Hanoi’s War and the Cause of Gridlock
in Washington
HANOI’S WAR: An International History of Vietnam’s War for
Peace by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen is the best
book on the Vietnam War to be written in the last 25 years. As she says in the introduction, there have
been many, many books about the Vietnam War as seen from the American side, but
few from the Vietnamese perspective.
Dr. Nguyen was born in
Vietnam but was brought to the United States as an infant. She had family fighting on both sides of the
war. She grew up in Pennsylvania and has
been given access to once secret archives of North Vietnam. This book is essential for anyone trying to
understand the Vietnam War.
For beginners, Hanoi’s
War claims that by the time of the
American War, both Ho Chi Minh and General Giap had
been marginalized. The war was run by Le
Duan and Le Duc Tho, both of whom favored a big war strategy of General
Offensive, General Uprising. Their plan for victory was to defeat the “puppet”
government in the south by getting the people to rise up. The build-up in 1964,
the 1968 Tet Offensive, and the 1972 Easter Offensive
were all intended to accomplish this objective.
Essentially, American airpower thwarted this goal. Giap
and Ho had favored continued guerilla war but lost the political battle in
Hanoi.
Basically, the big war proponents felt that the Vietnamese
communists had already been cheated of victory twice, in 1945, when Ho allowed
the French to return; and in 1954, when Ho agreed to the temporary partition of
the country. So, Le Duan
and Le Duc Tho were wary of
negotiations and determined to fight on until final victory.
This is a great book that will
change anyone’s mind about the Vietnam War.
Just the new facts alone, like the fact that both Ho Chi Minh and
General Giap were not in Vietnam for the 1968 Tet Offensive , make this book worth reading. It is also available
on an audio CD, so it can be listed to in the car, or can be borrowed and
downloaded (actually, the book stays in the cloud) for free through libraries
that have Hoopla.
So, what does this have to do
with gridlock in Washington? When Barack
Obama was elected he said about Vietnam, “We not going to refight old battles.” But, without a general consensus about the
past it is impossible to make policy for the future. Unless we can agree on what happened, what
were the mistakes and what were the successes, it is difficult to go forward in
a rational way.
It was pretty clear that
slavery was the major issue from the War for Independence to the Civil
War. There is no disagreement. The South lost and slavery was abolished in
law, but not exactly in fact. After the
civil war industrialization and the progressive movement were the major issues
that battled across the political stage.
World War I marked the emergence of the United States as a
global power and creditor nation.
Between the wars there was the depression and the debates over how to
effectively address the global economic crisis.
After World War II, the United States was the undisputed
Master of the Universe, locked in a Cold War with the Communist Bloc. Korea was a stalemate and Vietnam was a
disaster.
Until we answer the question of what happened in Vietnam,
what went wrong and what went right, we can not have a coherent policy. Did the US win the Vietnam War? No. Did it lose it? Well, not really.
Hanoi’s War suggested
these lessons to me. 1. The massive
military buildup in Vietnam was counterproductive. The United States should have stayed with the
advisory and military assistance role.
It had been received wisdom before Vietnam that the United States should
not get involved in a land war in Asia.
How did that happen? One thing is clear, American complicity in the
overthrow and murder of President Diem was the trigger for the big war, just as
the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the trigger for World War I, with
equally unpredictable consequences. It
is the unpredictable consequences from violent acts of which we should all be
afraid.
In essence,
Nixon’s diplomatic openings with the Soviet Union and China paid big
dividends. Essentially, Hanoi’s backers
forced it to change strategy from defeating the South to get rid of the
Americans, to negotiating an American exit first, before continuing the
military struggle to victory. If there
was any winner of the Vietnam War, it was China (as is obvious today.) China, with some Soviet assistance, combined
with the heaviest bombing campaign of the Vietnam War, enabled Nixon to
negotiate a face saving exit from Vietnam.
Since Vietnam, our best
presidents: Reagan, Clinton, and Obama, have favored the diplomatic route over
the military. The Bushes, on the other
hand, have favored the military route over the diplomatic and political. The results speak for themselves.
The problem in Washington is that none of the
decision-makers know anything about the Vietnam War. It is politically unpalatable to say we “lost”,
because America’s real philosophy is based on football, i.e. quitters never win
and winners never quit. So, there is a
huge cohort, mostly in the Republican Party, that maintains that we really “won”
the Vietnam War, or could have won it but were prevented from winning it by the
politicians at home. This scenario is
frighteningly similar to Adolf Hitler’s analysis of the reasons Germany lost
World War I. And name-calling Talk Radio hosts who either make up facts or
present them so selectively as to constitute a distortion for partisan purposes
are jeopardizing the security of the country by focusing the people’s attention
on trivia instead of the serious issues that require deliberation.
And like Hitler between the wars, the United States
refuses to see itself as the aggressor, not only in Vietnam, but in many other
interventions around the world. Anyone
who believes the invasion of Iraq was based on faulty intelligence has no
intelligence of his or her own. The
record is clear that Bush and Cheney wanted to go to war with Iraq long before
9/11. Bush mentioned Iraq as the major foreign policy problem in the last
debate of the 2000 campaign that took place just four days after the Cole
bombing. That makes the US the aggressor
in Iraq.
So, my point is that successful
government policy, that, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that most people
hope results in peace and prosperity (although there are a few people who are
always looking for a fight) depends on accurate understanding of the past, both
its successes and failures.
Vietnam, a highly complex
situation, had plenty of wise moves and plenty of missteps by all the parties
involved: the North and South Vietnamese, the Americans, the Soviets and the
Chinese.
If we want to end the gridlock in Washington and move
forward into a peaceful and prosperous future, we need to be tough enough to
face the truth about the past. When it
comes to Vietnam, Hanoi’s War by
Lien-Hang T. Nguyen is a great place to begin.