"A
Battle We Lost in the War We Won" by Peter Rodman
from the New York Post, April 30, 2000.
(Peter W. Rodman is Director of National Security Programs at The Nixon Center in Washington. He was a special assistant to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon and Ford administrations.)
Our Vietnam involvement, from the vantage point of 25 years, can be judged on three levels: strategic, practical, and moral.
The strategic rationale can still be debated: Was the war necessary to buy time for Southeast Asia to strengthen itself against revolutionary tides? Was this worth the eventual strategic cost? The practical questions are still debated, too: Could a smarter military strategy have won the war? By 1968, the American people came to the reasonable practical conclusion that their leaders did not know what they were doing.
Moral Vindication
The great irony of Vietnam is that the level on which the war was most virulently denounced at the time – the moral level – is where it is the most vindicated by history. No sooner had the Communists taken over when American officials’ warnings of a Communist bloodbath – so ridiculed before April 1975 – were borne out in breathtaking fashion. The "re-education" camps of the Vietnam gulag, the tens of thousands of boat people, the chemical warfare against Lao tribesmen, and, of course, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia – this horror is what we had fought to prevent, and what our allies’ defeat guaranteed.
The American people never doubted the war’s morality – the rightness of our purposes. They turned against the war on practical grounds, as noted above, because they lost confidence in their leaders' conduct of it. But there were plenty of intellectuals and public figures whose antiwar passion was far more radical – who thought America was evil and that the Communists represented the "progressive" forces of history. These are people for whom America’s crime in Indochina would have been greater had we succeeded.
The vindication of our Vietnam effort was only reinforced by the later collapse of the Soviet Union. The moral pretensions of Communism were blown away once and for all.
Reversal of Fortune
Future historians, indeed, will have to explain that very phenomenon – the extraordinary reversal of historical fortune that occurred between 1975 and 1985.
The fall of Indochina was the low point of a truly dismal period for the West. At the end of 1975, Congress (seeing "new Vietnams" under every bed) cut off a U.S. attempt to halt a blatant Soviet/Cuban military intervention in Angola. The Kremlin, thereby emboldened, was on a roll, intervening subsequently in Ethiopia, South Yemen, and Afghanistan. Even Western Europe, demoralized by energy crisis and economic recession, nearly fell prey to the growing strength of local Communist Parties.
Leonid Brezhnev, in February 1976 at the 25th Soviet Communist Party Congress, gloated that the global "correlation of forces" was shifting in favor of "socialism." In those days, the triumphalism was on the Soviet side. And that’s how things looked.
Vietnam was not the only cause of this, certainly. But European observers pointed with alarm to the collapse of America’s international credibility, and the seeming paralysis of American power, as major causes of the world’s instability and demoralization.
The whole concept of American credibility had itself been mocked by anti-war critics. Just a fantasy of our warped leaders who wanted to prolong the war, they scoffed. But this concept, too, was vindicated. Credibility means that allies believe your commitments and foes believe your warnings. In 1990-91, when Saddam Hussein ignored American warnings to leave Kuwait alone, Iraqi officials pointed to Vietnam as proof that the United States didn’t have the stomach for taking casualties. Saddam guessed wrong then, but America had to re-earn its credibility the hard way – by going to war again, and winning.
By 1985, of course, things had turned around dramatically. Western economies were flourishing (the Information Age had begun). The Soviets had clearly overreached in the time of American weakness, especially in Afghanistan, and internally they went through a period of decrepit leadership and economic stagnation. Most of all, the United States had regained its self-confidence – electing Ronald Reagan. So we recovered, and the world recovered.
Getting the Lessons Right
Some sectors of our intelligentsia, however, still haven’t gotten it right. They still feel guilty about American power – apologizing all the time about America’s past policies. And they are still inhibited about the decisive use of American military force. Unfortunately, many of these people now run our government in Washington.
But the American people, as I say, never doubted the goodness and greatness of this country. They never doubted the nobility of the cause of freedom that we championed throughout the Cold War. Nor do they doubt it now. Vietnam was a tragic battle lost, but in a war we brilliantly won.
