Vietnam, 1968: Happy New Year!

Could the war in Vietnam really have been won? It is a common belief among American conservatives that it could have, had it been fought with no holds barred—and had the troops not been betrayed by politics back home.

I resist this argument. For one thing, it sounds too much like the “stabbed in the back” myth popular in Germany after the First World War. It is too easy for people who have lost to convince themselves they were cheated.

It is indeed clear from the records of both sides that, in fact, the Tet offensive in 1968 was a huge defeat for the Communists. It was actually their last-gasp attempt to seize power. “The Front had been fighting for a long time. Its generals were not sure they could continue. One big push, they told their people.” (Neale, A People’s History of the Vietnam War, p. 106).

Their desperate hope was that, given the opportunity, the cities would rise and support them. It did not happen. Their organization in the South was virtually wiped out in the operation.

Worse, according to Communist operatives, they lost a great deal of their popular support. They had been levying huge taxes on the promise that they would overthrow the government. They failed, and their wells of support were accordingly drying up.

In the event, though, the offensive convinced the American public that they wanted out.

Could the outcome have been different, then, had the Americans chose a different course? General Westmoreland in fact saw a great opportunity at the time, and wanted to administer the coup de grace. He wanted two hundred thousand more troops, which he would use to invade Cambodia and Laos to cut of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and for an “Inchon-style” landing behind the front lines in North Vietnam.

The possibilities are intriguing. But personally, I don’t think it would have made any difference in the end. There were, reportedly, close to 170,000 Chinese troops in North Vietnam. Presumably, they were there as the proverbial “trip-wire”: if the US invaded the North, China was saying, it would come in.

And the domestic American situation really does need to be considered. As Johnson, the most skilled of politicians, understood, the American public would not have accepted this. The American armed forces might even have mutinied. When Nixon eventually did go in to Cambodia, there were serious consequences on the home front and in terms of US prestige abroad.

Meantime, the Communists had the perfect political platform to retain the support of the countryside. They simply promised that, if in power, they would take the land from the big landowners, and dole it out to the peasants. Since there were a lot more poor peasants than rich landowners, this won a lot of support.

Of course, it was a cruel lie. Once in power, they didn’t really do that. They took the land from the rich landowners, and gave it to themselves, as the government. The peasants continued to work someone else’s land for next to nothing. The party officials who benefited were even from the same class, as Neale points out, as the rich landowners.

But this proposition had the double advantage of being instantly understandable by the peasants, and obviously to their benefit. Abstractions like the right to vote or a free market were much less clear and much less clearly attractive.

This put the US in an untenable situation morally and ideologically from the start. They were supposed to be there for democracy. But the fact was that, had free elections been held, the Communists would have won.

Perhaps the one way the US might have won the war, once they had passed up on the Buddhist option, was by taking the money they were investing in war materiel, and using it instead to obviously improve the life of the peasants. It could have itself, for example, bought the land for a fair price from the large landowners, and doled it out to the peasants working it. And the US could have offered tax breaks to American firms setting up industries in the cities, factories offering good wages. This could even have been a profitable venture.

But then again, an even better, more honest, approach might have been to hold genuinely free and fair elections, watch the Communists win, and declare mission accomplished.