No More Learning

As his distortion of the essential terms of the agreement clearly revealed, the United States was backing away from the settlement and refusing to implement it. Nixon later explained that "We had to use [Kissinger's press conference} to undercut the North Vietnamese prop- aganda maneuver [namely, making public the terms of the agreement] and to make sure that our version of the agreement was the one that had great public impact. "139 This result was substantially achieved; the media characteristically accepted Kissinger's version with no recogni- tion that it was diametrically opposed to the terms of the 9-Point Plan,
230 MANUFACTURING CONSUlT
though the facts were plain to anyone who troubled to look at the readily available public record.
The United States then proceeded with a vast shipment of arms to 1 the GVN while demanding substantial changes in the October agree-
ments. Hanoi, in contrast, pUblicly insisted that the October agreements
be signed. The media adopted the version of events relayed regularly
by Kissinger, depicting him as caught between two irrational adversar- ies, Hanoi and Saigon. The Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Hai- phong followed, causing great damage and also the loss ofseveral dozen B-52S (the exact numbers are contested, but the losses clearly shocked the Pentagon), as well as a highly adverse world reaction, although the media continued to relay the Washington interpretation of what had happened. Thus Stanley Karnow wrote that "evidently" the primary aim of "Nixon's bombings of Hanoi" was "to compel the Nonh Viet- namese to return to negotiations," a curious version of the readily available facts. l40 After the military and political failures of the Christ- mas bombings, the U. S. government then signed the January peace agreements, which were virtually identical to the terms it had rejected the preceding October-and, still more significant, were hardly differ- ent in essentials from the NLF proposals of the early 1960s, which caused such dismay in Washington and compelled the U. S. government to escalate the war so as to prevent a political settlement, thus virtually destroying Indochina, with millions of casualties and three countries utterly devastated-a fact considered of little moment in the West.
The charade that took place in October was reenacted in January. As the agreements were announced on January 24, the White House made an official statement, and Kissinger had a lengthy press confer- ence in which he explained clearly that the United States was planning to reject every essential provision of the accords the administration had been compelled to sign, presenting a version that explicitly violated them at every clUcial point. In yet another astonishing demonstration of servility, the media accepted the Kissinger-White House version unquestioningly, thus guaranteeing that the Vietnamese enemy would appear to be violating the agreements if it adhered to them.
Recall that all of this took place during the period when the media had allegedly reached their peak level of militant opposition to state authority. Let us now briefly inspect this remarkable record.
The Paris Agreements committed "the United States and all other countries [to] respect the independence, sovereignty, unity and territo- rial integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam" (article I). Pending reunification of Vietnam, which is to "be carried out step by step through peaceful means . . . and without
j
I
THI! INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 231
foreign interference," tae "military demarcation line" at the 17th paral- lel is to be regarded as "only provisional and not a political or territorial boundary" (article IS). In the South, there are two parallel and equiva- lent "South Vietnamese parties," the GVN and the PRG. This is the central element of the agreements, which proceed to specify in detail the responsibilities and commitments of the two "South Vietnamese parties. " These are to achieve national reconciliation through peaceful means, under conditions of full democratic freedoms, while "Foreign countries shall not impose any political tendency or personality on the South Vietnamese people" and "the United States will not continue its military involvement or intervene in the internal affairs of South Viet- nam" (articles 9C, 4). "The two South Vietnamese parties undertake to respect the cease-fire and maintain peace in South Vietnam, settle all matters of contention through negotiations, and avoid all armed con- flict" (article 10). Furthermore, "the two South Vietnamese parties"
will proceed to "Achieve national reconciliation and concord, end ha- tred and enmity, prohibit all acts of reprisal and discrimination against individuals or organizations that have collaborated with one side or the other," and, in general, "ensure the democratic liberties of the people," which are outlined, along with procedures to ensure the reconcilation undertaken by "the two South Vietnamese parties" (articles II, 12). The agreements committed "the two South Vietnamese parties" not to "ac- cept the introduction of troops, military advisers, and military person- neI including technical military personnel, armaments, munitions, and war material into South Vietnam" and called for a "total withdrawal" of all such personnel within sixty days, while "the two South Viet- namese parties" will settle "The question of Vietnamese armed forces in South Vietnam . . . without foreign interference" (articles 5, 7, 13).
