Vietnam

The Necessary War

Michael Lind

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781439135266
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Michael Lind casts new light on one of the most contentious episodes in American history in this controversial bestseller. In this groundgreaking reinterpretation of America's most disatrous and controversial war, Michael Lind demolishes enduring myths and put the Vietnam War in its proper context—as part of the global conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Lind reveals the deep cultural divisions within the United States that made the Cold War consensus so fragile and explains how and why American public support for the war in Indochina declined. Even more stunning is his provacative argument that the United States failed in Vietnam because the military establishment did not adapt to the demands of what before 1968 had been largely a guerrilla war.In an era when the United States so often finds itself embroiled in prolonged and difficult conflicts, Lind offers a sobering cautionary tale to Ameicans of all political viewpoints.

CHAPTER 1

THE INDOCHINA THEATER

The Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1946–89

In the winter of 1950, Moscow was as cold as hell. On the evening of February 14, 1950, in a banquet hall in the Kremlin, three men whose plans would subject Indochina to a half century of warfare, tyranny, and economic stagnation, and inspire political turmoil in the United States and Europe, stood side by side: Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh.

In the 1960s, when the United States committed its own troops to battle in an effort to prevent clients of the Soviet Union and China from conquering Indochina, many opponents of the American intervention claimed that the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh’s communism was superficial, compared to his nationalism. In reality, there was an international communist conspiracy, and Ho Chi Minh was a charter member of it. Beginning in the 1920s, Ho, a founding member of the French Communist party, had been an agent of the Communist International (Comintern), a global network of agents and spies controlled with iron discipline by the Soviet dictatorship. In the 1930s, Ho had lived in the USSR, slavishly approving every twist and turn of Stalin’s policy; in the 1940s, he had been a member of the Chinese Communist party, then subordinated to Moscow. Ho Chi Minh owed not merely his prominence but his life to his career in the communist network outside of his homeland. Because he had been out of the country for so many years, he had survived when many other Vietnamese nationalists, noncommunist and communist alike, had been imprisoned or executed by the French or by the Japanese during World War II.

From the 1940s until the 1990s, the regime Ho founded would depend on military and economic support from one or both of the two great powers of the communist bloc. With the blessing of Stalin and the critical aid of Chinese arms and advisers, Ho’s Vietminh (Vietnamese nationalist) front would drive the French from Indochina in the mid-1950s; with the help of Chinese logistics troops, Soviet and Chinese antiaircraft personnel, and even Soviet fighter pilots, Ho’s North Vietnam would withstand American bombing while guiding insurrection in South Vietnam in the mid-1960s; with Soviet and Chinese aid, Soviet arms and Soviet advisers, Ho’s heirs in Hanoi in the mid-1970s would conquer South Vietnam and Laos, invade Cambodia, and convert Indochina into the largest Soviet satellite region in the world outside of Eastern Europe.

Ho Chi Minh owed little to Vietnamese tradition, and almost everything to his foreign models, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Like Lenin and Stalin, Nguyen Ai Quoc had renamed himself (“Ho Chi Minh” means the Enlightened One, or the Seeker of Enlightenment). Ho would be the center of a cult of personality, just as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao had been. Lenin had Leningrad, and Stalin had Stalingrad; therefore Saigon, after the communist victory, would become Ho Chi Minh City. Ho’s grim tomb in Hanoi would be modeled on Lenin’s tomb in Moscow. In death, as in life, Ho Chi Minh would be a minor clone of the major communist tyrants. Even the smallest details of Ho’s government would be borrowed from the Soviet Union or from Mao’s imitation of Soviet examples. In the 1950s, Mao would copy Stalin’s war on the Soviet peasantry, and Ho, with help from Chinese communist advisers dispatched by Mao, would similarly terrorize the North Vietnamese population into submission to the new totalitarian ruling class. In the decade that followed, the North Vietnamese communist oligarchy would persecute and purge North Vietnamese intellectuals, following the example of Mao’s purges of Chinese intellectuals, itself modeled on Stalin’s campaigns against dissident thinkers. The official culture of North Vietnam, and later of united communist Vietnam, would be a crude copy of the official cultures of the Soviet Union, its satrapies in Eastern Europe, and its Chinese offspring and ultimate rival. The Vietnamese communists would model their “reeducation camps” on communist China’s laogai and the Soviet gulag. Well into the 1980s, visitors to communist Vietnam would see portraits of Ho’s role model and mentor displayed on office walls: “X-talin,” as the name is transliterated in Vietnamese. Stalin.

