularly the cost of American lives; "They believed that no more Americans should die for Vietnam. " The only other Americans are those who thought it proper that "more Americans should die for Vietnam. " Americans were dying for Vietnam in the same sense in which Russian boys are dying
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for Afghanistan, but those who could perceive this fact, and who op- posed the war not merely because the cost was too great but because aggression is wrong, are excluded from the category of Americans.
As in the media retrospectives, the antiwar movement is given short shrift. A few activists are quoted, but permitted to discuss only ques- tions of tactics. Even Eugene McCarthy, plainly the favored antiwar figure in this presentation, says nothing except that "I think the case is rather clear about what's wrong about our involvement"-which is fair enough, since the media's favorite dove had never been a serious critic of the war and was to disappear quickly from the scene after failing to gain political power, thus demonstrating again where his commitments lay. James Fallows is permitted to describe "the spirit of the times": "to look for the painless way out, namely, a physical defer- ment. " In the real world, this was a position that hardly defined "the spirit of the times," although it is a facet of this "spirit" that is far more acceptable to mainstream opinion than the principled and courageous resistance of many thousands of young people, an intolerable phenome- non and therefore erased from the record. As Peter Biskind observes, for all the attempt at "balance," and "despite the preference of (the PBS series] for doves over hawks, it is the right, not the left, that has set this film's political agenda," in conformity to elite opinion.
Biskind concludes his review ofthe PBS series by stating: "The truth is that the war was a crime, not a tragedy. The tragedy is that this film lacks the conviction to say so. " The same may be said about the retro- spective commentary generally. The war was a "tragic error," but not "fundamentally wrong and immoral" (as the overwhelming majority of the American people continue to believe), and surely not criminal aggression-the judgment that would be reached at once on similar evidence if the responsible agent were not the United States, or an ally or elient.
Our point is not that the retrospectives fail to draw what seem to us, as to much of the population, the obvious conclusions; the more signif- icant and instructive point is that principled objection to the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral," or as outright criminal aggres- sion-a war crime-is inexpressible. It is not part of the spectrum of discussion. The background for such a principled critique cannot be developed in the media, and the conclusions cannot be drawn. It is not present even to be refuted. Rather, the idea is unthinkable.
All of this again reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobil- ized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion, independent of state authority and elite interests,
1.
6
The. Indochina Wars (II): Laos and
Cambodia
THEGENEVA ACCORDS OF I954 PROVIDED FOR A POLITICAL SET- tlement in Laos and Cambodia. Both countries, however, were drawn into the U. S. attack on Indochina, with devastating consequences. In both cases, the media made a noteworthy contribution to this outcome.
6. 1. LAOS
In Laos, as in Vietnam, the United States undertook to prevent a political settlement, as described frankly in congressional hearings by Ambassador Graham Parsons, who stated that "I struggled for 16 months to prevent a coalition. " A U. S. military mission was established under civilian cover in violation of the Geneva Accords, headed by a general in civilian guise, and U. S. aid flowed in an effort to establish U. S. control. A measure of its scale and purposes is given by the fact
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that Laos was "the only country in the world where the United States supports the military budget 100 percent. "1
Nevertheless, a coalition government was established in 1958 after
the only elections worthy of the name in the history of Laos. Despite extensive U. S. efforts, they were won handily by the left. Nine of the thirteen candidates of the Pathet Lao guerrillas won seats in the na- j tional assembly, along with four candidates of the left-leaning neutral-
ists ("fellow travelers," as they were called by Ambassador Parsons).
Thus "Communists or fellow travelers" won thirteen of the twenty-one
seats contested. The largest vote went to the leader of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanouvong, who was elected chairman of the national assembly.
U. S. pressures-including, cruciany, the withdrawal of aid--quickly led to the overthrow of the government in a coup by a "pro-Western neutralist" who pledged his allegiance to "the free world" and declared his intention to disband the political party of the Pathet Lao (Neo Lao Hak Sat, or NLHS), scrapping the agreements that had successfully established the coalition. He was overthrown in turn by the CIA favor- ite, the ultra-right-wing General Phoumi Nosavan. After U. S. cliems won the 1960 elections, rigged so crudely that even the most pro-U. S. observers were appalled, civil war broke out, with the USSR and China backing a coalition extending over virtually the entire political spec- trum apart from the extreme right, which was backed by the United States. The U. S. government assessment was that "By the spring of1961 the NLHS appeared to be in a position to take over the entire country," primarily because of its control of the countryside, where it had "dili- gently built up an organization covering most of the country's ten thousand villages," as noted ruefully by the bitterly anti-Communist Australian journalist Denis Warner. 2 The problem was the familiar one: the United States and its clients were militarily strong but politically weak.
