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All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth;
all the peoples have a right to live to be happy and free.
Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of VietnamThe United States must be compelled
to get out of Vietnam immediately and without conditions.
Bertrand RussellLet peace-minded persons and organizations
in every state of the United States
and in every country of the world
devise ways to call for an end to military intervention
in Vietnam as a first imperative step
to ending the threat of nuclear war
and bringing justice, freedom and peace to mankind.
A. J. MusteThis war turns the clock of history back
and perpetuates white colonialism.
The greatest irony and tragedy of it all
is that our own nation which initiated so much
of the revolutionary spirit in this modern world
is now cast in the mold of being an arch anti-revolutionary.
Martin Luther King, Jr.I went to Vietnam a hard charging Marine 2nd Lieutenant,
sure that I had answered the plea of a victimized people
in their struggle against communist aggression.
That belief lasted about two weeks.
Instead of fighting communist aggressors
I found that 90% of the time our military actions
were directed against the people of South Vietnam.
These people had little sympathy
or for that matter knowledge of the Saigon Government.
We are engaged in a war in South Vietnam
to pound a people into submission to a government
that has little or no popular support
among the real people of South Vietnam.
By real people I mean all those Vietnamese people
who aren't war profiteers or who have not sold out
to their government or the United States
because it was the easy and/or profitable thing to do.
letter to Senator FulbrightObviously a major lesson of Vietnam
is that we must know ourselves better.
Daniel Ellsberg
Most people agree that the American military involvement in
Vietnam was a tragedy,
and as in classical drama we can learn
many lessons from the suffering inflicted
and undergone by the
"hero."
Our concern in this book is with peacemaking
and the ways of establishing peace in the world.
From this perspective
the official policies of the United States Government
were a colossal
failure, since US influence in Vietnam resulted in the opposite
of peace
until the United States finally withdrew all of its influence.
Even from the military point of view Indochina was
the only war the USA has ever really "lost," and it happened while
America
was generally considered to be the greatest military power
in the history of the world
and at the hands of an "enemy"
who was considered "primitive" and "weak."
Perhaps never before has history so clearly shown the stupidity,
folly,
and utter ineptness of using bombing and killing to try
to solve human problems.
Psychologically we may come to see that
those problems were more in American
attitudes than in the situations
of the Vietnamese
except insofar as they suffered from American
"influence."
In this chapter we will explore how those
attitudes created a terrible situation
and how we can change in
order to prevent such misery and failures in the future.
When World War II began, the area in Southeast Asia now known
as
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos was a colony called French Indochina.
The French colonial government there declared allegiance to the
Vichy regime,
which the Nazis established in southern France after
their invasion in 1940.
During that war the Japanese, as allies
of the Nazis, occupied Indochina
and ruled through the French
colonial administration
until the Vichy regime in France fell.
The Japanese then set up Vietnamese emperor
Bao Dai to rule over
the Vietnamese.
Since 1940 a guerrilla resistance movement known
as the Viet Minh,
led by Communist Ho Chi Minh, had struggled
against the
Vichy French colonialists and the Japanese invaders.
They were even aided by the United States and trained by their
advisors.
In August 1945 when the Japanese surrendered to the Allies,
a popular revolution swept Vietnam and placed the Viet Minh in
power.
Under Ho Chi Minh's chairmanship the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam (DRV)
was established on September 2, 1945, and the
Declaration of Independence,
which Ho had written, was announced.
He quoted from the American Declaration of Independence and from
the
French Revolution's 1791 Declaration of Human and Civic Rights
in order to appeal to the human rights principles of these two
nations.
As the Americans had done two centuries before, he listed
the grievances
the people had suffered under their colonial overlords,
in this case the French.
The document concludes:
Vietnam has the right to be free and independent
and, in fact, has become free and independent.
The people of Vietnam decide to mobilize
all their spiritual and material forces
and to sacrifice their lives and property
in order to safeguard their right of liberty and independence.1
Although President Roosevelt had wanted to see Vietnam under
a United Nations
trusteeship to prepare it for independence, at
the Potsdam conference
President Truman and British prime minister
Attlee agreed to divide
French Indochina at the sixteenth parallel,
leaving China in control in the north
and giving the British operational
control over southern Vietnam.