Three men could hardly be more unlike in personality than the conniving Stalin, the impulsive, extroverted Mao, and the quiet, stoic Ho, but all were devout adherents of the political religion of Marxism-Leninism, whose prophet, Lenin, looked down on them from a portrait in the Kremlin banquet hall. It was Lenin’s sect of Marx’s religion, not the foibles of its individual proponents, that would do the greatest harm to the suffering peoples of the Soviet empire, China, North Korea, and Indochina. It was not Stalin’s gangsterism or Mao’s egomania but Lenin’s doctrines that produced the famines that killed millions in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and even more millions in China during the Great Leap Forward in 1958–62. The campaigns of government terror against the hapless villagers of North Vietnam in the mid-1950s and in Cambodia in the mid-1970s were not the results of Ho’s or Pol Pot’s personal ambitions or personal cruelty; the public denunciation, imprisonment, torture, and execution of “landlords” and “rich peasants” and “middle peasants” formed an integral part of the demented Marxist-Leninist program for atomizing existing societies in order to create a new socialist man. Stalin claimed to be the true heir of Lenin, and he was. As the historian Martin Malia has observed: “Thus the awful truth of the [Soviet] experiment in the integral Marxist project could be realized only by Leninist means, and the Leninist means could reach their socialist objective only by Stalinist methods.”¹

The greatest atrocities of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh lay in the future, on that evening in the winter of 1950. Ho, after traveling to Beijing, had made a pilgrimage to Moscow to ask for Soviet and Chinese help in his effort to expel the French and subject all of Indochina to totalitarian rule. When Mao had arrived in Moscow two months earlier on December 16, 1949, he had been summoned to the Kremlin for an audience with Stalin. The meeting had been tense; Stalin had feared that Mao might prove to be as disloyal as Yugoslavia’s Tito, whom Stalin had recently expelled from the communist camp for failure to follow Moscow’s orders. For his part, Mao had wanted to replace the Sino-Soviet treaty of 1945, which Stalin had negotiated with the deposed Nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek, with a new treaty more favorable to what was now the world’s most populous communist country. When Stalin had asked Mao what he wanted, Mao had answered evasively, saying that he wanted to send for his foreign minister, Zhou Enlai—a hint of his interest in a new treaty. Stalin had pressed Mao to begin the negotiations at once: “If we cannot establish what we must complete, why call for Zhou Enlai?” Mao had answered with an unconvincing rationalization—he, Mao, lacked authority to negotiate, because Stalin, as chairman of the Council of Ministers, was of a higher rank.

Stalin, who preferred to be the manipulator rather than the manipulated, had been offended by Mao’s evasiveness. Eventually Zhou Enlai had arrived, and the revised treaty, along with secret protocols, had been signed earlier in the day on February 14. At the banquet in honor of his new Chinese allies, Stalin showed that he had not forgotten the incident of December 16. When Ho Chi Minh, seeking a Soviet-Vietnamese treaty comparable to the Sino-Soviet treaty, gathered up the courage to approach the leader of the communist bloc and to ask for “instructions,” Stalin made sure that Mao and his interpreters were near enough to hear his reply. In a Georgian accent tinged with sarcasm, Stalin said to the president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, “How can you ask for my instructions? I am the chairman of the Council of Ministers, and you are the chairman of the state. Your rank is higher than mine; I have to ask for your instructions.”²

Ho Chi Minh might have expected any number of responses to his petition for a treaty with the Soviet Union. But he could not have foreseen that his solemn request would give one of his heroes, Stalin, an occasion to mock his other patron, Mao.

