Peace With Honor: Vietnam, Redux

While Richard Nixon & Henry Kissinger are credited with ending the United States’ involvement in Vietnam and brokering peace, they were not able to achieve "peace with honor", per se, keeping in mind a strict interpretation of the word “honor”. They inherited the conflict from previous administrations, as our next President will inherit Iraq from Bush Jr., and acknowledged that the effort was already a failure. The mark of peace with honor by the time Nixon took office would have been, in the minds of many, a complete withdrawal from the disastrous campaign and the region without committing any more troops.

Many Americans who voted for Nixon did so because he promised to end the war; Nixon himself played into their hopes, echoing the words of Woodrow Wilson in one of his campaign speeches, saying "Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try?" As the conflict raged on, it became obvious to the increasingly skeptical American media, civilians, and military, and to the opposition that any decisive victory for the United States was highly unlikely. There are many indications that Nixon’s primary concern with regards to Vietnam was not achieving peace with honor, but rather, achieving peace through just enough compromise to end the unpopular war with minimal public humiliation to the United States as an international player and world power.

To this end, he deceived the American people, Congress, and even members of the military of which he was commander-in-chief, and when all was said and done, he abandoned the ideals and goals on behalf of which the United States became involved in Vietnam in the first place. His abuses of executive power during Vietnam came into focus four years after Operation Menu, and were being considered as articles of impeachment when a disgraced President Nixon resigned during the Watergate scandal. Nixon, while professing to want to end the war, increased U.S. military presence with B-52s flying secret bombing missions in Cambodia, known collectively as Operation Menu, hoping that the show of sheer firepower of the US military would rattle the North Vietnamese and compel the NLF to agree to his diplomatic terms and compromise. Instead, Hanoi responded to the Nixon administration’s show of actual force much in the same way it responded to their previously unanswered threats of force; it made no statement about the bombings in Cambodia in public or private statements, and never acknowledged the presence of their forces there. They quietly steeled their resolve, and continued to make a mockery of the supposed unparalleled power of the United States.

It is said that Kissinger gave the impression that an eventual Communist victory would be tolerable so long as it was suitably delayed as to avoid openly embarrassing the United States. The real source of difficulties in winning the war, Nixon and Kissinger felt, were not the Vietnamese, but the American dissenters in the anti-war movement. In his November 3, 1969 Silent Majority speech, Nixon declared “North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” The assertion that it was the publicly voiced disapproval of anti-war protesters and not the failed policy of the government that was causing the immense economic and human losses of the war to continue to spiral out of control was indicative of Nixon’s refusal to accept the harsh reality of our position in Vietnam. “I will not be the first President of the United States to lose a war,” he said. Nor would he be the last, it would seem.

Between 1965 and 1973, the United States spent $120 billion on funding the war, resulting in Nixon not only losing the war after squandering an incredible amount of human and economic resources, but also setting up the country for tough financial times ahead with a large federal budget deficit.

Although President Nixon was cognizant that American troops withdrawing under his (failed) Vietnamization policy needed to be protected from attacks by the North Vietnamese, his decision to continue the futile secret bombing of Cambodia not only escalated the war he had vowed to end, but also increased the political tension and social division in the United States, leading to massive outpourings of anti-war/anti-government sentiments. The incursion was deemed necessary to destroy Communist bases and supply lines supporting the war in Vietnam, to protect American servicemen and women, and to guarantee the successful withdrawal of America from Vietnam. Nixon’s April 30, 1969 announcement that the U.S. had launched an “incursion” into Cambodia sparked a massive demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio. On May 4^th that day of protests and calls for peace ended in a scuffle between National Guardsmen and students, leaving four protesters shot dead and several wounded. Photographs of the dead and wounded youths at Kent State were distributed world-wide in newspapers and periodicals, and served to amplify anti-war/anti-Nixon sentiments at home and abroad.

The newly instituted draft played a large role in stoking the fires of controversy with regards to anti-war sentiment among the youth of America. The conscription protocols provided exemptions and deferments more easily for middle and upper class registrants who could claim they were full time students making active progress towards an undergraduate or advanced degree. Thusly, the draft inducted disproportionate numbers of poor, working-class, and minority registrants who were unable to afford higher education. Upper class families with sons of service age who were concerned with the family image signed up for the National Guard, which was rarely deployed overseas. In some cases, these families that were able to use their connections to gain a position in the National Guard, which had limited openings, also leading to a perception that the wealthy were using the National Guard to ensure that their children were assigned low-risk duty in the U.S. while the sons of the poor, who were mostly Black and Hispanic, were being shipped off wholesale to die in the jungles of Vietnam.