In his January 24 press conference, Kissinger made it dear that the United States maintained the right to provide "civilian technicians serving in certain of the military branches," and as its forces were withdrawn after the signing of the agreements, the United States pro- ceeded to keep or introduce 7,200 "contract civilians" to "handle main- tenance, logistics, and training jobs formerly performed by the U. S. military," many of them "retired military men," under the supervision of a U. S. major-general. 141 The provisions concerning technical per-
sonnel were thus at once nullified, along with the U. S. pledge to refrain from any intervention "in the internal affairs of South Vietnam. "
In a speech of January 23, Nixon announced that the GVN would. be recognized as the "sole legitimate government in South Vietnam," nullifying articles 9c and 4 as well as the basic principle of the agree- ments: that the two parallel and equivalent "South Vietnamese parties"
232 MlI. ! 'ollJF/l. CTUF. J! 'olG CONSENT
are to proceed toward a settlement with no U. S. interference or effort to impose any "political tendency" on the people of South Vietnam. In its "summary of basic elements of the Vietnam agreements" on January 24, the White House announced that "the government of the Republic of (South) Vietnam continues in existence, recognized by the United States, its constitutional structure and leadership intact and un- changed"-the reason for the parentheses being that this "constitu~ tional structure" identifies the GVN as the government of all Vietnam. This "constitutional structure" also outlawed the second of the twO parallel and equivalent parties, along with "pro-communist neutralism" and any form of expression "aimed at spreading Communist policies, slogans and instructions"; and the GVN announced at once that such
"illegal" actions would be suppressed by force, while President Tilleu stated that "this is solely a ceasefire agreement, no more no less. "14z With these declarations, the United States and its client regime thus nullified the central principle of the Paris Agreements, and flatly re- jected the provisions for "the two South Vietnamese parties" to achieve "national reconciliation and concord" by peaceful means without forceful measures or repression.
In short, the United States announced at once, clearly and without equivocation, that it intended to disregard every essential provision of the scrap of paper it was compelled to sign in Paris_
Kissinger attempted to obfuscate the matter in his January 24 press conference, reprinted in full in the New York Times. l4 ) He claimed, falsely, that "we have achieved substantial changes" from the October 9-Point Plan, thus implicitly offering a justification for the Christmas bombings. He stated that "what the civil war has been all about" is "who is the legitimate ruler of South Vietnam" and "is there such a thing as a South Vietnam even temporarily until unification," claiming that the United States had achieved its objectives on these points by virtue of the "specific references to the sovereignty of South Vietnam" and "the right of the South Vietnamese people to self-determination"; and he claimed that the United States had also achieved its goal with regard to the status of the demarcation line.
All of this was blatant deception. The wording of the agreements reflected the DRV-PRG position in all the respects Kissinger men- tioned, while Kissinger's insinuation that the agreements permitted the United States to recognize the GVN as "the legitimate ruler of South Vietnam" is in explicit contradiction to the agreements he had just signed, as is his attempt to create the impression that the "civil war" is "between North and South Vietnam. " The core provision of the Paris Agreements establishes the GVN and the PRG as "the two South
THE I~DOCHINA W ARS (I): VIETNAM 233
Vietnamese parties," parallel and equivalent, to move toward unifica- tion with the North, abrogating the provisional demarcation line, which has no political status. Kissinger was attempting to confuse "sove- reignty of South Vietnam" with "sovereignty within South Vietnam"; the latter is what the war "was aU about" from the outset, and the agreements simply reiterated the position of "the enemy" that this was a matter to be settled by the two South Vietnamese parties without extemal interference, as in the October 9-Point Plan. l44
Just as in October, the purpose of this obfuscation was, in Nixon's words, "to make sure that our version of the agreement was the one that had great public impact. " And again it succeeded. The media-without exception, to our knowledge-accepted the Kissinger-White House version as expressing the contents of the agreements, enabling them to interpret the PRG-DRV insistence on the actual terms of the Paris Agreements as an effort to disrupt them. Thus Joseph Kraft, a liberal dove on these issues, wrote that "Much of the blame goes to the Communists" for the subsequent breakdown of the cease-fire, because "Hanoi has never abandoned the objective of unifying all of Vietnam"; that is, Hanoi has never abandoned its objective of living up to the terms of the Geneva Accords of 1954, now explicitly reiterated in the Paris Agreements ofJanuary 1973. 145 As a dove, he also added that "just as much of the blame goes to President Thieu"-but none, of course,
can be assigned to Washingron. He cites Communist military actions in the South and dispatch of equipment as the major reason for the breakdown of the cease-fire, citing no evidence; as we shall see, the facts reveal quite a different reason.
