"Who Owns the Vietnam War"

[Kirkhill]

From commentarymagazine.com

Who Owns the Vietnam War?
Arthur Herman
December 2007
     

In late August, an American President spoke forthrightly for the first time about what happened when the United States abandoned its commitments to two sovereign nations in Indochina, South Vietnam and Cambodia, and allowed them to be overrun by Communist forces. The President’s remarks, which were intended to heighten public awareness of what might happen if we repeated the same mistake in Iraq, occupied barely three paragraphs in a 45-minute speech. Acknowledging that there is “a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam war and how we left,” Bush added that “Whatever your position is on that debate,”

one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our own vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “reeducation camps,” and “killing fields.”
His words set off a firestorm among America’s liberal elite. Outraged, Senator Joseph Biden accused the President of “playing the American people for fools.” Everyone knows, Biden said, that “in Iraq, just as we did in Vietnam, we are clinging to a central government that does not and will not enjoy the support of the people” and is therefore doomed. The historian Robert Dallek declared that Bush’s comparison “boggles the mind,” and that the true comparison worked the other way around: even though “we dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater, we couldn’t work our will” to prevent North Vietnam’s triumph over its southern neighbor—any more, presumably, than we can “work our will” in Iraq. Stanley Karnow, the author of Vietnam: A History (1983), one of the most widely read accounts of the war, asked sarcastically: “Does [Bush] think we should have stayed in Vietnam?” To Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations, the postwar horrors that befell Vietnam and Cambodia occurred “because the United States left too late, not too early.”.............

Even before the last Marine helicopter left the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in April 1975, a narrative had developed to explain the course and the ultimate meaning of the war, and ever since then it has served as a template for understanding and evaluating America’s behavior in the world. .......


But is it accurate? By the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, in the wake of revelations about the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia and the testimony of escapees from postwar Vietnam itself, critics like Guenter Lewy (America in Vietnam, 1978) and Norman Podhoretz (Why We Were in Vietnam, 1982) were undoing crucial elements of the standard account, especially its characterization of American motives in Indochina and its rosy portrayal of our adversaries. Lately, however, thanks to a growing body of evidence and careful work by scholars aided by first-hand accounts from former North Vietnamese and Vietcong participants, a much more comprehensive picture has begun to emerge, one that challenges the conventional wisdom from start to finish.

Among the new generation of historians of the Vietnam war, important debates and differences still remain—for example, over the efficacy of American tactics of counterinsurgency and pacification. But they overwhelmingly agree on one point: the old account is a myth, and no longer stands up to scrutiny........

Much, much more on the link and deserves to be read in full.

 

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Kirkhill,great read,everyone who has any interest in how the left operates
should take the time to read this very revealing article.That is the left,not
just in the US,but everywhere in the Western world.It is quite relevant
to the opposition to the war in A-stan and Canadas involvement.
                                      Regards
                                                 

 

[54/102 CEF]

4 References for you - a paper I wrote on the Kennedy Admistration and the Vietnam War - If pressed for time just read the conclusion
http://www.donlowconcrete.com/Vietnam/ -- note the point about Clark Clifford finding no support among erstwhile Allies at

2nd Ref
Foreign Affairs, July 1969. A Viet Nam Reappraisal, Clark M. Clifford http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19690701faessay47401/clark-m-clifford/a-viet-nam-reappraisal.html

3rd ref - a video Interview with Colonel Harry Summers -----> http://webcast.ucsd.edu:8080/ramgen/UCSD_TV/9175.rm

Text version
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Summers/summers2.html

4th A CBC Look back at media of the day regarding Vietnam http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-71-1413/conflict_war/vietnam/

Happy Holidays to all!