The DRV accepted this and welcomed
British troops into Saigon in September.
However, some dissenting
Vietnamese Trotskyites were arrested and killed.
The British then
attacked the independence forces of the Vietnamese
in order to
restore to power the French colonial government in the south.
The United States tacitly accepted French sovereignty over Indochina, and
President Truman neglected to respond to several letters of
appeal from Ho Chi Minh.
Yet General MacArthur complained,
If there is anything that makes my blood boil,
it is to see our Allies in Indochina and Java
deploying Japanese troops to reconquer the little people
we promised to liberate.
It is the most ignoble kind of betrayal.
In February 1946 France and China agreed to let French troops
replace the Chinese north of the sixteenth parallel.
Ho Chi Minh
negotiated with the French for a free
Vietnamese state within
the French Union.
The agreement of March called for 15,000 French
troops in the north
along with 10,000 Vietnamese soldiers.
Ho
Chi Minh and some compatriots traveled to France for a conference;
the rest of the delegation soon left in protest, but Ho stayed
on
to bargain for a modus vivendi which recognized some
political freedoms of the Viet Minh in the south.
Returning in
October, Ho Chi Minh pleaded with the armies
of the Vietnamese and French to stop fighting,
ending his proclamation with the
following words:
If we use the right words, they will certainly listen to us.
Violent actions are absolutely forbidden.
This is what you have to do at present
to create a peaceful atmosphere,
paving the way democratically
to reach the unification of our Vietnam.2
However, in November 1946 the French commander at Haiphong
used a minor customs clash as a justification for
launching an
all-out French attack on the city.
The Viet Minh were driven into
the countryside,
and the guerrilla war against the French had
begun.
Not only did the United States fail to support the rights
of the
Vietnamese people for self-determination, but the Truman
administration
gave military aid to France for its colonial war
in Vietnam.
After the Chinese Communist revolution in 1949 the United States
decided to increase its military aid to the French in Vietnam.
In January 1950 China and the Soviet Union
recognized the government
of Ho Chi Minh.
Dreadfully afraid of the Communists, the United
States government
wanted to help the French destroy the Viet Minh,
but it could not publicly justify supporting a colonial war.
Therefore
Bao Dai, who had been in exile in Hong Kong for three years,
was
nominally recognized by France as the independent government of
Vietnam.
This enabled American military assistance to go to France
while Bao Dai was the "publicized" recipient.
On May
8, 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson made the following statement:
The United States Government, convinced that
neither national independence nor democratic evolution
exist in any area dominated by Soviet imperialism,
considers the situation to be such as to warrant
its according economic aid and military equipment
to the Associated States of Indochina and to France
in order to assist them in restoring stability
and permitting these states to pursue
their peaceful and democratic development.3
To compare objectively this attitude to the facts of the situation,
one cannot help but see the American paranoia and hypocrisy.
First,
America was helping France to squelch Vietnamese national independence
and democratic evolution with imperialistic war and colonial oppression.
Second, the only Soviet involvement was a simple
diplomatic statement
toward a purely ideological ally.
Even aid from the Chinese Communists
was minimal during this period.
Yet from 1950 to 1954 the United
States gave the Bao Dai government
$126 million in economic, military,
and technical assistance
while supplying the French with $2.6
billion of military material,
which accounted for four-fifths
of the French military effort.
With Eisenhower's election in 1952
the new Secretary of State,
John Foster Dulles, expressed the
paranoia as the "Domino Theory."
The Korean War was
fought for these same reasons during this period.
By 1952 the
French were spending a third
of their national budget on the Indochina
War.
In spite of the military power of France aided by the United
States,
the Viet Minh were able to win an impressive victory at
Dienbienphu in 1954.
In this battle alone the Vietnamese estimated
that they had 20,000 killed.
In this Indochina War the French
colonial forces lost about 95,000 killed.
The French were ready
now to give up control of Vietnam,
and they agreed to an armistice
at Geneva.
However, the document was never signed by any of the
parties
because the United States refused to give even its oral
consent.
