Chomsky's Challenge to American Power

A Guide for the Critical Reader

Anthony F. Greco

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780826519498
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Noam Chomsky is a pioneering scholar in the field of linguistics, but he is better known as a public intellectual: an iconoclastic, radical critic of US politics and foreign policy. Chomsky's Challenge examines most of the major subjects Chomsky has dealt with in his nearly half century of intellectual activism--the Vietnam War, America's broader international role (especially its interventions in the Third World), the structure of power in American politics, the role of the media and of intellectuals in forming public opinion, and American foreign policy in the post-Cold War world.

Chomsky is as controversial as he is influential. Admirers see him as a courageous teller of unpleasant truths about political power and those who wield it in the United States. Critics view him as a propagandist and ideologue who sees only black and white where there are multiple shades of gray. While Chomsky's fans tend to view him uncritically, his critics often don't take him seriously. Unlike any previous work, this book takes Chomsky seriously while treating him critically. The author gives Chomsky credit for valuable contributions to our understanding of the contemporary political world, but spares no criticism of the serious deficiencies he sees in Chomsky's political analyses.

CHAPTER 1

Vietnam

There may have been a time when American policy in Vietnam was a debatable matter. This time is long past. . . . The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act.

—Noam Chomsky, 1969

A SURVEY OF 110 LEADING American intellectuals in the early 1970s ranked Noam Chomsky by far the most influential intellectual critic of America’s war in Vietnam.¹ Chomsky’s case against the war was essentially a moral indictment of US policy: it challenged the official justifications American leaders advanced for war and emphasized the devastating impact of US intervention on the people of Vietnam.

America’s War in Vietnam: A Synopsis

Japan’s wartime occupation of French Indochina laid bare the vulnerability of French colonial rule and spurred the growth of a Vietnamese national independence movement.² The nationalists were united in the Viet Minh, a coalition that was broadly representative of Vietnamese society but dominated by the Vietnamese Communists under their charismatic leader, Ho Chi Minh.

THE FIRST VIETNAM WAR

The collapse of the Japanese occupation in late August 1945 enabled the Viet Minh to take control of a significant portion of northern Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh followed up quickly with the proclamation of an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). By the end of 1946 the Viet Minh were in a full-scale war with France for national independence.

US policymakers viewed France’s colonial war in Vietnam with ambivalence. On the one hand, the Americans saw European colonialism as an anachronism in the postwar world. On the other, they were focused on the emerging Cold War in Europe and were reluctant to alienate an important European ally over a distant conflict. Besides, a Communist-led regime in Vietnam was clearly not an acceptable outcome to the United States. Accordingly, Washington chose to support France’s effort to maintain control of its colony. US concern for the future of Vietnam was heightened by the 1949 Communist victory in China and the outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950. Increasingly, US decision makers viewed Vietnam in a Cold War context: a Viet Minh takeover in Vietnam would represent a major victory for international Communism. American financial aid to the French colonial war began in 1950 and escalated exponentially over the next few years, but the Viet Minh resistance continued unabated.

France’s will to continue the fight was clearly waning in early 1954 when the French prime minister accepted a Soviet proposal for an international conference on Far Eastern problems. The conference, held in Geneva, Switzerland, beginning in late April, was cochaired by Britain and the Soviet Union, with representatives of France, China and the Viet Minh’s Democratic Government of Vietnam participating. The United States attended as an “interested nation,” not as “a belligerent or principal in the negotiations.”³ The State of Vietnam, the nominally independent entity set up by France, attended in essentially the same capacity. The Geneva Conference took place against the backdrop of France’s most catastrophic defeat in its long war against the Vietnamese resistance, the loss in March of the strategically pivotal military base at Dienbienphu. The decisive Viet Minh victory there put the DRV in an apparently strong bargaining position at Geneva.

The Geneva Conference produced two agreements in late July. The first, between the French and the Viet Minh, set a cease-fire and divided Vietnam roughly at the 17th parallel into two “regroupment zones.”⁴ The French were required to withdraw all troops from northern Vietnam but retained effective control of the South. The document made clear that the two zones were not separate nations, and that they would be eventually reunited as one nation through free elections held throughout Vietnam. The second agreement was a final declaration by most of the participants—a consensus document not formally signed or voted on—that recognized the Franco-Vietnamese agreement and stipulated that general elections were to be held throughout Vietnam in July 1956 under the supervision of an international commission, with arrangements to be made by consultations between “the competent representative authorities” of the two regroupment zones.⁵

The Viet Minh were somewhat disappointed at Geneva. They had naturally hoped that they would be rewarded for their military triumph with control of a united Vietnam. In agreeing to a compromise, they yielded to pressure from their Chinese and Soviet allies, who were interested in exploring accommodation with the West.⁶ They also had excellent reason to expect that their broad popular support would bring them victory in the promised nationwide elections.

