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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
Triumph Forsaken:
The Vietnam War,
1954-1965
by Mark Moyar
Cambridge University
Press - August 2006
The effects of the South Vietnamese
government's poor performance from Ngo
Dinh Diem's death until the middle of 1965
have been understood widely, but its
causes have not. According to one standard
explanation, the Saigon government failed
because its leaders and its American
advisers selected the wrong methods for
combating the enemy. In truth, however,
the problem was not in the concepts but in
the execution. An explanation more
commonly advanced, closer to the mark but
still only partially correct, is that the
South Vietnamese government faltered at
this time because the country's ruling
elite was bereft of strong leaders. Many
individuals who occupied positions of
power in the post-Diem period, it is true,
did lack the necessary leadership
attributes, and none was as talented as
Diem, but the caliber of the elites as a
whole was not a critical problem. The
critical problems, rather, were the
exclusion of certain elites from the
government and the manipulation of
governmental leaders by the militant
Buddhist movement. From November 1963
onward, the top leadership in Saigon
repeatedly removed men of considerable
talent, either because of their past
loyalty to Diem or because of pressure
from the militant Buddhists. And in spite
of these purges, the government still had
some men, even at the very top at times,
who possessed leadership capabilities that
would have made them successful leaders
had it not been for militant Buddhist
conniving. The Buddhist leaders tried to
bridle every government that held power
after Diem, and in most instances they
succeeded, largely because government
officials feared resisting the Buddhist
activists after watching Diem lose
American favor, and his life, for
resisting them. As its American advocates
had desired, the 1963 coup led to
political liberalization, but rather than
improving the government as those
Americans had predicted, liberalization
had the opposite effect, enabling enemies
of the government to undermine its
prestige and authority, as well as to
foment discord and violence between
religious groups. Not until June 1965, by
which time the United States and most
South Vietnamese leaders had come to
realize the necessity of suppressing the
militant Buddhists and other
troublemakers, would political stability
return. By then, however, South Vietnam
had sustained crippling damage and Hanoi
was pushing for total victory.
Lyndon Johnson's lack of forcefulness
in Vietnam in late 1964 and early 1965
squandered America's deterrent power and
led to a decision in Hanoi to invade South
Vietnam with large North Vietnamese Army
units. According to the prevailing
historical interpretation, the leadership
in Hanoi relentlessly pursued a strategy
of attacking in the South until it won,
with little regard for what its enemies
did. In reality, however, North Vietnam's
strategy was heavily dependent on American
actions. Although Johnson's generals
favored striking North Vietnam quickly and
powerfully, he chose to follow the
prescriptions of his civilian advisers,
who advocated an academic approach that
used small doses of force to convey
America's resolve without provoking the
enemy. Because of his chosen strategic
philosophy and because of international
and U.S. electoral politics, Johnson made
only a token attack on North Vietnam
following the Tonkin Gulf incidents of
1964 and undertook no military action
thereafter. Rather than inducing the North
Vietnamese to reciprocate with
self-limitations, as the theorists
predicted, however, this approach served
only to heighten Hanoi's appetite and
courage. Johnson's lack of action, as well
as his presidential campaign rhetoric,
convinced Hanoi that the Americans would
not put up a fight for Vietnam in the near
future. This change came at a time when
the weakened condition of the Saigon
government indicated that South Vietnamese
resistance to a North Vietnamese invasion
would be weak. Consequently, in November
1964, Hanoi began sending large North
Vietnamese Army units to South Vietnam,
with the intention of winning the war
swiftly. The Americans were slow to
identify the shift in North Vietnam's
strategy and thus lost any remaining
chance of deterring Hanoi or otherwise
enabling South Vietnam to survive without
U.S. combat troops.
Some well-known historians have argued
that President Johnson wanted to inject
U.S. ground troops into the war whether
they were needed or not. Johnson made his
decision to intervene, they contend, at
the end of 1964 or in early 1965. In
actuality, Johnson reached his decision no
earlier than the latter part of June 1965,
by which time intervention had become the
only means of saving South Vietnam. The
first U.S. ground troops sent to Vietnam
arrived in March 1965, but Johnson
deployed them only to protect U.S. air
bases, not to engage the main elements of
the Communist forces. At the time of the
initial ground force deployments, Johnson
and his lieutenants did not foresee a
major war between American and Communist
forces, because they did not know that
Hanoi had begun sending entire North
Vietnamese Army regiments into South
Vietnam. They did not learn of this
development until the beginning of April.