Recognizing that its policies were in a shambles~ the United States agreed to take part in a new Geneva conference, which proposed a new settlement in 1962. This too quickly broke down, and the civil war resumed with a different line-up and with increasing intervention by the United States and its allies, and by North Vietnam, in the context of the expanding war in Vietnam. U. S. clandestine military operations began in 1961, and the regular U. S. bombing began in early 1964: Operation Barrel Roll, directed against northern Laos, was initiated in December 1964, several months before the regular bombing of North Vietnam. The bombing of northern Laos was intensified in 1966, reach- ing extraordinary levels from 1968 with the "bombing halt" in North
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LII. OS AND CAMBODIA 255
Vietnam-in reality, a bombing redistribution, the planes being shifted to the destruction of Laos. 3
Media coverage of Laos during the earlier period was sometimes extensive---over three times as great as of Vietnam in the New York Times in 1961, the Pentagon Papers analyst observes. But its contents were often absurd. For example, the aid cut-off that was the essential factor in the U. S. subversion of the elected government of Laos in 1958 "was never even reported in the national press," which barely men- tioned the eVents, and then with misleading commentary reflecting Washington deceit. 4 Bernard Fall gave a detailed and derisive exposure of some of the more ludicrous incidents, including inflammatory fabri- cations that helped create major crises and led to deeper U. S. involve- ment in Thailand and Indochina. Joseph Alsop's fevered reports of
largely invented Communist military actions were parr. icularly note- worthy. s
As the Vietnam War escalated, Laos became "only the wan on the hog of Vietnam," as Dean Rusk put it, a "sideshow war," in Walter Haney's phrase, as Cambodia was to be later on. Media coverage de- clined as the "sideshow war" escalated. There were, in fact, three distinct U. S. wars: the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail in the South; the bombing of the peasant society of northern Laos, which the U. S. government conceded was unrelated to the war in South Vietnam; and the "clandestine war" between a CIA-run mercenary force based on mountain tribesmen and the Pathet Lao, backed by North Vietnam apparently at about the level of the Thai and other mercenaries intro-
duced by the United States. The bombing of southern Laos was re- ported; the clandestine war and the bombing of northern Laos were not, apart from tales about North Vietnamese aggression, often fanciful and subjected to no critical analysis. 6
In July 1968, the Southeast Asia correspondent of Le Monde, Jacques Decornoy, published lengthy eyewitness reports of the bombing of northern Laos, which had become". . . a world without noise, for the surrounding villages have disappeared, the inhabitants themselves liv- ing hidden in the mountains . . . it is dangerous to lean out at any time of the night or day" because of the ceaseless bombardment that leads to "the scientific destruction of the areas held by the enemy. " He
describes "the motionless ruins and deserted houses" of the capital of Sam Neua district, first bombed by the U. S. Air Force in February 1965, Much of this "population center" had been "razed to the ground" by bombing, and as he arrived he observed the smoking ruins from recent raids with phosphorus bombs, the "enormous craters" everywhere in the town, the churches and houses "demolished," the remnants of U. S.
256 MASUI'ACTURJNG CONSENT
fragmentation bombs dropped to maximize civilian casualties. From this town to a distance of thirty kilometers, "no house in the villages and hamlets had been spared. Bridges had been destroyed, fields up to the rivers were holed with bomb craters. "7 After Decornoy's reports, there could be no doubt that the U. S. Air Force was directing murder- ous attacks against the civilian society of northern Laos. These reports of terrible destruction were repeatedly brought to the attention of the media, but ignored or, more accurately, suppressed. Later described as "secret bombings" in an "executive war," the U. S. attack was indeed "secret," not simply because of government duplicity as charged but because of press complicity.