American officials wanted France to continue the struggle.
Although President Eisenhower considered using tactical nuclear
weapons
or sending US troops, he had the good sense
not to involve
America in another land war in Asia.
Dulles tried to consolidate
interests in the area with the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
(SEATO), but only Thailand, Pakistan,
and the Philippines agreed
to assist each other against outside aggression.
The Geneva accords removed the French from northern Vietnam
and recognized the Bao Dai government in the south for the
two
years the French had been given to depart from there.
Then an
election was supposed to unify the country.
This temporary concession
of southern territory by the Vietnamese
to the French was a response
to strong pressure from the Soviet
and Chinese representatives
Molotov and Zhou Enlai.
The French left on schedule but were replaced
in May 1955
by the United States and its military support for
South Vietnam.
Bao Dai was replaced by the pro-American dictator,
Ngo Dinh Diem,
who refused to hold elections because the Communists
would have won.
Diem re-established the landlords who had been
removed by guerrillas
for supporting the Japanese and the French.
The peasants of the Viet Minh rebelled, and guerrilla fighting
spread.
Diem violated every article of the constitution
and had
thousands of people imprisoned in camps.
By 1959 United States
military "advisors" were being killed in Vietnam,
and
in 1960 the guerrillas formed the National Liberation Front (NLF).
The Second Indochina War had begun.
Most of the NLF were southern Vietnamese.
Very few northern
troops entered South Vietnam
until the American troops had arrived
in force.
The Americans were attempting to hold back a revolution
more than prevent an invasion; it was primarily a civil war.
On
December 20, 1960 the National Liberation Front
formulated the
following Ten Points:
1. Overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialist
and the dictatorial power of Ngo Dinh Diem, servant of the Americans,
and institute a government of national democratic union.
2. Institute a largely liberal and democratic regime.
3. Establish an independent and sovereign economy,
and improve the living conditions of the people.
4. Reduce land rent; implement agrarian reform
with the aim of providing land to the tillers.
5. Develop a national and democratic culture and education.
6. Create a national army devoted to the defense of the Fatherland and the people.
7. Guarantee equality between the various minorities and between the sexes;
protect the legitimate interests of foreign citizens established in Vietnam
and of Vietnamese citizens residing abroad.
8. Promote a foreign policy of peace and neutrality.
9. Re-establish normal relations between the two zones,
and prepare for the peaceful reunification of the country.
10. Struggle against all aggressive war; actively defend universal peace.
In the full manifesto each of these points included
several
specific means of implementation.
The text of Point 2 is a good
example:
2. To bring into being a broad and progressive democracy,
promulgate freedom of expression, of the press,
of belief, of assembly, of association,
of movement and other democratic freedoms.
To grant general amnesty to all political detainees,
dissolve all concentration camps dubbed “prosperity zones”
and “resettlement centers,”
abolish the fascist 10-59 law and other anti-democratic laws.4
The Twelve Points of Discipline for the People's Liberation
Army
suggested that
soldiers be fair and honest in business with
civilians,
never taking even a needle from the people.
When staying
in civilian houses, they should
take care of them as if they were
their own.
They should be courteous with people and love them.
With these ideals as standards, it is not surprising that
the
NLF made such successful inroads in South Vietnam.
By 1961 more than half of South Vietnamese
territory was under
Communist control.
Over the next two years President Kennedy sent
sixteen thousand
American soldiers as advisors to the South Vietnamese
army.
In May 1963 the Buddhists rebelled against Diem's tyrannical
government,
and monks began setting themselves on fire in protest.
The United States hinted that changes in the government were needed.
On the first day of November a military coup deposed Diem,
and
he and his brother Nhu were assassinated.
Over the next year and
a half the government of South Vietnam
changed hands among the
generals several times.
In February 1964 President Lyndon Johnson
issued public warnings to North Vietnam
and ordered the covert
bombing of Laos near the border of North Vietnam.
In August 1964 the USS Maddox was attacked while patrolling
in the
Gulf of Tonkin, probably in retaliation for a South Vietnamese
Navy
attack on an island in the north two days before.
