Resolving Our Vietnam Predicament

A Singular and well-observed feature of war is for the view in retrospect to depart radically from that which attended the beginning. Dangers that at the outset of hostilities seemed to justify the most sanguinary steps, in the perspective of years seem slight, sometimes frivolous. And prospects that at the beginning of conflict seemed easy and brilliant come to measure only the depth of the miscalculation. The case of men who in the past 30 years have planned expeditions against Moscow, Pearl Harbor and Pusan--not to mention Haifa and Tel Aviv--sufficiently establishes the point. At the same time, war turns reason into stereotype. Acceptance of what in the beginning is an estimate of national interest becomes an article of faith, a test of constancy, a measure of patriotism. At least while it lasts, war has a way of freezing all participants in their original error.

The war in Vietnam, by various calculations, has now gone on for more than half a decade and with mounting intensity for three years. It has shown these classical tendencies. The march of history has massively undermined the assumptions that attended and justified our original involvement. No part of the original justification--I do not exaggerate--remains intact. More remarkable, perhaps, very few of the assumptions that supported our involvement are any longer asserted by those who defend the conflict. Yet the congealing intellectual processes of war have worked to the full. Action that is not defended is still adhered to as a dogged manifestation of faith.

Let me be fair. Those who are committed not to support of this venture but to opposition have also shown a tendency to become frozen in fixed positions. For the first time since 1815, we are engaged in a conflict to which a very large part of the population is opposed. The unanimity rule that has previously characterized our national conflicts does not exist. Both those who defend and those who attack have lost some of their capacity to accommodate their thoughts to new evidence.

My purpose in this article is to see if, however slightly, I can rise above these rigidities. I do not wish to pretend to view our situation in Vietnam with any special insight or wisdom. I would like merely to inquire how this conflict will look when minds, those of supporters and adversaries alike, are no longer subject to the congealing influences of war. And I would like then to propose the course of action-- (continued on page 142)Vietnam Predicament(continued on page 139) I venture even to call it the moderate solution--that emerges from such a view.

Many will think that in labeling this a "moderate solution" I have made an unhappy choice of words. Moderation in these days is not in high repute. The term itself, in some degree, has come to imply pompous and comfortable and well-padded inaction. Thus, it rightly arouses suspicion. And increasingly, men are divided between those who want the catharsis of total violence and those who want the comforts of total escape. Yet if our national mood opposes moderation, history favors it. It does not vouchsafe us sharp, well-chiseled solutions. It gives us blurred edges and dull lines. Whatever the ultimate bang or whimper, we can be sure that in between there will be only compromises.

Let me begin with the terrible treatment that history has accorded our original justification for the Vietnamese conflict.

We are in Vietnam partly as a result of a long series of seemingly minor steps. Each of these steps, at the time, seemed more attractive--less pregnant with domestic political controversy and criticism--than the alternative, which was to call a firm halt on our involvement. The aggregate of these individual steps--more weapons, more advisors, a combat role for our men, progressive increases in our troop strength, bombing of North Vietnam, a widening choice of targets--is larger by far than the sum of the individual parts. The resulting involvement on the Asian mainland is not a development that all who asked or acquiesced in the individual actions wished to see or even foresaw.

But back of these individual steps, and especially the earlier ones, was a political and military justification that once seemed compelling. This justification was the assumed existence of a united, homogeneous and militantly evangelical communism that has chosen South Vietnam as the weak point for a probe. Speaking to the National Press Club some six months after he assumed office, Secretary of State Rusk gave an explicit formulation of the view of the world crisis in which Vietnam played a part. He said:

The central issue of the crisis is the announced determination to impose a world of coercion upon those not already subject to it ... it is posed between the Sino-Soviet empire and all the rest, whether allied or neutral; and it is posed on every continent....

This was an accepted view at the time. Few would have thought Mr. Rusk's formulation other than commonplace. He and others repeated the thesis--the doctrine of a centrally controlled and disciplined power guided from Moscow--dozens of times. Implicit therein was a pattern of policy and of action. This had immediate relevance to Vietnam.