The United States, as a somewhat reluctant observer rather than a principal in the Geneva negotiations, did not sign any document. The US representative, Bedell Smith, did however pledge that the United States would not threaten or use force to “disturb” the agreements. He also asserted support for the unity of divided states through free elections, and said the United States would view any violation of the agreements as a threat to international peace and security. But US secretary of state John Foster Dulles had other ideas. A unified Vietnam would almost surely be a Communist Vietnam. The day after the end of the conference, Dulles told a National Security Council meeting that “the great problem from here on out [is] whether we [can] salvage” southern Vietnam.⁷

THE CREATION OF SOUTH VIETNAM

The Vietnamese point man in that salvage operation was to be Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti-Communist nationalist appointed prime minister during the Geneva Conference by Bao Dai, the figurehead emperor who “ruled” Vietnam on behalf of the French. Diem had an extensive network of politically influential contacts in the United States, where he had lived for a couple of years earlier in the decade. Diem became the focus of a strong and ultimately successful push by the United States to supplant French with American influence in the southern regroupment zone, enabling Washington to become effectively the Western sponsor of a new State of Vietnam.⁸

Diem was rather incongruous in the role of postcolonial leader of a new nation. He had not been a leader of the armed struggle against the French. He was attached to no political party or movement and had no mass base. A devout Catholic, he was a member of a religious minority whose special privileges had long aroused widespread resentment among the overwhelmingly non-Catholic majority.⁹ His government was very much a family affair. Three of the six members of Diem’s first cabinet were family members. In addition, his father was ambassador to the United States and his youngest brother ambassador to Great Britain. His brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, in the special office of presidential counselor, was believed by some to be as powerful as Diem himself.¹⁰

A critical issue dividing the French from the Americans and Diem was the Geneva provision for unifying elections. The accords set a deadline of June 1955 for the representatives of the northern and southern zones to begin consultations on election preparations. The French took seriously the pledges they made at Geneva and felt responsible for ensuring that the agreements, including the provisions for elections, were successfully implemented. Generally seconded by the British, they felt not only that the scheduling of elections was a treaty obligation, but that failure to hold elections could be a cause for renewed warfare.¹¹ Diem, however, had from the beginning made clear that he would not be bound by Geneva. Ignoring the urgings of both the British and the French, he repeatedly spurned requests by the DRV for the preparatory consultations, claiming that free elections would be impossible in the Communist-controlled North.¹²

For Washington, the issue of elections was troublesome. On the one hand, Washington did not relish the prospect of Diem facing an electoral test; the Americans in early 1955 brushed aside a French proposal for the British, the French, and the Americans to develop a common approach to the issue of elections. On the other, to explicitly advise Diem, even in private, to resist elections could be embarrassing if it became public knowledge. The United States, after all, had been waving the banner of democracy and free elections since the outset of the Cold War. Washington settled on a policy of going through the motions of gently nudging Diem to acquiesce in consultations, but never really pushing him.¹³

The Viet Minh had counted on French support to ensure that elections would take place; they had no way of foreseeing the speed with which the Americans would move to take control of events. Once the June 1955 deadline for consultations had passed, it was increasingly clear to all parties that the elections were unlikely to happen. Still, the Viet Minh persisted, staging demonstrations and parades calling for consultations throughout South Vietnam. But with their Chinese and Soviet allies disinclined to exert any pressure for implementation of Geneva, the Viet Minh had to swallow their disappointment as the July 1956 deadline for elections came and went.¹⁴

While the implementation of the Geneva provisions for reunifying elections foundered, the regroupment of forces envisioned by the agreements was effected in reasonable time. About 130,000 southern Vietnamese affiliated with the Viet Minh, two-thirds of them guerilla fighters, went to the North.¹⁵ (An estimated five to ten thousand former guerillas remained in the South.)¹⁶ The population movements in the opposite direction were much larger. Estimates vary, but probably upwards of one million people—Vietnamese Catholics, French or Vietnamese military personnel and their dependents, French civilians, and Vietnamese tribesmen who had served the French as auxiliary troops—fled the North for the South. The resettlement of Catholics in the South helped Diem by providing him with a badly needed if limited political base.¹⁷

