http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704117304575137933430396268.html
Vietnam's economy grows, if not its freedom. Meanwhile, our sense of
the war is frozen in myth
APRIL 2, 2010
By PETER R. KANN
Vietnam: It is both a state and a state of mind. To more than 90
million Vietnamese, most under the age of 26, Vietnam is a country in
which corrupt Communist Party rule and chaotic capitalism, at least
for the moment, are producing strong economic growth. To most
Americans, Vietnam is little more than the grim memory of a failure
fixed in our collective memory by the antiwar left and a wave of
postwar pessimism. Two books now take up these contrasting versions
of Vietnam. One is an earnest primer on the country as it is today;
the other a passionate, and politically incorrect, guide to what
might have been.
In "Vietnam: Rising Dragon," Bill Hayton, a BBC correspondent who
spent several years based in Hanoi, makes a diligent reportorial
effort to explain the intricacies and ironies of today's Vietnam. He
does an admirable job of outlining the messy materialism of
Vietnamese society: the rise of an entrepreneurial class that is
intertwined with the ruling regime; the rapid economic growth that
has resulted from permitting even corrupted market forces to
function; and the machinations of aging Communist Party functionaries
for whom self-preservation is the overriding concern. Beneath
Vietnam's transformation "lurks a paranoid and deeply authoritarian
political system," Mr. Hayton says, although elsewhere he cannot seem
to decide whether the party rulers are a gang of geriatric
kleptocrats or well-intentioned old revolutionaries seeking to solve
social problems by maintaining a "Confucian-based respect for authority."
On this matter, and others, one comes away wishing that Mr. Hayton
had reported in a little less detail and taken the risk of coming to
some clearer conclusions. There is an old saw among foreign
correspondents that if you have no idea where your reporting is
leading you, simply end by writing "only time will tell." And that,
essentially, is Mr. Hayton's conclusion. "Whatever happens next is
unlikely to be dull," he tells us. Or: "Who knows what may happen in
the future?" Or: "Is Vietnam's fate to become just another South East
Asian oligarchy?" (The answer, I'd suggest, is that communist Vietnam
should be so lucky.)
But Mr. Hayton does not flinch from taking a stand on a couple of
subjects. Clearly a good environmentalist, he abhors the despoiling
of Vietnam's scenic wonders (like Ha Long Bay), the ravaging of its
forests and coastal fishing grounds, the polluting of its waterways,
and the literal devouring of its wildlife. And all these years later
he is resolute in his disgust with the U.S. and the "mass slaughter"
and "sheer monstrosity" of the war it waged. He is disappointed that
Vietnam and the Vietnamese have sought improved relations with
America and Americans.
Perhaps it is good that the punctilious Mr. Hayton projects some
passion, however misguided, for something other than the environment.
One wishes, however, that his antiwar ardor could at least be
extended to include some empathy for the hundreds of thousands of
former Army of South Vietnam soldiers who resisted the communist
takeover of South Vietnam, were then hauled off to brutal
re-education camps and still suffer a kind of internal exile as
official nonpersons under communist rule. Their plight rates less
attention in his book than the fate of brown bears and other wildlife.
To turn a page, as it were, we come to Phillip Jennings's "The
Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War." Here the reader will
find no waffling or antiwar claptrap. Mr. Jennings is a former Marine
helicopter pilot in Vietnam whom I later met in Laos, where he was
flying high-risk missions for the CIA's aviation operation, Air
America. (Many years later Mr. Jennings and I co-authored a review of
a dumb and dishonest film of that name.)
"No war in American history is in greater need of a politically
incorrectanother word for honesttreatment than the Vietnam War,"
Mr. Jennings begins, "because the people who misrepresented the war,
hammered vile lies about it into our national consciousness, and now
tout its supposed 'lessons' are the very same people who created
'political correctness' in the first place."
Mr. Jennings provides a persuasive history of our involvement in
Vietnam, from Dwight Eisenhower's efforts to aid the French to John
Kennedy's misguided coup against South Vietnam's leader Ngo Dinh
Diem; from the strategic military blundering of Lyndon Johnson, with
his concept of a carefully calibrated war of attrition ("aggressive
appeasement," Mr. Jennings calls it) to the Communist Tet offensive
of early 1968, which was a military "disaster" for the Communists but
was presented by the media as a major setback for the U.S. I was a
reporter in Vietnam during the battle and was among many who did not
initially understand its significance. Yet within a year or so I was
driving along Vietnam's mostly safe and secure roads and sleeping in
newly pacified villages. The war indeed was being won.
If Mr. Jennings has a hero, other than the American and South
Vietnamese soldiers who fought the battles, it is Richard Nixon.
Unlike LBJ, Nixon was unafraid to employ American air power against
the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos, against North Vietnamese sanctuaries
in Cambodia, and finallywith the "Christmas Bombings" of
1972against Hanoi and Haiphong in an effort to force the North
Vietnamese to the peace-conference table. Mr. Jennings, as a pilot,
may have an excessive faith in the efficacy of air power, but there
is no doubt that the battered North Vietnamese did wind up signing
the Paris Peace Accord in 1973 (only to immediately violate the
terms). The rest is sad denouement and catastrophe: Watergate, a
weakened presidency, a rebellious Democratic Congress, a cutoff of
promised military support to our South Vietnamese ally, a massive
North Vietnamese invasion of the south, and collapse.
Mr. Jennings is at his outraged best when he is exploding myths about
the war. The South Vietnamese government was corrupt and unworthy of
our support. (As opposed to what, he asksa totalitarian North
Vietnam?) The Vietnam War was a civil war that needed to be decided
by its own people. (But it was decided by a North Vietnamese
invasion.) The American people didn't support the war. (Yet, antiwar
rioters aside, most Americans supported Nixon's aim of achieving
peace with honor.) The war was immoral. (How is it immoral to defend
a people from the slavery of communism?) It was an unwinnable war.
(The U.S. had largely won the war by 1973 and merely needed to
fulfill its commitments to provide air support and other limited aid
to its ally.) As Mr. Jennings concludes: "The argument that Vietnam
was an unwinnable war was not true, but the Democrats in Congress
decided to make it so."
What Mr. Jennings touches on, but might have emphasized more, is that
with hindsight we can view Vietnam as but one battle in a larger war
for the future of East and Southeast Asia. If that battle was lost,
the wider war has been won. We need only look at the arc of peaceful,
prosperous, capitalist and largely democratic countries stretching
from Japan and Korea in the north to Indonesia in the south. The
values that we stood for, and that Mr. Jennings and his compatriots
fought for, have emerged victorious. Vietnam should be among those
free societies.
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Mr. Kann, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, was until 2007 chairman
of Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.
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