Vietnam – Commentary 2003-05

 Time Line (SW, 17 Apr 04)

1954 Vietnamese forces defeat French colonial troops at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Vietnam divided between independent North under Ho Chi Minh, and repressive pro-western puppet regime in South. US, unhappy with French defeat, begins military and financial aid to S Vietnam.
1959  US sends first 800 ‘advisers’ to back up S Vietnam regime.
1961-63  President JF Kennedy increases US forces in Vietnam to 3500 (1961), 11,300 (1962) and 15,000 (1963).
1964  In August, the US under Lyndon Johnson stages fake ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident’ to justify bombing of Vietnam.
1965  In July, Johnson raises troop levels in Vietnam to over 180,000.
1967  Rise in anti-war protests as US troops rise to 485,000.
1968  In Jan, the Vietnamese National Liberation Front launch Tet offensive, seizing control of key cities. US quells the rising militarily. In March, US troops massacre over 400 civilians at the village of My Lai.    In Nov, troop levels rise to 580,000 under Nixon.
1969  Nixon orders secret bombing of Vietnam’s neutral neighbour Cambodia. Huge anti-war demos in Washington.
1970  Nixon announces invasion of Cambodia. In anti-war protests, 4 students are killed at Kent State Uni.
1972  Nixon aides break into Watergate building to dig up dirt to smear critics of his policies. Nixon re-elected Pres. In Oct 72, he orders intense air-raids on Hanoi & Haiphong (N Viet towns).
1973  Ceasefire agreement with Vietnam signed.
1974  Nixon forced to resign over Watergate involvement and Gerald Ford becomes President.
1975  Last of US troops flee in helicopters from roof of American embassy. National Lib Front takes capital Saigon, re-naming it Ho Chi Minh City.

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The atrocities and the racism                                             
In Oct 1972, Nixon ordered a series of air-raids on the N Vietnamese towns of Hanoi & Haiphong. It was the most intense bombing in world history – with a destructive power of 5 times the atomic power dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The US dropped 1 million tons of bombs on N Vietnam and over 4m tons in the South – twice the amount the US dropped during the whole of WWII.
Thousands of villages in Vietnam were totally destroyed and around 2 million Vietnamese killed. The bombing included the use of weapons banned by international law, such as napalm and cluster bombs.  Over 100m pounds of defoliant chemicals like Agent Orange were dropped. 

Most studies of the war in S E Asia acknowledge that 4 times the tonnage of bombs was dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos than that used by the US in all operations during WWar II.  The U.S. deployed some 500,000 ground troops and dropped more than 6m tons of bombs. The U.S. aggression lasted more than 12 years. 58,000 Americans and 2-3 million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians lost their lives.

Christian Appy forcefully demonstrated in Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam, that the "search and destroy" missions were guaranteed to produce atrocities. Certain high-profile atrocities, such as My Lai, achieved prominent media coverage (nearly a year after the incident.) Far more murderous were campaigns such as the Phoenix program with its thousands of killings. Those in charge like a Lt. Calley received minor punishment for allowing the massacre of hundreds of women and children. 

Socialist Worker, 26 April 2003
More chemicals dropped than first thought resulting in horrific deformities
Between 1961-71 agents of mass defoliation were dropped on Vietnam to destroy food and shelter. A new scientific study published in Nature last week showed an extra 7 million litres of chemicals like Agent Orange were sprayed. Jeanne Stellman of Columbia unearthed lots of material that had been classed as top secret in earlier investigations. Her report says: ‘Large numbers of Vietnamese civilians were directly exposed to herbicidal agents…’
The weapons caused horrific deformities still being found Viet children. A Red Cross report (2003) said 650,000 Vietnamese are still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange & similar chemicals. 

A Roy, in her introductory essay The Loneliness of N Chomsky, for the new edition of Chomsky’s “For Reasons of State” (New Press, Jan 2003) includes the following: 

Chomsky wrote in 1984: For the past 22 years, I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962, or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina — without success. There is no such event on record. Rather, there is an American defence of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from the outside (namely from Vietnam).  

 

Layer by layer, Chomsky reveals at its core the pitiless heart of the American war machine, completely insulated from the realities of war, blinded by ideology, and willing to annihilate millions of human beings, civilians, soldiers, women, children, villages, whole cities, whole ecosystems — with scientifically honed methods of brutality.