The Maddox
fired back; two days later another attack was reported,
though
there was never any evidence that this second attack actually
occurred.
The US ships were not damaged nor were any Americans
hurt,
while they had sunk three or four of the attacking torpedo
boats.
Nevertheless, Johnson ordered sixty-four bombing
sorties
over
four North Vietnamese bases,
and he requested approval from
Congress to use armed force.
This excessive response has been
considered a violation
of the rules of civilized warfare as interpreted
in the Nuremberg trials.
Senator Wayne Morse, who had been informed
by a Pentagon officer that
the Maddox had been involved
in covert raids of North Vietnam,
objected that the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution gave the President war-making
powers without a declaration
of war, and he lamented it as a historic mistake.
President Johnson was overwhelmingly elected over Goldwater's
militaristic
and reactionary programs, and on February 7, 1965
he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam.
The next day the Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS)
issued a statement of outrage, saying that the US was supporting dictatorship,
not freedom, and
was intervening in a civil war, not a war of aggression.
SDS called
for a march on Washington in April and protested,
We are outraged that $2 million a day
is expended for a war on the poor in Vietnam,
while government financing is so desperately needed
to abolish poverty at home.
What kind of America is it whose response to poverty
and oppression in Vietnam is napalm and defoliation?
Whose response to poverty and oppression in Mississippi is silence?
It is a hideously immoral war.
America is committing pointless murder.5
A graduated bombing program was begun in March, and in April
the
United States began sending thousands of combat troops to
South Vietnam.
On April 17 the SDS march brought 20,000 people
to the capitol.
That month Hanoi offered its proposal for a settlement
consisting of four points
in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreements:
1. Recognition of Vietnamese independence and territorial integrity
by withdrawal of all US forces, bases, and weapons;
2. no foreign military bases or troops in Vietnam
and no military alliances for the two zones;
3. settlement of South Vietnamese affairs
according to the program of the NLF; and
4. peaceful reunification of Vietnam without any foreign interference.
This proposal was rejected in Washington out of hand,
because
they assumed the NLF program would exclude other groups.
In 1965
the Catholic Worker, the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA),
the Student Peace Union (SPU), and the War Resisters League (WRL)
published the "Declaration of Conscience Against the War
in Vietnam,"
which was signed by 6,000 people including David
Dellinger, Dorothy Day,
Ammon Hennacy, Bradford Lyttle, A. J.
Muste, Robert Swann, James Bevel,
John Lewis, Robert Moses, A.
Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Kenneth Boulding,
W. H. Ferry,
Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman, Linus Pauling,
and Straughton Lynd
and which read as follows:
Because the use of the military resources of the United States
in Vietnam and elsewhere suppresses the aspirations
of the people for political independence and economic freedom;
Because inhuman torture and senseless killing
are being carried out by forces
armed, uniformed, trained and financed by the United States;
Because we believe that all peoples of the earth,
including both Americans and non-Americans,
have an inalienable right to life, liberty,
and the peaceful pursuit of happiness in their own way; and
Because we think that positive steps must be taken
to put an end to the threat of nuclear catastrophe and death
by chemical or biological warfare,
whether these result from accident or escalation—We hereby declare our conscientious refusal
to cooperate with the United States government
in the prosecution of the war in Vietnam.
We encourage those who can conscientiously do so
to refuse to serve in the armed forces
and to ask for discharge if they are already in.
Those of us who are subject to the draft ourselves
declare our own intention to refuse to serve.
We urge others to refuse and refuse ourselves to take part in
the manufacture or transportation of military equipment,
or to work in the fields of military research
and weapons development.
We shall encourage the development of other nonviolent acts,
including acts which involve civil disobedience,
in order to stop the flow of American soldiers
and munitions to Vietnam.6
During Thanksgiving weekend there was another peace march in
Washington,
and the anti-war leaders urged the Communists to respond
to American peace initiatives.
Ho Chi Minh replied that the four
points still held, and that
the US must ease its criminal war
of aggression against Vietnam.
At Christmas the US temporarily
halted the bombing,
hoping for some capitulation from North Vietnam.
