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VIETNAM WAR

Was U.S. military intervention in Vietnam justified?

Viewpoint: Yes, U.S. military intervention in Vietnam was in keeping with the U.S. policy of containing communism.

Viewpoint: No, U.S. military intervention in Vietnam did not serve U.S. inter­ests, and it violated the precepts of the Western concept of a "just" war.

U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War changed the American public's perspective on the cold war and on how much the United States should be willing to pay in money and blood to attain foreign-policy goals. It also diminished public trust in the government.

Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were part of the French Empire, grouped together under the name Indochina. The region was occupied by Japan during the Second World War. After Japan's defeat, Vietnamese nationalists (the Vietminh), who had fought against the Japanese occupi­ers, demanded independence from France. France objected, and a ten­year war ensued. In 1950 France recognized a pro-French Vietnamese government, led by Bao Dai and located in Saigon in the south. Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Vietminh, claimed that he was the legitimate represen­tative of Vietnamese nationalists and countered by declaring the indepen­dence of the northern section of Vietnam, as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) with Hanoi as its capital city. He continued the war against French colonial forces, inflicting the final defeat on the French army on 7 May 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, located in northwest Vietnam near the border with Laos, eighty miles from the Chinese border. The battle cost five thousand French casualties, and about twice that number were taken prisoner. France appealed to the United States for military help but was turned down.

At peace talks in Geneva, Switzerland, it was decided that Vietnam would be divided along the seventeenth parallel for two years, after which a nationwide democratic election would determine who should rule the united Vietnam. The United States refused to accept the agreement (but agreed not to prevent its implementation). Bao Dai also refused to abide by the agreement, as did Ngo Dinh Diem, who succeeded Bao Dai as head of state in 1955. On 26 October 1956 Diem declared the indepen­dence of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The United States and its Western allies quickly recognized the South Vietnamese regime.

In 1957 North Vietnam began a covert military campaign to destabi­lize the South Vietnamese regime. The Vietcong, manned by procommu­nist cadres in the South, was created, trained, and supplied by the North. By 1961 its strength was estimated at one hundred thousand. South Viet­nam was already sinking into turmoil, as the Buddhist-majority population became increasingly disenchanted with the oppressive Diem regime, which relied largely on the nation's Catholic minority. By early 1963 the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, advised the State Department that the United States should begin to search for an

alternative to Diem. On 1 November 1963 South Vietnamese military officers overthrew Diem, and he and his brother were shot to death.

American support for the South Vietnamese regime began in 1955 and escalated as the Vietcong's attacks on the Saigon regime increased. Between January 1961 and June 1962, the number of U.S. military advisers in Saigon increased from 700 to 12,000. By the time of Presi­dent John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963, that number had reached 16,200. On 2 August 1964 North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the destroyer C. Turner Joy to join the Maddox, and on 4 August both destroyers reportedly came under attack. In response the administration sent Congress a resolution, which came to be called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the president to use American forces in Southeast Asia to defend American allies against com­munist attack. The House approved this resolution unanimously, and the Senate concurred with only two dissenting votes. President Johnson was thus given the authority to increase the num­ber of troops in Vietnam and use them in battle without asking Congress for a declaration of war.

On 7 February 1965 the Vietcong attacked a U.S. base near Pleiku, killing seven Americans and wounding more than one hundred. In retaliation Johnson ordered Operation Flaming Dart, in which a North Vietnamese military base, located sixty miles north of the border separating North from South Vietnam, was bombed. On 10 February the Vietcong attacked a hotel at Qui Nhon, eighty miles east of Pleiku, killing twenty-three members of the 140th Maintenance Detachment of a U.S. Army aircraft-repair unit. On 13 February, Johnson authorized Operation Rolling Thunder, an increasingly massive bombing campaign against targets inside North Viet­nam, which continued with only a few breaks until 1968, when Johnson, as part of his peace ini­tiative, announced a bombing moratorium.

In March 1965 two U.S. Marine battalions were sent to defend the Da Nang airfield. These Marines were the first American combat troops in Vietnam. In summer 1965 General William C. Westmoreland, commander of the American forces in Vietnam, asked for forty-four additional battalions, and by December 1965 the number of U.S. troops in the country had reached 200,000. In 1966 that number reached 400,000, and by the end of 1967 more than 500,000. By the end of 1968 the number of American soldiers in Vietnam had peaked at 540,000. Under President Richard M. Nixon's "Vietnamization" plan, which shifted more of the burdens of the fighting to the South Vietnamese military, American forces were drawn down to 280,000 at the end of 1970 and 140,000 at the end of 1971.

