Colossus
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FIGURE 4
Support for the Korean War, 1950–53
Source: John E. Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion, Table 3.3, p. 54.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES OUT
The real “lesson of Vietnam” had already been evident in Korea. But American policy makers chose to learn the wrong lessons. Not only did they resolve in future to act without the supposed encumbrance of allies and the United Nations, but they also resolved to act through proxies rather than on their own account. This made matters worse, not better. At least a Korean-style approach to the problem of Vietnam might have achieved a draw in the form of partition between North and South. An even more limited approach to imperialism was foredoomed to total failure.
There is no need here for the wisdom of hindsight. In Graham Greene’s prophetic novel The Quiet American, written when the United States was still propping up the doomed French colonial regime, American attitudes toward Indochina are personified by Pyle, who fails to see that he is as much of a “colonialist” as the cynical British narrator whom he befriends (and, symbolically, cuckolds):
[Pyle] was talking about the old colonial powers—England and France, and how you couldn’t expect to win the confidence of Asiatics. That was where America came in now with clean hands.
“Hawaii, Puerto Rico,” I said. “New Mexico.”
… He said … there was always a Third Force to be found free from Communism and the taint of colonialism—national democracy he called it; you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers.153
Pyle fails to grasp that this search for indigenous collaborators is quintessentially imperial. Nor does he see that to install such a Third Force without a long-term commitment to the country is bound to end in disaster. In an attempt to convince him of this, Greene’s narrator draws an explicit parallel with the British in India and Burma: “ ‘I’ve been in India, Pyle, and I know the harm liberals do. We haven’t a liberal party any more—liberalism’s infected all the other parties. We are all either liberal conservatives or liberal socialists: we all have a good conscience…. We go and invade the country: the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but … [in Burma] we made peace … and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we’d stay. But we were liberals and we didn’t want a bad conscience.’ ” 154
Those South Vietnamese who acted on the assumption that the Americans would stay—would at least defend a partition on the Korean model—underestimated the growing power of liberalism and a bad conscience within the American elite. Even a young American officer like Philip Caputo, who openly averred that he was “battling … the new barbarians who menaced the far-flung interests of the new Rome,” did so with a strangely apologetic air:155 “Maybe it was the effect of my grammar-school civics lessons, but I felt uneasy [searching a Vietnamese village], like a burglar or one of those bullying Redcoats who used to barge into American homes during our Revolution…. I smiled stupidly and made a great show of tidying up the mess before we left. See, lady, we’re not like the French. We’re all-American good-guy GI Joes. You should learn to like us. We’re Yanks, and Yanks like to be liked. We’ll tear this place apart if we have to, but we’ll put everything back in its place.”156 The effects of such imperial denial were ultimately crippling to American strategy Within a short time, the reality—that imperialists are seldom loved— began to sink in, as one disillusioned veteran put it: “We’re supposed to be saving these people and obviously we are not looked upon as the saviors here. They can’t like us a whole lot. If we came into a village, there was no flag waving, nobody running out to throw flowers at us, no pretty young girls coming out to give us kisses as we march through victorious. ‘Oh, here come the fuckng Americans again. Jesus, when are they going to learn?’ ”157
American military planners defined military success in terms of the ratio of enemy losses to their own losses; hence such grisly measures as the “net body count” and the “kill ratio” As figure 5 shows, even by their own criteria the high point of American military success was in 1967 or 1968; by 1971 the war was clearly being lost. Of course there was an ingenuousness as well a callousness about such calculations. The reality of military success is that it is also determined by how big a proportion of each side’s manpower is being lost and, more important, by the morale of each side’s combatants and civilians. In the end, it is more important to get the other side to surrender or flee than to inflict death and wounds.158 Over the entire period of the conflict the United States certainly inflicted higher absolute numbers of casualties on North Vietnam and the Vietcong than were suffered by American forces and the South Vietnamese. But as the American presence was scaled down in Vietnam, and as the willingness of Americans to sacrifice soldiers’ lives there diminished, so the odds tipped in favor of their more committed enemy.