Hanoi replied that the United States was thousands of miles away
and had no right
to invade South Vietnam or to impose conditions
on the DRV.
On December 21, 1965 the United
Nations passed a resolution declaring that
no state has the
right to intervene in the affairs of another state and condemning
armed intervention, because "every state has an inalienable
right to choose its political,
economic, social and cultural systems,
without interference in any form by another state."
A Citizens'
White Paper by Schurmann, Scott, and Zelnik, studying nine critical
periods
from November 1963 to July 1966, concluded that efforts
toward a political settlement
were usually retarded or broken
off by American military interventions,
which often resulted in
escalation.
The Pentagon Papers later revealed that the
expanded bombing of North Vietnam
was against the judgment of
the US Government's own intelligence advisors,
who did not believe
that it would stop Hanoi's support
for the Vietcong insurgency
in the South.
By 1967 nearly half a million American soldiers were fighting
in South Vietnam,
but at home the Spring Mobilization Committee
called for a bombing halt,
a US-initiated cease-fire, negotiations,
and a phased withdrawal of American troops.
About 200,000 people
marched from the United Nations building to Central Park,
and
in San Francisco 50,000 gathered.
Some 150 conscientious objectors
burned their draft cards in a public protest.
Young men were encouraged
to turn in their draft cards on October 16.
In Oakland, California
after nonviolent demonstrators were arrested,
thousands of people
tried to close down an army induction center;
the reaction of
the police resulted in a riot.
Violence also occurred in Madison,
Wisconsin; so SANE, SDS, and other groups
declined to sponsor
the Washington rally that consequently
on October 20 drew only
about 100,000 people.
Six days later Jesuit priest Philip Berrigan, Rev. James Mengel,
Tom Lewis,
and David Eberhardt poured their blood on the selective
service files
in the Baltimore Customs House and then waited to
be arrested.
On May 17, 1968 Phil and his brother Daniel Berrigan
with Tom Lewis and six others
used home-made napalm to burn 378
draft files of the Catonsville, Maryland draft board.
In their
statement to the press they explained that napalm had killed and
burned
so many people in Vietnam, and they noted that US nuclear
and conventional weaponry exceeds that of the rest of the world.
They were sentenced to three years in prison.
In September 1968
fourteen people burned about 10,000 draft files in Milwaukee,
and various other actions against draft files occurred around
the country.
In November 1967 General Westmoreland announced that troop
withdrawal
could begin in 1969 if the bombing and military progress
continued.
However, on the Vietnamese holiday of Tet at the end
of January 1968
the Vietcong (NLF) launched a massive attack on
the major cities of South Vietnam.
Within three weeks about 165,000
civilians had been killed,
and there were two million new refugees.
American forces bombed hamlets that the Vietcong occupied.
A US
major, looking at the devastated village of Ben Tre,
said, "We
had to destroy it in order to save it."
The offensive, which
included an invasion of the US embassy in Saigon,
came as a great
shock to Americans.
The huge size of the action and its surprise
to the Americans
and South Vietnamese Army indicated that most
of the people
in the country were more loyal to the NLF than to
the Government.
When Westmoreland and chief of staff General Wheeler asked
for 200,000 more troops,
President Johnson was visibly shaken
and began to doubt seriously
for the first time the military policies
he was following.
In March 1968 Senator Eugene McCarthy won a
victory in the
New Hampshire Presidential primary running against
Johnson's Vietnam war policy.
A few days later Robert Kennedy
announced his candidacy.
On March 31 President Johnson announced
he would not seek re-election,
and to begin de-escalation of the
war he limited the bombing to a small strategic area.
The war
and the anti-war movement that had been aroused to protest it
had ruined the Johnson presidency,
which on domestic issues had
been rather successful.
In May formal negotiations began in Paris.
If Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated on the night he
won the California primary
on June 5, he probably would have gained
the Democratic nomination
and if elected, could have ended the
war.
Instead, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who followed Johnson's
war policy,
gained the nomination even though he had not won a
single primary.
Frustrated people protested this miscarriage of
the popular will at the Democratic
national convention in Chicago
in August but were suppressed
by the brutality of Mayor Richard
Daley's police.