The Vietnamization plan was part of President Nixon's dual-track policy of "peace with honor." The aims of this strategy were to reduce and then end the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and reach an accommodation between North and South Vietnam. Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, met in secret with a North Vietnamese negotiator in August 1969, and in February 1970 he began talks with Le Due Tho, the chief North Vietnamese peace representative. While the secret talks were going on in Paris and the reduction of U.S. forces continued, the United States also expanded the war to neighbors of Vietnam. In 1969 the United States began bombing Vietcong hideouts in Cambodia, and, in April 1970, Nixon ordered an invasion of Cambodia by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.

In October 1972 Kissinger announced that the talks with the North Vietnamese were pro­gressing and that he believed "peace [was] at hand." Last minute snags in the talks led Nixon to order the Christmas bombing of 1972, and after eleven days of massive bombardment of Hanoi and Haiphong, North Vietnam returned to the negotiations table. The peace agreement between the United States and North Vietnam was signed on 17 January 1973, over the objections of South Vietnam. The last U.S. troops left Vietnam on 29 March 1973. In January 1975 the North Vietnamese resumed their offensive against the South. On 17 April, Saigon fell to the commu­nists and was renamed Ho Chi Minh City; Vietnam was united.

More than 56,000 Americans died in the war, and 300,000 were wounded; 1,300 soldiers were reported missing in action (MIA); 400,000 South Vietnamese and 900,000 North Vietnam­ese soldiers were killed. It is estimated that 750,000 Cambodian civilians and 150,000 Laotian civilians also died.

The legacy of the Vietnam War may be measured by two concepts it bequeathed the politi­cal discourse in the United States. The first is credibility gap, coined to express the American public's increasing doubts regarding President Johnson's announcements about the progress of the war. Indeed, scholars point to the U.S. involvement (and the manner in which it was handled domestically) as one of the two major events that led to a secular diminution in the American public's support for and belief in its government institutions and the spread of cynicism and apa­thy among the citizenry. (The other event was Watergate.)

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The second term born out of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was the Vietnam syndrome­the profound reluctance of Americans to support U.S. involvement in foreign wars if the number of U.S. casualties entailed rises above an unrealistically low (and, hence, in most cases, opera­tionally paralyzing) bar. The heavy emphasis in post-Vietnam U.S. military tactics on high-tech weapons and precision-guided munitions is a result of the Vietnam War. Reliance on such weapons diminishes the risk to American lives, but whether or not this reliance on high-tech gadgetry is always the most effective approach militarily is a different question.

Viewpoint: Yes, U.S. military intervention in Vietnam was in keeping with the U.S. policy of containing commu­nism.

No other issue in post-Second World War U.S. foreign policy has been more controver­sial and more emotionally charged than the U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War also contributed to the demise of two presidencies. President Lyndon B. Johnson came into office with an ambitious domestic agenda to change American society forever, righting past wrongs through his Great Society and civil-rights legislation. He was soon consumed by the deepening involve­ment of the United States in Vietnam, and, in 1968, defeated psychologically and by all accounts a broken man, he decided not to seek a second term. His successor, Richard M. Nixon, became convinced that the antiwar movement and perhaps even the Democratic Party were secretly funded by foreign sources­the Soviet Union or Cuba. When Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), refused to allow their services to engage in domestic spying on Nixon's opponents, Nixon ordered the creation of the "Plumbers," a pri­vate covert army composed of Cuban emigres and Americans of curious backgrounds who had worked for the CIA in the early 1960s in its anti-Castro campaign. One of the first oper­ations of the Plumbers was the June 1972 break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. Nixon resigned his office in August 1974 after the discovery of his illegal attempts to obstruct justice by attempting to prevent an investigation of the break-in.