By the middle of June, abetted by a
continuing infusion of North Vietnamese
soldiers, the Communist forces had won
many large victories and the South
Vietnamese Army was losing its ability to
challenge large Communist initiatives. The
North Vietnamese had entered the third and
final stage of Maoist revolutionary
warfare, in which the revolutionaries use
massed conventional forces to destroy the
government's conventional forces. Hanoi's
ultimate success, as its leaders
repeatedly stated, depended above all on
the ability of its conventional forces to
destroy the South Vietnamese Army,
particularly its mobile strategic reserve
units, not South Vietnam's small
counter-guerrilla forces. The fighting of
1965 demonstrated that, contrary to the
contentions of a multitude of pundits and
theoreticians, the Americans and the South
Vietnamese had been correct to develop a
large conventional South Vietnamese army
during the 1950s and early 1960s rather
than concentrate exclusively on small-unit
warfare.
Lyndon Johnson had always wanted to
avoid putting U.S. troops into the ground
war if there was any way that South
Vietnam could continue the war without
them. Like most of his advisers, he
doubted that U.S. ground force
intervention would result in an easy
victory, believing instead that it would
result in a long, painful, and politically
troublesome struggle against an enemy who
might never give up. But in June 1965,
Johnson and his military advisers
concluded, correctly, that only the use of
U.S. ground forces in major combat could
stop the Communist conventional forces
from finishing off the South Vietnamese
Army and government. Even as Johnson
became convinced of the need for
intervention, he held out hopes of
withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam
relatively soon, regardless of how the
fighting was going, in the belief that a
brief intervention might achieve as much
as a sustained intervention in terms of
preserving U.S. credibility and prestige
in the world.
Johnson decided that South Vietnam was
worth rescuing in 1965 primarily because
he dreaded the international consequences
of that country's demise. His greatest
fear was the so-called domino effect,
whereby the fall of Vietnam would cause
other countries in Asia to fall to
Communism. Historians have frequently
argued that Johnson fought for Vietnam
primarily to protect himself against
accusations from the American Right that
he was soft on Communism, which would have
harmed his reputation and denied him the
political support he needed to carry out
his domestic agenda. In actuality, the
domestic political ramifications of losing
Vietnam had relatively little influence on
Johnson's decision on whether to protect
South Vietnam. Johnson recognized that the
American people were largely apathetic
about Vietnam and would be no more likely
to turn against him politically and
personally if he left than if he stayed
and fought. Domestic political
considerations did, on the other hand,
exert great influence on how Johnson
protected South Vietnam, as they
discouraged him from bridling Ambassador
Henry Cabot Lodge, from taking a tough
stance on Vietnam before the 1964
election, and from calling up the U.S.
reserves and otherwise putting the United
States on a war footing. That there has
been great cynicism and confusion about
Johnson's motives was partly the
responsibility of the President himself,
for during this period he repeatedly
misrepresented his intentions to the
American people and he did not provide
decisive leadership that would have
clarified his views and inspired the
people's confidence.
The domino theory was valid. The fear
of falling dominoes in Asia was based not
on simple-mindedness or paranoia, but
rather on a sound understanding of the
toppler countries and the domino
countries. As Lyndon Johnson pondered
whether to send U.S. troops into battle,
the evidence overwhelmingly supported the
conclusion that South Vietnam's defeat
would lead to either a Communist takeover
or the switching of allegiance to China in
most of the region's countries.
Information available since that time has
reinforced this conclusion. Vietnam itself
was not intrinsically vital to U.S.
interests, but it was vital nevertheless
because its fate strongly influenced
events in other Asian countries that were
intrinsically vital, most notably
Indonesia and Japan. In 1965, China and
North Vietnam were aggressively and
resolutely trying to topple the dominoes,
and the dominoes were very vulnerable to
toppling. Throughout Asia, among those who
paid attention to international affairs,
the domino theory enjoyed a wide
following. If the United States pulled out
of Vietnam, Asia's leaders generally
believed, the Americans would lose their
credibility in Asia and most of Asia would
have to bow before China or face
destruction, with enormous global
repercussions. Every country in Southeast
Asia and the surrounding area, aside from
the few that were already on China's side,
advocated U.S. intervention in Vietnam,
and most of them offered to assist the
South Vietnamese war effort. The
oft-maligned analogy to the Munich
agreement of 1938 actually offered a sound
prediction of how the dominoes would
likely fall: Communist gains in one area
would encourage the Communists to seek
further conquests in other places, and
after each Communist victory the
aggressors would enjoy greater assets and
the defenders fewer.
Further evidence of the domino theory's
validity can be found by examining the
impact of America's Vietnam policy on
other developments in the world between
1965 and the fall of South Vietnam in
1975, developments that would remove the
danger of a tumbling of Asian dominoes.
Among these were the widening of the
Sino-Soviet split, the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, and the civil war in Cambodia.
America's willingness to hold firm in
Vietnam did much to foster anti-Communism
among the generals of Indonesia, which was
the domino of greatest strategic
importance in Southeast Asia. Had the
Americans abandoned Vietnam in 1965, these
generals most likely would not have seized
power from the pro-Communist Sukarno and
annihilated the Indonesian Communist Party
later that year, as they ultimately did.