Richard Nixon won a narrow victory over Humphrey,
and under his presidency
American military intervention in Indochina
would drag on for five more years.
In February 1969 Nixon's national security advisor, Henry Kissinger,
began arranging
the secret bombing of Communist bases in Cambodia
in violation of the US Constitution,
which requires Congress to
declare war before attacking another country.
To hide these crimes,
bombing pilots were ordered to bomb South Vietnam
and then had
their targets changed; but they still filed false reports that
they had bombed
South Vietnam when in reality they had bombed
Cambodia.
By March 1969 there were 541,000 US troops fighting
in South Vietnam.
From March 1969 to May 1970, the United States
conducted 3,630 bombing raids
on Cambodia, killing about 600,000
people there.
Another 350,000 civilians were killed in Laos by
US bombing.
The peace movement continued to grow and affected Nixon's policies.
President Nixon wanted to strike a "savage blow" against
North Vietnam
in the fall of 1969 by mining Haiphong harbor and
perhaps even using nuclear weapons,
but the demonstrations were
so large in October and November
that he changed his mind for
political reasons.
The paid staff of 31 for the Vietnam Moratorium
Committee (VMC)
had been infiltrated by CIA informers.
Local rallies
brought out about a quarter of a million people
to protest the
war on October 15.
On November 9 a full-page ad appeared in the New York Times signed by 1,365
active duty GIs, saying,
"We are opposed to American involvement in the war in Vietnam.
We resent the needless wasting of lives to save face for the politicians
in Washington."7
The story of the massacre of over seven
hundred civilians
at My Lai was exposed to public outcry.
On November
15 three quarters of a million people gathered in Washington
while
one quarter of a million marched in San Francisco.
After Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia on April 30,
1970,
student strikes were called on American college campuses.
On May 4 at Kent State University in Ohio four protesting students
were shot to death
by national guard troops, and many other students
were wounded.
Within a few days over four million students at
about 350 college campuses were on strike.
In June the Senate
repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and barred
future US military
operations in Cambodia without Congressional approval.
By 1970
the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) had become active
with creative actions such as a mock search-and-destroy
operation
in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
They also testified that atrocities
such as the My Lai massacre were not isolated cases
but part of
a pattern of war crimes for which they held the commanders responsible.
After testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations committee
in April 1971,
700 veterans
angrily stated their names and flung
their medals and ribbons back at the Capital.
On April 24 about
300,000 demonstrated peacefully
at the same time as 125,000 rallied
in San Francisco.
In Washington 30,000 people remained in West
Potomac Park
on May Day in an attempt to shut down the government.
On May 2 before dawn police warned people to leave because of
the use of drugs
and began making arrests using plastic handcuffs.
About 12,000 stayed, and by the end of the day more than 7,000
had been arrested.
The arrest total for three days was about 13,000,
the largest mass arrest in US history.
In June 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had secretly
commissioned
a detailed study of the war in Vietnam by 36 Pentagon
bureaucrats.
In eighteen months they wrote 1.5 million words of
narrative history and collected
a million words in documents that
covered US involvement in Vietnam from
World War II to May 1968
when peace talks began in Paris.
An employee of the Pentagon named
Daniel Ellsberg made a copy of all this
and gave it to Neil Sheehan
of the New York Times,
which began publishing a summary
on June 13, 1971.
After three installments the US Justice department
got a restraining order from a Federal court.
The Times
and the Washington Post took the case to the US Supreme
Court,
which on June 30 voted 6-3 to allow publication of the Pentagon Papers.
Ellsberg was prosecuted under the Espionage
Act; but after the judge discovered
that Nixon had ordered the
office of his psychiatrist raided, he was released.
Adapting to public pressure, President Nixon began withdrawing
US troops,
but he kept the war going by bombing Laos, Cambodia,
and North Vietnam.
The "Vietnamization" of the war was
doomed to fail without US support.
Running against the peace candidate
George McGovern in 1972, Nixon promised peace.
Using various illegal
political tricks against his opponents that were later exposed
in the Watergate scandal, Nixon gained an overwhelming electoral
victory.