Thus, to assume a unitary and evangelical force was inevitably to urge a policy of resistance. And resistance would have to be everywhere on the Communist perimeter. To allow transgression in one place would, most plausibly, be to encourage it elsewhere. And here we have the foundation for the analogy to Munich that for a long time played such a dominant role in the Vietnam discussion. The Sino-Soviet power being imperial and coercive, it was necessary also to assume that it would never be welcomed by those who might be subject to it. It could not reflect national aspiration; this was a flat contradiction in terms. Communist power might seek to exploit social grievance. But this, it was assumed, would only be a tactic designed to win subservience to the ultimate imperial and conspiratorial purpose. And this being so, no nation should yield to such tactics, even when the grievance--as might often happen--was real. Far better that people stay in a less enduring state of exploitation than to pass forever into this all-embracing system of coercion. This meant, further, that we could not be particular as to whom we might support; even the most nauseous non-Communist dictator was preferable to the enduring Communist imperialism. And even if the Communists had seduced a majority of the population, it was doubtful that we should yield. Rather, we should try to win them back. For this, the liberal strategist in this conflict set great store by ameliorative social action. Conservatives tended to place rather more reliance on a gun.

Given this view of the world struggle--and none, I think, will feel it an unfair summary of official attitudes in the early Sixties--our intervention in Vietnam was wholly understandable. It was unfortunate but not decisive that the governments we supported, in their commitment to democracy and humane and civilized values, left much to be desired. It was unfortunate but not decisive that our intervention was by something less than the popular demand of the people we aided.

Moreover, we had a right, given this view of the world, to expect two further and vital factors to be associated with our involvement. We had a right to expect that its necessity would be appreciated and supported by the American people--as our economic and political intervention in Turkey and Greece and western Europe following World War Two was supported or as our military intervention in Korea in 1950 was supported. And it was reasonable to expect that the most effective support would come not from those who automatically rally to the flag when the guns sound but from the more introspective, informed and deliberative community--those somewhat ambiguously styled the intellectuals--who would best appreciate the long-run consequences of short-run weakness and appeasement. Such people had given strong support to the Marshall Plan and to the Korean intervention. A generation earlier, they had been in the very forefront of the criticism of Munich, the agreed symbol of surrender. So their support could be expected now.

Finally, given this view of the world, there was every reason to expert that the American initiative in Vietnam would be welcomed by the rest of the non-Communist nations. Previous initiatives had attracted such applause. The closer a nation to the danger, the greater the prospective applause; for who could tell, after all, who was the next on the list? So the United States would both justify and enhance her claim to moral as well as economic and military leadership by assuming a commanding role in combatting the common menace in Indo-China.

Merely to state the assumptions that lie behind this conflict is to show how completely they, and the resulting expectations, have been dissolved. History may not vouchsafe us sharp edges, but, obviously, it can be a very effective blunt instrument. The assumptions that lay back of our Vietnam policy, including the concept of a unitary and all-embracing Communist imperialism, were not, in fact, based on any very close knowledge of the subject. They were a formula, in some measure a theology, adopted by lawyers, businessmen, Government officials and military men in the years of the Marshall Plan and NATO. Few of the authors had any firsthand knowledge of communism. Few had much experience of the political left. None had much experience of Asia. All were reacting to the then-current reality of Joseph Stalin. To some extent, it was a way of justifying the alliances, military appropriations, economic and military aid the proponents thought necessary. There is nothing remarkable in the discovery that a doctrine so contrived failed to stand the test of history. History is respectful of truth, but not of official truth.

Here is what has happened to the doctrine that justified our intervention:

1. The Communist world has gone to pieces along national lines. The two great centers, Moscow and Peking, during the past years have, on occasion, been close to diplomatic breach.

2. China, which the proponents of the Vietnam conflict for a while bravely pictured as the deus ex machina, is rein within itself. Its assumed puppet in (continued on page 278)Vietnam Predicament(continued from page 142) Hanoi, like its earlier puppet in North Korea, has publicly asserted its independence. Not even the most ardent defender of the war can now believe that Hanoi wants to be part of a Chinese-led empire.

3. The people we fight in South Vietnam, it is now widely agreed, carry the banners of Vietnamese nationalism. They do this against former colonial officers whom we support. Gone, therewith, is the notion that people will rally to any alternative to communism. As the British learned in India, the French in Africa, the Dutch in Indonesia and we learned in the Philippines, Western powers cannot win against aroused nationalism--and if wise, they do not try.

