Newsletter Numéro
27 3
mai 2005
Gabriel Kolko(*)
*[Gabriel Kolko has been affiliated with CEIMSA since the fall semester 2001, when he
agreed to serve as a co-director of our Atelier N°18 ("Les Banques américaines multinationales"). He is a leading American historian of modern warfare
and the author of several
U.S.
history classics, including Century of War:
Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?.
He has also written a comprehensive history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a
War:
Vietnam
, the
US
and the
Modern Historical Experience.
Professor Kolko has contributed to our research
center’s work on many occasions, and has helped guide our graduate
students to new sources for their original research in our American Studies
program at Stendhal University.
___________________________________________________________
The End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Ago :
Lesson from a total defeat for the US
The war
in
Vietnam
that ended 30 years ago with a
complete triumph for the Communists was the longest, most expensive and
divisive American war in its history, involving over a half-million
U.S.
forces at one point-plus
Australian, South Korean, and other troops.
If we
use conventional military criteria, the Americans should have been victorious.
They used 15 million tons of munitions (as much as they employed in World War
Two), had a vast military superiority over their enemies by any standard one
employs, and still they were defeated.
The
Saigon
army commanded by Nguyen van Thieu also was far stronger than their adversaries. At the
beginning of 1975 they had over three times as much artillery, twice as many
tanks and armored cars, 1400 aircraft and a virtual monopoly of the air. They
had a two-to-one superiority of combat troops – roughly 700,000 to
320,000. The Communist leadership in early 1975 expected the war to last as
much as a decade longer. I was in
South Vietnam
at the end of 1973 and in
Hanoi
all of April 1975 until the last
four days of the war, when I was in
Hue
and Danang
in the south. I am certain the Communists were almost as surprised as the
Americans that victory was to be theirs so quickly and easily; I told them from
late 1973 onward to expect an end to the war by the Saigon regime capsizing
without a serious fight – much as the Kuomintang had in China after 1947.
As a future Politburo member later confessed, they regarded my prediction as
"crazy." They were completely unprepared to run the entire nation,
and their chaotic, inconsistent economic policies since 1975 have shown it.
The
Americans and Communists alike shared a common myopia regarding wars.
What happens in the political, social,
and economic spheres are far more decisive than military equations. That was
true in
China
in the late 1940s, in
Vietnam
in 1975, and it is also the case in
Iraq
today.
South Vietnam
was an artificially urbanized
society whose only economic basis was American aid. The value of that aid
declined when the oil price increases that began with the war in the
Middle East
in 1973 caused a rampant inflation,
at which point the motorized army and society the Americans had created became
an onerous liability.
South Vietnam
had always been corrupt since the
U.S.
arbitrarily created it in 1955
despite the Geneva Accords provision that there should be an election to
reunify what was historically and ethnically one nation. Thieu,
who was a Catholic in a dominantly Buddhist country, retained the loyalty of
his generals and bureaucracy by allowing them to enrich themselves at the
expense of the people. The average Vietnamese, whether they were for or against
the Communists, had no loyalty whatsoever to the Thieu
regime that was robbing them. After 1973, soldiers' salaries declined with
inflation and they began living off the land. The urban middle class was
increasingly alienated, the Thieu
regime's popularity fell with it. It admitted there were 32,000 political
prisoners in its jails, but other estimates were far higher.
By the
beginning of 1975 the regime in
South Vietnam
was beginning to disintegrate by
every relevant criterion: economically and politically, and therefore
militarily. The
Saigon
army abandoned the battlefield well before the final Communist
offensive in March 1975. Moreover, with the Watergate scandal, the Nixon
Administration was on the defensive after 1973, both with the American public
and Congress, and after Nixon's forced resignation the new American President,
Gerald Ford, was simply in no position to help the economically and politically
bankrupt Thieu regime. The American army, at this
point, was too demoralized to reenter the war.
Washington
correctly assumed that its
diplomatic strategy had won
Moscow
and
Peking
to its side by threatening to swing
its power to the enemy of whatever nation would not support its
Vietnam
strategy – triangular
diplomacy.
But it
was irrelevant what
Hanoi
's former allies did--and essentially they did what
the Americans wanted by cutting military aid to the Vietnamese Communists. The
basic problem was in
Saigon
: the regime was falling apart for reasons having nothing to
do with military equipment. The Communists were stunned by their fast, total
victory over the nominally superior
Saigon
army, which refused to fight and immediately
disintegrated.
Thus
ended the most significant American foreign effort since 1945. There are so many
obvious parallels with their futile projects in
Iraq
and
Afghanistan
today, and the lessons are so
clear, that we have to conclude that successive administrations in
Washington
have no capacity whatsoever to
learn from past errors. Total defeat in
Vietnam
30 years ago should have been a
warning to the
U.S.
: wars are too complicated for any
nation, even the most powerful, to undertake without grave risk. They are not
simply military exercises in which equipment and firepower is decisive, but
political, ideological, and economic challenges also. The events of
South Vietnam
30 years ago should have proven
that. It did not.
___________
Newsletter n°1
Newsletter n°2
Newsletter n°3
Newsletter n°4
Newsletter n°5
Newsletter n°6
Newsletter n°7
Newsletter n°8
Newsletter n°9
Newsletter n°10
Newsletter n°11
Newsletter n°12
Newsletter n°13
Newsletter n°14
Newsletter n°15
Newsletter n°16
Newsletter n°17
Newsletter n°18
Newsletter n°19
Newsletter n°20
Newsletter n°21
Newsletter n°22
Newsletter n°23
Newsletter n°24
Newsletter n°25
Newsletter n°26
Newsletter n°27
Newsletter n°28
Newsletter n°29
Newsletter n°30
Newsletter n°31
Newsletter n°32
Newsletter n°33
Newsletter n°34
Newsletter n°35
Newsletter n°36
Newsletter n°37
Newsletter n°38
Newsletter n°39
Newsletter n°40
Newsletter n°41
Newsletter n°42
Newsletter n°43
Newsletter n°44
Newsletter n°45
Newsletter n°46
Newsletter n°47
Newsletter n°48
Newsletter n°49
Newsletter n°50
Newsletter n°51
Newsletter n°52
Newsletter n°53
Newsletter n°54
Newsletter n°55
Newsletter n°56