At the liberal extreme of U. S. opinion, Tom Wicker wrote that
American policy, which never accepted the Geneva agreement. came to insist, instead, that South Vietnam was a legally con- stituted nation being subverted and invaded by another power; and that view is implied even in the documents that finally pro- duced the cease_fire. l46
Wicker adopts Kissinger's version, which is in explicit contradiction to the actual documents; these simply reiterate the long-held position of the NLF and Hanoi with regard to the status of South Vietnam.
In the New Republic, Stanley Karnow wrote that "the Vietcong considers [the PRG] to be a parallel administration," failing to observe that it is not only "the Vietcong," but also the Paris Agreements just signed by the United States government that assign to the PRG a status exactly parallel to that of the GVN. 147 In Newsweek, Stewart Alsop
234 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
proclaimed that if the "marvelously elaborate" Nixon-Kissinger settle- ment "survives more or less intact, we will have won the war"-which would be true, under the Nixon-Kissinger interpretation, although under the evidently irrelevant terms of the Paris Agreements, the United States had abandoned its war aims and accepted the basic proposals of the Vietnamese enemy. Newsweek went on to explain in the same issue that Hanoi has now
accepted the provision that north and south are divided by a sacrosanct demarcation line, thus tacitly acknowledging the legiti- macy of the Saigon regime. . . . Equally vital to the Nixon Ad~ ministration was specific mention of the "sovereignty" of the Saigon government, and on this point, too, the U. s. had its way. Hanoi finally conceded that, in Kissinger's words, "there is an entity called South Vietnam. " In one important sense, the dispute over that question was what the war in Vietnam was all about. 148
Again, utterly and transparently false in every respect, as a comparison with the text just quoted immediately demonstrates, although in accord with Kissinger's deceptive version of the agreements, taken as sac? rosanct by the loyal media.
An honest and independent press would have announced the January agreements with headlines reading: "u. S. Announces Intention to Vio- late the Agreements Signed in Paris. " An informed press would have observed further that the Paris Agreements incorporate the principles rejected by the United States at Geneva twenty years earlier, as well as the essential principles of the NLF program of the early 1960s, which were similar to those advocated by Vietnamese quite generally and constituted the crucial fact that impelled the United States to escalate the war so as to block a political settlement among Vietnamese. The actual press simply adopted Washington's version of the agreements, never mentioning that this version contradicted them in every essential respect and thus guaranteed that the war would go on-as it did, Once again. the contribution of the media was to help implement further violence and suffering by adopting Washington's version of events-in this case, in the face of the fact that this version was, transparently, in flat contradiction to the documents readily at hand. One would have to search assiduously to discover a more blatant example of media subservience to state power.
The aftermath was predictable, predicted in the "alternative press," and similar to earlier occasions when the same factors were operative. As after Geneva 1954, the Communists, who had won a political victory
TH! ': INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 235
(on paper), attempted to pursue "political struggle," while the United States and its GVN client at once turned to military force to overturn the terms of the Paris Agreements. These facts were reported by the more serious journalists on the scene in Vietnam, notably Daniel South- erland, who observed from his extensive investigations that "the Saigon government has been guilty in by far the greatest number of cases of launching offensive operations into territory held by the other side," assuming "that it has the right, despite the cease-fire," to take back territory which it lost in t972," and giving many examples, as did others. I49 The U. S. government informed Congress cheerily that "the GVN has fared weB during the post-cease-fire maneuvering," adding "770 hamlets to the list of those over which it has dominant control" after the agreements-and in violation of them, a fact that passed without notice. The GVN thus added one milliOn people to the areas of its control, while expending sixteen times as much ammunition as the enemy and using the newly provided U. S. equipment, as intended, for massive military operations, including extensive bombardment of PRG areas to prevent refugees from returning to them as provided by the agreements. I50 The media either blamed the Communists, or some- times the GVN as well, but not the United States, which had an- nounced at once its intention to disrupt the agreements and now publicly expressed its pleasure in the military actions that successfully achieved this objective.