The Cold War on the Asian Front

The Cold War was the third world war of the twentieth century. It was a contest for global military and diplomatic primacy between the United States and the Soviet Union, which had emerged as the two strongest military powers after World War II. Because the threat of nuclear escalation prevented all-out conventional war between the two superpowers, the Soviet-American contest was fought in the form of arms races, covert action, ideological campaigns, economic embargoes, and proxy wars in peripheral areas. In three of these—Korea, Indochina, and Afghanistan—one of the two superpowers sent hundreds of thousands of its own troops into battle against clients of the other side.

In the third world war, Indochina was the most fought over territory on earth. The region owed this undesirable honor not to its intrinsic importance but to the fact that in other places where the two superpowers confronted one another they were frozen in a stalemate that could not be broken without the risk of general war. The Soviet Union and the United States fought proxy wars in Indochina because they dared not engage in major tests of strength in Central Europe or Northeast Asia (after 1953) or even the Middle East. Indochina was strategic because it was peripheral.

Throughout the Cold War, the bloody military struggles in the Indochina theater were shaped indirectly by the tense but bloodless diplomatic struggles in the European theater. By going to war in Korea and simultaneously extending an American military protectorate over Taiwan and French Indochina, the Truman administration signaled its resolve to defend its European allies. American officials swallowed their misgivings about French colonialism and paid for France’s effort in its on-going war in Indochina from 1950 until 1954, in the hope of winning French support for the rearmament of Germany. Khrushchev’s humiliation of the United States in the Berlin crisis of 1961 persuaded the Kennedy administration that a show of American resolve on the Indochina front was all the more important. In 1968, concern by members of the U.S. foreign policy elite that further escalation in Indochina would endanger America’s other commitments, particularly in the European theater, was one of the factors that led the Johnson administration to begin the process of disengagement from the Vietnam War. The Eastern European revolutions of 1989, which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, deprived communist Vietnam of its superpower protector and ideological model.

Although Indochina was the site of the greatest number of proxy-war battles, the greatest bloodletting in the Cold War—both in absolute numbers of war-related deaths and in intensity of combat—took place on the Korean peninsula between 1950 and 1953. However, among the regions in which proxy wars were fought, Indochina saw the greatest number of peacetime deaths as a result of state action, during the Khmer Rouge’s radical campaign of collectivization in the mid-1970s, which was inspired by the Maoist version of Marxism-Leninism and foreshadowed on a smaller scale by the Chinese-influenced North Vietnamese terror of the mid-1950s.

By the time Stalin met with Mao and Ho in Moscow in 1950, the Cold War had been underway for four years. In 1946, Stalin was tightening his grip on the countries in the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Defeated Germany was divided between Soviet and western zones of occupation that eventually became separate states (Austria, too, was partitioned until the mid-1950s). At the same time, Korea was partitioned between Soviet and American zones. Japan was wholly under U.S. administration.

Although many had expected the emergence of a tripolar world centered on Washington, Moscow, and London, World War II had weakened the British empire fatally. In February 1947, the British informed the Truman administration that the United States would have to assume the burden of supporting pro-Western forces in Turkey and Greece, where Stalin was backing communist insurgents. On March 12, Truman announced what became known as the Truman Doctrine: “the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” In June, the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe was announced in a speech at Harvard by Secretary of State George Marshall. Stalin, seeing U.S. economic aid as a threat, prevented the Eastern European nations under Soviet control from accepting the offer. The Truman Doctrine received an answer in September 1947. Andrei Zhdanov, acting as a mouthpiece of Stalin, announced that the world was divided into two camps, socialism and imperialism. Noncommunist nationalist movements in colonial and postcolonial regions, which had been courted as allies by the international communist network in the days of the Popular Front, were now included in the imperialist camp. By contrast, Zhdanov hailed the war of Ho Chi Minh’s communist-controlled Vietminh against France in Indochina as an example of “a powerful movement for national liberation in the colonies and dependencies.”³

Stalin ordered communists in Western Europe to launch a wave of strikes. The United States responded with shipments of economic aid. After Stalin’s gambit in Western Europe failed, he orchestrated a coup in Czechoslovakia that replaced the elected government with a communist dictatorship controlled by Moscow. The United States launched a covert program to support pro-American parties in Italy’s national elections and considered military intervention if a communist-led coalition won power there. Meanwhile, on the periphery of Europe, American advisers helped a dictatorship in Greece battle a communist insurgency supported by the Soviet bloc in the first major proxy war of the Cold War. The Greek insurgency was defeated, in part because Yugoslavia’s communist dictator, Tito, afraid of being purged by Stalin, broke away from the Soviet bloc to assume a position of uneasy neutrality between East and West.

