There is not a great deal left to negotiate about Vietnam. The Viet Cong controls the countryside, regularly collects taxes in at least thirty-seven of the forty provinces, enjoys the initiative in the war, and continues to expand its offensive. The only defense that can be made for the American air war against North “Vietnam is that it has provided something expensive and brutal which we could offer to stop doing in exchange for concessions from North Vietnam. Now we are offering a billion-dollar development proposal but it remains to be seen whether either the air raids or the money can make a negotiated settlement possible.
North Vietnam is suffering from the air raids, but it is not the kind of society which is critically vulnerable to air attack—even if non-nuclear air attack were as effective as it often is made out to be. If the North Vietnamese really want to absorb these blows—to dig in and take it—there is little reason to believe that they can be brought to surrender by conventional air attack any more than was Germany. (And Germany in World War II was bombarded daily by thousands of bombers, not the few hundred the United States can commit today). The North Vietnamese can reasonably expect that international political sanctions and opposition within the United States (to ignore entirely the threat of Chinese or Soviet intervention) would intervene to prevent the United States from expanding its offensive to the levels of nuclear war or mass attacks on the civilian population centers of a passive enemy.
Sustaining the Raids
Indeed, if the North Vietnamese government is as implacably set on discrediting or defeating American power in Asia, and isolating the United States internationally, as it is usually credited with being, its best strategy would be to reject the dollars and prepare to endure only a part of what the Germans endured, or the Japanese, or the Chinese Communists during their decade of privation in the Long March and in exile in China’s northwest. This is why it was a momentous lapse that the United States failed to exploit the shock of its first attacks. In the atmosphere of international alarm and fear of those first days there would have been pressures on Hanoi to compromise which now have been dissipated.
From the days of Alexander’s legions to that of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, young officers have had impressed upon them the tactical axiom not to reinforce defeat. An implicit acknowledgement of that principle was behind the American shift to air war against the North. If we were losing on the ground we might still win in the air. But we can be unchecked in the air and still not win, and we are still losing on the ground in South Vietnam. And now, in default of alternatives, we are again considering reinforcing the ground defeat. The commitment of American ground combat forces is under discussion in Washington, but in the same haze of optimism that surrounded the theory of air escalation. Earlier this year, before the air attacks began, the retiring chief of the Strategic Air Command, General Thomas Powers, argued for air attacks on the North, saying that the result would be that “within a few days and with minimum force, the conflict in South Vietnam would [be] ended in our favor.”
The argument now being put forward is that a clean end to the war can be provided by American Marines and infantry. If it is not immediately apparent why they can do what a quarter of a million French and Foreign Legion regulars were unable to do, the answer made is that the Americans would not be imperialists; and another argument complacently implied is that American troops simply are better in kind than French and German professionals.
With the imperialism argument we are at the heart of the matter: for what speaks here is ideological intoxication. We incorrigibly believe that because our intentions are pure, the blighted peasantry of Vietnam looks upon us as liberators from their native revolution. Yet the situation in South Vietnam has thus far deteriorated with every expansion of the American intervention since the mid-1950s. The reason is not only that Vietnam, like China, is a racially and culturally exclusivist and reactive society, in a fury of retaliation against humiliations administered from abroad, but that an overwhelmingly powerful foreign sponsor for one side in a civil war inexorably discredits the legitimacy and political validity of that side.
Malaya and the Philippines are commonly cited as cases of civil subversion in Asia which have been defeated. But in the Philippines the battle was won by Filipinos—by a vigorous and authentic local political and military offensive—not by American divisions. And Malaya was not only a civil war but a communal war: the Communist revolt was a rebellion by elements in the Chinese population, an identifiable and unpopular racial minority which was opposed not only by the British but by Malayan nationalism.
Robbed of Legitimacy
The local political elements in Vietnam which might have stood against the Viet Cong have one by one failed—because of their own inadequacies and follies, but also because they have been benevolently over-whelmed by the scale and power of the American intervention. One by one they have been robbed of their legitimacy, so that today one can hardly speak of the Saigon Government taking major decisions of war and peace in Vietnam.