After his 1972 Christmas bombing, several peace groups
and ten religious
peace groups formed the Coalition to Stop Funding
the War (CSFW).
A cease-fire agreement was signed in January 1973.
However, it was only when the Watergate scandal began to
weaken the Nixon presidency that Congress on July 1, 1973
finally cut
off all funds for any military activity in Indochina.
Without
American troops fighting their civil war,
the government of South
Vietnam could not last long.
On August 9, 1974 Nixon resigned
the Presidency
in order to avoid being impeached.
On April 21,
1975 President Thieu resigned and fled,
followed a week later
by his successor.
On April 30 Vietnam became a unified country
as US helicopters
completed the evacuation of 1,373 Americans
and 5,595 Vietnamese
abandoning their embassy in Saigon.
What were the results of American military involvement in Vietnam?
Without American support the government of South Vietnam completely
collapsed by 1975.
More than three million Americans were sent
to Vietnam.
About 58,000 were killed, and about 300,000 were wounded.
A conservative estimate of civilian casualties in South
Vietnam was the
Senate Subcommittee on Refugees estimates of 400,000
killed,
900,000 wounded, and 6.4 million turned into refugees.
The total number of people who were killed during the American-Vietnam
War
has been estimated between one million and three million people.
The United States dropped from the air 3.2 million tons of bombs
on South Vietnam,
2.1 million tons on Laos (almost one ton per
person), and 340,000 tons on North Vietnam.
Both Johnson and Nixon
each presided over more bombing
than was used by all sides in
World War II.
An obvious result of American military involvement
is that the people of Vietnam
were terribly militarized for self-defense
and forced
to try to solve their problems with military means.
This contagion spread with the war in Cambodia,
where millions
more were killed in the 1970s.
In South Vietnam alone the United States government directly
spent $141 billion.
In a country where the per capita income was
$157 per year,
the US poured in the equivalent of $7,000 per person
for the twenty million inhabitants.
If even one-tenth of this
amount had been spent helping the people of Vietnam,
surely they
would have become our friends; but spending it destructively resulted
not only in massive killing and maiming but also in a decadent
type of economy
involving large amounts of graft, favoritism,
prostitution, and drugs.
The world's most powerful and wealthy
nation was unable to defeat
an army of peasants using homemade
and captured weapons.
Ostensibly fighting to preserve freedom,
the United States
propped up a series of military dictators.
The
American forces traveled halfway around the world to attack Vietnamese
people
in North and South Vietnam supposedly to protect them from
"external aggression."
The only conceivable external
aggression, other than that of the US,
was the movement of people
from North Vietnam to South Vietnam;
yet the basis of the Geneva
Accords was that Vietnam was to be one country.
Then how can the
movement of Vietnamese in their own country
be considered external
aggression?
The United States claimed it must continue the fight
for its honor
and the respect of its allies; yet never before
has America been so dishonored
or lost the respect of its allies
more than it did in Vietnam.
Using the weak justification of SEATO's collective defense
arrangements,
the United States violated the United
Nations Charter, the Geneva Accords of 1954,
the Nuremberg
Code, the Hague Conventions, the Geneva Protocol of 1925,
the
1928 Pact of Paris, the Geneva Conventions and Genocide Convention
of 1949,
and the Paris agreements of 1973.
International law expert
Richard A. Falk noted the following illegal war policies:
1. the Phoenix Program,
2. aerial and naval bombardment of undefended villages,
3. destruction of crops and forests.
4. “search-and-destroy” missions,
5. “harassment and interdiction” fire,
6. forcible removal of civilian population,
7. reliance on a variety of weapons prohibited by treaty.
After devastating the country of Vietnam, the rich United States
has not even considered paying reparations.
In fact the US was
the only nation out of 141 that refused to endorse
a United
Nations resolution urging priority economic assistance to
Vietnam.
Another result is the terrible injuries, both physical and
psychological,
which the Vietnam veterans have suffered.
The moral
problems have caused severe psychological disturbances.
Hundreds
of thousands of Americans were trained to kill
and did kill hundreds
of thousands of Vietnamese.
