No More Learning

101. Hallin, "Uncensored War," p. 21.
102. New Statesman, August 7, 14; National Guardian, August 8, 15 (three articles), 22; I. F. Stone's Week{y, August 10, 24, September 7; cited with discus- sion by Elterman, who notes also that the New Republic accepted the U. S.
government version with no question, although with some pessimism about the prospects, echoed in The Nation.
103. Pp, III, 107.
104. PP, 111,531, 207.
105. James Reston, New York Times, February 26, 1965.
106. Braestrup, Big Story,- see section I, note I; hereafter cited with volume and page number only. Don Oberdorfer, Washington Post Magazine, January 29, 1978; Oberdorfer is the author of Tet! (New York: Doubleday, 1971), praised as a "fine" study (I, xiii). Diamond, New York Times Book Review, December 4, 1977; a journalist, he headed the News Study Group in the MIT Political Science department. Roche, see note 5. Mohr, "Hawks and Doves Refight Tet Offensive at Symposium," New York Times, February 27, 1978; Smith, "Read- ing History: The Vietnam War," History Today (October 1984).
107. Hening, America's Longest War, pp. 200-201.
108. On the record of Freedom House in service to the state and in opposition to democracy, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, appendix I, a small fragment of a record that merits more detailed exposure.
109. For additional evidence and discussion, see the review in Race & Class and More, from which we will draw extensively, particularly in appendix 3, and Porter's review, both cited in note I, above.
IIO. Thies, When Governments Collide, p. 201. This analysis, familiar in the scholarly literature, is quite different from Braestrup's conclusions, which, as Porter comments, he attributes to a consensus of historians without a single reference. Porter adds that "few independent historians" would endorse Braestrup's conclusions or his analysis of Communist objectives, quoting CIA analyst Patrick McGarvey and others. See his A Peace Denied, pp. 67f. , for further discussion of these issues.
III. New York Times, February 20, April 4, 1968. On internal U. S. government assessments, see below, and Kolko, Anatomy ofa War, p. 329. Kolko goes on to describe how these assessments underestimated the success of U. S. terror in decimating the NLF infrastructure in rural areas, and were thus overly "pessimistic. " Note that oy virtue of these conclusions, Kolko counts as "opti- mistic" by Freedom House logic, that is, supportive of U. S. goals. In fact, quite the opposite is true, still another illustration of the absurdity of the Freedom House assumptions-or, more accurately, of their blind adherence to the doctrines of state propaganda, reaching to the way in which the issues are
initially framed.
II2. Herring, America's Longest War, p. 189. Hoopes quoted from his Limits of Intervention (New York: McKay, 1969), p. 145, by Herring and Thies.
II3. PP, IV, 548, 558. April USG study cited by Porter, review of Big Story. McNamara, Statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jan. 22, 1968 (II, 20).
II4. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 386f.
lI5. Herring, America's Longest War, p. 204.
II6. Braestrup, Big Story, I, 671fI. ; Burns W. Roper in Big Story, I, chapter 14. II7. For serious interpretations of the basis for the shift of government policy, putting Freedom House fantasies aside, see Herbert Schandler, The Unmaking of a President (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Thies, When Governments Col/ide,' Kolko, Anatomy ofa War, noting particularly the crucial
376 NOTES TO PAGES 218-224
NOTES TO PAGES 225-237 377
issue of the perceived economic crisis resulting from the costs of the war. 1I8. See Kahin, Intervention, pp. 421ff. , for discussion of these important events.
1I9. Oberdorfer, Tet! ,' Porter, A Peace Denied, p. 66. On this forgotten massa- cre, and the various attempts to shift attention to the massacre carried out by the retreating NLF forces, see our PEHR, I, 345ff. , and sources cited, particu- larly Gareth Porter, "The 1968 'Hue Massacre,' "Congressional Record, Febru- ary 19, 1975, pp. S2189-94," and Porter's review of Big Story. Porter notes that Braestrup's estimate of destruction in Hue is far below that of US AID, which estimated in April that 77 percent of Hue's buildings wt:re "seriously dam- aged" or totally destroyed.
