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LOSING THE STRUGGLE FOR IDEAS: Lessons of Vietnam for Iraq and the War on Terror

LOSING THE STRUGGLE FOR IDEAS: Lessons of Vietnam for Iraq and the War on Terror. National Security Seminar. Prof. Robert F. Turner Center for National Security Law University of Virginia School of Law. In Praise of ISI (The “Intercollegiate Society of Individualists”).

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LOSING THE STRUGGLE FOR IDEAS: Lessons of Vietnam for Iraq and the War on Terror

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  1. LOSING THE STRUGGLE FOR IDEAS:Lessons of Vietnam for Iraqand the War on Terror National Security Seminar Prof. Robert F. Turner Center for National Security Law University of Virginia School of Law

  2. In Praise of ISI(The “Intercollegiate Society of Individualists”) • My time is limited, but I would be remiss in not commending ISI: • I first joined ISI 44 years ago, chaired IUCL for 2 years, and served on Board of Trustees 1986-92. • I learned more from ISI than in any college course. • My bottom line today is that IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. • If we fail to engage the forces of darkness in the struggle for public opinion, we can win every battle and still lose our wars.

  3. UNDERSTANDING VIETNAM:Some Facts You May Not Know • Despite horribly mismanagement by McNamara, American troops did not lose a single major battle in Vietnam. • By the early 1970s, we were winning decisively on the battlefields (despite press reports to the contrary). • Sadly, we failed to effectively counter the political warfare offensive, and many Americans accepted the myths and to this day believe the United States is a force for evil in the world.

  4. UNDERSTANDING VIETNAM:Some Facts You May Not Know In the brief time available, I’m going to quickly address some of the many “myths” of the Vietnam War. At their core, they portrayed our government as lying about the truth. The American people will tolerate reasonable error, but not lying. In 1973, under pressure from the so-called “peace” movement, Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by outlawing the use of Treasury funds to defend victims of aggression in Indochina.

  5. Let’s Turn to a Few of theVietnam MYTHS You may well have heard some of these before, or encounter them in the future.

  6. Ho Chi Minh:George Washington or Benedict Arnold? “Ho is sometimes called the George Washington of Vietnam.” - Dr. Spock on Vietnam 17 (1968)

  7. In Dec. 1930 Ho Co-Founded French Communist Party

  8. Ho Was Very Active inCommunist International (Comintern)

  9. Hanoi AdmitsHo’s Comintern Background • When the Vietnam Communist Party was established in February 1930, Ho Chi Minh was present as the official representative of the Communist International in Moscow.

  10. A surprising source to correctmany of the myths . . .

  11. A surprising source to correctmany of the myths . . . In 1973 ISI distributed my “Myths” monograph as a Special Book Offer.

  12. A surprising source to correctmany of the myths . . . A pdf file of this monograph is available on CNSL web site.

  13. Pentagon Papers onHo Chi Minh “Ho Chi Minh was an old Stalinist, trained in Russia in the early ‘20s, Comintern colleague of Borodin in Canton . . . [and a man who presumably] spoke with authority within the upper echelons of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” - 1 Pentagon Papers 261 (Gravel ed. 1971)

  14. The Issue of theJuly 1956 Elections

  15. Pentagon Papers: Text of U.S. Declarationat Final Session of Geneva Conference “As I stated on July 18, my Government is not prepared to join in a declaration by the Conference such as is submitted. However, the United States makes this unilateral declaration of its position on these matters: ‘In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to insure that they are conducted fairly.’” - The Pentagon Papers, vol. 1, pp. 570-71 (Gravel ed. 1971)

  16. Professor George Kahinon U.S. Position on 1956 Elections “But with American encouragement, Diem refused to permit the elections in 1956 . . . [B]y encouraging Diem to defy this central provision of the Geneva Agreements, the United States reneged on the position it had taken there in its own unilateral declaration. Civil war in Vietnam became inevitable.” - Widely quoted statement from 1965 “Teach In”

  17. David Shoenbrunon Proposed 1956 Elections “Washington and its supporters still claim today that free elections could not have been held in North Vietnam. They may well be right. The fact is, however, that they never once raised such a contention in the course of the Geneva Conference. The fact is that they never held a single meeting or put forward a single proposal to impose the conditions of free elections or to put the Communists to the test and expose them. . . . Since the elections were not held, then the entire agreement was null and void.”