Could the Vietnam War have been won if it had been fought more ruthlessly? In the eyes of many American military analysts, Vietnam exposed the flaws in the concept of limited war. General William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. combat forces until 1968, blamed the “ill-considered” policy of “graduated response,” which he believed had prevented a swift and decisive resolution of the conflict.159 General Bruce Palmer argued that “the graduated, piecemeal employment of airpower against North Vietnam violated many principles of war.”160 Colonel Harry G. Summers blamed U.S. military planners for pursuing Vietcong guerrillas who were deployed to harass the U.S. Army until larger divisions from the North could be sent down. The Americans exhausted themselves in this “counterinsurgency” effort; instead they should have driven into Laos to seal off the enemy infiltration routes running south, leaving the fight against the Vietcong to South Vietnamese troops.161 This was a view echoed by Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. “One of the lessons of the Vietnamese conflict,” he later wrote, “is that rather than simply counter your opponent’s thrusts, it is necessary to go for the heart of the opponent’s power; destroy his military forces rather than simply being involved endlessly in ancillary military operations.”162 According to Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the United States “should have fought in the north, where everyone was the enemy, where you don’t have to worry whether or not you were shooting friendly civilians…. The only reason to go to war is to overthrow a government you don’t like.”163
FIGURE 5
The “Net Body Count” and the “Kill Ratio,” Vietnam, 1966–72
DEFINITIONS: Net body count (bars): North Vietnamese Army plus Vietcong killed, missing or captured in action, less American forces plus South Vietnamese Army killed, missing or captured in action. Kill ratio (line): North Vietnamese Army plus Vietcong killed, missing or captured in action, divided by American forces plus South Vietnamese Army killed, missing or captured in action.
Source: http://www.vietnamwall.org/pdf/casualty.pdf
At the level of tactics too the war could have been fought more effectively American troops who had been trained to fight the Red Army in Central Europe took time to adjust to the jungle-covered mountains and paddy fields of Vietnam, took time to learn the dark arts of war against guerrillas.164 This process was not made easier by the demoralizing system of one-year tours of duty, which undermined unit cohesion and flattened the collective learning curve.165 Yet ultimately the Americans did show signs of having solved the operational and tactical challenges of the war. The North Vietnamese sneered that the Americans’ “sophisticated weapons, electronic devices and the rest were to no avail” against a mobilized populace.166 But in the final stages of the war the Americans were making devastating use of helicopter gunships, “smart” bombs and intensive bombardment by B-52s. It was this new style of air war that all but obliterated a North Vietnamese invading force at Easter 1972.167
There were other ways the war effort could have been improved. There was not a clear chain of command: CINCPAC (commander in chief, Pacific) ran the air war on North Vietnam from Hawaii, while CO-MUSMACV (commander, U.S.
Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) ran operations in South Vietnam. Intelligence gathering could have been better.168 Given the importance of liaison between the United States and the South Vietnamese government it was propping up, there could have been better coordination between American military leadership and American diplomatic representation.169 Yet even if the strategic, operational and tactical conduct of the war had been twice as effective, there was a fundamental political impediment to success: the war’s declining popularity. As early as October 1967—just two and a half years after the first marines arrived to defend Da Nang Airport170—more voters disapproved of the war than approved of it (see figure 6). The orthodox interpretation of this decline in public belligerence is that it was caused by rising American casualties. There is certainly a superficial—and indeed a statistical—correlation between the two variables.171 Yet the determinants of popular support for war are more complex than such calculations assume. Casualties in Vietnam were not exceptionally high by comparison with other foreign wars fought by the United States. The total number of American servicemen killed in action in 1967–9,378—was less than 2.5 percent of total U.S. forces in Vietnam. In all, just 1.4 percent of the 8.7 million American military personnel who served in Southeast Asia were killed; 2.2 percent were severely disabled. The world wars were significantly more lethal. The real problem was that by 1967 a rising proportion of Americans was doubtful that even these numbers were justified by the war’s objectives. Lack of clarity about America’s aims in Vietnam, lack of confidence that these could be achieved quickly and lack of conviction that the stated aims were worth prolonged sacrifice: these were what caused public support for the war to slide as the body count rose inexorably toward its cumulative total, which was not far short of 60,000 (of whom 47,000 were killed in action).
FIGURE 6
The Vietnam War: Casualties and Popularity
Source: John E. Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion, Table 3.1, p. 45f.