120. Kolko, Anatomy of a War, p. 309.
121. PP, IV, 539. On third-country forces, introduced well before the first sighting of a battalion of North Vietnamese regulars in the South, see Kahin, Intervention, pp. 333f. Korean mercenaries began to arrive in January 1965, while Taiwanese soldiers had reached "several hundred" by mid-1964, in addition to "a considerable number of soldiers seconded from Chiang Kai- shek's army on Taiwan," possibly as early as 1959 but certainly under the Kennedy administration, often disguised as members of the Nung Chinese ethnic minority in Vietnam and employed for sabotage missions in the North as well as fighting in the South. For MeNamara's estimate, see his statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, January 22, 1968; excerpts in Big Story, II, 14ff.
122. Bernard Weinraub, New York Times, February 8, 1968; Lee Lescaze, Washington Post, February 6, 1968; in Big Story, II, 1I6ff.
123. New York Times, April 4, 1968. See appendix 3 for similar comments from news reporting.
124. Robert Shaplen, "Letter from Saigon," The New Yorker, March 2, 1968. He estimates the NV A component of the forces engaged at 10 percent of some 50,000 to 60,000. .
125. Jean-Claude Pomonti, Le Monde hebdomadaire, February 4-8, 1968. Pomonti was expelled from the country soon after. The head of the Newsweek Saigon bureau had already been expelled.
126. Charles Mohr, New York Times, February 14, 1968. On Mohr, see Big Story, I, 718.
127. CBS-TV, February 14, 1968, Hallin, "Uncensored War," 171; Big Story, I, 158.
128. We return in appendix 3 to the evidence that Braestrup presents, compar- ing the facts with his rendition of them, including Cronkite's reports.
129. Boston Globe, February 24, 1968.
130. See note 1I8, above.
131. Marc Riboud, Le Monde, April 13, 1968; Newsweek, February 19 (banned from Saigon), March 30; "CBS-TV Morning News," February 12, 1968, cited in Big Story, I, 274; John Lengel, AP, February 10, 1968, cited in Big Story, I, 269. Such a psychological warfare program was indeed conducted, although not recognized as such by the media; see note 1I9 above and Appendix 3.
132. Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam Inc. (New York: Macmillan, 1971), with pictures of the ongoing fighting. We return to coverage of Hue in appendix 3. See also note 1I9 above, and sources cited.
133? PP, IV, 546f.
134? Paul Quinn-Judge, "Soviet Publication Paints Bleak Picture of War in
Afghanistan," Christian Science Monitor, Moscow, July 21, 1987. Quotes are Quinn-Judge's paraphrases.
135? Bill Keller, "Soviet Official Says Press Harms Army," New York Times, January 21, 1988.
136. PP, IV, 441; his emphasis. On Komer's role, as he sees it and as the record shows it, see FRS, pp. 84f.
137? See Seymour Hersh, The Pn'ce of Power (New York: Summit, 1983), pp. . 582,597, citing presidential aide Charles Colson and General Westmoreland. 138. For explicit references on these matters, here and below, see Noam Chomsky, "Indochina and the Fourth Estate," Social Policy (September- October 1973), reprinted in Towards a New Cold War, expanding an earlier article in Ramparts (April 1973). See also Porter, A Peace Denied,' Kolko, Anatomy of a Warj and Hersh, Price of Power. On the media during the
October-January period, see also Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, p. 347f. , documenting overwhelming media conformity to the U. S. government version o f the evolving events.
139? Cited by Hersh, Price of Power, p. 604.
140. New Republic, January 27, 1973. He notes that the Paris Agreements were "nearly the same" as the October agreements that "broke apart two months later," for reasons unexamined.
141. James N. Wallace, U. S. News & World Report, February 26,1973. 142. Boston Globe, January 25, 1973, cited by Porter, A Peace Denied, 181.
143? January 25, 1973; see State Department Bulletin, February 12, 1973, with slight modifications.
144? For a detailed examination, see Chomsky "Indochina and the Fourth Estate. "
145? Boston Globe, April 2, 1973.
