[Colin Glassey 9:00 PM] Vietnam Redux
Daniel Ellsberg was on the radio recently, talking about his decision to get the Pentagon Papers into the hands of the public, and about the Vietnam war. I have an opinion on this. I am not a neutral party either. My wife is Vietnamese, born in Saigon to parents who had fled North Vietnam (and likely execution by the not-so-kind Viet Communists). If things hadn't happened the way they did, it is highly unlikely that we would have ever met. So, I have an interest in justifing what did happen.
That said, here is what I think about the Vietnamese war. Our support of South Vietnam was reasonable. Our strategyfor fighting the war in South Vietnam was wrong. We could have won the war with a different strategy and kept South Vietnam free from the North.
Why was our support of South Vietnam reasonable? There really were people in Vietnam who didn't want Ho Chi Mihn and his communist friends to rule over them as a dictator. Why should we have let Ho and company take over all of Vietnam? Did they deserve to rule the whole country? We know now what they did with their power, no elections, little personal freedom, very little in the way of basic human rights. Many people who fought against the Communists before the French left the north were murdered after the Viet Mihn took over (my wife's uncle was one of them). By contrast, the Southern government was at least no worse than the North and, at times, better.
Our strategy for fighting the war in Vietnam was wrong. The problem was that we acted as though the forces working against the Southern government were largely composed of Southerners. This was not correct. By and large, the forces fighting us were Northern. To stop the Northerners from fighting us in South Vietnam we should have invaded and occupied North Vietnam. This was considered but rejected by Johnson who worried about starting World War 3. We know now that Johnson's fears were mistaken, but he made his call based on the available evidence. However, given that we were not going to invade the North, there was an alternate strategy.
Theophrastus's strategy for winning the war in Vietnam: build a defensive line from the sea to Thailand, station all U.S. forces along this line and prevent anything from moving from the North to the South. This would involve violating Laos's border. I'm sorry but frankly, I don't care about Laos and we shouldn't have cared back then. Laos is and was just a shadow of a country. Even if they had wanted to (which they didn't) Laos lacked the ability to control its own borders.
From the sea around Quang Tri to Khe Sanh (the offical border of Vietnam) is about 40 miles. From Khe Sanh to the Thai border (and the Mekong river) is another 100 miles. If we had fortified this 140 mile border and stationed three or four divisions there, then we would have ended the war in the South. We should have let the South Vietnamese Army and police handle internal resistance. We should never have gotten involved in policing South Vietnam. The only reason why the Southern army couldn't control the south was because of the constant influx of men and supplies from the North. Once that supply was halted, the fighting in the South would have been quite minor and winnable by the South Vietnamese.
The essential point is that the war in the South was the product, not of Southerners who were deeply unhappy with the government in Saigon, but instead it was the product of the North Vietnamese government. If we prevent the North from fighting in the South, the South would have been largely peaceful.
Sure it would have been expensive in money to station 120,000 troops along this new 140 mile border, but it would have been cheap in lives saved and the Southern government would not have fallen. We helped cause the Southern government to fall by trying to fight a war on the North's terms amidst a civiliam population that started out indiferent to the war but turned increasingly hostile as we bombed villages and fired artillery into free fire zones. In a real sense, we bought into the North's claims that the people of the South supported them, not the government in Saigon. This was a nice lie the Communists spread but it wasn't true, not in 1960, or even as late as 1965.
8:59:37 PM 
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