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Why Our Vietnam Strategy Failed
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11786 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1987 |
6,182 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Palmer, Jr.
Gen. Bruce Palmer, Jr., was Field Force commander in Vietnam
in 1967. He served as General Westmoreland's Army deputy from
1967 to 1968. From 1968 to 1973 was vice chief of staff. In
1974, he retired as unified commander of McGill Air Force
Base. |
The roots of our failure to think through our strategic problems in Vietnam are numerous, deep, and complex. In the beginning, lacking a basic knowledge of the region and an appreciation of the people, we grossly underestimated the situation, particularly the nature of the Hanoi regime whose tenacious will, we eventually learned, has few historical parallels. Ho Chi Minh, a dedicated, veteran communist, had exploited the strong spirit of nationalism that stirred in the hearts of all Vietnamese. His relentless, brutal struggle against French rule had already made him a father-figure and national hero. No comparable Vietnamese figure existed in South Vietnam, whose fortunes we undertook to defend in 1954. And when we deliberately displaced the French in Southeast Asia not long thereafter, we were tarred from the outset with the same brush of European colonialism. Meanwhile our European allies saw us as being hypocritical about our motives and declined to support us throughout the war. Although we eschewed any territorial or economic gains in South Vietnam, we were vulnerable to the charge of being simply another foreign invader.
The French withdrawal had left an enormous military, political, and economic vacuum in the region that would take the United States years to fill. Our government, for example, had only a dim idea of the immense difficulties we were to face and the time it would take to develop strong, reliable South Vietnamese forces in the absence of a stable, popularly supported South Vietnamese government. Naively, we believed that with our great military power, global experience in conflict situations, and our superior know-how, we could succeed where the French had failed. Finally, we badly misjudged the external threat to South Vietnam, not realizing the true nature of the Sino-Soviet split, and were unnecessarily inhibited by fear that the Chinese would intervene in Southeast Asia as they had in Korea in 1950. Many years passed before we realized that one of China's principal goals in Southeast Asia was to counter Soviet influence in the region. China, moreover, did not want a strong, aggressive nation on her southern flank, particularly in the light of the centuries-old Chinese-Vietnamese animosity.
Although largely ignorant about the area and the people, the United States, from the time of the creation of South Vietnam in 1954, recognized that it would depend indefinitely on U.S. support. South Vietnam was smaller by a third in population than the North and, moreover, the Viet Cong insurgency effectively denied the government access to some of its own people. Beginning in 1950, North Vietnam received a steady flow of aid from China via direct, secure overland links, as well as aid from the Soviet
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