When the North Vietnamese finally responded to U. S. -GVN vio- lence, the GVN quickly collapsed, leading to outrage in the U. S. government and media-which still persists-over this dramatic dem- onstration of Communist iniquity, which proves that their intentions all along were to destroy the free and independent government of South Vietnam and to reduce its people to Communist tyranny, thus further entrenching the principle that "Communists cannot be trusted. "
This useful lesson, firmly established by media complicity in trans- parent government deceit, has, not surprisingly, been applied in subse- quent efforts by the U. S. government to gain its ends by violence. One dramatic example was featured in the media in August 1987, when the Central American presidents confounded Washington strategy by adopting a political settlement that undermined the familiar U. S. reli- ance on force to compensate for its political weakness. As part of its immediate efforts to sabotage this agreement, the State Department called the Latin American ambassadors to Washington, where they were presented with "a copy of the 1973 Paris peace agreement that was negotiated to end the U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War," the Wall
Street Journal reported, adding that "the agreement was subsequently
236 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
ignored by North Vietnam. " Thejourna/ explained that this unfortU- nate "Vietnam experience," which proved that agreements with Com- munists are not worth the paper they are printed on, is one factor in administration "skepticism" about the Central American agreement. Copies of the 1973 Paris Agreements were distributed to the envoys "as a case study of how an agreement with ambiguous provisions could be exploited and even ignored by a Communist government," Neil Lewis reported in the lead story in the New York Times, adding: "In violation of the 1973 accord, North Vietnam overran South Vietnam and united the two parts of Vietnam under its banner in 1975. "151 The utility of a carefully crafted historical record, designed by the loyal media to serve the needs of state power, is revealed here with much clarity.
Surveying these events, we reach essentially the same conclusions as before, although once again the performance of the media-at the peak period of their alleged "independence" and "adversarial stance"-goes well beyond the predictions of the propaganda model, exceeding the expected nann of obedience to the state authorities and reaching the level that one finds in totalitarian states. As before, the servility of the media made a significant contribution to ensuring that the slaughter in Indochina would continue and that the U. S. government would be able to exploit its "Vietnam experience," as filtered through the media, for later exercises in international terrorism. The remarkable performance of the media also laid the basis for the postwar interpretation of "what the war was aU about" and why the United States failed to attain its ends, a matter to which we turn in the next section.
5. 6. THE VIETNAM WAR IN RETROSPECT
In April 1975, the war came to an end, and the thirty-year conflict
entered a new phase. Indochina faced the near-insoluble problems of reconstruction in a land that had been reduced to ruin by foreign annies I after a century of colonial oppression. In the United States too, elite
groups faced a problem of reconstructio~but of a different kind. The
problem in the United States was the reconstruction of ideology, the
taming of the domestic population that had lost its faith in the nobility
of intent and the inspiring benevolence of the elites who determine U. S.
policy. It was necessary to overcome what Norman Podhoretz, echoing
Goebbels, calls "the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force,"
THE INOOCHlNA WARS (r): VIETNAM 237
the dread "Vietnam syndrome," finally cured by the stirring triumph of U. S. arms in Grenada, so Podhoretz hoped. 1;2 This was part of a larger problem, the "crisis of democracy" perceived by Western elites as the normally passive general population threatened to participate in the political system, challenging established privilege and power. 1 5 3 A further task was to prevent recovery in the societies ravaged by the American assault, so that the partial ~'ictory already achie,,'ed by their destruction could be sustained.
