A Singular Journey

I've posted before about William Shawcross, the author of Sideshow. Mr. Shawcross's recent column in the NYT, "Defeat's Killing Fields," co-written with his former critic Peter Rodman, confirms (in the words of Norman Podhoretz) the "singular journey" that Mr. Shawcross has taken over the years "to the view that the United States is the key positive force for good in the world."

In their column, Messrs. Shawcross and Rodman write:

Some opponents of the Iraq war are toying with the idea of American defeat. A number of them are simply predicting it, while others advocate measures that would make it more likely. Lending intellectual respectability to all this is an argument that takes a strange comfort from the outcome of the Vietnam War. The defeat of the American enterprise in Indochina, it is said, turned out not to be as bad as expected. The United States recovered, and no lasting price was paid.

We beg to differ. . ..

The 1975 Communist victory in Indochina led to horrors that engulfed the region. The victorious Khmer Rouge killed one to two million of their fellow Cambodians in a genocidal, ideological rampage. In Vietnam and Laos, cruel gulags and “re-education” camps enforced repression. Millions of people fled, mostly by boat, with thousands dying in the attempt.

The defeat had a lasting and significant strategic impact. Leonid Brezhnev trumpeted that the global “correlation of forces” had shifted in favor of “socialism,” and the Soviets went on a geopolitical offensive in the third world for a decade. Their invasion of Afghanistan was one result. Demoralized European leaders publicly lamented Soviet aggressiveness and American paralysis.

True, the consequences of defeat were mitigated by various factors. The Nixon-Kissinger breakthrough with China contributed to China’s role as a counterweight to Moscow’s and Hanoi’s new power in Southeast Asia. (Although China, a Khmer Rouge ally, was less scrupulous than the United States about who its partners were.)

And despite the defeat in 1975, America’s 10 years in Indochina had positive effects. Lee Kuan Yew, then prime minister of Singapore, has well articulated how the consequences would have been worse if the United States had not made the effort in Indochina. “Had there been no U.S. intervention,” he argues, the will of non-communist countries to resist communist revolution in the 1960s “would have melted and Southeast Asia would most likely have gone communist.” The domino theory would have proved correct.

Scott Johnson at Powerline provides more details about this remarkably honest and admirable man.

William Shawcross

I remember reading William Shawcross's book Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia shortly after it came out in 1979, a brutal indictment of U.S. policy in Cambodia. Essentially (bear in mind I read the book twenty-five years ago) it painted a picture of a peaceful and essentially apolitical Cambodia dragged against its will into political and military conflict by Nixon, Kissinger and the United States. The bottom line: the United States created the Khmer Rouge, or at least gave them traction, and was responsible for the horrors there. The book was passionate, brilliantly argued, and extremely well written.

I have seen reports over the past several years of Shawcross's conversion, although I have not followed them closely. Having recently read Mark Moyars's magnificent Triumph Forsaken, however, I followed the links of a recent Power Line post, "Killing Fields Then and Now," that referred to Shawcross and an article he published in the Times of London, "Remember: for Cambodia read Iraq." I figured this was an opportunity to find out where thirty years had brought him.

The answer, it turns out, is a very long way. He now says that, "Given the catastrophe of the communist victories, I have always thought that those like myself who were opposed to the American efforts in Indochina should be very humble." But I was particularly taken by the sentences that followed:

I also think it wrong to dismiss the US efforts there as sheer disaster. Lee Kuan Yew, the former longtime Prime Minister of Singapore, has a subtler view. He argues that, although America lost in IndoChina in 1975, the fact that it was there so long meant that other SouthEast Asian countries had time to build up their economies to relieve the poverty of their peasants and thus resist communist encroachment — which they probably could not have done had IndoChina gone communist in the 1960s.

It is eerie how precisely Professor Moyar's book corroborates Shawcross's statement. Had the United States abandoned Vietnam in, say, 1964 or 1965, there is little doubt that the dominoes would have fallen: at the very least, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and (the big prize) Indonesia. John Kennedy made a disastrous decision in failing to halt the coup against and murder of Ngo Dinh Diem, and Lyndon Johnson, dealt a bad hand, tragically chose to fight a limited war rather than destroy North Vietnam as he should have. But even that limited war, which held off Communist victory for ten years, until we chose to abandon even that effort, delayed the North Vietnamese victory until Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and other countries in the region had achieved sufficient stability to withstand the shock of abandonment and defeat.

A recent National Review column on Shawcross, "The Shawcross Redemption," quotes a left-wing journal labeling him as "a fellow-traveler of U.S. imperialism, a committed Euroskeptic, a powerful advocate of pre-emptive war, and an apologist for monarchy and inherited privilege." Congratulations, Mr. Shawcross, you must be doing something right to merit such a frenzied and incoherent denunciation. Welcome aboard.

