No More Vietnams Read Free Page B

genocide in Cambodia. Certainly today the record is clear for all to see: A Communist peace kills more than an anti-Communist war.
    The claim that United States tactics caused excessive casualties among civilians must have seemed bizarre to those who were actually doing the fighting. Our forces operated under strict rules of engagement, and as a result civilians accounted for about the same proportion of casualties as in World War II and a far smaller one than in the Korean War. Many American bomber pilots were shot down, ending up dead or as POWs, because their paths across North Vietnam were chosen to minimize civilian casualties.
    For example, the two weeks of bombing in December 1972, which ended American involvement in the war by convincing the North Vietnamese that they had no choice but to agree to peace terms, caused 1,500 civilian fatalities, by Hanoi’s own estimate, compared with 35,000 killed in the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II. But by 1972 the war that was being reported in the United States bore scant resemblance to the war being waged in Indochina. Most American media reports conveyed the impression that our pilots, some of whom died in the air in order to save lives on the ground, were war criminals who had caused civilian fatalities comparable to those at Dresden, Hamburg, and other German cities where civilian targets were deliberately bombed for the purpose of breaking the enemy’s will to resist. By then intellectual Americawas so possessed by its obsessive self-hatred that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it believed the worst about the United States and the best about our enemies.
Myth II: The Vietnam War was unwinnable.
    This was a favorite argument of those who did everything in their power to prevent the United States from winning. They reasoned that if the Vietnam War was proved unwinnable, then all battles against totalitarian aggression were unwinnable. If we concede their point, we are giving a green light to Communist aggression throughout the Third World.
    The Vietnam War was not unwinnable. A different military and political strategy could have assured victory in the 1960s. When we signed the Paris peace agreements in 1973, we had won the war. We then proceeded to lose the peace. The South Vietnamese successfully countered Communist violations of the cease-fire for two years. Defeat came only when the Congress, ignoring the specific terms of the peace agreement, refused to provide military aid to Saigon equal to what the Soviet Union provided for Hanoi.
    But the myth of unwinnability was based on a more subtle assumption.
    During Vietnam many decided that wars such as the one being waged against the North Vietnamese were unwinnable because victory by Communist revolutionaries was inevitable. They believed that a liberationist surge was sweeping the Third World and that there was nothing the Western world could do, or should do, to stop it. The supposed primitiveness of our adversaries was a status cymbal they crashed loudly and proudly; that our “brutal” modern tactics were apparently ineffective against barefoot peasants in black pajamas was only further proof that their cause was right and ours was not. We were bullies, imperialists, blustery militarists armed to the teeth and fighting out of sheer bloodlust. The Communists, in contrast, were dedicated servants of principle, armed with littlemore than the joyful conviction that they were fighting for country, freedom, and justice.
    The assertion that our very bigness is badness has infested our culture to a surprising and troubling degree. The creator of the phenomenally successful Star Wars series recently explained that the climactic scene in one of his movies—in which the evil “Empire’s” giant war machines are destroyed by fuzzy little good guys with wooden bows and arrows—was inspired by the Vietnam experience. No matter that in Vietnam the Communist “good guys”