  18. North Vietnam and theGeneva Elections Issue • 10 May 1954 - Pham Van Dong proposed “supervision of post-Geneva elections by local commissions” • 10 May 1960 DRV Election • 99.85% voter turnout in Hanoi area (97% overall) • Bernard Fall observed: “There were no electoral booths or other means of ensuring secrecy of voting. Ballots were written out in full view of all persons in the polling stations, at open tables with aides standing ready to ‘help the comrades who had difficulty in making out their ballot.’” • Ho Chi Minh received 99.91% • Other key Communist Leaders received 98.75-99.6%

  19. Hanoi Acknowledged that France, NotSouth Vietnam, was bound by Geneva “[W]e demand that the French Government should correctly implement the agreements they have signed with us.” - President Ho Chi Minh (22 July 1954) * * * * * * * “[I]t was with you, the French, that we signed the Geneva Agreements, and it is up to you to see that they are respected.” - Premier Pham Von Dong (1 January 1955)

  20. Ho Chi Minh Recognized South VietnamWas Not “Party” to Geneva Accords “We demand the southern authorities to correctly implement this [Geneva] agreement. France, a party to it, must honour her signature and fulfill her duty.” - 4 Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works 111 (1962)

  21. The 1956 Elections Issue(New York Times (Editorial), 6 April 1956) “The plain fact is that neither the truce commission nor the signatories to the Geneva agreement have as yet established in Communist-dominated North Vietnam the essential conditions provided by the agreement for a ‘free expression of the national will.’ . . . Premier Diem is right and duty-bound to reject the proposed elections until the necessary conditions for freedom have been established in the North.”

  22. British Position on1956 Elections Issue As co-chairman of the 1954 Geneva Conference, Great Britain sent a note to the Soviets (the other co-chair) on 10 April 1956 complaining that, since the conference ended, the South Vietnamese army had been reduced by 20,000 men, while the North Vietnamese Army increased from 7 to 20 divisions. It also recognized that South Vietnam was not legally bound by the armistice agreements since it had not signed them and had protested against them at the Geneva Conference. - New York Times, 11 April 1956

  23. Pentagon Papers: Why the United Statesand South Vietnam Opposed “Elections” [T]he basis for the policy of both nations [SVN & US] in rejecting the Geneva elections was . . . convictions that Hanoi would not permit “free general elections by secret ballot,” and that the ICC would be impotent in supervising the elections in any case. - The Pentagon Papers, vol. 1, pp. 246-47 (Gravel ed. 1971)

  24. Did the State Department lie about “Aggression from the North?”

  25. Professors Kahin & Lewison the “Independent” NLF “[The NLF] is not ‘Hanoi’s creation’; it has manifested independence and its Southern. Insurrectionary activity against the Saigon government began in the South under Southern leadership not as a consequence of any dictate from Hanoi, but contrary to Hanoi’s injunctions. Abundant data have been available to Washington to invalidate any argument that revival of the war in the South was precipitated by ‘aggression from the North.’” - G. Kahin & J. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam 120 (1967)

  26. Le Duan Calls for a “NationalUnited Front” in South (Sept. 1960) At the Third Party Congress in Hanoi in September 1960, Party First Secretary Le Duan announced: “To ensure the complete success for the revolutionary struggle in south Viet Nam, our people there, under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the working class, must strive to . . . . bring into being a broad National United Front directed against the U.S. and Diem and based upon the worker-peasant alliance. . . .” - 1 DRV, Third National Congress of the VNWP 62-63

  27. Resolution of the Third Party Congress (1960)“On the Tasks and Line of the Party in the New Stage” “To ensure the complete success of the revolutionary struggle in south Vietnam, our people there must strive to . . . . bring into being a broad National United Front.” - 1 Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Third National Congress of the Viet Nam Workers’ Party225 (c. 1961?)

  28. Hanoi Announces Creation of the“National Liberation Front” “A ‘National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam’ was recently formed in South Vietnam by various forces opposing the fascist Ngo Dinh Diem regime. This was revealed by Reuters in Saigon . . . .” - Vietnam News Agency (Hanoi) 29 January 1961

  29. North Vietnamese GeneralsAdmit NLF Controlled by Hanoi - I “Vietnam has at last come clean. In half a dozen sentences in a French television documentary, the North Vietnamese military commander, General Vo Nguyen Giap, and his colleague, General Vo Bam, have demolished some of the myths which helped to swell the anti-Vietnam war movement from San Francisco to Stockholm. [continued on next slide . . .]

  30. North Vietnamese GeneralsAdmit NLF Controlled by Hanoi - II “According to General Bam, the decision to unleash an armed revolt against the Saigon government was taken by a North Vietnamese communist party plenum in 1959. This was a year before the National Liberation Front was set up in South Vietnam. . . . So much for the myth that the Vietcong was an autonomous southern force which spontaneously decided to rise against the oppression of the Diem regime. And General Bam should know. As a result of the decision, he was given the job of opening up an infiltration trail in the south.” - “We Lied to You,” The Economist (London), 26 February 1983

  31. PAVN Col. Bui TinOn the Origins of the NLF (1995) • “It was set up by our Communist Party to implement a decision of the Third Party Congress of September 1960. We always said there was only one party.” “How North Vietnam Won the War,” Wall Street Journal, August 3, 1995, p. 8.

