Comments on: Comparisons to Vietnam, ye gods

By: megapotamus

megapotamus — Fri, 21 May 2004 17:23:45 +0000

It has long seemed to me that everyone, left right and center, had forgotten the consequences of our retreat from Viet Nam. For those who count so many stains on American honor, this is a true one. Not so much for the personnel withdrawal from the field, Vietnamization of the conflict was actually pretty successful, but the loss of the media war on Tet and then the abandonment of even funding for the South was an abject display of dishonor as was the abandonment of the Shia’s at the end of Desert Storm. To redress this is why I support the war today.

By: Gary Farber

Gary Farber — Fri, 21 May 2004 11:47:28 +0000

“I’m a bit nervous to say anything about this, but I have always assumed it was because the economy was wrecked by the trade boycott, so they were terribly poor.” To be sure, the re-education camps had nothing to do with it. “There is a distinction between the Vietcong and the North Vietmanese army. The Vietcong (South Vietnamese communists – the NLF) were overwhelmingly the victims of mass murder and torture by the US-supported Diem regime. The fact that they were so badly weakened by this oppression allowed the much less pleasant North Vietnamese to take over the South after the war.” This is plausible if this were 1974. But anyone who’s read any of the countless detailed histories of the war of the last thirty years knows that this is merely the propaganda put out at the time; the “Viet Cong” (an American name; they were a revival of the Viet Minh) were completely the creation of North Vietnam, completely under the control and direction of the North, were simply the untrusted tools of the North, and in many cases subsequent to the war, were executed as insufficiently trustworthy. The idea that one or the other was “more pleasant” is risible. None of which justified the American war, of course.

By: nick

nick — Fri, 21 May 2004 10:27:38 +0000

Yep, jdw: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/other/85-hitchens.html

By: jdw

jdw — Thu, 20 May 2004 21:07:46 +0000

It just isn’t true that, once the facts became known, a “horrified Chomsky withdrew his support.” (etc) Didn’t the Hitch at one point spill much ink defending Chomsky from exactly these charges? My mind is totally being blown.

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Thu, 20 May 2004 20:31:14 +0000

Gareth, you shouldn’t make misleading statements about books in front of people who have read them, because, you know, it doesn’t work. Well, maybe it works with unsuspecting people who haven’t read the books, and I suppose that’s the point. Incidentally, it’s “After the Cataclysm”. Chomsky said that the Khmer Rouge had committed gruesome atrocities from the very beginning—in 1977 (his NATION article) and 1979 (PEHR II) he said the evidence was incomplete on the scale and he said it could be anywhere from thousands (the French Resistance comparison) to the full-fledged genocide that people were talking about. It’s clear from reading him that he was skeptical of the genocide, but he left it open as a possibility. Even then, he explicitly compared Cambodia under Pol Pot to what was happening in East Timor—he seemed to lean towards the notion that the absolute numbers of deaths in both places were probably comparable. That would be 100-200,000. In fact, the per-capita death toll was comparable, but Cambodia has ten times the number of people and 5-10 times the death toll of East Timor. After the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge and the facts came out, Chomsky started using the term “genocide” to describe Cambodia. When you say he defended his PEHR book, that’s true, but misleading. He’s saying that he took no firm stand whatsoever on what was happening in Cambodia in PEHR, which is true. I wish he’d be more forthcoming and admit that he was inclined to underestimate the likely death toll, but that’s different from your criticism because I’m criticizing him on positions he actually took. And Sebastian— Gee whiz, I thought my cry for moral consistency across the political spectrum, citing embarrassing examples and bashing left and right alike for their hypocrisy would either prick people’s consciences or (one would like to think) appear so obvious as to be banal. My position is the opposite of ANSWER’s—I would say that you and they are soulmates under the skin, differing only on the minor matter of which atrocities you choose to rationalize.

By: Gareth

Gareth — Thu, 20 May 2004 19:08:45 +0000

It just isn’t true that, once the facts became known, a “horrified Chomsky withdrew his support.” Beyond the Cataclysm, which compared the Khmer Rouge to the French Resistance, was published in 1979, and Chomsky and Herman defended their chapter on Cambodia in Manufacturing Consent, which was reissued in 2001 with yet more apologetics.

