Vietnam Wars 1945-1990
by Marilyn Young

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Book Reviews of Vietnam Wars 1945-1990

Book Review: U.S. imperialism getting out of hand
Summary: 5 Stars

In 1954, the French had to withdrawl and the Genevea accords were signed. This called for Ho Chi Minh and his group to withdrawl to the North of the country and the French puppet Bao Dai's government to be in control of the South. A provisional line separated North and South Vietnam, to be completely eliminated when elections for the reunification of the country took place in July 1956. The Americans then moved from supplying arms to the French to taking over the whole effort to crush independent nationalism in Vietnam.

The U.S., she shows, understood that the Viet Minh would win any free and fair election and that Ho Chi Minh was more of a nationalist than a communist. Therefore, it was necessary to set up a permanent separate nation in South Vietnam, under the dictatorship of Ngo Dinh Diem, who launched a campaign of slaughter and terror against his opponents, leftist or otherwise. In an endnote she quotes Diem's former chief of staff as saying that had the Diem regime confined the police state terror and torture to only communists or communist sympathizers, one could symphathize with them for such persons inherently deserved such treatment. But his terror spread to other political parties, people who simply did not like his government and those resisting extortion by government officials. Despite being constantly slobbered over as a great humanitarian statesman in the U.S. media and among American liberals, conservaties in South Vietnam were beginning to openly oppose his regime, worrying U.S. officials about his regime's stability.

Finally in 1959, Hanoi authorized the Viet Minh in the South to resist in self-defense the terror of Diem's government. A couple thousand North Vietnamese, most of them natives of the South, began infiltrating the country. In 1960 the National Liberation Front (NLF) was formed amongst many South Vietnamese dissidents led by the former Viet Minh ("viet cong" in U.S. propaganda).

Diem's biggest problem from the U.S. perspective was that he had begun negotiations with North Vietnam on the withdrawl of U.S. troops from South Vietnam and agreeing to allow for the NLf to join South Vietnamese policial life and disucss possible reunification of the country in the future. This was a real horror to U.S. officials as comes up many times in the documents the author quotes.

In any case Diem was overthrown and killed on November 1'st 1963 in a U.S. backed coup. The problem was that the U.S. had trouble finding any military officer that was not intent on continuing Diem's efforts to reach agreement with the NLF and North Vietnam. They installed a series of military dicatatorships over the next few years until they finally found one sufficiently pliable represented by Ky and Thieu.

The U.S. extended its bombing to North Vietnam, then launched an all out invasion of South Vietnam, accelerating its program of mass murder. Some of the more interesting documents quoted in this book come from the Rand corporation. The infamous "strategic hamlet" program is examined in the village of Duc Lap in one document. Another notes that villages in militarily contested areas often felt hostility towards both the GVN (South Vietnamese government)and the NLF but hostiliy towards the NLF tended to be based on the U.S.-GVN bombing that its presences in villages caused, excess taxation, and sometimes military defeat. Anger towards the NLF was based more on despair than hatred. On the other hand hositlity towards the government of South Vietnam was based on a "a more basic hostility resulting from GVN aims and behavior..." Another document spoke of increased support for the NLF resulting from the massive defoliation program launched by the U.S., allegedly to deny food sources to the NLF which it did not do but greatly devastated peasant farmers. This exacerbated the feeling that the U.S/ GVN were "at best minimally concerned with the peasant's welfare."

The author quotes the elite political scientist Samuel Huntington who was deeply impressed by the massive refugee exodus to the cities caused by the American terror bombing of the countryside. It was good because it was the only way to deprive the Vietcong of its supporters, the people of rural South Vietnam for the Viet cong was a powerful organization which could not be separated from its "constituency" so long as the constintuency continued to exist.

The author goes on to discuss the domestic aspects of the Vietnam war as well as the mass murder operations conducted in Laos and Cambodia. She notes that the U.S., as in South Vietnam, avoided opportunities to make peace by backing the forming of  a coalition government with the left wing insurtgents there as proposed by the dictator Prince Siahnouk. Siahnouk had been overthrown in early 1970 because he was vehemently opposed to the U.S. bombing his country despite U.S. claims that he supported it. When the U.S. bombing reached its horrific peak in 1973, Cambodia's infrastructure and moderate and progressive  civil society were just about completely destroyed, leaving the harshest and most brutal elements, in this case the Khmer Rouge, previously a very fringe wacko group of the insurgency, to take power.

Thieu's regime fell in 1975. The author notes that in his final pathetic words in power, he attacked Kissinger for allegedly selling out South Vietnam in the January 1973 peace agreement though the author notes that Thieu continued to attack and seize territory held by the NLF, continuing the war as if there had been no peace agreement with U.S. support. The U.S. gave him all the military aid in the world but Thieu was opposed by virtually all sectors of South Vietnamese society and he could arrest and kill tens of thousands of people and steal every election but the fundamental illegitamacy of his regime could not be hid.

Summary of Vietnam Wars 1945-1990

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