146. New York Times, March I, 1973.
147? New Republic, February 17, 1973.
148. Newsweek, February 5, 1973.
149? Chn'stian Science Monitor, March 30, 1973.
150. For documentation, see our article in Ramparts (December 1974); May- nard Parker, Foreign Affairs (January 1975); Porter, A Peace Denied. See Porter on Pentagon assessments of North Vietnamese military activities and opera- tions, very limited in comparison to the U. S. -GVN offensive in violation of the
cease-fire and the agreements generally.
151. Robert Greenberger, Wall StreetJourna~ August 17; Neil Lewis, New York Times, August 18, 1987. For further details and the general background, see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism (Boston: South End Press, 1988), part 2, chapter 7.
152. "Proper Uses of Power," New York Times, October 3? ,1983. On the ways the task was addressed in the early postwar years, see our PEHR, vol. 2, largely devoted to the media and Indochina during the 1975-78 period.
153? See the Trilateral Commission study cited in note 3. 154? PP, IV, 420; Journal of International Affairs 25. 1 (1971).
155? Mark ~cCain,Boston Globe, December 9, 1984; memo of May 19, 1967, released dUring the Westmoreland-CBS libel trial.
378 NOTES TO P AGES 238-243
? ? . . -"TJ -"T-
156.
Memorandum for the secretary of defense by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, February 12, 1968, in Gareth Porter, ed. , Vietnam: A History in Documents (New York: Meridian, 1981), pp. 354f. ; Pp, IV, 541, 564, 482, 478, 217, 197? 157. John E. Rielly, Foreign Policy (Spring 1983, Spring 1987). Rielly, ed. , American Public Opinion and U. S. Foreign Policy 1987> Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, p. 33. In the 1986 poll, the percentage of the public that regarded the Vietnam War as "fundamentally wrong and immoral" was 66 percent, as compared with 72 percent in 1978 and 198~. ~mong "leader~" (including representatives of churches, voluntary orgamzatlo~s, and ethnIc organizations), the percentage was 44 percent, as compared wIth 45 percent in 1982 and 50 percent in 1978. The editor takes this to indicate "some waning of the impact of the Vietnam experience with the passage of time"; and,
perhaps, some impact of the propaganda system, as memories fade and people are polled who lack direct experience.
158? New Republic, January 22, 1977; see Marilyn Young, "Critical Amnesia," The Nation, April 2, 1977, on this and similar reviews of Emerson's Winners
and Losers.
159. John Midgley, New York Times Book Review, June 30, 1985; Drew Middle-
ton, New York Times, July 6, 1985.
160. Review of Paul Johnson, Modern Times, in New York Times Book Review,
June 26, 1983, p. 15?
161. New York Times, May 28, 1984. A CIA analysis of April 1968 estimated that
"80,000 enemy troops," overwhelmingly South Vietnamese, were killed during
the Tet offensive. See note 44, above.
162. Arthur Westing, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (February 1981); Colin Norman, Science, March II, 1983, citing the conclusion of an international conference in Ho Chi Minh City; Jim Rogers, Indochina Issues, Center for International Policy (September 1985). On the effects of U. S. chemical and environmental warfare in Vietnam, unprecedented in scale and character, see
SIPRI, Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976). . '
163. Ton That Thien, Pacific Affairs (Winter 1983-84); ChItra Subramaruam, Pacific News Service, November 15, 1985; both writing from Geneva.
164. News conference, March 24, 1977; New York Times, March 25, 1977? 165. Bernard Gwertzman, New York Times, March 3, 1985.
166. Barbara Crossette, New York Times, November 10, 1985, February 28,
1988; AP, April 7, 1988.
167. John Corry, New York Times, April 27, 1985.
168. Time, April 15, 1985. The discussion here is in part dra~n from Noam Chomsky, "Visions of Righteousness," Cultural Critique (Spring 1986).