4. Those we support have recurrently by their burlesque of democratic and constitutional process reduced their American supporters and onetime defenders to an embarrassed silence. Gone is the notion that any alternative will be accepted in the United States.

5. The assumption that we could count on the applause and support of the other countries has disappeared. No European or American nation has rallied to our side. Few leaders dare speak in our favor. In Asia, despite propinquity to the assumed danger, the most aggressive arm twisting has not brought us allies, only a few clients. But it is not that we have failed to win support that is our misfortune. We have aroused by far the most massive hostility in our national experience. There is an underlying implication, never quite conceded, that much of this opposition has been manufactured by Communists. If this is so, it is the most drastic of all indictments of our Vietnam enterprise, for it shows what an unparalleled opportunity our enterprise has accorded the Communists for turning our erstwhile friends into hostile critics. However, there is no reason to think that the Communists are this much involved. People have probably reacted in accordance with their own conclusions and their own conscience.

6. Finally, with all else has gone the assumption that Americans could be rallied, more or less automatically, behind any war, however ill considered, distant or cruel, provided only that Communists could be identified on the other side. Instead, the American people have watched the collapse of the assumptions on which the Vietnam war was launched. In vindication of an intelligence none should mistrust, a very large number have reached the inevitable conclusion: The assumptions that look us into Vietnam have been shown by history to be false. Therefore, we should not be there.

The reasons that took us into the conflict having disappeared, why do we remain?

We remain, as all know, because men are human and do not like to concede, even to themselves, that they were wrong. Those who urged our intervention were associated with what could one day be regarded as the greatest miscalculation in our history. They remain in command. They are naturally reluctant to admit that their view of the world--the view that counseled this vast effort--has been shown to be wrong. And so, aided by the military momentum of the event itself, they continue. That is why we are now at war.

It also counsels us on our course. Moderates, among whom I number myself, should urge that when a change of direction comes--as it must--there will be no recrimination. We must counsel those persisting in error that they are far more likely to compound the damage to their reputation than to retrieve it. For that is what happens to men who persist in the face of fact.

But there are stereotypes in the attitudes of those who are critics of our involvement in Vietnam. If one is detailing the miscalculations of those with whom he disagrees, it is salutary, also, to look for the errors of those with whom he agrees. It is most salutary of all, and in addition a trifle exceptional, to search for error in one's own past positions and attitudes.

One grave error of those who criticize our involvement in Vietnam is to assume that the critics are a small and heroic and perilously situated minority. We are nothing of the sort. In times past in the United States, popular opinion and official persecution have dealt rather harshly with dissent. Lives have been ruined and men silenced. There has always seemed some special likelihood of this when the primitive emotions of war have been released. But there is no danger of such repression when vast numbers, including an overwhelming proportion of the young and the articulate, are involved. One wonders, indeed, if under such circumstances one should speak of dissent. Martyrs do not march by the millions. This tendency to appropriate their cloak serves only to give a highly erroneous impression of the weakness of the opposition to our venture in Vietnam.

If anything, reflection should be on the reverse. There is no community concerned with foreign policy in the United States where the critic of our involvement in Vietnam is not accorded a warm and even enthusiastic hearing. There are quite a few where it is not deemed tactful or discreet for an official defender to appear. For the first time in our history, last spring those responsible for our foreign policy found it necessary, in pursuit of this discretion, to avoid that fine old American folk rite, the commencement ceremony. Either too many students and too many faculty would be present or too many would obtrusively decline to be present.

I think, also, that those who are critical of American involvement in Vietnam spend too much time worrying about the motives and tactics of those who share their goals. Second only to the fear that criticism will be suppressed is the fear of critics that they will be found in association with someone who, for whatever eccentric reason, has developed a latter-day affection for Ho Chi Minh. This is silly. I do confess to wishing that more of those who are concerned about Vietnam would redirect their concern toward winning friends and influencing their fellow citizens in effective fashion.