It is hard to say which was cause and which was effect. Was it the declining popularity of the war that persuaded Lyndon Johnson to seek a negotiated peace, or was it the other way around? There are those who would argue that American society by the 1960s was simply incapable of pursuing such a war to a successful conclusion.172 But there is a strong case to be made for a lack of effective political leadership. Johnson simply failed to make the case for war either to the public or to Congress.173 Worse, as early as Christmas 1965 he embarked on a strategy of seeking peace negotiations by suspensions of the air war against Hanoi. This gambit, repeated in September 1967, proved disastrous. By indicating an American readiness to accept a compromise peace, it encouraged the North Vietnamese to keep fighting, while creating an expectation in the United States that an end to the war was in sight. It is no coincidence that public disapproval of the war overtook public approval the following month. Yet even in early 1968 it was still not too late. More than 40 percent of voters still believed that if the United States gave up the struggle, “the Communists will take over Vietnam and then move on to other parts of the world.”174 Lance Corporal Jack S. Swender was very far from the only American who believed it was better to “fight to stop communism in South Vietnam than in Kincaid, Humboldt, Blue Mound, or Kansas City.”175 Westmoreland was inflicting heavy losses on the enemy as the Tet offensive foundered. The fatal mistakes were the new defense secretary Clark Clifford’s refusal to send more troops and Johnson’s decision to announce another partial bombing halt in the hope of starting talks. From this point onward American policy became a search for an honorable exit—latterly any kind of exit.
This was a goal which Nixon and Kissinger pursued with great ruthlessness. Secretly bombing Cambodia while secretly parleying with Le Duc Tho in Paris was doubly Machiavellian. But the position they had inherited from Johnson was beyond salvage. The cease-fire eventually signed in January 1973 was a death sentence for the South Vietnamese regime, which the Americans had originally intervened to save, while the “collateral damage” caused in Cambodia did nothing to stop that country from falling under the most brutal of all the Communist regimes in Asia. The fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge and the flight of the last Americans from Saigon happened within days of one another in April 1975. The humiliation of American “imperialism”—a term of abuse now heard as often in the American as in the Chinese press—seemed complete. What had once been called “the white man’s burden,” as Senator J. William Fulbright lamented in January 1968, had simply been relabeled the “responsibilities of power.”176 On balance, Americans preferred the irrespon-sibilities of weakness.
There were those who acknowledged what Greene had all along predicted: that the United States was the heir of European empire in Vietnam. “[If] this makes us the policemen of the world,” wrote platoon leader Marion Lee Kempner just three months before his death in November 1966, “then so be it. Surely this is no more a burden than the British accepted from 1815 until 1915, and we have a good deal more reason to adopt it since at no time was Britain threatened during this period with total annihilation or subjection which, make no mistake about it, we are.”177 In many other minds, however, the condition of imperial denial nevertheless persisted. Louis J. Halle insisted that America was “not fighting in Indo-China for imperialistic reasons … we are not fighting there because we want to increase our territorial possessions or build an empire.”178 On the contrary, the Vietnam War was a simple case of mistaken identity. Kennedy and Johnson had made the tragic error of seeing the North Vietnamese regime as a mere instrument of world communism, the evil empire the United States had vowed to contain.179 But it had turned out to be inspired more by a zealous nationalism; had not Ho Chi Minh himself approvingly cited the American Declaration of Independence?180 The Saigon government, by contrast, had been unworthy of American support.181 In any case, as such eminent analysts as George F. Kennan and Arthur J. Schlesinger Jr. now discerned, Indochina had been of marginal strategic significance.182 The inference to be drawn was clear, and Nixon effectively drew it in the “doctrine” he enunciated at Guam. America should fight only when its national interests were at stake; imperiled regimes looking for U.S. sponsorship would henceforth have to do the dirty work themselves.