With his American support now firm and the French moving out of the way, Diem solidified his rule by staging a referendum in October 1955 that deposed Bao Dai and made Diem president of a newly created Republic of Vietnam (RVN). Diem received 98 percent of the vote in the well-rigged election. After a January 1956 ordinance that effectively outlawed all organized political opposition, elections to a National Assembly in March 1956 followed the pattern of the October referendum. Ninety of the 123 legislators elected were essentially handpicked by the Diem government.¹⁸

Around the same time Diem moved to forestall challenges to central government authority by abolishing the elected village councils that had been set up by Bao Dai. The councils were replaced by committees appointed by the province chiefs, who in turn were to be selected directly by the president. Vietnamese Army (ARVN) officers, often corrupt cronies of Ngo Dinh Nhu and his coterie, were heavily represented among the province chiefs. The committee posts were disproportionately occupied by Catholics who had come from the North and were basically unknown and unsympathetic to the villagers.¹⁹

The installation of a new political and administrative elite in the countryside roughly coincided with and facilitated the restoration of a traditional elite—the landlords. During the war against the French, the Viet Minh had confiscated French-held land and large Vietnamese-owned estates, distributing land to the landless. Where land was still rented, they placed limits on rental rates and instituted a variety of measures to protect tenants’ rights. The Diem regime reversed many of these reforms, and compelled tenants to sign contracts reaffirming the landlords’ rights to their land. Diem’s subsequent “land reform” program, instituted tardily under pressure from the United States, was largely ineffective, being ridden with loopholes and poorly enforced. Only a tiny percentage of peasants gained any benefits.²⁰

Diem thus employed the trappings of constitutionalism to establish an oligarchic dictatorship. He also used brute repression. With the Denunciation of Communism campaign, begun in late 1955, Diem’s regime cast a dragnet that swept up anyone suspected of links with the North. The historian Eric Bergerud writes, “Predictably, the Cong An, Diem’s police, were hardly discriminating. It proved easy to accuse any potential enemy of having Communist affiliations. Jails filled, and an uncommonly large number of prisoners were shot while attempting to escape.”²¹ Different estimates of the numbers jailed and executed are roughly consistent. One historian puts the average rate of killings at 150 per month through 1957, with the rate of arrests at 5,000 per month.²² Another cites figures of 2,000 killed and 65,000 arrested in 1957 alone.²³ A later study by the US Defense Department acknowledged that “there can be no doubt . . . that innumerable crimes and absolutely senseless acts of suppression against both real and suspected Communists and sympathizing villagers were committed. Efficiency took the form of brutality and a total disregard for the difference between determined foes and potential friends.”²⁴

In the short run, the Denunciation of Communism campaign was a great success. A small, rudimentary Communist Party apparatus had remained underground in the South after the regroupment mandated by Geneva, but it was devastated by Diem’s anti-Communist campaign.²⁵ By the end of 1957 Communist Party membership fell to about one-third of its prior strength of five thousand. Morale within the party dropped precipitously, with some members expressing a sense of betrayal in reaction to their abandonment by their northern comrades.²⁶

REVOLT

Soon, however, the Communists started fighting back, aided in their recruitment efforts by resentment stirred by Diem’s repression. Clashes between the ARVN and armed units led by former Viet Minh began as early as 1957, with one thousand casualties on both sides before the end of that year. The fighting escalated over the next few years, with casualties reaching eleven thousand during 1959. The Viet Minh also retaliated with a campaign of terror against Vietnamese government personnel and supporters. Beginning in mid-1957, village officials, police and security personnel, and civilians such as schoolteachers and social workers became targets.²⁷

Hanoi observed the rising level of unrest in the South with some disquiet. The Vietnamese Workers (Communist) Party in the spring of 1956 gave its southern followers permission to engage in limited self-defense measures in reaction to the anti-Communist campaign, but the party leadership refused to countenance armed rebellion. This stance reflected Hanoi’s conclusion that with the shelving of the elections mandated by Geneva the reunification of their country would have to be put on indefinite hold; accordingly, priority would go to consolidating the Communist regime in the North. The Hanoi regime’s nonintervention policy also reflected the belief that the weak and corrupt Diem regime would eventually collapse on its own without any help from outside.²⁸

It wasn’t until January 1959, after often acrimonious internal debate, that Hanoi responded to its southern cadres’ repeated pleas for permission to organize an armed resistance.²⁹ That May, a supply route to the South (the beginning of the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail) was created, and southern Communist regroupees began returning from the Nor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Vietnam
• 2. Cold War Empire
• 3. Domestic Power and Global Purpose
• 4. Ideology, Illusion, and the Media
• 5. America in the Post–Cold War World
• Summary and Conclusions
• Notes
• Index