The passions the Vietnam War aroused­and the fact that the United States lost the war-have always made it difficult to assess the merits of the American decision to intervene in Vietnam. In addition, what we now know about the brittleness of the international com­munist movement and its internal divisions

also makes it hard to see the events in South­east Asia through the eyes of decisionmakers at the time. Yet, to make sense of the U.S. deci­sions regarding the war, one must take their point of view. Their thinking was not unrea­sonable for the time and was consistent with the assumptions sustaining U.S. foreign policy as a whole. This period itself may be divided in three: 1950-1965, when efforts were made to assist the South Vietnamese Army fight more effectively; 1965-1968, when Johnson Ameri­canized the war; and 1969-1973, when the Nixon administration inherited the war and con­tinued it for another five years. Some of the justi­fications used by the Nixon administration were similar to those of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. Other, new calcu­lations intervened as well, however, having to do with Nixon and Kissinger's efforts to fashion new relationships with the Soviet Union and China and to create a global order in which the United States would be less of a world police­man. While the United States was trying to offer the two communist powers inducements to become more status quo oriented, it was also important to make sure that the USSR and China understood that the relatively lower pro­file the United States was going to assume in the new order did not mean that they could engage in continuing efforts to erode the West's posi­tion by using war-by-proxy tactics.

There are other criticisms leveled against the American involvement. One addressed the question of whether or not the U.S. military employed the right strategy for fighting the war. Not only military analysts such as Harry Summers and Andrew Krepinevich raised this issue; it was also raised by the Gls themselves, some of whom chalked the letters UUUU on their helmets ("The unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful"). Indeed, the strategic policies and military tactics employed by the Johnson administration under the direction of Secre­tary of Defense Robert S. McNamara did little to take the necessary steps to win the war or to stabilize South Vietnam and make it fully self­sufficient. McNamara's poorly conceived ideas about how to fight the war, however, do not invalidate intervention in principle. Other crit­ics question the morality of the American

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involvement, pointing to what they see as the lack of proportionality between the level of violence the U.S. forces used and the impor­tance of the goals being pursued and the likeli­hood of achieving them. Once again, however, this critical approach to tactical military policy neither addresses the strategic importance of defending South Vietnam nor means that there were no alternate policies that could have been successful.

Vietnam was divided into two countries in 1954. In the context of the cold war, this situa­tion was not unique. Moreover, when the pro-Western half of a divided state such as Ger­many or Korea came under attack or threat of attack from the other, pro-Soviet half, the United States did not hesitate to act quickly and decisively to defend the pro-Western sec­tor. Thus, in 1948, when the Truman adminis­tration concluded that the Soviet Union might be planning to take over West Berlin-which, although deep inside the Soviet zone of occu­pation, was an undisputed part of the com­bined Western occupation zones of Germany­the United States put its forces on alert and began a massive airlift of supplies, letting the Soviets know that the United States would react forcefully to any effort to interfere with the Western lifeline. Two years later, when North Korea invaded South Korea, the admin­istration reacted quickly by sending American troops to defend the South. The decisions by

the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson adminis­trations to resist communist encroachment from North Vietnam into South Vietnam was thus entirely in keeping with U.S. policy of contain­ment as it was practiced at the time.

There were five other reasons that prompted the U.S. intervention. With the information available today, not all these rea­sons appear compelling. In fact, we now know that some of them were not all based on robust factual or logical foundations. Yet, deci­sionmakers at the time did not have the bene­fit of this knowledge.

The first argument for intervention was based on the Munich analogy. The lessons drawn from the 1938 Munich Agreement among Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the United Kingdom, and France were a formative influence on the generation of American lead­ers who made the decision to intervene in Viet­nam. In that agreement, the Western powers agreed to sever the Sudetenland region from Czechoslovakia and give it to Germany. Adolf Hitler had already sent German forces to occupy the Rhineland in 1936 and Austria in March 1938. Both actions were in strict con­travention of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler's argument was that he was taking full control of his country (in the case of the Rhineland) and reunifying the German-speaking people (in the case of Austria). The Sudetenland was populated by people of German stock, and

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President Lyndon B. Johnson (second from right) meeting with the National Security Council-George W. Bell, Dean Rusk, and Robert S. McNamara-to discuss the Tonkin Gulf incident, 4 August1964

(Corbis/Bettmann)

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Hitler claimed it would be his last territorial demand. The British and the French agreed to his occupation of the region. In May 1939, however, Germany invaded the rest of Czecho­slovakia, and in September it invaded Poland, triggering the outbreak of the Second World War. The lesson Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Robert S. McNamara, Walt W. Rostow, and all the other decisionmakers who developed the U.S. strategy in Vietnam drew from the Munich experience was straightforward: a greedy dictator cannot be appeased; the more he is given the stronger and more ambitious he becomes; and eventually, and inevitably, he will threaten vital American interests, at which point the United States will have to make a stand. It was thus better and far less costly, they believed, to tackle such a ruler and defeat him early, when he is weaker rather than stron­ger. The North Vietnamese encroachment fol­lowed communist victories in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia, and China-and also com­munist attempts to take over Greece, break up Iran, and meddle in Turkey. Communist expansion had to be stopped; the line had to be drawn. The successful foiling of communist designs on Greece, Turkey, and Iran were recent examples for American policymakers that taking a firm stance did pay.