By: Ed Zeppelin

Ed Zeppelin — Thu, 20 May 2004 17:29:56 +0000

And the Iraq-Vietnam comparisons are invariably overdrawn; the chief similarity seems to be that both are a mess. And I would suggest that the chief similarity seems instead to be the fact that both conflicts can be described as “unwinnable.”

By: daniel elstein

daniel elstein — Thu, 20 May 2004 17:05:48 +0000

I have as much contempt for Hitchens as the next guy, but he does have a point here. Remember the following pieces of information: 1. There is a distinction between the Vietcong and the North Vietmanese army. The Vietcong (South Vietnamese communists – the NLF) were overwhelmingly the victims of mass murder and torture by the US-supported Diem regime. The fact that they were so badly weakened by this oppression allowed the much less pleasant North Vietnamese to take over the South after the war. So you can’t blame what happened to the Boat People (for instance) on the Vietcong. 2. So far as torture and the murder of civilians goes, the US started it. The CIA were operating along the border in the years leading up to the war, and committed numerous atrocities. The story I remember (which was later related by ex-CIA guys) was that the Americans would go into a village and come over really friendly and build a lovely school for the kids. Then they’d then blow up the school, killing the kids, and blame it on the communists. That’s how the CIA did counterinsurgency. Faced with that kind of behaviour, is it any wonder that that the communists took to using dirty tactics themselves?

By: Peter K.

Peter K. — Thu, 20 May 2004 15:49:12 +0000

1. The anti-war Left has been comparing Gulf War II to the Vietnam War and the mainstream has picked up on this. Hitchens merely pointed out one of the many things wrong with this analogy and anti-Hitch folks act like he started the whole thing. 2. As Chomsky has pointed out repeatedly, America didn’t lose the Vietnam War. It destroyed Vietnam, partyly by dropping more bombs on it than were dropped during WWII. Everyone knows the record. Everyone should know the following, whether they think taking out Saddam was a good idea or not: Saddam did commit genocide. The Vietnamese, after fighting the Japanese, the French and the Americans did invade Cambodia and put an end to the genocide there.

By: Petra Maurice

Petra Maurice — Thu, 20 May 2004 13:42:37 +0000

A lot of use want to dump onto Hitchens. Like shooting fish in a barrel, I think. I’d rather say my take at Heinl’s piece, which I was curious to read. My reaction: underwhelment. Let’s leave the style – which contains such amusing if dated phrases as “kinky California”. It sounds like a good description of the U.S. Army circa 1971. However, it does not address why it came to pass. There’s a lot of whinging about insubordinate soldiers (which are bad) but no analysis as to why they prosper. (Generally, they don’t.) Nor is there any inquiry into why fragging was almost wholly an American thing. (Other troops in the field like South Koreans or even draftee Australians never got up to the same hijinks.) It also contained one mother-of-all-non-sequiturs: Offcers,” says a recently retired senior admiral, “do not stand up for what they believe. The older enlisted men are really horrified.” Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., an ex-company clerk, was a platoon leader who never even learned to read a map. His credentials for a commission were derisory; he was no more officer material than any Pfc. in his platoon. Yet the Army had to take him because no one else was available. Commenting on the Calley conviction, a colonel at Ft. Benning said, “We have at least two or three thousand more Calleys in the Army just waiting for the next calamity.” Oddly enough, I think you could not fault Lt. Calley on lack of zeal or belief. You can fault him on many other things, but not on the lack of those quantities.

By: q

Thu, 20 May 2004 12:25:19 +0000

Hitchens relates the conduct of the enemy (“a very civilized foe”) in the Vietnam war (1965-75?) to the current enemy (“evil and ruthlessness”). I don’t see that Vietnam after 1975 fits in. Hitchens appears to be trying to say that if the current enemy were “civilised” he would understand if the media were less than enthusiatic, but because the enemy are so “ruthless” and “evil”, it is strange that the media are not wholeheartedly behind the war effort, by which I interpret as suppressing bad news and criticism. Can anyone quantify “civilized foe” vs “evil and ruthlessness”? The Vietnamese tried to remove the West from SE Asia, the Muslims are trying to remove the West from the Middle East. Not much difference there. Hitchens provides some criteria for someone who wants to be a civilised foe, and gain some sympathy: -do not use of weapons of mass destruction -don’t target civilians -do use women as fighters and organizers -do not torture -do not mass murder It should be a simple matter to determine which combatants today and in previous years meet these 5 criteria from CH. (The third one puzzles me.)

