Vietnam: the Good Fight

Maybe not wise or practical, but morally, Vietnam was justified, especially in hindsight.

It was culturally traumatic, and militarily disastrous. It was a collossal mistake and soure of bitterness for decades. The Vietnam war remains a touchstone of shame and division in the US; a toxic and momentous legacy in Vietnam itself. I saw the first several episodes of Ken Burns's treatment of how we got into that war, and found it very interesting, historically. The documentary's tone was drenched with sadness and tragedy. But it also let some significant facts leak in.

The problem was that the government of South Vietnam was a mess. It was essentially a successor state to the French colonial regime, while the government of the North was the successor of the successful independence fight, led by the communists / Viet Minh. The North capitalized on its credibility with effective PR, and before you know it, the South was overrun with Viet Cong and related insurgents, sympathisers, and agents, especially in the rural areas. And all seem to agree that Ho Chi Minh would have won the re-unification elections that were never held. But the North was not all it seemed. It was also a brutal communist state- a predator state. According to Wikipedia:

"The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, along with China, Cuba, and Laos, is one of the world's four remaining one-party socialist states officially espousing communism. Its current state constitution, 2013 Constitution, asserts the central role of the Communist Party of Vietnam in all organs of politics and society."

This, two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, and four and a half since the end of the American War (Vietnam War). This is a durable system! While Vietnam has lately followed China's lead in adopting limited capitalism, we should not imagine that it is a free or prosperous country. It remains very much in the totalitarian camp.

At the time, the US had just been through a similar war, in Korea, another tough slog defending the South from a blitzkrieg by the North. In that case, the US and the South were successful, and now South Korea has transformed into a happy, rich country, exporting K-Pop off an assembly line that seems to have no limit. Meanwhile, North Korea has remained stable in its way- stably dictatorial and desperately poor.

These are the conditions that the US was consciously defending South Vietnam from, and we were very right to do so. Unfortunately, the French had so thoroughly loused things up, between their import of Catholicism, their moral blindness in denying the Vietnamese what they had themselves had just fought World War 2 to regain, their futile war in Vietnam, and their organization of the South under Emperor Bao Dai and Prime minister Ngo Diem, that propping up the South proved impossible. The US did not want to replicate the colonialism of the French, just to keep the South out of the communist hands. But as it turned out, we would have had to do so and run the whole country, indeed on a rather brutal basis, if we really had wanted to save the situation. The problem was never military, but political- the people of the South were so mistreated by their government that their will to fight, in the myriad ways one has to fight in a civil and a guerrilla war, had dropped to zero.

So I think we should recognize that the US was doing a noble and proper thing in this war. Leaving the South defenseless, or cutting and running after we had gotten involved, would have been expedient, but not morally good. However, in hindsight, those would have been the wisest policies, saving everyone a great deal of death and waste. But that is a different point, both from the moral perspective, and given that hindsight comes too late. We can grant that many people, not least of whom were John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, recognized to some degree the bad, almost futile situation they were getting into. But while we can doubt their wisdom in not following their own analyses with greater discipline and political courage, their moral purposes were not bad ones.

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