I find myself also more than a little critical of those of my fellow critics who admit to a feeling of frustration and defeat in their efforts to influence the Administration on Vietnam. For one thing, they have not been without influence. On the contrary, they have had a great deal. Even within the Administration, there are far more people with honest doubts than is commonly imagined. There are more now. I venture to think, than ever before. And one has only to ask, had there been no criticism, no objection--for that matter, no demonstrations--where would we be in Asia now? Where would the bombs be falling? Can anyone doubt that we would be far more deeply and dangerously involved than now?

Next, as is said even of the President of the United States, the critics of our Vietnam involvement have been much too influenced by the polls. These, I do not doubt, show correctly the reaction of people to the war. They show the national, deeply conditioned tendency to rally to the flag. But the polls do not show depth of feeling. They do not show ability to articulate feeling--to persuade. They do not show length of memory. They do not indicate who will write the history and draw the lessons. They do not always show where youth--and thus the next generation--stands. If those who feel deeply and remember long, those who can persuade others and who will be the next electorate are opposed, it may not matter too much that they are a minority. Nor will they long be such. As noted, our wars in the past have been fought on something close to unanimity rule. And they have always had the part of the population that now opposes in full support. That it is wise to act in neglect of the informed, articulate and young--that they can be ignored as somehow morally as well as numerically inferior--is far from proven. On the contrary, it is likely to be remembered as one of the cardinal political errors of modern times. In American life, the intellectual, so-called, is fashionably dismissed as a serious factor in all the battles except the last.

The critics of our Vietnam involvement have also been too ready to imagine that the opposition in Hanoi is eager to oblige peace-loving men by entering negotiations on whatever terms we believe convenient. This is unduly optimistic--and also dangerous. Let me be clear on one thing. There is not the slightest doubt that Hanoi has indicated a willingness to negotiate on various occasions. And this willingness has not required our withdrawal as a precondition. Officials who imply otherwise are further widening the credibility gap. But it is a mistake to base policy on any particular assumption as to the behavior and intentions of Hanoi or the leaders of the National Liberation Front. We do not know the enemy that well. And it is very easy for those who are hostile to the idea of a negotiated settlement, those who want a military solution, so to handle our relations with Hanoi and the NLF and so to gauge and present their responses and nonresponses that those who disagree are left well out on a limb.

If we can have negotiations, that is much to be desired. But there must be something more. There must also be a policy that allows of stubbornness, suspicion, ill will, obtuseness and the waywardness that results from internal political struggle on the part of those with whom we are involved. Any policy that relies on negotiations is a policy that is at least partly at the mercy of others. We must also have a course of action that is within the scope of our own authority. We must invite negotiations. And we must have a better policy than mindless escalation, should negotiations prove not to be possible.

This brings me to my final point of criticism of my fellow critics. They exaggerate the difficulties in finding an alternative course of action to the one we have been following. This tragedy has continued so long that they have come to believe that the alternatives have now disappeared. "Perhaps something could have been done earlier. Now it is too late." This is wrong--as well as morally weak. Alternatives to continued and deepening involvement exist. They have even been made somewhat more feasible by the march of events.

Let me outline a feasible course of action that reduces our commitment in Vietnam to sensible proportions, protects the larger peace, conserves our national interest and, what could perhaps be more important, reflects the interest of the sadly beset and tortured people of this part of the world. It is a policy that does not depend on the cooperation of Hanoi and the NLF, although should that be forthcoming, all would be much eased.

The first step is to accept in fact what many reasonable men have already conceded, which is that great areas of South Vietnam must remain indefinitely under the authority of the Viet Cong. They have been under this authority for years--sometimes ten or more. It was not the policy even in the most militant of the Cold War years to roll back the Communists from their established positions of power. Not even John Foster Dulles so urged. There is no indication that such policy is wanted by the people most immediately involved--there is no indication whatever that they would ask it at the price of the horrors of military liberation. None can say, in the context of rural Asia, that on the completion of this effort their liberties would be greater or their well-being enhanced. The men who defend these parts of the country--this is especially true of the Mekong Delta--are not foreigners but men who fight on their native soil.

Much of the country under Viet Cong control, the Delta apart, is wild and lightly populated. To invest American lives in so slight, improbable and subjective a gain as restoring these swamps and jungles to a Saigon administration is unthinkable. Nor do I honestly believe that even the militant friends of our involvement will defend it with much enthusiasm. In Laos, we have reconciled ourselves to continued control in the north by the Communist Pathet Lao. What was sensible there is sensible in Vietnam.