The second argument for U.S. intervention in Vietnam was the recognition of the growing rift between the Soviet Union and China. Mao Tse-tung accused Nikita S. Khrushchev of becom­ing soft and effete, more concerned with improv­ing the living standards of Soviet citizens than with spreading the socialist revolution. Vying for legitimacy in the communist world, China took a belligerent stance toward world affairs, calling the United States a "paper tiger" and belittling the likely cost of a global nuclear war that might result from a direct confrontation between the communist and free worlds (a cost to which Khrushchev referred when explaining his adop­tion of a less-confrontational attitude toward the West following the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis). U.S. decisionmakers were convinced that China was encouraging and assisting North Vietnam to attack the South as part of a Chinese master plan to take over Asia. American policymakers per­ceived that China had tried such expansion before-in Korea. This radical, revolutionary China harbored dangerous ambitions. Although it was actually the pro-Soviet factions in both Korea (led by Kim II-Sung) and North Vietnam (led by Ho Chi Minh) that had launched aggres­sive attacks on their respective neighbors to the south, American policymakers at the time remained convinced that what they perceived as a monolithic communist movement had to be

stopped. Vietnam was a good place to draw the line.

The third reason was the Soviet Union's support for what it called "wars of national liber­ation." In a secret speech delivered in late 1960 Khrushchev admitted that the Marxist notion of spreading socialism through revolutions in advanced industrial societies was no longer via­ble because these capitalist countries had become militarily strong. Any Soviet aid to efforts in destabilizing such societies might be exceedingly costly for Russia. The alternative was to encour­age communist revolutions in Third World coun­tries, a concept advanced by Vladimir I. Lenin in his writings on imperialism. In the 1950s and 1960s liberation movements in many of these countries were fighting the colonial powers for national independence. By siding with the nationalist forces during these revolutions, indig­enous communists had a good opportunity to take over the reigns of power once independence was achieved. The Soviet Union could help its communist supporters come to power and weaken Western colonial nations such as Britain and France. The Kennedy administration became convinced that Vietnam was a test case for this new Soviet policy, one that had to be thwarted.

The fourth reason had to do with an argu­ment voiced by many: while free markets were suitable for advanced societies, command econo­mies and planning were more suitable for Third World countries in the early stages of economic development. MIT economist Walt Rostow chal­lenged such views in his 1960 book, The Five Stages of Economic Growth (somewhat immod­estly subtitled A Non-Communist Manifesto). Kennedy read the book before his presidential­election campaign and later appointed Rostow deputy national security adviser. Rostow's beliefs were widely shared in the Kennedy administra­tion, many of whose decisionmakers saw Viet­nam as an "on-going lab" (in the words used by General Maxwell D. Taylor testifying before a Congressional committee) for U.S. economic and social development ideas. It was thus impor­tant to make a stand in Vietnam, not only to pre­vent a communist takeover, but also to show the efficacy of Western-style economic and social development plans. At least until 1965, policy­makers placed much emphasis on various social and economic development schemes to accom­pany the military effort.

The fifth reason had to do with domestic politics. The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations had learned-perhaps too well­the lessons of China. In 1949 Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson wrote a White Paper to explain the Truman administration's decision not to intervene in China to prevent the communists

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from coming to power. "The unfortunate but inescapable fact," he wrote, "is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabili­ties could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it." This statement was true, but it did not pre­vent the question of "Who Lost China?" from poisoning American politics for two decades, giving rise to a rabid right-wing backlash and an undemocratic communist witch hunt led by Sen­ator Joseph McCarthy. American decisionmak­ers, especially Democrats, became exceedingly reluctant to "lose" another Asian country to communism because of what would be perceived as American inaction. Domestic pressures for intervening in Vietnam against communist aggression were intense, and prudent politicians felt they could not defy such pressures without risk.