"Go After the Head of the Snake"

What a terrible mess Lyndon Baines Johnson inherited in Vietnam. JFK had created the mess. He had refused to fight for Laos, thereby permitting the North Vietnamese to open the second Ho Chi Minh trail through that country. For short-sighted and self-serving political reasons he had appointed and then lacked the courage to relieve his Republican rival, Henry Cabot Lodge, as U.S. Ambassador and thus prevent the coup against and assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963.

But JFK did not live long enough to reap the whirlwind. It fell on LBJ to watch and react as resulting political chaos promptly led to an accelerating decline in South Vietnamese military effectiveness, just as North Vietnam readied and then in the Spring of 1965 launched major military operations involving large regular NVA units.

LBJ was not blameless. He accepted the same "limited war" concept that JFK and his advisors had championed, and he saddled himself with those same JFK advisors who had helped create the mess. Even after the discovery of many large regular NVA units in South Vietnam, his own predilections and the counsel of his advisors led him to reject the sage advice of former President Eisenhower to "go after the head of the snake instead of the tail."

That said, however, LBJ was a tragic figure, not a villain. Trapped in a situation not of his own making, he received little help. His pleas to his advisors for solutions resulted in a choice among proposals that, at best, attacked the tail:

"'I'm pretty depressed reading all thse proposals,' Johnson told McNamara on July 2[, 1965]. The President confided to his wife, 'Vietnam is getting worse every day. I have the choice to go in with great casualty lists or to get out with disgrace. It's like being in an airplane and I have to choose between crashing the plane or jumping out. I do not have a parachute.'"

Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), at 409.

In retrospect, of course, LBJ should have either gone after the head of the snake or, failing that, jumped out of the plane. But hindsight is 20-20.

Dominoes

"No one can say with absolute certainty what would have happened had South Vietnam been defeated in 1965, considering the complex interaction of many individuals with a diverse array of personalities, cultures, and limitations, and considering the powerful role of chance in human conflict. What can be said, based on analysis of the information available then and subsequent revelations, is that staying in South Vietnam in 1965 was a much more promising option for the United States than leaving, even if it meant fighting the war in the flawed way that the United States ultimately fought it. High was the probability that the fall of Vietnam in 1965 would have knocked over many dominoes in Southeast Asia."

Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (New York: Cambridge 2006), at 388.

Stringers: David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan Say "Ouch!"

Given the current problems with anti-US and anti-Israeli stringers in the Middle East, it's interesting to read that this is not a new phenomenon:

"Two of the sources upon whom the journalists [in Vietnam in 1963] relied most heavily, Pham Ngoc Thao and Pham Xuan An, were actually Communist agents. . . . Pham Xuan An [pictured] was a member of the international press itself, for he worked as a stringer for Reuters. Muoi Huong, the Communist who recruited both Pham Ngoc Thao and Pham Xuan An, later said that he had told An to become a journalist for the very purpose of influencing foreign reporters. . . . [David] Halberstam [of the New York Times] and [Neil] Sheehan [of UPI] relied heavily on information from Pham Xuan An; Halberstam considered An to be their best source on the South Vietnamese officer corps because of his supposed contacts among the officers. The newsmen's reliance on Pham Xuan An goes a long way toward explaining why the press kept reporting dissatisfaction among the officers in 1963 that did not actually exist."

Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), at 214-15.

John Paul Vann Says "Ouch!"

"As an Army officer, [John Paul Vann] demonstrated an extraordinary willingness to risk his life for military gain, which would win him much respect. He had charisma, tremendous energy, and a knack for planning military operations. His upbringing, however, undoubtedly contributed to his serious character flaws. One of the most damaging of these flaws was a penchant for lying."

Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), at 173.

The Lessons of Vietnam?

Over at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, Ed Darrell is beginning a series of posts on "Applying the Lessons of Vietnam in Afghanistan and Iraq". He begins by asking the right question: "Can we even say, with assurance, what those lessons are?" Unfortunately, he then does not answer it, or rather assumes that the answer is "yes," for he immediately launches into what he believes the first of those lessons is.

I say "unfortunately," because that first question is the crucial one. It is becoming clear that the answer is either "no" or "yes, but those lessons may well be exactly the opposite of those assumed by conventional wisdom."

Exhibit A is Mark Moyar's book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge University Press 2006). Mackubin Thomas Owens, Professor of National Security at the Naval War College, has written a glowing review in the Weekly Standard, "A Winnable War: The Argument Against the Orthodox History of Vietnam", which will provide some idea of Moyar's thesis.

You can't apply the lessons until you know what the lessons are. If Mr. Moyar and others are correct, most or all of the received wisdom is wrong -- and it makes a difference. Just today, for example, the Christian Science Monitor has published an article by Professor Owens in which he draws on Mr. Moyar's book. The Democrats won't like the title: "Why Bush's War Plan Can Work".