Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Prosperous Southeast Asia proof U.S. didn't fight in vain
April 30, 2005
BY THOMAS LIPSCOMB
The spectacular fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, had Americans glued to their television sets. Many Americans felt so whiplashed by media accounts of a war they didn't understand they accepted the fall of Saigon as humiliating proof of an American defeat. As the years passed, a collection of myths accrued that today are regarded as historical fact. It is time to re-examine them. There may be good reason to do so since Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Jacques Chirac and others repeatedly warn there is an imminent danger that America's attempt to liberate Iraq may become "another Vietnam."
As "everyone knows," Vietnam was a war in which the lives of Americans drafted from the lower classes, disproportionately black and Hispanic, were wasted in a failed intervention in a civil war between Vietnamese. Except, as a former secretary of the Navy who served in Vietnam as a Marine officer, James Webb, has pointed out, 67 percent of those who served and 73 percent of those who died were volunteers, not draftees. And blacks ''comprised 13.1 percent of the serving age group, 12.6 percent of the military and 12.2 percent of the casualties.''
The "civil war between Vietnamese" is a misrepresentation of the Geneva Agreement of 1954 that, among other things, negotiated the removal of the French colonial power and separated North and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel, pending a popular election to be held in 1956 to determine a single government for them both. The majority of the population remained in the communist North, even after several million fled to South Vietnam. Sen. John Kennedy regarded the election as "obviously stacked and subverted in advance."
When, not surprisingly, it did not take place, the war began in the late 1950s with the return of communist cadres to what had now become South Vietnam as a "National Liberation Front" to create an insurgency against the Diem government. Better known as the Viet Cong, the NLF was not an independent political movement of South Vietnamese. According to an editor of the official North Vietnamese People's Daily, "It was set up by our Communist Party." So this was no civil war. North Vietnam began and supported a campaign of Viet Cong subversion of its sovereign southern neighbor.
But, after more than 60,000 American soldiers died, South Vietnam still ended up as part of the North Vietnamese totalitarian state. So what could it have been but an American defeat? John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's secretary of state, so mocked for his "domino theory," gave a logical answer to that question years before American forces had even begun a role in Vietnam. Prior to the Geneva Agreement in 1954, Dulles was asked if the new Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was designed to solve the Indochina problem or the problems of Asia. Dulles replied: "The purpose . . . is to save Southeast Asia, to save all of Southeast Asia if it can be saved; if not to save essential parts of it . . . then the 'domino theory,' so-called, ceases to apply."
At the time Asia was anything but stable. The fragile former British colonies Malaysia and Singapore were under siege by communist guerrilla forces. The second-largest political party in India was the growing communist party. Taiwan expected an assault from Red China at any moment. China itself was suffering from Mao's "Great Leap Forward" industrialization that led to the greatest famine in modern history, killing 30 million. Indonesia was headed toward a "year of living dangerously" showdown with a large communist insurgency. The Philippines continued to have a problem with its communist Huk rebellion.
Dulles wanted to save "essential parts" of Asia. America understood at the outset it was unlikely to save all of it. And America succeeded. It may have lost Vietnam and been unable to stop the communist takeover that led to the death of a quarter of Cambodians in the "killing fields." But the dominoes did not fall. Only four years later, in 1979, American trade with Asia had surpassed trade with Europe.
Now, 30 years later, the new "Asian tigers" have standards of living and booming economies that would astonish an old Asia hand like Dulles. Asian prosperity is the wonder of the 21st century and particularly valuable to U.S. trade. In this brilliant company of Asian states, full partners in the global economy, the People's Republic of Vietnam remains mired in irrelevancy. America may have lost a tactical intervention in Vietnam, but the Middle East should be so lucky as to have Iraq turn out to be "another Vietnam."
Thomas Lipscomb was chairman of the Vietnam Veterans' Leadership Program of New York.