America lost nearly 60,000 soldiers in Viet­nam. The number of Vietnamese killed-soldiers and civilians, Southerners and Northerners-is probably ten or twenty times greater. The United States did not save South Vietnam from commu­nism and probably could not have done so if it continued to follow the military policies of the Johnson administration. In order to save Ameri­can lives, the United States used high-tech attri­tion tactics that inflicted terrible damage on the people and the landscape of Vietnam, both North and South. Although the communist takeover of the South and the unification of Vietnam under communist rule did not lead to the wholesale massacres that took place in neigh­boring Cambodia between 1975 and 1978 under the Khmer Rouge regime, hundreds of thou­sands of South Vietnamese civilians were sent to brutal "reeducation" camps, and many died. Vietnam did not become a pawn of China; in fact, its leadership's strong leanings toward the USSR created a new problem for Beijing in the context of its estrangement from Moscow. Although many neighboring countries in South­east Asia remained noncommunist, Cambodia and Laos came under communism. American resolve in Vietnam, though ultimately unsuccess­ful, may even have discouraged and demoralized otherwise large and powerful communist revolu­tionary movements in countries such as Indone­sia and the Philippines. Despite this current knowledge, the U.S. intervention in Vietnam should be judged to have been a costly mistake, given the way in which it was run, especially by the Johnson administration and during the early part of the Nixon administration. For this rea­son, it was not a "noble cause," as Ronald Reagan described it during the 1980 presidential campaign. It was not, however, a venture verging

on criminality, as some critics suggest. It was a mistake because the goals the United States set for itself, to the extent that they were achievable, could not have been achieved with the plan suc­cessive administrations adopted and within the limitations that public opinion was willing to tolerate and the restrictions that Congress imposed. Much damage and pain were caused in the futile effort to achieve them.

-BENJAMIN FRANKEL, SECURITY STUDIES

Viewpoint: No, U.S. military intervention in Viet­nam did not serve U.S. interests, and it violated the precepts of the Western concept of a "just" war.

In deciding whether to use armed force, poli­cymakers invariably take into account national interest and moral issues, as they see them. The extensive documentation now available on the deci­sion-making process during the Vietnam War dem­onstrates that both these issues informed internal U.S. governmental debate on the war, though moral considerations were often more implicit than explicit. With a few exceptions, the highest-level American policymakers convinced themselves that the ongoing war in Vietnam was crucial to Ameri­can national security and morally justified in terms of the benefits to the South Vietnamese.

The national-security argument was based on the "domino theory," which held that, even though South Vietnam had little intrinsic strategic or economic significance, its fall to communism would eventually pose the gravest threat to U.S. national security. Throughout the war it was nearly axiomatic among U.S. policymakers that a commu­nist victory in South Vietnam would inexorably be followed by the progressive and irreversible fall of neighboring countries, the rest of Southeast Asia, Japan, all of the Pacific, and then (in some versions) the Third World, Latin America, and even western Europe. Vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson's 1961 report to President John F. Kennedy asserted this accepted wisdom: "The battle against Communism must be joined in Southeast Asia ... or the United States, inevitably, must surrender the Pacific and take up our defenses on our own shores .... We must decide whether to help these countries to the best of our ability or throw in the towel in the area and pull back our defenses to San Francisco and a Fortress American concept."

Apart from the national-security issue, poli­cymakers also believed that the Vietnam War was (in Ronald Reagan's words) "a noble cause." They had two reasons for this conviction. First,

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JOHNSON'S VIETNAM President Lyndon B. Johnson's most d1fficull fo/'$ign-pollcy problem was what Iha Un/tad States should do with Viet­nam. Recently publlshed transcripts of White House audio tapes include a 20 February 1964 conversation. In which Johnson made the following observations to Sec/'$tary of Defense Robert S. McNamara:

I would say that we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom. Now we could pull out of there. The dominoes would fall, and part of the world would go to the Commu­nists. We could send our Marines in there, and we could get tied down in a Third World War or another Korea action. The other alter­native is to advise them and hope that they stand and fight. Now we think that ... in the period of three years, we can have them trained. And we've moved some there who were guarding the establishments that didn't need to be guarded anymore . ... We'd put in ten thousand more if they could be useful and if they needed them for training. But this thou­sand we didn't need, because they were guarding whatever they were guarding and that's why we pulled them out.