Although the primary theater of the early Cold War was Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union were also drawing battle lines in Asia. In February 1948, at a communist-sponsored conference of radical youth in Calcutta, Chinese and Vietnamese communists called for armed struggle against the West and pro-Western governments. Following the Calcutta meeting, a series of communist-inspired rebellions broke out throughout the region. In March, Burmese communists rose in insurrection against the newly independent government; in June, the Malayan communist party took up arms; and in August, the communist-led Hukbalahap insurgents in the Philippines renewed their war against the pro-American Philippine government. In September 1948, Indonesian communists clashed with the Indonesian authorities, following the return from exile in the Soviet Union of Indonesian communist leader Musso, who had announced that his movement would follow the “Gottwald Plan” (a reference to the communist seizure of power in the recent Czechoslovakian coup). The Indonesian communist revolt was put down within a month, but the Burmese, Malayan, and Philippine insurgencies burned on for years.⁴

In Indochina, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh—a communist-controlled front of nationalist parties—had seized power in August 1945, when the Japanese occupation of French Indochina had come to an end with the Second World War. To conceal his actual purposes, Ho pretended to disband the Indochinese communist party. In the summer of 1946, while Ho traveled to Paris in the hope of persuading the French to peacefully cede power to his regime, his chief deputy, Vo Nguyen Giap, supervised the systematic destruction of all political opposition by imprisoning, exiling, or murdering tens of thousands of noncommunist Vietnamese nationalists and leftists. Following the failure of Ho’s negotiations with France, hostilities began at the end of 1946. France dispatched troops in an effort to reimpose French authority over Indochina. Squeezed between French forces and the nationalist China of Chiang Kai-shek (who was by no means hostile to the effort to expel the French from the region), the Vietnamese communists managed to survive until Mao’s Communist party, with critical military aid and logistical support provided by the Soviet Union and North Korea, won the Chinese civil war in 1949. In early 1950, Ho traveled to Moscow to join Mao and Stalin.

“In the Far East,” former Red Army journalists General Oleg Sarin and Colonel Lev Dvoretsky have written,

China, North Korea, and North Vietnam became Stalin’s firm allies. In the latter two, Kim Il Sung and Ho Chi Minh were dictators with immense power who strictly toed the Kremlin’s line and who in turn were heavily supported with Soviet arms, goods, and services. Stalin gave them both a great deal of thought and attention, constantly mulling over plans for unifying these two countries under the red banner and thus creating new opportunities for spreading Soviet Communism further into Asia. Stalin was in an excellent position to fulfill the rest of his dreams.⁵

Stalin, who may have hoped that a coalition containing communists would come to power in Paris, was careful to keep the appearance of distance between his regime’s and Ho’s. He instructed Mao to assume responsibility for aiding the Indochinese comrades. The Chinese communist leadership viewed Indochina as one of “three fronts” contested with the American-led “imperialist” bloc; the other two fronts were Korea and Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime, defeated on the mainland, still survived. Mao, expecting a conflict with the United States over Taiwan, was informed in the spring of 1950 that Stalin had given his North Korean client, Kim Il Sung, permission to reunify the divided Korean peninsula by force, following the failure of an attempt to do so by means of a guerrilla war that had cost around one hundred thousand Korean lives.

With the backing of Stalin and Mao, Kim launched an invasion of South Korea on June 24, 1950. Viewing the crisis as a test of American credibility in the Cold War, the United States, along with Britain and dozens of allies, dispatched troops under the cover of the United Nations to rescue the South Korean regime of Syngman Rhee. With a daring amphibious landing at Inchon ...