As we have seen, through the mid-sixties, the media loyally fulfilled their function of service to state violence, and there was no significant popular opposition to the U. S. attack on Indochina. True, in 1964, the population voted 2 to 1 in favor of the "peace candidate," who was assuring them that we want no wider war while laying the groundwork for the rapid escalation planned for the postelection period, a note- worthy illustration of the character of electoral politics in a society lacking genuine opposition parties and a critical and independent press. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm of the ideological institutions for the rapid escalation of U. S. efforts to "defend South Vietnam" from "inter- nal aggression" helped keep the public in line as the U. S. invading army rose to over half-a-miUion men on the ground and appeared to be attaining some success in "grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass," although at "horrendous cost," in the words of pacification chief Robert ("Blowtorch") Komer, later to become a high-ranking official of the Human Rights Administration. 154
By 1967, the popular mood was shifting, and the public was begin- ning to defy the hawk-dove consensus of elites for whom the issues were limited to tactics and expedience, a matter of much government concern. Defense Secretary McNamara warned the president, in secret, in May 1967 that expansion of the American war might "polarize opin- ion to the extent that 'doves' in the US will get out of hand-massive refusals to serve, or to fight, or to cooperate, or worse? "155 At the time of the Tet offensive, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were concerned with "our
capacity to meet the possibility of widespread civil disorder in the months ahead"; in considering further troop deployments, they took care to ensure that "sufficient forces are stili available for civil disorder control," including "National Guard forces deployed under State or Federal control" and U. S. Army troops. The Pentagon warned further that a request for more troops might lead to "increased defiance of the draft and growing unrest in the cities," running the risk of "provoking a domestic crisis of unprecedented proportions. " Earlier, the Pentagon feared that escalation ofthe land war beyond South Vietnam might lead to massive civil disobedience, particularly in view of opposition to the
238 MANUFACTURING CONSENT I
war among young people, the underprivileged, women, and segments of the intelligentsia. "The sight of thousands of peaceful demonstrators being confronted by troops in battle gear" during "the massive anti-war demonstration" and "massive march on the Pentagon" in October 1967 was particularly disturbing, the Pentagon Papers analyst observed. lS6 The gradual withdrawal of the increasingly demoralized U. S. military forces led to a diminution of visible protest by the early 19705, but the "Vietnam syndrome" was never cured. As late as 1982, 72 percent of the public (but far fewer "opinion makers" and, to judge by other evidence cited earlier, virtually none of the "American intellectual elite") regarded the Vietnam War as "more than a mistake; it was fundamentally wrong and immoral," a disparity between the public and its <<leaders" that persists as of 1986. 151
The primary task facing the ideological institutions in the postwar period was to convince the errant public that the war was <<less a moral crime than the thunderously stupid military blunder of throwing half a million ground troops into an unwinnable war," as the respected New York Times war correspondent Homer Bigan explained, while chastis- ing Gloria Emerson for her unwillingness to adopt this properly moder- ate view. ISS The "purpose of the war" must be perceived as "preventing North Vietnam from subjugating South Vietnam" Oohn Midgley), "the real enemy, of course, [beingJ North Vietnam, supplied and sustained by the Soviet Union and China" (Drew Middleton)159-all in defiance of the plain facts. The primary issue was the cost to the United States in its noble endeavor; thus Robert Nisbet describes tbe "intellectual pleasure" he derived from "a truly distinguished work of history" with a chapter covering the 1960s, "with emphasis on the Vietnam War and its devastating impact upon Americans," obviously the only victims worthy of concem. l60 To persuade elite opinion was never much of a problem, since these were the reigning conceptions throughout, and clearly privilege, along with media access, accrues to those who follow this path. Bur the public has nevertheless remained corrupted.
An ancillary task has been to keep the devastation that the United States left as its legacy in Indochina hidden from public view. Indeed, one finds only scattered reference to this not entirely trivial matter in the U. S. media-a remarkable achievement, given the agency of de- struction and its scale. Keeping just to Vietnam, the death toll may have passed three million. In an article entitled "Studies Show Vietnam Raids Failed," Charles Mohr observes that the CIA estimated deaths from bombing of the North at welt over 30,000 a year by 1967, "heavily weighted with civilians. "161 Crop-destruction programs from 1961 had a devastating impact, including aerial ~struction by chemicals, ground
1
j
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 239
operations to destroy orchards and dikes, and land clearing by giant tractors (Rome plows) that "obliterated agricultural lands, often in- cluding extensive systems of paddy dikes, and entire rural residential areas and farming hamlets," leaving the soil "bare, gray and lifeless," in the words of an official report cited by Arthur Westing, who com- pares the operations to the "less efficient" destruction of Carthage during the Punic Wars. "The combined ecological, economic, and so- cial consequences of the wartime defoliation operations have been vast and will take several generations to reverse"; in the "empty landscapes" of South Vietnam, recovery will be long delayed, if possible at all, and there is no way to estimate the human effects of the chemical poison dioxin at levels "300 to 400% greater than the average levels obtaining among exposed groups in North America. "162
