On a hiding to nothing
VIETNAM: AMERICANS COULD NOT HAVE HOPED TO TRIUMPH – AUTHOR
Book shows how successive US administrations manipulated events in Vietnam in the name of political manouevering at home.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, which marked the end of the Vietnam War, cynical American veterans had T-shirts made which read: “Participant, Southeast Asia War Games, 1961-1975: Second place.”
It summed up the reality of America’s military and political loss, as well as the sense of futility among those soldiers. It is interesting that in his excellent, comprehensive history of the conflict, Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975, Max Hastings doesn’t mention it, although he brings in boxes full of other observations about society – both American and Vietnamese, both trivial and massive – which help elevate the book beyond a dry treatise.
With the passage of 44 years since the Americans fled South Vietnam ignominiously in Huey choppers from the roof of the embassy in Saigon, it is easier to remove the emotion and analyse Vietnam then and now.
It certainly began, in the closing days of World War II, when the French decided to continue to run Indochina as one of their colonies, as a liberation struggle. As in the case of many such post-1945 struggles, Russian and Chinese communists backed the North Vietnamese. After the defeat by the North Vietnamese Army in 1954, the French pulled out and the Americans came in to support a so-called democratic government in the south.
Hastings shows, clearly, that successive American administrations cynically manipulated events in Vietnam in the name of political manouevering at home. President Richard Nixon’s lies to the American people were eventually unmasked and his sleazy White House show came to an end in 1973 with his resignation, just ahead of impeachment.
The war cost more and more money and took the lives of more and more people on both sides – yet, ultimately, it was not one the Americans could have hoped to win, believes Hastings.
“The communists enjoyed the critical propaganda advantage that they were almost invisible to most of the people, most of the time. They set a light footprint on the land, contrasted with that of the Americans whose steps might be compared – as they were by some cultured Vietnamese – with those of some sci-fi movie giant, lumbering across the landscape, expunging tranquillity, smashing fragile structures in its path.”
That is still happening today – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria – everywhere there are heavy American military boots. Yet, the war was not the glorious, righteous struggle the communists portrayed to the West (and sympathetic journalists and activists in the States).
Doctrinaire communism reduced Vietnam to one of the poorest countries in the world after 1975 and it is only now beginning to struggle back.
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were killed or jailed to enforce the new order. Looking at it that way, perhaps the US did have a moral imperative … because true democracy still eludes the country.
Yet after between 2.5 million and 3.5 million deaths – and many more millions left crippled or injured – the Vietnam War was, by any standards, a human tragedy. Hastings’ attempt to bring a balanced and nuanced view makes this book a must-read for anyone interested in history and geopolitics … and those able to see the warnings about developments in the 21st century world.