No More Vietnams Read Free

defeat for the West.
    Until we shake this Vietnam syndrome, the United States will court failure in any international initiative it undertakes—in the Third World, in East-West relations, even in relations with our friends. Behind the champagne glasses and polite smiles, every leader and diplomat we encounter in Washington and abroad wonders whether we can be counted upon in a crisis or if we will cut and run when the going gets tough. They carefully analyzed the spasmodic opposition to our small Grenada operation in key media and intellectual circles. They puzzled over the difficulty the Reagan administration encountered in trying to obtain the approval of the Congress for adequate military and economic aid to those fighting Communist aggression in Central America. From these events they cannot help but conclude that we have not recovered from the Vietnam syndrome.
    They are half right and half wrong. The American people remain committed to the cause of freedom around the world. In their hearts they understand that American power plays a crucial role in that cause. Throughout the Vietnam War, a majority never stopped believing that the Communists shouldbe prevented from winning. But their willingness to help South Vietnam resist Communist aggression was sapped by the length and seeming futility of the war, by the shrill voices of dissent, and by the trauma of Watergate. Eventually, in 1974 and 1975, when we could have kept South Vietnam afloat by keeping our commitment to provide military aid at a level commensurate with Soviet support of the North, Congress refused. The American people, by then exhausted, discouraged, and confused, tacitly accepted a congressional decision that led to a defeat for the United States for the first time in our history.
    The American people have begun to emerge from the shadow of the Vietnam disaster; their election and reelection of President Reagan proved as much. But an alarming number of those political and intellectual leaders who belonged to the so-called leadership elite remain in the darkness, muttering to one another the tired old verities of the 1960s, the reassuring but thoroughly fatuous myths of Vietnam.
    The twenty-year story of the Vietnam War is a long, complicated one with many characters and a wide variety of subplots. The drama is replete with missed cues and lost opportunities. Many must share the blame for missing those opportunities: the military commanders and political leaders who made political, strategic, and tactical errors in waging the war; those in the Congress who refused to do as much for our allies in South Vietnam as the Soviet Union was doing for North Vietnam; and those whose irresponsible antiwar rhetoric hampered the effort to achieve a just peace. In the end, Vietnam was lost on the political front in the United States, not on the battlefront in Southeast Asia.
    Some tag the media or the antiwar movement, and frequently both, for the loss of Vietnam. It is true that some of those who covered the war so distorted the truth that it became impossible for Americans to figure out what was happening. But while the antiwar movement—a brotherhood of the misguided, the mistaken, the well-meaning, and the malevolent—was a factor in our eventual defeat, it was not the decisive factor. Therehave been antiwar movements for as long as there have been wars; they existed, for example, in the United States during both world wars. What overwhelms them is victory in a just cause. Those who began and escalated the war in Vietnam in the 1960s did not give the American people victories and did not effectively explain the justice of what we were fighting for. In the resulting political vacuum, the antiwar movement took center stage and held it until the curtain fell on one of the saddest endings in modern history.
    Those who parrot the slogan “No more Vietnams” in opposing American efforts to prevent Communist conquests in the Third World base their case