The Moral of Vietnam

President Nixon’s recent pronouncement to withdraw a further 50,000 troops from Vietnam, leaves nearly half a million troops in this unhappy land and deceives no one. It is Nixon’s sop to the millions of Americans protesting the continuation of this shameful war and the President’s own act of atonement for the horrors of Song My. The publicized Nixon strategy of gradual withdrawal is predicted on the South Vietnamese army’s ability to fight its own war. The world knows this for a piece of nonsense The South Vietnamese have no stomach for this self-destructive war and would lay down their arms in thousands the moment the Americans left their shores They see themselves as shameless mercenaries of a foreign power and only fight with a gun at their back. How can they fight when they see their general and officers using the war to crave out fortunes for themselves through opium smuggling, black marketeer and every known variety of corruption? And why not? This is not their war and it is only the promise of unlimited booty stolen from their own people and their American benefactors which make them risk the people’s wrath and serve as lackeys to the hated American.

The sickening awareness that they are holding up a house rotten to its foundations, has trapped the Americans in Vietnam. The honest and logical step of recognizing the monstrosity of their error and pulling out does not come easily to Nixon after all he was vice President in the administration which first laid the American people into the mess of Vietnam.

It was under Dulles’ pressure that Diem refused to hold the promised elections for unification in 1956 and began his assault on all patriotic elements in the South. The guerrilla uprising followed inevitably from the clear awareness that the Americans would not permit a free vote in Vietnam. After all even Eisenhower had admitted that such a vote would go in favor of ho Chi Min  whose victorious war against French imperialism had made him a legend in his own life time in South as much this corrupt legacy  and had to continue to lie to their own people justify the American presence. Whilst the stink from the Diem gimme was reaching the four corners of the globe the great liberal Kennedy was sending his Green Berets to Vietnam to defend’ freedom; Johnson fought his 1964 election campaign against Goldwater on the promise of limiting the war. Yet sent his bombers over North Vietnam the moment he was elected to unleash bombing that exceeded the total tonnage of bombs dropped over Germany throughout the Second World War. The fact remains that the Americans are captives of their own policy. The strategy of creating pliable satellites around the globe to contain communism has today become counter-productive and has 300,000 American casualties in Vietnam. As long as American guns money and advice could contain insurrections or promote coups as in Iran and Guatemala, this was tolerable. But in Vietnam the strategy of a cheap victory failed and only the intervention of over half a million American troops prevented the Viet Cong from winning total victory as Carly as 1956.

Today after five years of bloody war, American policy is in shambles, its troops facing disaster and the battlefront now spreading to its cities all this has come about by the sheer guts and tenacity of the Viet Nemeses resistance. Outnumbered 4 to 1 in the Battlefield, faced with the mightiest arsenal of weaponry in history, they have brought American to its knees indeed  had the Russians been willing to provide their crack  pilots and MIG-23’s to neutralize American’s complete domination of the air, this war would have been over 4 years ago. On the ground the Viet Cong have, in spite of lower manpower and inferior firepower, proved immeasurably superior to the Americans, both in tactics and courage to survive at all the Americans have had to destroy most of Viet Nam’s Villages and towns and defoliate their country side. The low morale of the American conscript makes him call in bombers the moment there is the slightest danger to life and limp. The massacres at Song my, which are outraging the conscience of the American people are the inevitable result of American cowardice and desperation in the field. The killing of non-combatants has been commonplace throughout the war and maces up the bulk of the so-called body count of Viet Cong dead.

The rising cost of the war and toll in American life has finally begun to sicken America, and today the ‘silent majority’ is joining the young and the Americans to protest a war without end or meaning. The war has finally brought home to the Americans the sickness within their own society which sends soldiers to strange lands to kill women and children whilst racial injustice and poverty within America make a mockery of the American dream. This awareness of their own crisis will make future Vietnam all the more difficult. For this the Third world must owe a debt of blood to the Viet Nemeses people. They have highhandedly fought the war of the world’s oppressed and we will all be the involuntary beneficiaries. When we talk big about the fight against imperialism from the safety of our tea houses and drawing rooms let us remember that we have not shed a drop of blood or missed even a meal to pay for this struggle-our struggle –in Vietnam. The fact that a US President must think many times before he sends his marines to preserve capitalism in Pakistan makes us eternally indebted to his nation of heroes. 

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