Monsicha Hoonsuwan

Critical Analysis

U.S. Interventionism

Professor Cardwell

17 November 2010

The Mirage of Anti-Communism in Vietnam War

When the U.S. decided to withdraw from Vietnam in 1975, it did so with such a

sense of urgency and disappointment that almost no one bothered to look back at what the

U.S. left behind: devastation. Vietnam was in dire need of aid. Nine thousand out of

15,000 hamlets, 25 million acres of farmland, 12 million acres of forest were destroyed,

and 1.5 million farm animals had been killed in the South. Yet, when the Vietnamese

government raised the issue of reparations to President Carter, the U.S. president’s

response was indifference: the U.S. does not pay reparations for mistakes—no matter

how tragic. It had gone into Vietnam with good motives that had later gone wrong; thus,

unlike Germany and Japan, the U.S. was not a wrongdoer. In addition, the Vietnam War

produced a difficult time in the U.S., too. The war divided the country, shattering the

pride of the U.S. people who finally realized that the U.S. could—and did—lose the war.

Amidst such distress, the question to why the U.S. went into Vietnam in the first place

emerged time and time again. In addressing this question, Marilyn B. Young states in her

book The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 that instead of “why”, one should interpret the

question as “How the U.S. got to Vietnam.” Of course, there are standard justifications

such as to preserve stability in France or to secure trade markets in Southeast Asia for

Japan. However, Young largely believes that it was to reorganize the post WWII world

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according to its principle of liberal capitalism. In other words, the war had nothing to do

with salient factors in Vietnam and much to do with the U.S. predisposition to war.

Communism containment had little to do with the U.S. decision to go into Vietnam;

rather, it was the U.S. desire to prove and maintain its own credibility—its hegemony—

as the protector of the free world.

Young makes it clear in her titling the book “Vietnam Wars” instead of “Vietnam

War” that in order to answer the crucial “how” question, one needs to go back before

November 1955—the official start of Vietnam War—and look at the war from a broader

perspective. While the U.S. government refers to Vietnam War as a single occurrence, the

Vietnamese saw it as a series of wars fought against colonial powers with the ultimate

aim of one independent Vietnam. Hence, for the Vietnamese, the war started with the

fight against French colonialism led by Ho Chi Minh of the Viet Minh, a revolutionary

leader whose left-leaning ideology was apparent. Convinced of the U.S. commitment to

anti-colonialism and the principle of self-determination to all peoples, Ho relentlessly

sought to establish ties with the U.S. and appealed for U.S. support in achieving

independence for Vietnam. However, the U.S. government refused to lend Ho the help he

needed, viewing him as a puppet of Soviet Russia, despite many U.S. officials’ comments

that Ho was—first and foremost—a nationalist. Ho’s highest priority was national

revolution. Social revolution, in his idea, would later build on that success. The U.S.

government’s failure to realize the extent in which nationalism triumphed over

communism in the case of Vietnam stemmed from NSC-68, the blueprint of U.S. Cold

War foreign policy. According to Young, the U.S. government officials—conservative or

liberal—had come to accept a set of axioms derived from NSC-68 as being

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unquestionable. These axioms include the belief that U.S. intentions are “always good”

and communism is “fundamentally bad” (p. 27). Hence, Young argues that the U.S.

ignored Ho’s plea not because the U.S. was against self-determination or was not truly

committed to self-determination per se, but because the U.S. government believed that a

communist could not be a “genuine nationalist.” Hence, it had no interest in replacing a

colonial power with Ho who could not possibly be anything else but a communist—a

proxy of Kremlin.

