Vietnam: a War Lost and Won

We become enmeshed in our own deceptions and lose all sense and recollection of what we were trying to do in the first place. Simplifications that were once convenient become quagmires that we can't escape from when they are no longer so. Pretences that we thought we could get away with become embarrassments and millstones round our necks when the truth starts to get out. Objectives that seemed clear at early stages turn out to have unforeseen difficulties to them that we would rather people did not understand, so we start by blurring them in the minds of others and end up in fog and confusion ourselves. The Vietnam war really needs a Thucydides, but it has not lacked for chroniclers and commentators, much of the story has got out into the public record, and at least Nigel Cawthorne's account is level-headed and free from histrionics or preaching. It doesn't come over to me as a political work in the sense of taking a particularly judgmental stance regarding the combatants, and while Cawthorne obviously knows an atrocity when he sees one, where there are wider lessons to be drawn he leaves it by and large to his readers to draw them. I have not attempted to verify the detail, but a good deal of this ghastly narrative rings a bell, and I would guess that he is unlikely to be far wide of the facts in general. The miasma of deception that pervades the book is not of the author's creating, it comes from the actors. The Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the first ratcheting-up of the stakes in the war seems to have been fabrication. Victories were regularly claimed that were no victories at all. Bombing of neighbouring countries was happening and being denied with barefaced mendacity. However it is one thing to lie to other people if one's own mind is at least clear. What in my own view is a lot worse is a pig-headed refusal to see that some basic strategic assumptions were at best questionable. Underlying this conflict was a perceived need to combat some ill-defined spread of international communism, often conveniently summed up as the domino theory. Any reasonable person could see that the Soviet Union was a squalid nuisance and that firmness was needed in dealing with it. In addition it had aspirations as a world power seeking parity, or more, of status with America, in consequence of which America invented the concept of something called `the West', a number of nations given rather more of a role than they might have wished in furthering American objectives and threatened with domino status if they stepped out of line. However it had been obvious from an early stage to President Eisenhower for one that red China was no domino nor any lackey, to say the least, of the Soviet Union, but the domino concept had caught hold, and that was what the war in Vietnam was originally supposed to have been about. Neither the Soviet Union nor China, it became increasingly clear, had much influence over Ho Chi Minh or General Giap, but we were in there now and