In the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or de- stroyed, along with some twenty-five million acres of farmland and twelve million acres offorest. One-and-a-half million cattle were killed, and the war left a million widows and some 800,000 orphans. In the North, all six industrial cities were damaged (three razed to the ground) along with twenty-eight of thirty provincial towns (twelve completely destroyed), ninety-six of n6 district towns, and 4,000 of some 5,800 communes. Four hundred thousand cattle were killed and over a mil- lion acres of farmland were damaged. Much ofthe land is a moonscape, where people live on the edge of famine, with rice rations lower than those in Bangladesh. Reviewing the environmental effects, the Swedish peace-research institute SIPRI concludes that "the ecological debilita- tion from such attack is likely to be of long duration. " The respected Swiss-based environmental group IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) concluded that the ecology is not only refusing to heal but is worsening, so that a "catastro- phe" may result unless billions ofdollars are spent to "reconstruct" the land that has been destroyed, a "monumental" task that could be addressed only if the United States were to offer substantial repara- tions, a possibility that cannot be considered in a cultural climate of abysmal ignorance, chauvinism, and the self-righteous pursuit of self- interest. Destruction of forests has increased the frequency of floods and droughts and aggravated the impact of typhoons, and war damage to dikes (some of which, in the South, were completely destroyed by
U. S. bombardment) and other agricultural systems has yet to be re- paired. The report notes that "humanitarian and conservationist groups, particularly in the United States, have encountered official resistance and red tape when requesting their governments' authoriza- tion to send assistance to Vietnam"-naturally enough, since the
United States remains committed to eNure that its achievements are not threatened by recovery of the countries it destroyed. t63
There is little hint of any of this, or of the similar Carthaginian devastation in Laos and Cambodia, in mainstream U. S. media coverage. Rather, with remarkable uniformity and self-righteousness, the prob- lems of reconstruction, hampered further by the natural catastrophes \lnd continuing war to which the United St\ltes has made what contri- bution it can, are attributed solely to Communist brutality and inepti- tude. The sole remaining interest in postwar Vietnam in the U. S. media has been the recovery of remains of U. S. personnel presumed to be killed in action, the Vietnamese preoccupation with other matters serv- ing as further proof of their moral insensitivity.
In one of his sermons on human rights, President Carter explained that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because "the destruction was mutual,"164 a statement that elicited no comment, to our knowledge, apart from our own-a fact that speaks volumes about the prevailing cultural climate. Some feel that there may once have been a debt but that it has been amply repaid. Under the headline "The Debt to the Indochinese Is Becoming a Fiscal Drain," Bernard Gwertzman quotes a State Department official who "said he believed the United States has now paid its moral debt for its involvement on the losing side in Indochina. " The remark, which also passed without comment, is illuminating: we owe no debt for mass
slaughter and for leaving three countries in ruins, no debt to the mil- lions of maimed and orphaned, to the peasants who still die today from exploding ordnance left from the U. S. assault. Rather, our moral debt results only from the fact that we did not win. By this logic, if the Russians win in Afghanistan, they will have no moral debt at all. Pro- ceeding further, how have we paid our moral debt for failing to win?
By resettling Vietnamese refugees fleeing the lands we ravaged, "one of the largest, most dram\ltic humanitarian efforts in history" according to Roger Winter, director of the U. S. Committee for Refugees. But <<despite the pride," Gwertzman continues, <<some voices in the Reagan Administration and in Congress are once again asking whether (he war debt has now been paid. . . . "165
The media are not satisfied with "mutual destruction" that effaces all responsibility for some of the major war crimes of the modern era. Rather, the perpetrator of the crimes must be seen as the injured party. We find headlines reading: "Vietnam, Trying to Be Nicer, Still Has a Long Way to Go. >> "1t'S about time the Vietnamese demonstrated some good will," said Charles Printz, of Human Rights Advocates lntema- tional, referring to negotiations about the Amerasian children who
THE INDOCHINA W ARS (I); VIET'SAM 241
constitute a tiny fraction of the victims of U. S. aggression in Indochina. Barbara Crossette adds that the Vietnamese have also not been suffi- ciently forthcoming on the matter of remains of American soldiers, although their behavior may be improving: "There has been progress, albeit slowl on the missing Americans. " The unresolved problem of the war is what they did to us. Since we were simply defending ourselves from "internal aggression" in Vietnam, it surely makes sense to con- sider ourselves the victims of the Vietnamese.
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.
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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.