169. Wall Street Journa~ April 4, 1985. An exception was Newsweek (Apr. 15, 1985), which devoted four pages of its thirty-three-page account to ~,reportby Tony Clifton and Ron Moreau on the effects of the war on the wounded land. " The New York Times retrospective includes one Vietnamese, a defector to the West who devotes a few paragraphs of his five-page denunciation of
the enemy ;0 the character of the war, and there are scattered references in
other retrospectives.
170. Presidential adviser Walt W. Rostow, formerly a pro~esso~ at ~IT, now a respected commentator on public affairs and economiC hIstOrian at the
University of Texas, The View from the Seventh Floor (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 244. Rostow's account of Mao and North Korea is as fanciful as his remarks on Indochina, as serious scholarship shows.
171. Stuart Creighton Miller, "Benevolent Assimilation" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 271.
172. Allan E. Goodman and Seth P. Tillman, New York Times, March 24, 1985. 173. New York Times, March 31, 1985. Charles Krauthammer, New Republic, March 4, 1985.
174. On Lebanese opinion and the scandalous refusal of the media to consider it, and the general context, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (Boston: South End Press, 1983).
175. It is widely argued that the United States supported France in Indochina out of concern for French participation in the U. S. -run European military system. This appears to be a minor factor at best, and one can also make a case that the reverse was true: that support for France in Europe was motivated by concern that France might "abandon Indochina" (see Geoffrey Warner, "The USA and the Rearmament of West Germany," International Affairs [Spring 1985]). This factor also fails to explain U. S. efforts to keep the French in Indochina, and to take up their cause after they withdrew.
176. Cited by Porter, A Peace Denied, p. 36, from 1966 congressional hearings. 177. See, inter alia, essays in PP, V, by John Dower, Richard DuBoff, and Gabriel Kolko; FRS, chapter I. V; Thomas McCormick, in Williams et aI. , America in Vietnam; Michael Schaller, "Securing the Great Crescent," Jour- nal ofAmerican History (September 1982).
178. See p. 187, above, and PEHR, vol. I, chapter 4.
179. Gelb, "10 Years After Vietnam, U. S. a Power in Asia," New York Times, April 18, 1985, quoting Professor Donald Zagoria.
180. See FRS, pp. 48f. , citing upbeat analyses from the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1972.
181. Far Eastern Economic Review, October I I , 1984.
182. SeeAWWA, p. 286.
183. Fox Butterfield, "The New Vietnam Scholarship: Challenging the Old Passions," New York Times Magazine, February 13, 1983, referring specifically to Race's study cited earlier, an in-depth analysis of the NLF victory in rural areas prior to the escalation of the U. S. war in 1965, "invalidated" by events that occurred years later, according to Butterfield's interesting logic.
184. See our PEHR, II, 84, 166ff. , 342; Daniel Southerland, "No Pens and Pencils for Cambodia," Christian Science Monitor, December 4, 1981; AP, "U. S. Bars Mennonite School Aid to Cambodia," New York Times, December 8,1981; Joel Charny and John Spragens, Obstacles to Recovery in Vietnam and Kampuchea: U. S. Embargo of Humanitarian Aid (Boston: Oxfam America, 1984), citing many examples of "explicit U. S. policy" under the Reagan ad- ministration "to prevent even private humanitarian assistance from reaching the people of Kampuchea and Vietnam. "
185. Louis Wiznitzer, Christian Science Monitor, November 6, 1981; Kamm, "In Mosaic of Southeast Asia, Capitalist Lands Are Thriving," New York Times, November 8, 1981.
186. See p. 187 and note 2.
187. For a point-by-point response, demonstrating that the accusations are a
380 NOTES TO PAGES 248-256
NOTES TO PAGES 256-259 381
melange of falsehoods and misrepresentations apart from a few minor points changed in subsequent broadcasts, see the "Content Analysis and Assess- ment," included in Inside Story Special Edition: Vietnam Op/Ed, cited in note 2, above.
188. Karnow,Vietnam. Foradetailedcritiqueofthishighlypraisedbest-seller, see Noam Chomsky, "The Vietnam War in the Age of Orwell," Race & Class 4 (1984 [Boston Review, January 1984]). See Peter Biskind, "What Price Bal- ance," Race & Class 4 (1984 [parts in The Nation, December 3, 1983]), on the PBS television history.