Now we estimate that with the fifteen thousand that we've got left, and all the rest of the year and a large part of next year, that we can just train anybody . ... And for that reason, we've said that we can reduce that number after they'd trained. Now this nation has made no commitment lo go in there to fight as yet. We're in there to train them and

since South Vietnam was a v1ct1m of interna­tional aggression, the United States was fighting to uphold international law and order. The con­flict between the communist movement in South Vietnam and the Saigon government could not be seen as a civil war or a revolution because the National Liberation Front (NLF), or Vietcong, was a tool of the communist government of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam. Indeed, North Vietnam itself was considered a "proxy" of the People's Republic of China, so that the true aggressor was China, or possibly even "interna­tional communism."

Second, the United States was protecting the human rights of the South Vietnamese, fighting for the causes of freedom and democ­racy against communist totalitarianism. Later in the war, the emphasis shifted to the princi­ple of self-determination: the South Vietnam­ese must be allowed to determine their own political system, free from the coercion of com-

advise them, and that's what we're doing. Nobody really understands what it is out there and they don't know, and they're getting to where they're confused. And they're ask­ing questions and saying why we don't do more.

Well, I think ... you can have more war or you can have more appeasement. But we don't want more of either. And it's their war and it's their men. And we're willing to train them. And we have found that over a period of time that we kept the Communists from spreading. We did it in Greece and Turkey with the Truman Doctrine, by sending them men. We did it in Western Europe by NATO. We've done it there by advice. We haven't done it by going out and dropping bombs and we haven't done it by going out and sending men to fight. And we have no such commit­ment there. But we do have a commitment to help Vietnamese defend themselves. And we're there for training and that's what we're doing. And they say that the war is not going good. Well, there are days when we win, and there are days when we lose. But our pur­pose is to train these people and our training is going good, and we're trying to train them.

Source: Michael R Beschloss, ad., Taking Charge: The White House Tapes. 1963-1964 {New York: Simon & Schuster. 1997), pp. 248-249.

munist revolution or external North Vietnam­ese intervention.

No part of the national-security and moral justifications was persuasive. The domino theory fails on several grounds. The theory is intended to predict the consequences of allowing interna­tional aggression to succeed, and, therefore, it was irrelevant to the situation in Vietnam. For several reasons it was quite unpersuasive that South Vietnam was the victim of international aggression-unless one means American aggres­sion. During the 1950s the communist revolu­tion in South Vietnam was in all essential respects an indigenous movement, receiving little or no assistance from North Vietnam. To be sure, the situation changed in the 1960s, when North Vietnam began playing an increasingly larger role, eventually eclipsing the NLF, the southern communist movement. The escalation of North Vietnamese involvement, however, was in reaction to the growing American interven-

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tion, which always preceded and was far greater than any Northern role.

In a larger sense, however, the timing and extent of Northern "intervention" in South Viet­nam was irrelevant since there was never a per­suasive case for regarding South Vietnam as a separate state from North Vietnam. For most of its centuries-long history, Vietnam had been one country. Even after Indochina was occupied, col­onized, and broken into administrative divisions by France in the nineteenth century, the French continued to treat Vietnam as essentially a single country. The French withdrew from Vietnam in 1954 after a series of defeats inflicted by the Viet­minh communist forces of Ho Chi Minh, fight­ing for the independence not of "North Vietnam," which did not exist, but of all Viet­nam.

As a way of easing the French out of Viet­nam, at Geneva in 1954 Ho agreed to postpone a complete communist victory briefly. As a face­saving device for the French, Vietnam was tem­porarily divided into northern communist and southern noncommunist "zones." The Geneva Accords specified that the demarcation line, the seventeenth parallel, was "not in any way to be interpreted as constituting a political or territo­rial boundary." On the contrary, nationwide elections under international supervision were to be held in 1956 to reunify the country.

Because the scheduled elections would almost certainly have led to an overwhelming vic­tory for Ho and the reunification of Vietnam under communist rule, the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower set out to undermine the Geneva Accords and to create a permanently divided Vietnam, with the south under an anticommunist government.

Whatever its persuasiveness as an account of the consequences of allowing international aggression to succeed, the domino theory was inapplicable to the Vietnamese conflict if any one of the following propositions were true: the revolution in the South was initially an indige­nous one; Northern intervention in the South was a response to prior American intervention; or North Vietnam was not a separate state from South Vietnam. In fact, all three were true.

Moreover, even if there had been interna­tional aggression by North Vietnam, one state, against South Vietnam, a different state, the domino theory would still have been inapplica­ble unless several further requirements were met: North Vietnam had to have both the intention and capability to engage in more widespread expansion throughout Southeast Asia; North Vietnam had to be acting as an instrument of China; and even if that were the case, China had to have both the intention and

capability of widespread expansionism through­out Asia.

