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COMMENT
Bush should heed lessons of
Vietnam
By John Berthelsen
If
the world thinks that democracy and social change are
right around the corner for Iraq in the wake of the Bush
administration's projected invasion, there is no more
disheartening a model than Vietnam, where I served as a
war correspondent in the 1960s.
The US adventure
began earnest in 1961 as the Americans became
increasingly concerned about guerrilla action to
overthrow the country. US foreign and military policy
were dedicated to fundamental reform of Vietnam's
economy and society and preserve the region from
communism, much as the current US administration of
President George W Bush now seeks to reform Iraq as an
example to the rest of the Arab world. The Bush
administration believes, as the John F Kennedy
administration did in 1961, that through the energetic
application of American ideals, a society can be
reformed and transformed. For the United States, the
attempt to reform Vietnam led to a tragedy of
unimaginable proportions.
It is customary today
to think of Vietnam as a war, and it was. But the US
military had been preceded by years of attempts to
rebuild the country via the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) and other
organizations.
There were plenty of euphemisms,
including "nation-building behind a military shield".
The military called it "winning hearts and minds",
usually abbreviated to WHAM. (General James F
Hollingsworth of the 1st Infantry Division, however,
once told me, "Get 'em by the ass ... Their hearts and
minds will follow.") The United States led massive
attempts to reform a thoroughly corrupt society whose
own generals were selling ammunition to the enemy. In
fact, the US probably devoted more money and resources
to attempting to reform Vietnam than any other country
ever has, including the Marshall Plan in Europe directly
after World War II.
There were huge construction
projects - highways built, rivers spanned. South
Vietnam's people would have to be won over "village by
village, hut by hut, by social and political means, with
information and propaganda", according to Robert Komer,
who was in charge of America's failed pacification
efforts for many of those years. Accordingly, Americans
with both the military and USAID and the Volunteers of
America and many other organizations risked their lives
every day, not only building roads and schools but
digging wells, giving shots, mending cleft palates,
teaching hygiene.
They organized elections under
sometimes terrifying conditions of atrocious
intimidation by both the Viet Cong and the Republic of
Vietnam itself. In virtually every village that I ever
visited that was not under direct military attack,
Americans and their South Vietnamese counterparts were
eager to show us their latest civil handiwork. There was
almost never a time when a US Army captain or a marine
lieutenant, accompanied by a grinning peasant village
chief, wasn't eager to demonstrate yet another civic
improvement.
There was the misguided Strategic
Village program, in which entire villages were picked up
by helicopter and flown away from communist threats to
new locations where new, neat housing had been
constructed for them. There were the Combined Action
Companies, or CACs, run by the US Marines, in which
marine and Vietnamese Army units were integrated with
each other in villages. (The name was hurriedly changed
to Combined Action Platoons, or CAPs, when months later
someone finally pointed out that cac was an
indelicate Vietnamese word for human waste. It is
particularly significant that nobody in the marine high
command apparently spoke enough Vietnamese to recognize
a vernacular word for feces.) There was the so-called
"Land for the Tiller" program of agrarian reform, begun
in 1970 under the auspices of US funding and technical
assistance. The "miracle grain" strain of rice was
developed to increase crop yields vastly.
None
of it worked. The last military and USAID advisors left
aboard helicopters for aircraft carriers in the South
China Sea, of course, just ahead of the pursuing North
Vietnamese. Some 58,169 Americans had died of injuries
or on the battlefield. Another 304,704 were wounded. The
government of Nguyen Van Thieu, which was the last to
flee in 1975, was as corrupt as the government of Ngo
Dinh Diem, overthrown and murdered in a coup sanctioned
by the US 12 years before, in 1963. The successive
governments engineered in between were all just as
corrupt no matter how often the Americans tried to find
a better administration. President Thieu was reported to
have loaded up an entire airplane with as much gold
bullion as it could carry on his way out.
Nor
did Vietnam teach any lessons to Thailand, Malaysia,
Taiwan or the Philippines or the rest of Southeast Asia,
which evolved into varying kinds of democracies on their
own, without US tutelage.
