Politics and Policy The Vietnam War remains a source of conflict. Generally you can classify people's opinions into three groups. The first group says that we could have won the war if the politicians and anti-war demonstrators hadn't interefered. The second group says that the war was unwinnable by the Americans, for a variety of reasons. The third group says that we shouldn't have been in Vietnam for moral reasons, regardless of whether we could have won the war or not. Because it is relevant to our current situation in Iraq, I thought it prudent to state my own opinion. I think the war was lost for the Americans between 1963 and 1965, long before the major American troop commitment began. The reason we lost is relevant to our current situation in Iraq. In South Vietnam there were, roughly, four classes of people. The first were the Buddhist peasants which made up most of the population, especially in the countryside. The second were the merchants, many of Chinese descent, who formed a small middle class (mostly in the large cities). The third was the Catholic elite who controlled the government and the official army - many of them new to S. Vietnam, having fled N. Vietnam. The fourth class was the Monsignors (sp?) in the mountains, who were looked down upon by virtually everybody else, the "hillbillys" of Vietnam. When the U.S. became involved in Vietnam, we listened to the Catholic elite. These were the ones who were the administrators to the former French colonial masters, and many could speak English as well as French. Our country formed its opinion of the conflict based upon their stories of oppression by the brutal Communists of the north. They assured us that most South Vietnamese would support a true democratic government, if only the U.S. would provide enough protection for them to safely show that support. So American troops were committed, to buy time while the South Vietnamese army was trained and organized to deal with the Communists. Because the initial troop count was limited, American advisors instituted a campaign to get tens of thousands of widely dispersed small villages to consolidate into larger ones which were more easily defended against the V.C. A "home guard" system of defense was set up to train the villagers to defend themselves against such incursions, and they were supplied with weapons to use in those efforts. The whole effort was a dramatic failure. First of all, most of the rural S. Vietnamese had no interest in preserving the Catholic elite in Saigon. They hated them for their bribery and extortion attempts, their smug condescension as they looked down upon the peasants, and their connections to French imperialism. Second, even if a rural peasant wasn't V.C. themselves, they probably had extended family members who were. They weren't going to go shooting blindly at any V.C. who appeared in the night. Third, the consolidation of the rural villages forced the villagers from their ancestral home and farmlands, surrendering the countryside to the V.C. and making hundreds of thousands of families permanent refugees. Fourth, the larger village chiefs and government bureaucrats considered the policy a godsend - it allowed them extort bribes and rent from the refugees, and to charge them for the materials which the Americans provided to build them homes. Fifth, and most importantly, the "home guard" turned into an excellent opportunity for the V.C. At a time when N. Vietnam was not exporting any arms to S. Vietnam due to economic difficulties, the Americans trained and armed a whole army of V.C. themselves. The villagers would slip off into the night as V.C., and return to the villages during the day to continue their life as farmers or refugees. In the meantime, the S. Vietnamese government wasn't fighting the Communists. That goal was reserved for the U.S. forces. Instead, the largest, most reliable portion of the S. Vietnamese army was stationed in Saigon to protect against an anti-government coup, and the remainder was fighting against private war-lords who had control of areas around Saigon. So what the U.S. did was intervene in a civil war, taking the side of the rich elite (Catholics) and the poorest minority (Montagnards) against the majority of Buddhist peasants. But they never realized this - and many today still don't accept that our basic viewpoint of the war was flawed. We saw the situation the way we wanted to see it, because (in part) those with a self-interest in promoting our intervention fed us the intelligence we wanted to believe. Now we also became involved in Iraq, in part, because Iraqi politicians who thought they could come to power with our assistance told Bush and his advisors what they wanted to believe -that there were weapons of mass destruction, that the Iraqi people would welcome us with open arms, etc. Instead, we find ourselves in the middle of the opening stages of a civil war between rival factions that really hate each other, although many groups are more than willing to try to manipulate the use of our troops for their own advantage. This should not be a surprise to anyone - it was discussed prior to Gulf War I as being a reason why we should avoid a direct invasion of Iraq. At the time no invasion was considered possible, because (a) there was no support among our Muslim allies for invasion of Iraq, (b) there was no viable plan for governing a post-Saddam Iraq, and (c) the U.S. military didn't want to get bogged down in a police action in an urban environment. None of these factors changed, but G.W. Bush went ahead anyway. Now it’s just as much a danger to mis-apply the lessons you learned in one war to another war, as it is to ignore the altogether. Although there are some similarities between the Vietnam and Iraqi situations, there are just as many differences. One of the problems with Vietnam was that the government was trying to apply the lessons learned in WWII and Korea to the situation in Vietnam. Posted by RHP6033        Copyright 2006-2007 - Brookridge Associates Inc. All rights reserved.