None of these propositions was true. As subsequent history demonstrated, North Viet­nam had neither the desire nor the capability to spread beyond Laos and Cambodia, which along with Vietnam made up the traditional Indochinese Federation. Given the long his­tory of '!ietnamese resistance to Chinese dom­ination, there was never any reason to suppose that a communist Vietnam had any intention of acting as China's proxy. Indeed, by 1979 the two countries were at war. In any case the image of China that drove American policy­that it was a radically expansionist, fanatical, and reckless power seeking domination of Asia either by outright aggression or the "export" of revolution-had little basis in fact. Even at that time most scholars of Chinese foreign pol­icy were arguing that China had neither the capabilities nor the inclination to follow radi­cally expansionist policies, but rather was basi­cally defensive, pragmatic, and cautious.

Finally, of course, the most decisive refu­tation of the domino theory came in 1975 in the aftermath of communist victory in Viet­nam. The only subsequent spread of commu­nism in Southeast Asia-let alone beyond-was into Laos and Cambodia. Not only were those two states special cases because of their histori­cal links to Vietnam, but, more important, their fall was of no strategic significance for Southeast Asian, let alone U.S., security. The whole point of the domino theory was that the loss of less significant countries was impor­tant because it would inexorably lead to the loss of significant ones. The United States did not go to war in Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism to two tiny states of Indo­china, but rather to prevent the fall of all Southeast Asia, the eventual undermining of much of the rest of the world, and the spread of communism to the shores of America.

In the Western system of ethics, the just­war philosophy provides a commonly accepted moral language and set of principles by which to evaluate war. This philosophy holds that war is morally allowable only when several moral criteria have been satisfied. The most important criteria are jus ad bellum, or just cause; proportionality; and jus in hello, or just methods of warfare. The Vietnam War was a moral failure in all three respects.

The just-cause principle mandates that wars be fought only for unambiguously moral purposes, such as self-defense, the maintenance of international order, or, in certain extreme cases, the upholding of basic human rights in another state. If it really had been the case that the purposes of the American intervention in

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Vietnam had been to resist international aggression, defend freedom, develop democ­racy, or preserve the principle of self-determi­nation, the Vietnam War would arguably have met the just-cause criterion-indeed, the war might even have been "a noble cause." The true purposes of the U.S. intervention, how­ever, were revealed in the behavior of the United States, not its rhetoric.

The only state guilty of international aggression in the Vietnam War was the United States, and the American intervention had nei­ther the intention nor the consequence of upholding freedom, democracy, or self-deter­mination. As was the case in so many Third World states during the cold war, the real pur­pose of the extensive U.S. intervention in Viet­nam from 1954 through 1973 was to keep in power anticommunist military dictatorships, threatened not by international aggression but at first by democracy itself and later-after the United States joined the South Vietnamese government in blocking any chance at peace­ful, democratic change-by indigenous revolu­tion.

When the discrepancy between pro­claimed purposes and actual behavior became widely noted, the U.S. government shifted its emphasis from the freedom-and-democracy claim to that of the principle of self-determina­tion: the South Vietnamese, it was said, must be allowed to determine their own political system, free from the coercion of communist revolution or "external" (North Vietnamese) intervention. The communists, however, had turned to violence and revolution only after the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, with U.S. collaboration, had aborted the political pro­cess set up by the Geneva Accords of 1954, precisely because of the fear that if the Viet­namese were allowed freely to choose their political future, they would choose Ho as their national leader.

Thereafter, the United States made it clear that the goal of self-determination was accept­able only so long as the process would not lead to neutralism or nonalignment, let alone to communism. Elections were rigged; coups were arranged against South Vietnamese gov­ernments that indicated a willingness to nego­tiate with the North, such as the Diem government, in 1963; and only the hardest-line military governments were supported by the Americans.

As this history suggests, true American support of the principle of self-determination could have provided the United States with the long-sought "honorable exit" from the war. Rather than seize such opportunities, Washington repeatedly squelched them. In

1965, for example, the U.S. ambassador to

South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, was asked by a congressional committee what American policy would be if a South Vietnam­ese government asked for a U.S. withdrawal. His answer was: the United States would not depart from South Vietnam if the request came from "a left wing or even neutralist gov­ernment that, in the U.S. view, did not reflect the true feelings of the South Vietnamese peo­ple or military leaders."

