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Looking back on Vietnam
Salon presents a week-long retrospective on the war and its consequences, at home and abroad.
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[04/24/00]

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No. 1, I think that back in the '60s a lot of people talked about the domino theory, and they would smirk and chuckle at the naiveté of those who thought that if we would abandon Vietnam, that Laos and Cambodia would fall to the Communists, and then after that, Thailand and after that, who knew, maybe the Philippines and then maybe even Hawaii.

When we did leave Vietnam nobody seemed to point out or say, Gee maybe I was wrong, look what happened in Laos and Cambodia. Because we'd stayed there for 12 years, we did indeed stop that from being any worse than it was. It stopped after Laos and Cambodia. Thailand did not fall to the Communists. Neither did the Philippines. Those were real dangers back in those days.

There are a lot of reputable historians who say that one of the factors contributing to the ultimate fall of Communism, at least in the Soviet empire, was the fact that we had stayed by our guns and stood by our friends and our treaty obligations for 12 years or more in Vietnam.

I think there's probably something to that [argument that we should have fought harder] in that one of the things that I found at the time was a sense of frustration among some of the troops when I would interview them. They were frustrated because there was no policy of trying to win the war. It was called at the time McNamara's No-Win Policy. We deliberately were engaged in military activities and just as deliberately were determined not to win.

When you do that, you reduce the entire business to getting up each morning, going out and seeing how many gooks you can shoot. That to me and to a lot of people, was profoundly immoral. And yet that is what Robert McNamara imposed upon the American military. Plus the general atmosphere of political control over the details of military operations.

Also Visit our Vietnam: 25 Years Later site for more articles like this one.

Certainly we have a very important principle in this country of civilian control of the military. On the other hand, in the grass-roots operations of the military, down at the platoon level, it was a source of great frustration. You would be pursuing the enemy, have him in sight, he crosses over some invisible border and suddenly you have to break off pursuit. Or worse, you're sitting there receiving incoming fire and not only are you not allowed to return the fire, you're not even allowed to load rounds in your weapon without approval from political authorities up the chain of command. I'm sorry, that is not a good way to fight a war.

In the short run the war had a great effect [on foreign policy]; in the long run, I don't know. Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's secretary of defense, commissioned a study to determine what we should have learned from Vietnam, and the results were published as the Weinberger Doctrine. Among other things, it said, God forbid if we have to get involved in military operations overseas again, there are a number of criteria that should be met. There should be a clearly defined U.S. interest to be served, not just going off to play peacekeeper or policeman to the world. There must be strong political support on the home front because it's impossible to fight the enemy abroad and Congress at home at the same time. You should have a clearly defined military objective to achieve. You should define what it means to win. And finally, you should have an exit strategy, so that once you have achieved your objective, you get out as quickly and expeditiously as possible.

With Desert Storm we saw that applying such lessons led to very good results. Since Desert Storm though, we have been ignoring all of those lessons to our country's detriment, and certainly to our country's ability to keep a strong defense.

It had a profound effect on American culture in so many ways. A whole generation of people were torn apart by the war and their attitudes toward it. It made us rethink a lot of our values and our priorities. It made us doubt a lot of what we had held without question. Every once in a while I guess a little soul-searching is good for a society, so I'm not sure it was necessarily bad that we had to go through that as a country. But by now we have a population the majority of whom have never experienced war, certainly not on the scale of Vietnam -- and please God they never will.

Jonathan Schell, war correspondent and author of "The Real War" and "The Time of Illusion: An Historical and Reflective Account of the Nixon Era"

The Vietnam War accomplished the virtual destruction of South Vietnam, the deaths of more than 50,000 American soldiers, the embitterment of American society, the pulverization of a liberal consensus in the Democratic Party and the worst constitutional crisis in the United States since the Civil War, namely Watergate and the [resignation] of Nixon, which were not conceivable without the war. There were no positive consequences worth mentioning.

The war was lost by the French before the United States ever arrived. Its essence was political. The great majority of the Vietnamese people were resolved, even at the price of living under the repressive regime in North Vietnam, to live as a single, united, independent nation. Nothing the United States did or could have done would have altered that will. In its absence, victories in battle were simply meaningless. The United States, in fact, monotonously won the battles -- as opposed to the war -- including the Tet Offensive. But these military victories only postponed the day when, upon the eventual withdrawal of our armies (which the American people had been promised and rightly demanded), that political will would have its way, and Vietnam would be united under the North.

The American military belatedly learned the lessons of Vietnam to a fault. They have been a rather dovish influence in subsequent interventions -- such as the ones in the Balkans. They demand an "exit strategy" before they will enter a conflict; they demand that politicians solve political problems, leaving them with strictly military tasks. Whether this has been positive or not depends on your evaluation of the subsequent interventions. My own views are mixed.

By destroying the liberal consensus centered upon the Democratic Party (there were other causes, but this was the main one), the war changed the direction not just of foreign policy but of American politics. What the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King began, the war finished. Nixon was the product. Ever since, the Democrats have been meandering from one thing to another in search of the lost consensus. The most recent innovation has been Clintonism, which has managed to hold its own against the Republicans at the cost of sweeping concessions to Republican views.
salon.com | April 24, 2000

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