Today the centers of non-Viet Cong political strength that survive in Vietnam are isolated. There are the sects—the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai with their private armies, powerful in their areas but interested in survival, not ideological anti-Communism. There are most of the Catholics (but not all; there are Catholics with the Viet Cong, perhaps out of despair but some with conviction; the student Le Hong Tu who attempted to assassinate the American Ambassador two years ago was a Catholic who asked for and received the sacraments before he was executed). There are the politically-active Buddhists, ambiguous in defining what they want but usually considered “neutralists” prepared to compromise with the Viet Cong. There are the old liberal political cadres in Saigon, almost wholly drawn from a narrow class of civil servants and the French-educated elite. There are the National Army and the Civic Guard—or parts of them, ofiqcer groupings, some special units, the sizable mercenary units of non-Vietnamese (mostly veteran professionals from the French colonial army) who make up the hard edge of the paratroop and commando formations of the army. The mass of the army, like the peasant mass from which it is drawn, is moved by these self-conscious centers of power and decision but is not mobilized behind them—nor perhaps behind the Viet Cong, although on the face of it the Viet Cong seems closer to the peasantry than any of its rivals.
The U.S. Alone
There is, in any event, no core of political power left in Vietnam that is capable of competing with the Viet Cong throughout the country. There is only the United States, anxiously attempting to sustain a formal regime in Saigon, to recreate somehow a national politics and a national morale in Vietnam, to supply through American programs and American propaganda the non-Communist nationalism that might stand against the rebellion. But the effort is a contradiction of its own terms. So we find ourselves drifting towards the final resort: to supply through our own troops the power that can no longer be evoked from Vietnamese society.
But the truth about this choice should be understood. This would be war to wrest Vietnam out of the centrol of a native revolutionary movement, a war to conquer this country and to hold it against the force which, however hateful we may consider it to be, is the single effective national political-military movement left in Vietnam. It could be done, but it would be worse than Korea, worse than the island campaigns of World War II. This would be brutal ground war, and we would face civil resistance and terrorism. There is, pace General Powers, no decisive and surgically neat way to win this war.
And there is no mandate for such a war in American public opinion. Whatever the issues at stake-the real issues, which are not the tendentious simplicities of the State Department White Paper-there is no evidence that the American public is prepared to sustain a major ground war in Vietnam. Those who oppose this war are not a marginal minority of American opinion. They include Walter Lippmanu and Hans Morgenthau and the New York Times. They include a major part, perhaps a majority, of the professional foreign affairs community outside government—and many within the government. They include ocers who have resigned their commissions rather than fight in what they regard as an unjust war in Vietnam, and those reserve officers who today doubt that they could honorably accept mobilization. This kind of thing did not take place over Korea or Berlin or the Cuban missile crisis, and it would not take place today if our confrontation were with the Soviet Union or directly with China. If this opposition should be ignored in Washington the result could be a moral crisis in the domestic political affairs of this country comparable to that which corrupted French politics for the decade of its colonial wars.
This war in Vietnam has been made into a symbolic confrontation of American power with Asian Communism. We are responsible for having given it this terrible symbolic weight, stubbornly refusing to see it in its tormented singularity. Having done this we find ourselves driven to win—for we have squandered every chance we have been offered to isolate what is special and native in it, to stalemate or compromise the civil war on terms that would salvage our own larger interest in Asia while reducing China’s symbolic gains. Mr. Johnson’s new initiative might provide the opening through which some kind of settlement can be found: for the international as well as the domestic pressures against this war are very great. But an aid scheme, since the success of the Marshall Plan, has too often been an American substitute for political policy. In this crisis there are political issues which money may not be able to obscure. And our position is not very secure.
For intoxicated with the need for victory, we face defeat. We are very near to seeing the skull beneath the skin: that there can be no victory for us in Vietnam. Not even a ground conquest of that country would give us a victory that could be recognized as one. There is no victory in Vietnam for anyone who is not a Vietnamese. And for the Vietnamese nation, victory and defeat now are indistinguishable.