  32. More “Admissions” from Hanoi • In May 1984, Vietnam Courier admitted VWP’s decision to liberate South Vietnam was made on May 19, 1959, but kept “absolute secret” as the Ho Chi Minh Trail was built and hundreds of thousands of troops were sent south with supplies.

  33. Prof. William Duikeron Origins of War in South Vietnam “[O]ne of the most pernicious myths about the Vietnam War—that the insurgent movement in South Vietnam was essentially an autono-mous one that possessed only limited ties to the regime in the North—has been definitively dispelled.” William Duiker, “Foreword: The History of the People’s Army,” in Victory in Vietnam at xvi.

  34. The End of the International Law Debate • The argument that it was illegal for the United States to help defend South Vietnam was premised almost entirely upon the assumption that the NLF was autonomous and not controlled by Hanoi. • After Hanoi’s post-war admissions, very few of the old anti-war stalwarts among international lawyers have been willing to debate the issue. (See the debate in The Real Lessons of the Vietnam War.)

  35. Did America Go to War in VietnamWithout Public Support? What do the polls tell us?

  36. Public Approval of President JohnsonImmediately Before and After Tonkin Incident Gallup Poll—Percent of Americans having a “favorable” view of LBJ (change attributed by Gallup to support for handling of Vietnam issue) July: 42% August: 72% A 58% increase!

  37. Gallup Polls on Vietnam War—I • Late August 1964—More than 70% of Americans said US was handling the war “as well as could be expected” • November 1965—60% of those with opinion said they would be “more likely” to support a candidate for congress who favored “sending a great many more men to Vietnam” • September 1966—60% of those expressing opinion on options in Vietnam favored escalation of war effort • February 1967—75% favored continuing the bombing of North Vietnam

  38. Gallup Polls on Vietnam War—II • May 1967—69.4% said U.S. was “morally justified” to have become involved in Vietnam • July 1969—63% approved of way Nixon was handling “the situation in Vietnam” • September 1970—60% favored “withdrawal” • June 1971—By 2 to 1 margin, Americans said sending troops to VN had been “a mistake”

  39. U.S. Public Opinion and the 1968 Tet Offensive “The Tet offensive of winter 1968 was the event that turned public opinion decisively against the war. News that communist forces had infiltrated major cities throughout the south and blasted into the American Embassy in Saigon hit the pubic like a bombshell. Those in favor of the war fell from 62 percent to 41 percent. For the first time in the war, the “doves” were in the majority, practically doubling their numbers in one month, from 23 percent to 43 percent.” —The Lessons of the Vietnam War 177 (Starr, 1991)

  40. Col. Bui Tin on 1968 Tet Offensive Q. What about Gen. Westmoreland’s strategy and tactics caused you concern? A. Our senior commander in the South, Gen. Nguyen Chi Thanh, knew that we were losing base areas, control of the rural population and that his main forces were being pushed out to the borders of South Vietnam. He also worried that Westmoreland might receive permission to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In January 1967, after discussions with Le Duan, Gen. Thanh proposed the Tet Offensive. . . . Tet was designed to influence American public opinion. We would attack poorly defended parts of South Vietnam cities during a holiday and a truce where few South Vietnamese troops would be on duty. . . .

  41. Col. Bui Tin on 1968 Tet Offensive • Q. What about the results? • A. Our losses were staggering and a complete surprise. Giap later told me that Tet had been a military defeat, though we had gained the planned political advantage when Johnson agreed to negotiate and did not run for re-election.

  42. U.S. Public Opinion:Confusing angry hawks with doves in 1968 “By 1968 a five-to-three majority of the American public saw the original decision to go to war as a mistake, but simultaneously the number of those who wanted to end the war by escalating, even to the point of invading the DRV, exceeded the number favoring complete withdrawal by a comparable margin. Support for the war, according to polls, exceeded confidence in the President’s handling of it, and that confidence was declining. This account for the astonishing and rarely recognized phenomenon that Eugene McCarthy’s total in New Hampshire contained three hawkish anti-administration votes for every two pro-withdrawal votes; ‘of those who favored McCarthy before the Democratic Convention but who switched to some other candidate by November, a plurality had switched to Wallace.’” —Leslie Gelb & Richard Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: System Worked 1972

  43. Human Rights and the Vietnam Conflict

  44. Freedom of the Press in South Vietnam (1970) “Under its new press law, South Vietnam now has one of the freest presses in Southeast Asia, and the daily paper with the biggest circulation here happens to be sharply critical of President Thieu. …[S]ince the new press law was promulgated nine months ago, the government has not been able to close down Tin Sang or any other newspaper among the more than 30 now being published in Saigon.” —Daniel Sutherland, “Free-swinging press keeps Saigon ducking,” Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 18, 1970

  45. There Were 34 Daily Papersin Saigon in 1970

  46. Ché Guevara Bookfor Sale in Saigon

  47. Ché Guevara Diaryin Saigon Bookstall

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