From his latest
interview, Christopher Hitchens talking about Noam Chomsky (
via SIAW):
I recently looked up some of his old polemical classics - on
the Vietnam war, for example, and on East Timor and on Sharon's conduct in
Lebanon in 1982 - and found them still to be highly cogent and lucid.
Chomsky's early classics unfortunately do not seem to be available online (*). I have looked at
Necessary Illusions, 1989 and
Deterring Democracy,
1992. There was plenty about Central America in the 1980s, but not much about
Vietnam, or Indochina as foreign policy experts tend to describe the issue.
I did find this bit: U.S. bombing 'contributed significantly to the rise, and probably
the brutality, of the Khmer Rouge' (
NI, Ch 5 ). But I will come back to Chomsky later.
The archives of
Foreign Affairs are quite illuminating: here, for example, is
Foreign Policy and the Democratic Process: Is a Foreign Policy Consensus Possible?, Fall, 1978.
One important article was written in 1947 by "Mr. X", who turned out to be
the head of the US State Department's Policy Planning Staff, George F. Kennan.
The article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", set out the strategy of
containment (
link). Unlike the neo-cons (**), Kennan did not ignore the sources of Soviet
weakness:
Much has been done to increase efficiency of labor and to teach
primitive peasants something about the operation of machines. But maintenance
is still a crying deficiency of all Soviet economy. Construction is hasty
and poor in quality. Depreciation must be enormous. And in vast sectors of
economic life it has not yet been possible to instill into labor anything
like that general culture of production and technical self-respect which
characterizes the skilled worker of the west.
...
Russia will remain economically as vulnerable, and in
a certain sense an impotent, nation, capable of exporting its enthusiasms
and of radiating the strange charm of its primitive political vitality but
unable to back up those articles of export by the real evidences of material
power and prosperity.
Kennan also wrote, in
PPS/23:
We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal
objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and
democratization.
Wikipedia, apparently
following Noam Chomsky
here and
here (more from zmag.org
here,
and
here), quote this as:
'A document written by Mr.Kennan which states: "We should cease to talk about
vague and. . . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living
standards and democratization." ', creating a general from a specific ( '
In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense
now...' - my emphasis). That was just one of Chomsky's sets of dots that accomplish the task. See also -
A response.... After that, it is difficult to rely too heavily on the credibility of Chomsky's writing.
To get back to Kennan's point, note too that it is based on an assessment
of economic realities: 'The greatest of the Asiatic peoples—the Chinese and
the Indians—have not yet even made a beginning at the solution of the basic
demographic problem involved in the relationship between their food supply
and their birth rate.'
From
Vietnam: The Retrospect:..., David Fromkin and James Chace,
Foreign Affairs, Spring 1985. (The first of the authors is not to be confused with David Frum
of 'axis of evil' fame):
Closely allied with the theory of global containment is the so-called
domino theory, according to which Southeast Asia was a region such that if
one country fell to communism, the effect would be to knock down the countries
around so that they would fall to communism too. C. L. Sulzberger of The
New York Times employed a different metaphor and pictured America’s Asian
and Pacific allies as being caught in a giant nutcracker between Red China
and radical Indonesia. ...
Some of those most involved in sending American troops to Vietnam, however,
argue that this is precisely because America won its anti-domino, anti-nutcracker
victory two decades ago. Up until 1965, leaders of the domino countries—Malaysia,
Singapore, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and even India—are said to have
privately told the American government that it was vital for the United States
to stay the course in Vietnam so as to save them from being crushed between
China and Indonesia. In 1965-66 the arms of the nutcracker fell off: a new
anti-communist government took power in Indonesia and destroyed the communist
party in that country, while China withdrew from world affairs and concentrated
her energies on the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution. In his 1967 memorandum,
Secretary of Defense McNamara stated that, "To the extent that our original
intervention and our existing actions in Vietnam were motivated by the perceived
need to draw the line against Chinese expansionism in Asia, our objective
has already been attained."
Similar analysis by McGeorge Bundy follows, cited by Chomsky in
Rethinking Camelot, Ch1, (1993). Comparing Vietnam with Iraq, John Lewis Gaddis
says recently:
Historians now acknowledge that American counterinsurgency operations
in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem
was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home. Military learning
is also taking place in Iraq, but the domestic opposition is not even approaching
Vietnam-era proportions: 2004 was nothing like 1968.
According to 'Vietnam: The Retrospect:...',
Nixon and Kissinger believed that they had 'succeeded in negotiating a satisfactory
end to the war'. Rather, it was Congress that pulled the rug away. 'In his
1983 Wall Street Journal article, Nixon wrote that, "Between 1973 and 1975,
Congress cut the arms budget for South Vietnam by 76 percent. The Soviet
Union, on the other hand, doubled its shipment of arms to North Vietnam."...
Ellsworth Bunker, U.S. ambassador to Saigon, said that by the end of 1972,
"we had achieved our objective, made it possible for the South Vietnamese
to defend themselves." ' Fromkin and Chace comment:
Many of us would agree with Mr. Nixon that the regimes America
supported in Indochina were less bad than the regimes America opposed; as
a moral matter we were right to choose the lesser of two evils. But there
is a practical side to the issue too, and it can be expressed simply by saying
that we want to win. What was wrong in backing a weak, corrupt, inefficient
regime against a brutally powerful, fanatically puritanical, ruthlessly efficient
adversary was that our side was likely to lose.
...
Having learned in 1966 that the enlarged war to which he had just
committed the United States suddenly had become unnecessary, should [the
President] have recalled the American armies and brought them home? Would
that not have inflicted a damaging blow to American prestige?
...
Henry Kissinger writes in his memoirs,
For nearly
a generation the security and progress of free peoples had depended on confidence
in America. We could not simply walk away from an enterprise involving two
administrations, five allied countries, and thirty-one thousand dead as if
we were switching a television channel. . . . As the leader of democratic
alliances we had to remember that scores of countries and millions of people
relied for their security on our willingness to stand by allies. . . . We
could not revitalize the Atlantic Alliance. . . . We would not be able to
move the Soviet Union toward the imperative of mutual restraint. . . . We
might not achieve our opening to China. . . .
And,
Mr. Kissinger added, we might not have succeeded in our Middle East diplomacy
if world confidence in America’s willingness to honor all of its international
engagements were to be weakened or lost.
The article then puts alternative views to this argument.
I would like however to point out a recent parallel here. When, in early
2003 with over 100,000 US troops on its borders, the Iraqi regime began to
partially comply with demands for UN weapons inspections, why was the US
not satisfied with this? It seemed to me that this too came down to a matter
of prestige: only total victory was sufficient.
(*) My old copy of
Fontana Modern Masters on Chomsky suggests 'American Power and the New Mandarins'. All I could find online was
this conservative critique.
'As a tenured professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, he has enjoyed a privileged position from which to launch his
anti-American polemics.' This rather makes Chomsky's point for him, about
suppression of dissent by economic means.
(**) 'they ignored the Soviet economy, even after one of their own, Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had begun warning of its deterioration.' See '
Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution', John B. Judis,
Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995
