The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War

1. No More Vietnams: Historians Debate the Policy Lessons of the Vietnam War

1 No More Vietnams Historians Debate the Policy Lessons ofthe Vietnam War David L. Anderson It has been thirty years since the end of the Vietnam War, and historians of American foreign relations are still vigorously debating the historical questions of why the United States chose to persist in a major military campaign in Vietnam for so long and why, ultimately, that costly and controversial intervention failed to achieve Washington's stated objectives. Thousands of books and articles have been published on the American war in Vietnam, advancing knowledge and understanding ofthe conflict, yet the lessons learned and the meaning of the war for American diplomatic and military doctrine are still contested. What makes resolution of such important historical questions remain so elusive? The war has left conflicting mythologies that continue to battle with each other. Boiled down to an extreme simplification, the debate is over the concept no more Vietnams. One interpretation ofthis term is that the United States must abjure from virtually all types of military intervention abroad. The term Vietnam syndrome came into use after the war to describe a pathological aversion among American policymakers to the use offorce as an instrument offoreign policy. The other understanding ofthe term no more Vietnams is that the United States must never again "lose" in cases in which defense of the nation's security requires military intervention. Proponents of this view argue that the United States 13 14 David L. Anderson National Security Adviser Walt W Rostow briefs President Lyndon B. Johnson during the Battle for Khe Sanh in 1968. Y. R. Okamoto, courtesy ofLyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. should get over the Vietnam syndrome and regain the political will to use America's massive power to achieve foreign policy objectives. In both cases, there is the implication that, because of its power and the global reach of its interests, the United States can choose where and when to engage its military force. The Vietnam War was a war of choice. The Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations chose to define the survival ofSouth Vietnam as of vital strategic interest to the United States in the global policy of containment of Soviet and Chinese power. Official American rhetoric increasingly exaggerated the value of the objective as domestic opponents of the war questioned the choice and the cost of the intervention . There is a proclivity when policymakers choose war to exaggerate the results ofthe intervention and to understate the costs in order to justify continuing the intervention. One example of such an exaggeration is couching the reason for continuing the intervention in terms of preserving America's international credibility. Wars of choice, like the Vietnam No More Vietnams 15 War, leave a gap between ends and means that almost invariably produces division, dissatisfaction, and domestic debilitation.1 The last American war that was not a war of choice was World War II. The danger to U.S. interests posed by the strength and ideology of the Axis powers left the United States no choice but to defend itself and its historical allies. World War II is often termed the good war and the Vietnam War the bad war. The Korean War in between the two gets obscured as a forgotten, stalemated war. The reasons for fighting the good war were much more self-evident to Americans than were the reasons for fighting the bad war. Moreover, the Unites States won the good war by the rational standard that the hostile power and oppressive ideology ofthe nation's enemies had been nullified. American forces came home to well-deserved victory celebrations and national self-congratulations. The reasons for fighting the bad war were much less evident, however. The small, rural country of Vietnam lacked the power to threaten the United States directly, and its internal politics were much too localized to be a crucial test of American ideology. In the end, there was no U.S. victory in Vietnam, and, thus, the questions were left open as to whether a victory was ever possible, how it could have been achieved, and, most challenging, what would have constituted victory. At the end ofOliver Stone's Platoon (1986), about the realities ofcombat for American soldiers in Vietnam, the young GI who is the main character reflects, "I think now looking back that we did not fight the enemy , we fought ourselves and the enemy was within us:'2 In the context of...