A SENSE OF ASIA
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam …
See the Sol Sanders Archive
By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
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April 28, 2005
Thirty years on this end of April, remembering those shocking pictures of Americans and Vietnamese being helicoptered off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, what is there left to say? It was said by many at the time to have written finis to the U.S. debacle in Vietnam. But of course it didn't. We have returned to "Vietnam" over and over again, as a dog to his vomit, as the saying goes. And there is hardly a commentator worth his salt who has not pontificated on "the meaning of Vietnam".
I don't pretend to be a Vietnamese mavim, even though I joke among my closest American friends of having "invented" the place because of a year I spent as a correspondent in Hanoi during the French Indochina War, as well as my time there during "the American war". In these three decades, I have watched as millions of words have tumbled into print and into the airwaves about "Vietnam". I have marveled at two things: how often the writer/speaker did not in my cognizance know what he was talking about, and how often I found I was totally ignorant of an aspect of something I had assumed I knew.
It is encouraging to see less talk about Iraq or Afghanistan, or wherever, being tapped as “the new Vietnam”. As some long dead white Frenchman has said, historical analogies are odious. One of my old friends – may he rest in peace – never forgave me for criticizing a book of his on counterinsurgency. I had offered the counter thesis there was no such thing as a “science” of fighting guerilla wars. My argument: in the nature of things, insurgencies are parochial, local, insular, sui generis. Generalizations about the Tupamaros in Montevideo in the 1960s and the Moros in the Philippines in the early 1900s and terrorists in Iraq in the 2000s either are false, or so vapid as to be meaningless; e.g., the government must cultivate relations with the population “to win their hearts and minds”.
Then there is the question of “the lessons of history”. I wonder if George Santayana doesn’t groan somewhere beyond this mortal realm every time he hears for the nth time his quotation being trotted out in some simplistic argument about being the victim if one does not remember history. Again, there are comparisons to be made and inventories to be taken of what went before in geopolitical situations. But a resort to 19th century German geopoliticians in a world where technology almost daily reinvents life itself seems absurd on the face of it. I haven’t read it for a long time but I suspect Arthur Koestler’s The Yogi and the Comissar might be a better guide to examining what is happening around us, even though he only guessed at the new scientific revolution underway.
Does that mean we simply close the closet door on “Vietnam”? Certainly not.
In all the examination of “Vietnam”, it seems to me the most critical missing part of the U.S. response to the problems it posed for us initially and we encountered during our long preoccupation with it, has been failure to recognize that great American trap, “scientism”. That is, an inordinate belief what happens around us can be systematically analyzed, dissected and remedies can thereby be deduced for all that ails ourselves or the world.
The “science” in Vietnam was unbelievably ridiculous. An example comes to mind: there was a Saigon press conference where one of the many expert-chiefs was describing a new method of analyzing and judging our “counterinsurgency” effort. He had mathematical formulae for U.S. activities to enhance the life of the civilian population; so much for a new bridge or market road, so much for a new water supply system, etc. I had just returned from a particularly bitter conflict area, a few years later to become screaming headlines with the My Lai atroicity. I asked our worthy how much should be subtracted from the number he had assigned to the recent construction of a children’s playground by an American unit in a provincial village given the well-known local knowledge it was a “drop” for VietCong communications. The silence was profound.
I am not descending into an orgy of mysticism; logic should prevail. But the simple fact is war has been the most inefficient and unpredictable activity of man since the first caveman hit the second caveman over the head with a club. [The Greeks should not, logically, have won at Thermopylae.] Not to recognize that as basic is to criticize, attempt to correct, and solve problems in a vacuum. Leaving aside the pure petty political advantage they seek to derive, some of the current critics of what is happening in Iraq – not the least those in the media – are distorting what should be a fruitful debate. And perhaps that more than anything else is/was “the Vietnam syndrome”, not just to an aversion to the use of force in settling international disputes under any conditions.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@comcast.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
April 20, 2005
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