Nonetheless, these
attempts at political, agrarian and economic reform were
no mere window-dressing. They were accomplished by
earnest, dedicated men and women at an enormous cost in
blood and treasure.
It is true that the
Americans set out to reform South Vietnam under
horrendous conditions - backing a corrupt incumbent
administration against a recalcitrant population, beset
by a direct, over-the-border incursion from its
then-northern neighbor, which in turn was backed by
Russia.
In Iraq, the Bush administration has the
advantage of seeking to get rid of a dictator reviled by
his own people. The war should go relatively well and it
probably will result in the quick destruction of the
Iraqi military. But any supposition that the peace that
follows will be quick or easy is probably wrong. The
Bush administration would do well to consider Vietnam -
or for that matter Afghanistan, where Islamic
fundamentalists are starting to resurface - before
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his colleagues set
out to reform Iraq.
The Vietnam War ended up
costing US$494 billion in direct spending and an
incalculable amount in indirect costs. President Lyndon
Johnson's attempt to provide US society with both guns
and butter - refusing to raise taxes to pay for the war
- engendered an inflationary cycle that lasted for a
generation. This is much as the Bush administration is
doing today - asking for additional tax cuts at a time
when administration planners think the Iraqi occupation
would last two years and that war costs would be $50
billion to $60 billion. It would be prudent to remember
that in 1966 the Pentagon estimated the cost of the
Vietnam War at $45 billion.
Domestically,
America's 15 years of intense involvement in Vietnam
left its own cities on fire and destroyed trust in
government by an entire generation. Twenty-eight years
after the last helicopter lifted off the roof in Saigon,
the US government is still suffering from lost
credibility. The war spawned a military that for 25
years was loath to get involved in another conflict. It
made the word "pacification" a joke.
The fact is
that it is very hard to reform any society, not only
from within, but especially from without. In Vietnam's
case, government institutions had been in place for
generations before the French were driven out in 1957,
however ineffectual they were. In Iraq's case, a handful
of pretenders, most of whom fled Iraq and are looked
upon with resentment by those who stayed, are going to
have to construct a government from scratch, especially
given the array of thieves and thugs with which the Bush
administration has chosen to align itself. One potential
leader favored by the US government fled Jordan ahead of
charges of bank fraud. Another is wanted in Denmark on
charges of torturing Iraqis when he was a henchman of
Saddam Hussein.
In addition, the United States
will inevitably face the absolute fury of the people of
the nations that surround it. Even if Saddam Hussein's
Praetorian Guard melts away, which it probably will,
there will be plenty of guerrillas - many of them
diehard, suicidal Islamic fundamentalists - to cause
mischief. It was axiomatic in Vietnam that fewer than 20
percent of its people backed the government and perhaps
the same amount backed the Viet Cong, with the other 60
percent wanting nothing more than to be left alone.
No matter what percentage of the population is
pacified, there will still be plenty of people to do the
shooting. The US Marines walked ashore in Da Nang in
1965 to be greeted with ao-dai-clad women putting
leis around their necks. But ultimately Vietnam became
so dangerous for Americans that helicopters became the
preferred mode of travel. A drive of more than a few
miles outside any city dared sniper fire. I remember
leaving Vietnam for Europe to discover with a stunning
sense of relief that I could ride in a car for more than
10 miles in the countryside without fear of being shot
at.
It will be tempting to respond to even a
small minority with overwhelming force, which
dramatically nullifies pacification attempts. In
Vietnam, pacification ultimately evolved into the
grotesque Phoenix program, in which at least 20,000
Vietnamese village chiefs and other local officials were
assassinated with the connivance of the US Central
Intelligence Agency. The administration would do well to
consult the Israelis in Nablus and Ramallah and Gaza
about pacification.
There is little doubt that
Saddam Hussein should go and that most of Iraq's people
want him gone. But Americans beware. This may not be
easy. It could take untold amounts of money and time,
and, if Vietnam is any gauge, its chances of success are
not assured.
John Berthelsen was a
correspondent in Vietnam for Newsweek magazine in 1966
and 1967.
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