Communism's ultimate failure to knock over
the dominoes in Asia was not an inevitable
outcome, independent of events in Vietnam,
but was instead the result of obstacles
that the United States threw in
Communism's path by intervening in
Vietnam.
It has been said that the Johnson
administration, in its first years, could
have negotiated a U.S. withdrawal from
Vietnam that would have preserved a
non-Communist South Vietnam for years to
come. Evidence from the Communist side,
however, reveals North Vietnam's complete
unwillingness to negotiate such a deal.
The Communists would not have agreed to a
settlement in 1964 or 1965 that could have
prevented them from gaining control of
South Vietnam quickly. With their list of
military victories growing longer and
longer, with a clear and promising plan
for conquering South Vietnam on the
battlefield, the North Vietnamese had no
reason to accept a diplomatic settlement
that might rob them of the spoils.
The Americans did miss some strategic
opportunities of a different sort,
opportunities that would have allowed them
to fight from a much more favorable
strategic position. In the chaotic period
following Diem's overthrow, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and other U.S. military
leaders repeatedly advocated an invasion
of North Vietnam. Johnson and his civilian
advisers rejected this advice, however, on
the grounds that an American invasion of
the North could lead to a war between the
United States and China. Historians have
generally concurred in the assessment that
Chinese intervention was likely. But the
evidence shows that until at least March
1965, the deployment of U.S. ground forces
into North Vietnam would not have prompted
the Chinese to intercede. Having suffered
huge losses in the Korean War, the Chinese
had no more appetite for a war between
themselves and the Americans than did
their American counterparts. Johnson's
failure to attack North Vietnam also
worked to the enemy's advantage by
facilitating a massive Chinese troop
deployment into North Vietnam, which in
turn freed up many North Vietnamese Army
divisions for deployment to South Vietnam
and made a subsequent U.S. invasion of
North Vietnam much riskier.
Another opportunity not taken -- one
that never carried a serious risk of war
with China -- was the cutting of the Ho
Chi Minh Trail with American forces.
Johnson rejected many recommendations from
the Joint Chiefs to put U.S. ground forces
into Laos to carry out this task, and on
this point, too, historians have backed
the President over his generals. The
Johnson administration and some historians
have argued that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was
not essential to the Communist war effort,
but new evidence on the trail and on
specific battles makes clear the
inaccuracy of this contention. The Viet
Cong insurgency was always heavily
dependent on North Vietnamese infiltration
of men and equipment into South Vietnam
through Laos, and it could not have
brought the Saigon government close to
collapse in 1965, or defeated it in 1975,
without heavy infiltration of both. Other
orthodox historians have argued that an
American ground troop presence in Laos
would not have stopped most of the
infiltration, but much new evidence
contradicts this contention as well. The
United States, moreover, missed some
valuable opportunities to sever Hanoi's
maritime supply lines, although it did cut
some of the most important sea routes in
early 1965.
In sum, South Vietnam was a vital
interest of the United States during the
period from 1954 to 1965. The aggressive
expansionism of North Vietnam and China
threatened South Vietnam's existence, and
by 1965 only strong American action could
keep South Vietnam out of Communist hands.
America's policy of defending South
Vietnam was therefore sound. U.S.
intervention in Vietnam was not an act of
strategic buffoonery, nor was it a
sinister, warmongering plot that should
forever stand as a terrible blemish on
America's soul. Neither was it an act of
hubris in which the United States pursued
objectives far beyond its means. Where the
United States erred seriously was in
formulating its strategies for protecting
South Vietnam. The most terrible mistake
was the inciting of the November 1963
coup, for Ngo Dinh Diem's overthrow
forfeited the tremendous gains of the
preceding nine years and plunged the
country into an extended period of
instability and weakness. The Johnson
administration was handed the thorny tasks
of handling the post-coup mess and
defending South Vietnam against an
increasingly ambitious enemy -- and in
neither case did the administration
achieve good results. President Johnson
had available several aggressive policy
options that could have enabled South
Vietnam to continue the war either without
the help of any American ground forces at
all or with the employment of U.S. ground
forces in advantageous positions outside
South Vietnam. But Johnson ruled out these
options and therefore, during the summer
of 1965, he would have to fight a
defensive war within South Vietnam's
borders in order to avoid the dreadful
international consequences of abandoning
the country.
Copyright
© 2006 Mark Moyar from the book
Triumph Forsaken by Mark Moyar Published
by Cambridge University Press; August
2006
Mark
Moyar holds a BA summa cum laude in
history from Harvard University and a
Ph.D. in history from Cambridge
University. He is the author of Phoenix
and the Birds of Prey: The CIA's Secret
Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong. Moyar
has taught at Cambridge University, Ohio
State University, and Texas A&M
University. He is presently Associate
Professor and Course Director at the
United States Marine Corps University in
Quantico, Virginia.
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