No More Vietnams Read Free Page A

on four articles of faith:
    â€¢Â The war in Vietnam was immoral.
    â€¢Â The war in Vietnam was unwinnable.
    â€¢Â Diplomacy without force is the best answer to Communist “wars of national liberation.”
    â€¢Â We were on the wrong side of history in Vietnam.
    The time has come to debunk these myths.
Myth I: The Vietnam War was immoral.
    The assertion that the Vietnam War was an immoral war was heard more and more often as the years dragged on. This said less about the war than about the construction that critics were putting on the idea of morality. Like all wars, Vietnam was brutal, ugly, dangerous, painful, and sometimes inhumane. This was driven home to those who stayed home perhaps more forcefully than ever before because the war lasted so long and because they saw so much of it on television in living, and dying, color.
    Many who were seeing war for the first time were so shocked at what they saw that they said this war was immoral when they really meant that all war was terrible. They were right in saying that peace was better than war. But they were wrong in failing to ask themselves whether what was happening inVietnam was substantively different from what had happened in other wars. Their horror at the fact of war prevented them from considering whether the facts of the war in Vietnam added up to a cause that was worth fighting for. Instead, many of these naive, well-meaning, instinctual opponents of the war raised their voices in protest.
    Sadly, their voices were joined with those of others who did not like the war because they did not support its aim: resisting Communist aggression in South Vietnam. These critics’ outrage was thoroughly premeditated. It was not that the war was immoral, but rather that their pretensions to a higher morality dictated that the United States should lose and the Communists should win. Except for a small minority, these critics were not Communists: Some believed the Vietnamese would really be better off under the gentle rule of Ho Chi Minh and his successors. Others knew this was not true but didn’t care that Ho was a totalitarian dictator. Their immorality thesis was that we were fighting an indigenous uprising in South Vietnam and therefore opposing the will of the Vietnamese people; that the people of Vietnam would be better off if we let the South Vietnamese government fall; and that our military tactics were so harsh that we needlessly and wantonly killed civilian Vietnamese.
    This thesis was false on all counts.
    Antiwar activists portrayed the National Liberation Front as the soul of the Vietnamese revolution, an indigenous nationalist movement that had risen spontaneously against the repressive Diem regime. This made powerful propaganda in the West, providing both rallying point for antiwar forces and apparent evidence for the frequently made contention that the United States had intervened in a civil war. In reality the National Liberation Front was a front for North Vietnam’s effort to conquer the South, and as such was just another weapon in Hanoi’s arsenal. Many Viet Cong had infiltrated from the North, and all took their cues from the North. When the war was over and Hanoi had no further use for it, the National Liberation Front was immediately liquidated. Instead of beingawarded positions of power in the new Vietnamese government, many of its members were sent to “reeducation” camps, along with hundreds of thousands of other South Vietnamese, by those who had directed the war effort from the beginning and who now ruled all of Vietnam: the warlords in Hanoi.
    In fairness to some of the antiwar activists, it could be contended that they could not have foreseen the reign of terror the Communists have brought upon the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. While they could be charged with naivete for overlooking Ho’s murderous policies in North Vietnam, some deserve credit for condemning, however belatedly, the