Tuesday, October 02, 2001

Remora.
More about Thieu's passing - here's the first chapter of No Peace, No Honor. Larry Berman's book shows that the previous two schools of thought about the end of the Vietnam war are both wrong. Nixon's version was that Congress lost the war, by stripping him of his power to intervene after the 73 treaty was signed. The "decent interval" theory, of Frank Snepp - whose last book I reviewed here - is that the treaty was forged with the utmost cynicism by Kissinger and Nixon, fully conscious that under the terms of it, South Vietnam was doomed unless the US intervened, long distance, with the utmost brutality -- a futile brutality too, as would seem self-evident to anybody else.
Remember, though, this is the administration whose bombing planners in Cambodia didn't even have current maps of the place. Random bombing didn't bother them -- chances were you'd kill some enemy somewhere if you dropped enough tonnage of explosives.
Berman's interpretation is different:

"No Peace, No Honor draws on recently declassified records to show that the true picture is worse than either of these perspectives suggests. The reality was the opposite of the decent interval hypothesis and far beyond Nixon's and Kissinger's claims. The record shows that the United States expected that the signed treaty would be immediately violated and that this would trigger a brutal military response. Permanent war (air war, not ground operations) at acceptable cost was what Nixon and Kissinger anticipated from the so-called peace agreement. They believed that the only way the American public would accept it was if there was a signed agreement. Nixon recognized that winning the peace, like the war, would be impossible to achieve, but he planned for indefinite stalemate by using the B-52s to prop up the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency. Just as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution provided a pretext for an American engagement in South Vietnam, the Paris Accords were intended to fulfill a similar role for remaining permanently engaged in Vietnam. Watergate derailed the plan.

The declassified record shows that the South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and the United States disregarded key elements of the treaty because all perceived it was in their interest to do so. No one took the agreement seriously because each party viewed it as a means for securing something unstated. For the United States, as part of the Nixon Doctrine, it was a means of remaining permanently involved in Southeast Asia; for the North Vietnamese, it was the means for eventual conquest and unification of Vietnam; for the South Vietnamese, it was a means for securing continued support from the United States."

Air war. Nixon really was a visionary -- he realized that what America wanted was a war with zero American casualties. It took a while, but Clinton pulled it off in Kosovo. Of course, the question is: how long can you stick to that kind of policy?
Ah, the sickness of it, the sickness unto death.

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