By the ignominious end of the American intervention in Indochina, such views were widely shared. In 1974 two-fifths of those polled agreed with the statement that “the U.S. should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.” Ten years before, just 18 percent had thought so.183 The consensus that had emerged by 1978 was that the Vietnam War had been “more than a mistake; it was fundamentally wrong and immoral.”184 A succession of films rubbed this in. Though their budgets were large by Hollywood standards—in the case of Apocalypse Now fabulously so—these films proved conclusively that war films made better economic sense than actual wars. At even the most conservative estimate, the Vietnam War itself had cost over a hundred billion dollars, financed in large measure by borrowing; between 1964 and 1972 the gross federal debt had increased by roughly the same amount as had been spent on the conflict. Admittedly, that was not a huge increase in public indebtedness by comparison with what was to come in future decades. The biggest deficit of the Vietnam years was equivalent to just over 3 percent of American GDP, less than the deficit for 2003. In that sense, Vietnam was no more crippling in terms of dollars spent than it was in terms of blood spilled. Yet the fact that so many of the dollars had to be spent abroad proved to have serious implications for what was supposed to be the anchor currency of the international monetary system devised at Bretton Woods. On August 15, 1971, a year and a half before the last American troops left Vietnam, Richard Nixon appeared to acknowledge the end of U.S. economic supremacy with his decision to “close the gold window,” ending the convertibility of the dollar and ushering a new era of floating exchange rates. Significantly, it had been European—and especially French—pressure on the dollar that had sounded the death knell for
Bretton Woods, challenging (though not ending) the dollar’s status as the world’s predominant reserve currency. Failure in Vietnam did more than redefine American attitudes to the world, driving many Americans toward a repudiation of postwar globalism. It also changed the attitudes of the world toward the United States, unleashing a wave of anti-American feeling (not least within the West European intelligentsia) that was to endure for the rest of the cold war, no matter how egregious the repressiveness of Communist regimes around the world. The imperialism of anti-imperialism had come fatally unstuck if it was the United States that was cast in the role of the evil empire. Small wonder the most successful post-Vietnam movie of them all was in fact a science-fiction fable in which the audience was invited to identify with a ragtag collection of freedom fighters battling for an underdog Rebel Alliance against a sinister Galactic Empire. In Star Wars George Lucas perfectly expressed the American yearning not to be on the dark side of imperialism. It was not without significance that as his cinematic epic unfolded backward a generation later, the archvillain Darth Vader was revealed to have been an all-American Jedi Knight in his youth.
LITTLE CAESARS
Failure in Asia could of course be blamed on the sheer distance of Korea and Vietnam from the American mainland. Yet even in its own backyard—Latin America and the Caribbean—the United States found it surprisingly hard to make a success of the imperialism of anti-imperialism. There were plentiful interventions. But just as in the past, where Left-wing governments were overthrown with American assistance or approval, they were generally replaced by military dictatorships whose murderous conduct did nothing to endear the United States to Hispanic-Americans. This happened in Guatemala in 1954, in the Dominican Republic in 1965 and in Chile in 1973.185 In justifying his decision to send troops to Santo Domingo, Johnson offered the classic rhetoric of imperial denial: “Over the years of our history our forces have gone forth into many lands, but always they returned when they were no longer needed. For the purpose of America is never to suppress liberty, but always to save it. The purpose of America is never to take freedom, but always to return it; never to break peace but to bolster it, and never to seize land but always to save lives.”186 The subsequent records of the wholly undemocratic regimes installed in each case made a mockery of these words. The most puzzling thing, however, was the failure of the United States to pull off a successful intervention in a country that was geographically nearer, economically more promising and strategically more valuable than all of these: Cuba. Not only was the United States powerless to prevent Fidel Castro’s Communist Revolution from succeeding in 1959, but two years later it failed ignominiously to pull off a countercoup by anti-Castro exiles (the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and in October 1962 it came to the brink of a third world war when the Soviet Union sent nuclear missiles to the island.187 Only by secretly offering to withdraw American missiles from Turkey were the Kennedy brothers able to avoid what would indeed have been “one hell of a gamble”—namely, a U.S. invasion of Cuba—and secure the peaceful withdrawal of the Soviet weapons.188 What the Cuban missile crisis revealed was that when the two superpowers confronted each another “eyeball to eyeball,” they discovered that they had grown to resemble each other. We now know that both parties blinked in the confrontation; perhaps it was the surprise of recognition.189 For in truth neither of the two anti-imperialist empires cared enough about Cuba to risk a thermonuclear duel. Not for the first or the last time, the principal beneficiary of this standoff was a petty dictator. So long as the superpowers could compete only through proxies, it was the little countries that got the Caesars—and, all too often, the Caligulas too.