I was speaking of the govt he would have controlled if we'd intervened to put the Viet Minh in power in 1945 as you advocated. By that time, the communists he led did have control of the VM. Put the VM in power, you put the communists in power.
I never advocated intervention to put the Viet Minh in power. I advocated American intervention to guarantee Vietnamese independence, a very different thing. The Viet Minh did not hold power at the close of WW2. Ho Chi Minh did make the first move: as soon as Japan surrendered, he marched his armed force (about 250 men, armed and trained by American advisors) into Hanoi and declared independence. That did not mean he was in control. The Viet Minh had neither the armed strength nor the popular mandate to manage anything even remotely resembling a government. There were many other groups contending for power, including a prominent cluster of nationalist groups backed by Chiang Kai-Shek and his secret police chief Tai Li, who had extensive business interests in Indochina. If Americans were in the driver’s seat as guarantors of the freedom of a new republic, with all of the guns, all of the resources, all of the money, don’t you think there might have been a few things that could have been done to influence the direction taken by the new state?
Any alternative view rests on the assumption we could have outmaneuvered the communists and helped non-communist nationalists gain power. This would mean getting involved in a Vietnamese civil war
It would have meant involvement in a political struggle. Not an easy thing to manage, but an easier thing than jumping into the wrong side of a war of liberation against a detested and crumbling colonial power.
Why involvement in a communist vs non-communist nationalist struggle in 1945 would have been good whereas it was not good in the '60's is hard to understand.
If it’s hard for you to understand, you need to think a little harder.
Would you rather fight a communist-directed movement with an army of 250, 4-5000 “semi-armed” (meaning machetes and a few antique guns) support cadres, and scattered popular backing mainly in the north, or a fully communist movement with an armed force of 150,000, plus a well organized, nationally distributed, and in many areas nearly comprehensive political organization? Would you rather have intervened as inheritor of the mantle of the hated and despised French, or guarantors of independence? Which do you think would have placed us in a situation of greater advantage?
Ideologues in DC insisted on forcing the 1945 conflict into the “communism vs. democracy” paradigm, when it wasn’t that at all. It was a war for independence, and whoever became the most effective champion of independence was going to emerge with the mandate to rule. Ho knew this very well, but in 1945 he simply didn’t have the resources to immediately take over the mandate of the liberator. If we had stepped in while he was still weak the political advantage of having defeated the French would have accrued to us instead of him. Our people on the spot knew this, but nobody wanted to listen. Once the communists had earned the stature they got from defeating the French, trying to beat them was like walking up a water slide. Once we had intervened on the French side, our standing to offer a solution was gone.
The VN communists ultimately won the VN war and what does it turn out that they won for their people? Authoritarianism, poverty, misery.
That’s what their people already had, and given the quality of the governments the US supported in Vietnam, that’s what they were going to get in any event. The postwar period was very brutal, yes, but that would have been the case no matter who won. If the communists had lost, what do you think the new government would have done with their supporters? At least the communist victory brought peace, and the country is moving along a maturing curve that could have started much earlier. Today it is not the worst government in the 3rd world, though by no means one of the better ones. The human rights picture has improved enormously, as have economic freedoms.
Sometime try looking at postcolonial outcomes, and looking for distinctions between decolonizations that were forced by military means and those that were voluntary. The distinction is much sharper than any drawn on the basis of ideology. When nations gain independence by fighting for it, or when nations have had to resort to war to rid themselves of a postcolonial dictator, the country is almost always taken over by the person or group that led the revolution, and dictatorship almost always ensues. Nations that achieve a negotiated independence, or dispose of their dictators peacefully, have a much easier time.
There are three simple reasons for this. First, people who lead successful revolutions have armies at their disposal, and armies are useful things for people who would seize power. Second, it is easy for the leader of a successful revolution to assume the mantle of the liberator, also a very useful thing for a would-be despot. Third, the Darwinian process inherent in revolution ensures that the leaders of successful revolutions are determined, charismatic, and often ruthless individuals. Nice guys seldom make it. When such people get power, they often want to keep it.
I’m not trying to say that Ho Chi Minh was some kind of cuddly little pussycat in 1945. I’m saying that if you have to fight a pit bull, it’s better to fight it when it’s a puppy, and you are in a position of strength, then to wait until it’s full grown and you are in a position of weakness.
Again, none of this is meant as “blame” for anyone, least of all for the American leaders of the time. If we are ever going to learn anything from our messes, the first thing we have to do is leave the blame behind and dispassionately examine the events and the causative chains that generated them. There is nothing to be gained by blaming past figures for not seeing a picture that would not become clear for generations. There is a good deal to be gained by looking back at mistakes they were made, and drawing whatever lessons we can from them. |