The economic costs of the war on America were also a cause for concern among the poor who were already suffering on home soil. Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that “America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor as long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube." Other Civil Rights leaders, such as Eldridge Cleaver pointed out that in many parts of the South, Jim Crow laws prevented many blacks from voting and, yet they were sent in overwhelming numbers to die for the very government that disenfranchised them.

But Nixon and Kissinger had far more to worry about than the kids not being alright. The administration’s concerns for the loss of face in the global community were deeply rooted in the Domino Theory, which was common foreign policy at the time. The fear that appearing ineffectual in Vietnam would hamper the United States’ ability to maintain leverage in the Middle East and other regions of the world where its interests lay, pushed Nixon and Kissinger to devote their entire effort toward building up an image of strength in the face of their rivals, the Soviets. In order to maintain nuclear credibility in the eyes of the global community, it was crucial for the Nixon administration, already under enough fire at home, to ensure that the outcome of Vietnam was viewed favorably in the world as a show of America’s effectiveness and resolve as an ally. By then, all other goals of the intervention had long fallen to the wayside. In the end, the terms set forth in the Paris agreement did not remotely address the issue as to who was to rule South Vietnam at all, nor did it provide any sort of feasible framework for meaningful negotiations to take place.

Therefore, to blame the shadow of doubt hanging over Nixon’s “peace with honor” on the media, so-called revisionist history, or on Congress can be construed as an apologist effort to defend the administration’s bullheaded tactics for the sake of maintaining appearances and supporting nuclear deterrence policies. While posturing for the Soviets can be seen as a vital piece of political theater that set the U.S. up for foreign policy into the 80’s, the end of the Vietnam war achieved with the Paris agreement can be viewed as a successful brokering of peace, but perhaps not an honorable one. Coupled with the myopic focus of the Nixon administration on the idea of "saving face" and protecting the United States' credibility, the decision to escalate by entering self-declared neutral Cambodia put the final nail in the coffin and effectively robbed Nixon and Kissinger of any claim of true honor or victory both at home and abroad. These policy choices left America shouldering the weight of the beating its clueless Congress and beleaguered military took in the worldview during and after Vietnam.

Today, Dubya is sitting pretty in the White House, riding out the last days of his 2nd term, and acting like our actions in Iraq & Afghanistan have decreased the terrorist threat that shook our nation to its core on September 11th. I still wonder how ANYONE deludes themselves into thinking this, when we already know the government was aware of the threats posed to America by Al Qaeda before the World Trade Center Tragedy. We also know that Osama bin Laden is still at large, and that Al Qaeda continues to flourish and train in Pakistan and all over the world because as a group with no central leadership and many cells operating throughout the world, the only way to can stop them is to cut off their economic resources.

For all of opinion polls that show the dramatic decreases in Bush's approval ratings from the beginning of the war in '03 till present day, it's a wonder anyone with even an inkling of what occurred when the U.S. became involved in Vietnam approved of this plan, though I will say that from the beginning, sensible people were at least scratching their heads going "Why are we attacking Iraq?". Not that it helped us at all. Why not attack Pakistan or Iran, where we have REAL enemies hiding out? Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a bad made for TV movie about all this.

The war in Iraq & Afghanistan continues to rage on, with no apparent end in sight. Over 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died with countless numbers injured. Iraq is in turmoil, Afghanistan has fallen into the hands of drug lords, our allies are pulling out, American confidence in the government is failing, our economy is in the toilet, Bin Laden remains at large, Al Qaeda continues to plot and train without interruption--mission accomplished? And what mission was that? Have we achieved "peace with honor" or peace of any kind, for that matter, in Iraq?

There are a number of blogs that deal exclusively and comprehensively with the war, and do an excellent job with doing so, therefore I am not going to try to summarize their content because my focus is more on the historical background of the policy in Vietnam, but rather refer the reader to seek out some of the information that is widely available through independent media and the mainstream media alike. I would not presume to know all about the war in Iraq or presume to know where it is going, but as many have already pointed out, the parallels with Vietnam era war, politics, & economics and the current American condition are staggering.

Which leaves me, the child of an American veteran drafted into Vietnam wondering every night in front of the evening news:

What unforeseen challenges await our next president?

Will we ever learn from our mistakes?

Where do we go from here?