The Vietnam War

I am watching The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the ten-episode documentary that PBS broadcast last year. Based on a few things I read online, I was worried that it would champion a revisionist perspective -- that the U.S. Goliath could have triumphed if not for the cowardliness of politicians and students. But so far, I just finished watching episode five, there's been no revisionism of any sort.

A month or two ago, in preparation for the Burns-Novick documentary, I watched Vietnam: A Television History, the 13-episode WGBH-produced documentary which was broadcast in the fall of 1983. No revision there either. The U.S. was beat fair and square by a much more motivated people fed up with colonial domination.

There are differences between the two documentaries. The Burns-Novick film focuses on average soldiers, where the WGBH documentary had lots of wonderful interviews with people at the top of the heap who were still alive in the late-70s/early-80s -- McGeorge Bundy, Madame Nhu.

This morning Yves Smith reposts a Tomgram by Danny Sjursen, "The War That Never Ends (for the U.S. Military High Command): And It’s Not the War on Terror."

Sjursen helpfully summarizes revision when it comes to the Vietnam War and he traces its influence on GWOT:

Historian Gary Hess identifies two main schools of revisionist thinking. There are the “Clausewitzians” (named after the nineteenth century Prussian military theorist) who insist that Washington never sufficiently attacked the enemy’s true center of gravity in North Vietnam. Beneath the academic language, they essentially agree on one key thing: the U.S. military should have bombed the North into a parking lot.

The second school, including Petraeus, Hess labeled the “hearts-and-minders.” As COINdinistas, they felt the war effort never focused clearly enough on isolating the Vietcong, protecting local villages in the South, building schools, and handing out candy — everything, in short, that might have won (in the phrase of that era) Vietnamese hearts and minds.

Both schools, however, agreed on something basic: that the U.S. military should have won in Vietnam.

[snip] 

Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, and the others entered service when military prestige had reached a nadir or was just rebounding. And those reading lists taught the young officers where to lay the blame for that — on civilians in Washington (or in the nation’s streets) or on a military high command too weak to assert its authority effectively. They would serve in Vietnam’s shadow, the shadow of defeat, and the conclusions they would draw from it would only lead to twenty-first-century disasters.

[snip] 

Today’s leaders don’t even pretend that the post-9/11 wars will ever end. In an interview last June, Petraeus — still considered a sagacious guru of the Defense establishment — disturbingly described the Afghan conflict as “generational.” Eerily enough, to cite a Vietnam-era precedent, General Creighton Abrams predicted something similar. speaking to the White House as the war in Southeast Asia was winding down. Even as President Richard Nixon slowly withdrew U.S. forces, handing over their duties to the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) — a process known then as “Vietnamization” — the general warned that, despite ARVN improvements, continued U.S. support “would be required indefinitely to maintain an effective force.” Vietnam, too, had its “generational” side (until, of course, it didn’t).

The fundamental thing to understand about the Vietnam War is that South Vietnam was never a real organic entity. Diem managed to kick the French out when he beat the mafia that controlled Saigon. Then when Diem began to lose his grip because of a Buddhist-led popular uprising, the Kennedy administration backed a coup that led to Diem's death. The show was over right there. The U.S. killed the guy who justified the fiction that there was a South Vietnam. Instead, the U.S. decided to pour more and more resources into the country in an attempt to maintain the fiction.