In short, far from serving the purposes of nonaggression, freedom, democracy, or self­determination in Vietnam, the United States made a mockery of these principles. As in so many other places during the cold war, when­ever ideological anticommunism clashed with morality, there was no contest.

The principle of proportionality requires that the good that may reasonably be expected to emerge from war must outweigh the evils of war itself. An alternative formulation of the same principle holds that a war must have a reasonable chance of success at a cost commen­surate with the true stakes of that war.

Perhaps a case can be made that, in the ini­tial stage of U.S. involvement in Vietnam (1954-1964), it was at least plausible (though certainly questionable) to believe that the stakes were high in terms of the global policy of containing communist expansion and that American political, economic, and military assistance to South Vietnam would be suffi­cient to prevent a communist victory. Even as evidence accumulated that the stakes had been exaggerated, however-because of the Sino­Soviet split, the limited nature of Soviet or Chinese support for North Vietnam, and the growing evidence that the domino theory was implausible-the American role in Vietnam expanded; the probability of success declined; and the economic, political, and, above all, human costs mounted.

It would be hard to find a more disastrous failure of proportionality. Indeed, it is diffi­cult even to construct a coherent account of the thinking of American policymakers. Did they truly believe in the apocalyptic predic­tions of the domino theory? If so, then why was overwhelming force in Vietnam not applied? Devastating as the war was, obviously far more could have been done: unlimited bombing of North Vietnam, a million (or nearly unlimited) rather than 500,000 Ameri­can troops in South Vietnam, perhaps an inva­sion of North Vietnam, and even, if necessary, the use of tactical nuclear weapons. All these measures involved high costs and serious risks, of course, but if the future of the West and direct U.S. national security had been truly at

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 1• THE COLD WAR, FIRST SERIES

stake, surely those costs and risks had to be accepted.

The unwillingness to escalate the Ameri­can military commitment to Vietnam to the level that finally might bring victory suggests that policymakers harbored doubts about whether the stakes were really global. In that case, however, why were they willing to bear the already enormous costs of the war, as well as risk Chinese or Soviet intervention? If poli­cymakers believed the domino theory, they should have done far more; if they did not believe it, they should have done far less. Indeed, if all that was at stake was the political complexion of the strategically and economi­cally insignificant countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, they should have done nothing at all.

The core principle of jus in hello is that war must never be made on innocent civilians or noncombatants. Perhaps the worst feature of the Vietnam War was that its conduct amounted to a massive-indeed, properly con­sidered, a criminal-violation of this principle. The "strategy" of the American war effort was one of attrition: General William C. West­moreland, commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, stated, "We'll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the point of national disaster for generations." Because of the use of massive, inherently indiscriminate firepower, together with the fact that the enemy successfully blended into the general populace, those who "bled" inevitably included more than a million North and South Vietnamese civilians.

In addition to the massive use of fire­power, it was also the deliberate policy of the American government to destroy villages and farmland in South Vietnam, so as to drive peo­ple off the land and deprive the communists a population base from which to conduct the war. Moreover, throughout the war there were extensive individual or small-unit atrocities car­ried out by American soldiers, whose actions, while not "policy," were nonetheless wide­spread, largely unchecked, and unpunished.

As the war escalated, Vietnam itself became increasingly unimportant. Rather, it became a battlefield in the global ideological crusade against "international communism," a

country that-regrettably-had to be destroyed in order to be saved.

Not only was the Vietnam War a military and political disaster, but it was also an intel­lectual disgrace (based as it was on the vacuous premises of the domino theory) and a moral catastrophe. It was unjust in its ends, for the preservation of a dictatorial and repressive anticommunist regime in South Vietnam was insufficiently compelling in either moral or national-interest terms to justify the massive intervention in an internal revolution. It was even more unjust in the means by which it was fought. Indeed, America's conduct in the Viet­nam War violated every criterion of the just­war philosophy, the centuries-old consensus of Western religious, philosophical, and moral thought on war.

-JEROME SLATER, STATE UNIVERSITY OF

NEW YORK AT BUFFALO

References

Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institutions, 1979);

Mike Gravel, ed., The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, 5 volumes (Bos­ton: Beacon, 1972);

David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972);

George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979);

George McTurnin Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Knopf, 1986);

Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, revised and updated edition (New York: Penguin, 1997);

Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);

Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982);

Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988);

Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Ai;gument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

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