By: W. Kiernan

W. Kiernan — Thu, 20 May 2004 11:53:58 +0000

Contrary to some of the posts above, Vietnam did not launch an unprovoked attack against Cambodia in 1978. From Ben Kiernan’s The Pol Pot Regime: “…Cambodian forces made raids into the Vietnamese provinces of Kien Giang and An Giang on March 15-18 and 25-28 1977…launched concerted attacks on Vietnamese Army posts and border villages in An Giang between April 30 and May 19, killing 222 civilians, and shelled Chau Doc, the provincial capital, on May 17 (1977)… from September 24 (1977) onwards Cambodian forces totaling about four divisions had launched continuous attacks along the entire border of Tay Ninh proviince, and … over a thousand civilians had been killed or wounded in this area between September 24 and late November (1977)… On the night of 24 September (1977) elements of the reconstituted 3rd Eastern Zone Division… crossed into Tay Ninh province and massacred nearly three hundred civilians … Taken by surprise, Vietnamese units only recaptured the area a week later, by which time they were also cconfronting the 5th Eastern and 18th Central Zone Divisions…” It wasn’t until December 1978, after twenty months of repeated Cambodian incursions into Vietnamese territory, that Vietnam finally launched their all-out counter-invasion which finally drove the Khmer Rouge government out of Phnom Penh. The number one complaint against Noam Chomsky concerns his rather tentative defense of the Khmer Rouge government, presented in 1976 and 1977 when Cambodia was almost perfectly isolated from the outside world, so no one outside had any way of knowing the depth of the Khmer Rouge’s brutality. However, after the Vietnamese ousted Pol Pot and the dimensions of the Khmer Rouge’s genocide (15 to 30 percent of the Cambodian population murdered outright) became known to the outside world a horrified Chomsky withdrew his support… while the U.S. government began secretly to subsidize the Khmer Rouge remnants in exile, and our diplomats publicly insisted that the Heng Samrin government which had been installed in Cambodia by the Vietnamese was not the legitimate government of Cambodia, but instead we would only recognize the Khmer Rouge in that capacity.

By: MFB

MFB — Thu, 20 May 2004 11:31:55 +0000

In addition, South Vietnam was devastated by war and couldn’t feed itself—and after 1975 wasn’t receiving any foreign food aid. (Same as Cambodia, of course.) Hence, plenty of reason to flee. Plus, a lot of people had supported the Government of South Vietnam, and somehow the Communists didn’t want to treat them tremendously well. (And, I suspect, used this accusation against anybody they didn’t like.) So life in ex-South Vietnam was hard all over.

By: Alison

Alison — Thu, 20 May 2004 11:18:04 +0000

anyone trying to paint 1970s/80s Vietnam as basically a force for good, really has to come up with a pretty good explanation of why so bloody many Vietnamese regarded it as a worse bet than small open boats on the South China Sea. I’m a bit nervous to say anything about this, but I have always assumed it was because the economy was wrecked by the trade boycott, so they were terribly poor.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 20 May 2004 06:59:39 +0000

Also, the Vietnamese put an end to the genocide in neighboring Cambodia by invading and “liberating” it. Saddam and company, meanwhile, engaged in genocide. Have you ever wondered why there are so many excellent Vietnamese restaurants in Australia, Peter? Or for that matter, so few Hmong left in Vietnam. I have a lot of time for 1990s Vietnam as a developmental state, but anyone trying to paint 1970s/80s Vietnam as basically a force for good, really has to come up with a pretty good explanation of why so bloody many Vietnamese regarded it as a worse bet than small open boats on the South China Sea. Sebastian: st is right. The “war nobody wants to fight” refers to the current (using a phrase I believe to have been rehabilitated) quagmire. The current quagmire is a direct consequence of poor battle selection by those people who chose “That War Then” over the possibility of a better war later.