Not omy did the media fail to publish the information about the attack against a defenseless civilian society or seek to investigate further for themselves, but they proceeded to provide exculpatory accounts that they knew to be inaccurate, on the rare occasions when the bomb- ing was mentioned at all. As the bombing of Laos began to be reported in 1969, the claim was that it was targeted against North Vietnamese infiltration routes to South Vietnam (the "Ho Chi Minh trail"), and, later, that U. S. planes were providing tactical support to government forces fighting North Vietnamese aggressors, a far cry from what Decornoy had witnessed and reported, and a much more tolerable version of the unacceptable facts. S
Keeping just to the New York Times, through 1968 there was no mention of the bombing apart from tiny items reporting Pathet Lao complaints (Dec. 22, 31, 1968). On May 18, 1969, the Times reported U. S. bombing in Laos, alleging that it was "directed against routes, including the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, over which the North Vietnamese send men and supplies to infiltrate South Vietnam. " A June 14 report states that "American planes bomb targets all over Laos, especially along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to harass the Pathet Lao, the Communist-led rebel movement in Laos, and to stop tbe flow of enemy supplies to South Vietnam. " Charles Mohr reported on July 16 that U. S. bombing "is directed against infiltration routes from North Viet- nam that pass through Laos en route to the South. " There is a July 28 reference to "200 American bombing sorties a day over northeastern Laos," directed against North Vietnamese forces, and Hedrick Smith adds from Washington on August 2 that the United States "has been bombing North Vietnamese concentrations" in Laos. T. D. Allman repOI1ed bombing sorties "in tactical support" of government forces fighting the North Vietnamese and "harassing attacks against Commu- nist positions all over northeast Laos" on ~llgust25, the latter providing
Ii<
THE INDOCHINA WARS (II): LAOS AND CAMBODIA 257
the first glimpse of something beyond the approved version. Further reports of U. S. air power in tactical support and "to cut North Viet- namese supply routes" appear on September 7, followed by Allman's report of successes of a government offensive with forces "stiffened by Thai soldiers," supported by "the most intense American bombing ever seen in Laos" (Sept. I8). Then followed reports from Washington and Vientiane (Sept. I9, 20, 23, 24, 30) confirming that the U. S. Air Force was providing tactical support for government combat missions in addi- tion to bombing North Vietnamese infiltration routes, including a Sep- tember 23 Agence-France-Presse dispatch reporting "bombing of Pathet Lao areas by United States aircraft," thus implying that the bombing went well beyond infiltration routes and combat operations, common knowledge in Paris and Vientiane but yet to be reported here.
In short, the terror bombing of northern Laos, although known, remained off the agenda, and reporting in general was slight and highly misleading, to say the least. Elterman observes that the war in Laos and Cambodia was virtually "invisible" in the media through 1969, apart from the leftist National Guardian, which gave substantial coverage to what was in fact happening. 9
On October I, I969, the New York Times finally ran an account by T. D. Allman, whose valuable reporting throughout the war appeared primarily overseas, concluding that "the rebel economy and social fab- ric" were "the main United States targets now," and that the American bombardment had driven the population to caves and tunnels during the daylight hours, making it difficult for the Pathet Lao "to fight a 'people's war' with fewer and fewer people. " Control of territory was now of lesser importance, he wrote, "with United States bombers able to destroy, almost at will, any given town, bridge, road or concentration of enemy soldiers or civilians. "lo
This confirmation of what had long been known in restricted peace- movement circles, and consciously suppressed in the mainstream press, passed without particular notice. The CIA clandestine army had swept through the Plain of Jars in the preceding months, evacuating all re- maining civilians to areas near Vientiane, where they and their harrow- ing stories were largely ignored by the well-represented media, although available elsewhere. II
Walter Haney, a Lao-speaking American who compiled a detailed collection of refugee interviews that was described as "serious and carefully prepared" by U. S. Ambassador to Laos William Sullivan, quotes remarks by a UN official in Laos as "the most concise account of the bombing":
258
MANUFACTURING CONSENT
By 1968 the intensity of the bombings was such that no organized life was possible in the villages. The villages moved to the outskirts and then deeper and deeper into the forest as the bombing reached its peak in 1969 when jet planes came daily and destroyed all stationary structures. Nothing was left standing. The villagers lived in trenches and holes or in caves. They only farmed at night. {Each} of the informants, without any exception, had his village completely destroyed. In the last phase, bombings were aimed at the systematic destruction of the (material} basis of the civilian society. 12
A staff study by a Kennedy subcommittee concluded that a main pur- pose of the U. S. bombardment was "to destroy the physical and social infrastructure" in areas held by the Pathet Lao, a conclusion well supported by the factual record. H
There were also eyewitness reports of the destruction of northern
Laos by Western reporters, but published overseas. T. D. Allman flew
over the Plain of Jars in late 1971, reporting that "it is empty and ravaged" by the napalm and B-sz saturation bombing being "used in
an attempt to extinguish all human life in the target area"; "All vegeta-
tion has been destroyed and the craters, literally, are countless" and
often impossible to distinguish among the "endless patches of churned
earth, repeatedly bombed. " At the same time, the WashingUJn Post published the statement of Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans, who reported from northern Laos that "I have seen no evidence of indis- criminate bombing"; it is the North Vietnamese who are "rough," and
the people are not "against the United States-just the opposite. " The Lao-speaking Australian reporter John Everingham traveled in 1970 t "through dying village after dying village" of the Hmong tribesmen
who had been "naive enough to trust the CIA" and were now being
offered "a one-way 'copter ride to death' " in the CIA clandestine army,
in the remains of a country where bombing had "turned more than half
the total area of Laos to a land of charred ruins where people fear the
sky" so that "nothing be left standing or alive for the communists to inherit. " No U. S. journal, apart from the tiny pacifist press, was inter-
ested enough to run his story, although later the media were to bewail
the plight of the miserable remnants of the Hmong, put on display as "victims of Communism. " In 1970, the Bangkok World (Oct.