Lesson from Vietnam: Don't judge an insurgency by its media

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

In post-World War II guerrilla history – “emergency”, insurgencies, revolts, terrorism, or other names this kind of war the U.S. is fighting in Iraq has gone by — nothing has been so difficult as judging at the moment who’s winning, who’s losing. That explains as much as hostile media coverage conflicting Iraq estimates at Congressional hearings, the Pentagon, and the White House.

Traditionally judgment calls miscalculated – whether Malaya or Algeria — and not only on the side of the more transparent party, usually the counter-insurgency. But also by the guerrillas [in Iraq, of course, selfprofessed al-Qaida agents, although obviously a mixed bag.]

There is no better example than an episode in the bitter Vietnam winter of 1961-62. An American ally, President Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnam government, supported by American military and civilian advisers, was up against the wall in Vietnam’s “wild west”, the food-rich, marshlands of the Mekong Delta. Growing attacks were led by “recycled” cadre infiltrated through Laos and Cambodia from North Vietnam where they had gone after the country’s 1954 division. Much like the numerically small international Iraq complement they drifted back into as critical command and demolition experts.

Meanwhile, from Vietnamese who earlier had fought the Communists with the French, and raw recruits, Washington was trying to fashion security forces. It was hard. Constant Vietnamese-American friction and tactical decision changes played into Communists’ hands.

Hanoi was working a long-term strategy. They established forward headquarters just over the border while Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk looked the other way [pace Syria’s Basher Asaad]. It would be another decade before Washington would seriously attempt to cope with Cambodia. Washington had, in fact, begun torturous negotiations for a neutral, disarmed Laos. In reality Hanoi reinforced logistics on mountain routes originating inVietnam’s ancient wars against Chinese domination, to be romanticized as “The Ho Chi Minh Trail”.

At this point in time a group of intrepid young American journalists, innocent of “spin” by a resentful Diem government, joined an eager young American military adviser, noted for his media courting, for an outing. Their Mekong Delta expedition ended with a miserable ambush. Vietnamese infantry was shelled by its own artillery with perhaps most casualties from “friendly fire”.

For the young journalists, it was the end of the world: confirmation Saigon was losing the war. Their “dispatches” – curious now read against the young American officer’s official reporting, an opposite story but not one he retailed to them — said the American effort had failed, the Diem government was losing, and hinted that something [anything!] had to be done.

Thus began the long media campaign “to expose” the Diem government, aided, abetted, and often manipulated, by Hanoi. Only three years later it produced President John F. Kennedy’s, apparently reluctant, decision to support a military coup against Diem — who many old-timers believed was the only viable alternative to the legendary caricature of Ho Chi Minh created by worldwide Soviet agitprop. Murdered, it now appears on Kennedy’s personal order to prevent a come-back, Diem’s fall reduced South Vietnam to chaos. It forced the brutal decision, after Kennedy’s own assassination, by Lyndon B. Johnson, for the U.S. to take over the war.

As they say, the rest is history — albeit however much bent out of shape by ideologues in academia who, mostly having escaped military service, increasingly presented the fight as not only “immoral”, but the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.

In truth, Southeast Asia, as Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yu points out, got its respite to regroup. But the U.S. lost 55,000 lives and embittered its domestic political scene for more than a generation.

There is a little remarked footnote to this grim history: at the very moment the media were writing off the Saigon effort, the Communists were making another assessment. How do we know? Not from the self congratulatory pronouncements accumulated by gullible postwar Hanoi travelers. But from documented in the writings of an Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, confirmed from post-Soviet Moscow files as an MKVD/KGB agent.

Burchett has written during that same winter, the war was going so badly from its perspective, Hanoi reassessed its long-term strategy, considered [and rejected, finally] temporarily withdrawing from the Delta.

There is little question of Burchett’s access to such information. He had moved on to Indochina from a career in which he gulled his “colleagues” in the Western press. But during the Korean War he participated in torture of Australian, U.S. and UK POWs by North Korean “interrogators” to force them into falsely confessing war crimes. Most of his “reporting” on Vietnam was from Cambodia, Laos, Hanoi, China and Russia.

One can only speculate what al-Zaqarwi, the supposed leader of the Iraqi insurgents, estimates is his current situation. But take any evaluations — especially from the media — with a touch of nuoc nam.