When they discovered it was for no
good reason, the remorse,
grief, guilt, anger, frustration, and
resentment erupted.
By 1980 the number of veterans, who had committed
suicide,
was already larger than the number of Americans killed
in Vietnam.
The veterans bear the heaviest psychological burden.
Yet all Americans were responsible, especially
the politicians
and officers who gave the orders.
The only restraints on US military escalation were the fear
of a conflict with China
or the Soviet Union and the conscience
of the American public
as represented in the peace movement.
During
the Vietnam War about 170,000 young American men were granted
Conscientious Objector (CO) status by their draft boards or from
the military,
and some 300,000 applied but were denied the deferment.
The number of men who illegally avoided the draft has been estimated
at 600,000,
and about a third of these were formally charged.
About 40,000 fled to Canada, while another 20,000 escaped to other
countries
or hid from authorities in the United States.
The number
of COs increased from 18,000 in 1964 to 61,000 in 1971,
and the
number of prosecutions went from 340 in 1965 to 5,000 for the
year 1972.
About 17,000 in the military applied to be Conscientious
Objectors.
Noting that anti-war demonstrators did not kill a single person
during the period
the US Government killed hundreds of thousands
in Indochina, Fred Halstead
summarized the accomplishments of
the anti-war movement as breaking the spell
of anti-Communist
hysteria, increasing healthy skepticism of political leaders,
changing the stereotype of soldiers as obedient pawns, becoming
reluctant to
engage in military adventures abroad, and expanding
social reform movements to issues of foreign policy.
For the first
time in American history the people successfully
challenged the
government's right to wage war.
Why, then, did America get bogged down in the quagmire
of Vietnam
for so long at such great cost?
After World War II the United
States becam
the greatest power in the history of the world.
The abuse of greatness is the abuse of the power.
America thought
it could do no wrong.
At the same time Americans had a tremendous
fear of Communism.
Historically, it took a decade and a half before
the US even recognized
the Soviet Union and more than two decades
before
it recognized nearly a billion people in China.
With a
world-wide military force the United States was arrogant enough
to think that it could stop Communism by force of arms.
Psychologically
there was the irrational fear that if America did not intervene,
somehow Communism would take over the world.
The Soviet empire
was likewise afraid of encroachment
through Korea or eastern Europe
and therefore took steps to place a protective ring around itself,
while the United States has protective military bases all around
the world.
Because of this combination of American power, fear of Communism,
and self-righteous concepts about capitalist democracy,
the US
foolishly tried to set up a non-Communist government in a country
that was trying to free itself from French colonialism by a
combination
of nationalistic independence and Marxist ideology.
Politicians
apparently believed that only by the influence of its military
power
could the United States try to hold back the tide
of political
revolution and national independence in Vietnam.
What are the lessons for the future that Americans and others
can learn?
Military methods ultimately do not solve political
and social problems.
Independence and self-determination are best
attained without military interference.
Military methods only
militarize the opposition and escalate violence
so that peaceful
solutions are more unattainable.
The security of the United States
and its allies is not really threatened
by what goes on in small
underdeveloped countries.
Nuclear weapons are of no use in these
situations.
Armed intervention will eventually backfire.
The US
has no legal right to be a policeman in another country.
The veterans
can teach others of the horrors and agonies of war.
The American
people must not allow the President to go astray while intoxicated
with power.
An effective peace movement can dramatically influence
political policies.
Finally, every person has the responsibility
to refuse to support an illegal and immoral war.
1. Vietnam: A History in Documents ed. Gareth Porter,
p. 30
2. Ho Chi Minh, On Revolution, p. 161.
3. Viet-Nam Crisis: A Documentary History, Volume 1: 1940-1956,
p. 148.
4. Vietnam: A History in Documents ed. Gareth Porter, p.
206.
5. Out Now! A Participant's Account of the American Movement
Against the Vietnam War
by Fred Halstead, p. 35.
6. Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History ed. Straughton
and Alice Lynd,
p. 270-271.
7. Out Now! A Participant's Account of the American Movement
Against the Vietnam War
by Fred Halstead, p. 504.
This is a chapter in World Peace Efforts Since Gandhi,
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