According to Young, Not only did the U.S. government fail to recognize the

strong sense of nationalism in Vietnam, it also failed to conceive the fact that Vietnam

was one country, and the 17th Parallel was merely an artificial line splitting this country

into two states inhabited by people of the same ethnicity. Moreover, Young argues that

the U.S. populace struggled to comprehend the fact that the National Liberation Front or

Vietcong was not a communist force receiving orders from North Vietnam, but an

umbrella organization that included independent non-Communist organizations as well as

individuals (p. 70). Determined to oppose Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S.-installed leader of

South Vietnam, and seek peaceful reunification of the North and South, the NLF received

increasing support from the people of South Vietnam due to Diem’s ruthless and unfair

regime, which in the end moved people to align with the NLF. The NLF, Young argues,

replaced Saigon authority even before the end of 1960. Given that the forces fighting in

South Vietnam were from the same country, none of them were fighting in the name of

communism; this war clearly was not a war between communism and capitalism as the

U.S. government might claim. Young concludes that the war in the South was between

“contending Vietnamese forces” (p. 73), the weaker of which was created by the U.S.

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with the lack of popular support. As a result, the U.S. had to contribute at least 400,000

U.S. combat troops to keep the government of South Vietnam in power.

There were opportunities for peace, and for the U.S. to disengage itself from the

war, Young argues, but the U.S. did not pursue that route. In fact, after the overthrow of

Diem, the non-Communist military junta led by Duong Van Minh sought to be a

government of reconciliation, promising to work for peaceful coexistence between North

Vietnam and South Vietnam. The French government was also ready to help negotiate for

the neutralization of Indochinese states. At this moment, the prospect of peace seemed

high; yet, the U.S. did not want to go down the path of peace or neutralization because it

would lead to “unification on Communist terms” (p. 107), not the U.S. terms. As a

response to the junta’s conciliatory efforts, the U.S. criticized them for being too soft and

reluctant to wage the war in the South and plotted a successful “Pentagon’s coup” (p.

108) against Minh’s regime, shattering the hope for reunification between Hanoi and

Saigon. Moreover, in 1966, UN Ambassador Goldberg stated that the U.S. government

was ready to move toward peaceful negotiations and hoped that there would be a

reciprocal response in North Vietnam. President Carter also said that the U.S. was still

open for unconditional discussions but was not aware of any serious effort the North

Vietnamese had made to end the war. When the North Vietnamese took President

Carter’s words seriously and offered concessions, however, the President ignored it

completely. This shows that not only did the U.S. not care about the opportunities to end

the war, but it also acted as if the North Vietnamese did not want to end it when in fact, it

offered realistic concessions. Senator James William Fulbright addressed the ignorance

saying, “It’s a bunch of crap about [U.S. government] wanting to negotiate” (p. 182).

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For a story as complex and heartrending as the Vietnam War, Young has done a

laudable job in keeping the readers’ interests with her exceptional writing skills. The lack

of esoteric terminology and obscure historical allusions make details easier to absorb,

even for those who have no prior knowledge of the Vietnam War. Relying heavily on

first hand accounts from both the U.S. and Vietnamese side, The Vietnam Wars 1945-

1990 successfully lays down the chronology of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and

is a relatively balanced book, although the atrocities committed by the North Vietnamese

and the Vietcong are almost never mentioned. The photographs from various sources

included in the book are a good addition to understanding the War. Yet, they would have

been more useful if, instead of being lumped together into one section of photographs,

they were inserted as a part of the text. That way, readers could draw the relevance

between the text and the photographs and enhance their understanding of the war.

As Young signed her book’s preface in August 1990, Iraqi troops had just invaded

Kuwait in the start of what would be known as the Persian Gulf War. Not long after,

however, the U.S.-led coalition force authorized by the U.N. would enter Iraq. Watching

the event unfolding, Young admitted the “unwanted conclusion” (p. x) that the primary

instrument of U.S. foreign policy is war; the U.S. fights wars to impose its will on other

sovereign nations regardless of the will of those nations’ people. This pattern continues

today with the war in Iraq, confirming Young’s fear that the U.S. people will continue to

ask why they are involved in such wars—the question often raised about Vietnam. Why,

then, has the U.S. not yet learned from its past mistakes?

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