189. Kahin, Intervention, pp. 307-8.
190. Later, in another context, we hear that "to many peasants, [the U. S. Marines] were yet another threatening foreign force" (episode 6, on "Amer- ica's Enemy" and their point of view).
191. Biskind, citing a London Times account; Butterfield, New York Times, October 2, 1983.
Chapter 6: The Indochina Wars (II)
I. CitedbyBernardFall,AnatomyofaCn'sis(1961;reprint,NewYork:Double- day, 1969), p. 163, from congressional hearings. The reasons were political: the Pentagon was not in favor. See also Walter Haney, "The Pentagon Papers and U. S. Involvement in Laos," in Pentagon Papers, Senator Gravel edition (Bos- ton: Beacon Press, 1972; hereafter PP), vol. 5.
2. State Department Background Notes (March 1969); Denis Warner, Reporting Southeast Asia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1966), p. 171.
3. On this period, see, among others, Haney, "U. S. Involvement in Laos"; Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia (New York: Pantheon, 1970; hereafter A WWA); Nina S. Adams and Alfred W. McCoy, eds. , Laos: War and Revolu- tion (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Charles Stevenson, The End ofNowhere (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
4. Howard Elterman, The State, the Mass Media and Ideological Hegemony: United States Policy Decisions in Indochina, I974-'75-Historical Record, Gov- ernment Pronouncements and Press Coverage (Ph. D. diss. , New York University, 1978), p. 198.
5. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis.
6. A request to the (very cooperative) American embassy in Vientiane to obtain their documentation would have quickly revealed to reporters that the claims they were relaying on the basis of embassy briefings had little relation to the facts, as one of us discovered by carrying out the exercise in Vientiane in early 1970. For a detailed review of the available facts concerning foreign (North Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese Nationalist, and U. S. ) involvement through the 1960s, and their relation to what the media were reporting, see A WWA, pp. 203-36; and Noam Chomsky, For Reasons ofState (New York: Pantheon, 1973; hereafter FRS), pp. 178-79. See also chapter 5, p. 177, and note 22.
7. In Adams and McCoy, Laos; excerpts in AWWA, PP. 96-97.
8. On attempts by former Times Saigon bureau chief A. J. Langguth to explain
away the suppression of the bombing of northern Laos by obscuring the crucial distinction between the bombing of the civilian society of the North and the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail in the South (acceptable within the doctrinal system in terms of "defense of South Vietnam against North Vietnamese aggression"), see Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 402.
9? Elterman, State-Media-Ideological Hegemony, pp. 332ff. and appendixes. 10. The report states that "until early this spring, when North Vietnamese troops began a series of advances in northeast Laos," the war had been "lim- ited," U. S. bombing had been aimed at "North Vietnamese supply routes" and "concentrations of enemy troops," and "civilian population centers and farm- land were largely spared. " Extensive refugee reports were soon to show that this account was inaccurate, as Decornoy's eyewitness reports had done fifteen months earlier.
II. See references cited above, and, shortly after, Fred Branfman, Voices from
the Plain ofJars (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); and Walter Haney, "A Survey ~fCivilian Fatalities among Refugees from Xieng Khouang Province, Laos," m Problems of War Victims in Indochina, Hearings before the [Kennedy] Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees, U. S. Senate, May 9, 1972, pt. 2: "Laos and Cambodia," appendix 2. There were some 1970 reports in the media: e. g. , Daniel Southerland, Christian Science Monitor, March 14; Laurence Stern, Washington Post, March 26; Hugh D. S. Greenway, Life,
April 3; Carl Strock, New Republic, May 9; Noam Chomsky, "Laos," New York Review of Books, July 23, 1970, with more extensive details (reprinted in
AWWA).
12. Haney, PP, V. See FRS, pp. 176f. , on Sullivan's misrepresentation of
Haney's conclusions.
13? Refugee And Civilian War Casualty Problems in Indochina, Staff Report for
the [Kennedy] Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees, U.