Next, having revised our strategic objectives, we should, for the time being, seek the maximum of security, tranquillity and well-being in the limited but populous areas that we control. With our vast commitment of manpower to the area, this broadly defensive strategy becomes entirely feasible. This is not a matter of retiring to enclaves, although the attack on that policy was less that it was militarily unwise than that it was militarily unwanted. Rather, it is simply a defensive policy that reflects the avowed absence of territorial ambition. I frankly do not think that the areas we defend can be very large--they will be, in the main, urban and populous areas that, by and large, have been difficult for or even immune to guerrilla operations. They will serve as a refuge for those who have committed themselves to our enterprise. They will be a position wherein to await negotiations. They will reassure those among us who believe--as I do not--in the so-called domino theory. Should negotiations be delayed and should the enemy continue to attack, an active defense will be necessary. There will be casualties. But these will be incomparably smaller than those resulting from any effort to secure and hold the whole country. Perhaps in this war-weary land we can expect stagnation and quiet--as in Laos or Korea. And one day there will be negotiations.

The next step, strongly dictated by our own interest, is to cease the bombing of North Vietnam. (The acceptance of the territorial status quo in South Vietnam will end, except for defensive purposes, the equally deadly and rather less publicized air attacks there.) Our air attacks on the North have also, in their own way, dissolved a great many false assumptions--they have dissolved the assumption that they could interdict or even much handicap the movement of men and supplies to the South, or that they could force negotiation or that they wouldn't affect our moral authority elsewhere in the world. They have shown the unwisdom of the military syllogism that, because we have airplanes, air power is pro tanto always elective. They have shown that, whatever the shortcomings of our politics, Americans are not so cynical that a party can win an election by opposing such use of air power and then turn around and initiate precisely this action, all within weeks.

Now, and not surprisingly, given the weight of our attack on a poor and primitive land, the supply of targets that do not involve even more brutal civilian slaughter or greater international risks has been exhausted. So it is clear that we should end these raids. With this action we end the most reckless and sanguinary aspect of our involvement in Vietnam and the one that always carried with it the temptation of yet more escalation, yet greater involvement. We lose nothing. And in the background are the repeated suggestions that, if the bombing thus ends, there can be negotiations. Rarely in foreign policy is the path of wisdom so clearly etched.

Next we must begin to disengage ourselves from the political generals to whom we have become committed in Saigon. That commitment, no less than the belief in a military solution, was the product of assumptions that have thoroughly dissolved. It was part of the belief that foreigners and Americans alike would approve any alternative to communism.

Finally, we must begin to put Vietnam back in proper mental perspective. It bulks large in our minds not because it is a place where great issues are being decided but because we have so often said it is such a place. We must now begin to live by the truth and not by our own propaganda. Indo-China is not the crossroads of the world; no great issues of strategy or security are involved. Earlier statements that to fight there is to avoid fighting in Hawaii or Santa Monica are now recalled only with amusement. The countries in that part of the world that have so far lived in the greatest security have not been those, like Thailand, that we defend, but those, like Burma, that we do not defend. The collapse of Israeli democracy would have been a tragedy for all mankind--and partly because it was a democracy, it did not collapse. No serious person will suggest that any government of the past decade in Saigon should evoke a similar passion. Our best judgment must now be that, on the other side, we are involved with one of the many forms of national communism with which we have learned that we can live and with which, as a practical matter, we now know that we must live.

The steps I have just outlined--the abandonment of the goal of territorial conquest and pacification, de-escalation and a defensive strategy, the ending of the air attacks, political detachment, an escape from our own propaganda, negotiation if this proves possible--are not very dramatic. Nor do they bring our history in Indo-China to an end--though even if the ending of the air attacks does not bring negotiations, we can be sure, as I say, that someday negotiation will occur. But this is the nature of the moderate program. Violence and death do not lack in drama; as all who are experienced in Washington have long been aware, it is always the men of least moral courage who are the loudest in recommending sanguinary action and sending in the bombers and the Marines. But the moderate path I have outlined is one we can adopt and one that will see us clear. It is the one for which the largest measure of agreement can be won. The task of the moderate is to win that agreement.