Here's an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm:

We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn't so hot — if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene — now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding white phosphorous so as to make it burn better. It'll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it'll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.

Independent 11 Mar 05
Vietnamese lose Agent Orange lawsuit
A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by 4 million Vietnamese that US chemical companies committed war crimes by making Agent Orange for use in the war in Vietnam. Judge Jack Weinstein disagreed that defoliants should be considered poisons banned under international rules of war.

Westmoreland, commander of the US forces in Vietnam was a mass killer
By NORMAN SOLOMON 20 Jul 05
[Solomon is author of the book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, published in July 2005.]

After he died in July 2005, Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called Westmoreland possibly our most disastrous general since Custer.” From early 1964 until 1968, the U.S. military machine under Westmoreland methodically slaughtered Vietnamese people. The Post's front page said "Westmoreland's military strategy was to conduct a war of attrition, trying to kill enemy forces faster than they could be replaced."

Westmoreland did his best to spin the media. In April 1967, a month when several hundred thousand Americans participated in antiwar protests, General Westmoreland spoke to an Associated Press luncheon and asserted that the Vietnamese Communist enemy was able to continue the anti-U.S. struggle "encouraged by popular opposition to our efforts," suggesting they could have won the war but for those unpatriotic civilians back home.

The End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Ago (30April 2005)
Commentary By GABRIEL KOLKO
[Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience.]

The war in Vietnam ended 30 years ago with a complete triumph for the Communists. It was the longest, most expensive and divisive American war in its history, involving over a half-million U.S. forces at one point-plus Australian, South Korean, and other troops. The Americans used 15 million tons of munitions (as much as they employed in World War Two), had a vast military superiority over their enemies by any standard one employs, and still they were defeated.

The Saigon army commanded by Nguyen van Thieu also was far stronger than their adversaries. At the beginning of 1975 they had over three times as much artillery, twice as many tanks and armored cars, 1400 aircraft and a virtual monopoly of the air. They had a two-to-one superiority of combat troops-roughly 700,000 to 320,000. The Communist leadership in early 1975 expected the war to last as much as a decade longer. I was in South Vietnam at the end of 1973 and in Hanoi all of April 1975 until the last four days of the war, when I was in Hue and Danang in the south. I am certain the Communists were almost as surprised as the Americans that victory was to be theirs so quickly and easily; I told them from late 1973 onward to expect an end to the war by the Saigon regime capsizing without a serious fight-much as the Kuomintang had in China after 1947. As a future Politburo member later confessed, they regarded my prediction as "crazy." They were completely unprepared to run the entire nation, and their chaotic, inconsistent economic policies since 1975 have shown it.

South Vietnam had always been corrupt since the U.S. arbitrarily created it in 1955 despite the Geneva Accords provision that there should be an election to reunify what was historically and ethnically one nation. Thieu, who was a Catholic in a dominantly Buddhist country, retained the loyalty of his generals and bureaucracy by allowing them to enrich themselves at the expense of the people. The average Vietnamese, whether they were for or against the Communists, had no loyalty whatsoever to the Thieu regime that was robbing them. After 1973, soldiers' salaries declined with inflation and they began living off the land. The urban middle class was increasingly alienated.

By the beginning of 1975 the regime in South Vietnam was beginning to disintegrate by every relevant criterion: economically and politically, and therefore militarily. The Saigon army abandoned the battlefield well before the final Communist offensive in March 1975. Moreover, with the Watergate scandal, the Nixon Administration was on the defensive after 1973, both with the American public and Congress.
After Nixon's forced resignation the new President, Gerald Ford, was unable to sustain the Thieu regime while the American army was too demoralized to keep going. The basic problem was in Saigon: the regime was falling apart for reasons having nothing to do with military equipment. The Communists were stunned by their fast, total victory over the nominally superior Saigon army, which refused to fight and disintegrated.

Total defeat in Vietnam 30 years ago should have been a warning to the U.S.: wars are too complicated for any nation, even the most powerful, to undertake without grave risk. They are not simply military exercises in which equipment and firepower is decisive, but political, ideological, and economic challenges also.