John F. Kerry, Historian and Moralist

Responding to a Wall Street Journal columnist’s criticism of his nonchalant claim that the communist takeover of South Vietnam didn’t have untoward consequences – “We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia, and it didn’t happen” – Senator John Kerry says [link probably for subscribers only, so I quote him in full],

James Taranto misinterpreted my words and misreads history (“‘It Didn’t Happen,’” Opinion, July 26). I know the tragedy that followed a tragic war. John McCain and I led the effort to locate American POWs and ultimately normalize relations with Vietnam. I traveled to Cambodia to help create a genocide tribunal to bring to justice the butchers of the killing fields.

But what did not happen was the region-wide war or immediate chaos predicted by many who believed we had to maintain our massive military presence in Vietnam. A brutal dictatorship consolidated power in Vietnam, the region’s refugee crisis worsened and two years after we left Vietnam, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge launched a genocide.

Mr. Taranto mistakenly views the violence after 1973 as a direct result of our withdrawal. In fact, the violence arose from the conditions that led us to withdraw: a Vietnamese civil war we couldn’t stop supported by a Cambodian insurgency we couldn’t bomb into submission. It’s horrifying that so many South Vietnamese suffered. But, even accepting Mr. Taranto’s estimate of 165,000 Vietnamese deaths – double that of most academic sources – this is a significant decrease from the preceding eight years when 450,000 civilians and 1.1 million soldiers were killed.

We should not repeat the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq, but let’s have an honest debate rather than a hysterical one. The agony of exiting a quagmire is that there are few certainties and no good options. That choice was created not by the advocates for changing course, but by the architects of a disastrous war.

The number of distortions and falsifications in these four paragraphs is remarkable. What the supporters of South Vietnam predicted was precisely that “a brutal dictatorship” would “consolidate power in Vietnam”. They further predicted, quite accurately, that it would kill tens of thousands of Vietnamese, imprison hundreds of thousands and drive millions into exile, and that the same catastrophes would overwhelm Laos and Cambodia. No one foresaw “region-wide war or immediate chaos”, because, unfortunately, once the U.S. cut off all aid to the free nations of Southeast Asia, in December 1974, no one there had the wherewithal to resist the communists.

South Vietnam succumbed not to civil war but to a conventional invasion from the North. Indigenous guerilla activity had largely come to an end after the failure of the Tet Offensive in 1968. The supposedly southern-bred Viet Cong increasingly consisted of Northern infiltrators, as Hanoi itself openly declared after the war. In 1972, after American troop levels had been reduced drastically, the North launched its first invasion. The South Vietnamese Army, bolstered by American air and naval support, defeated it so soundly that the communists in January 1973 accepted a peace agreement that, if its terms had been adhered to, would have permanently ended Northern aggression against the rest of Southeast Asia. For the next two years, South Vietnam was reasonably peaceful, while neither the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia nor the Pathet Lao in Laos made any appreciable progress in their wars against admittedly inept anti-communist governments.

But the American Left did not want a noncommunist Southeast Asia to endure as a monument to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It pooh-poohed Hanoi’s violations of the Paris Accords, and the post-Watergate Congress cut off military assistance, to the point of forbidding ammunition sales to the South Vietnamese armed forces. When the North invaded again, in 1975, the South lacked the means, not the will, to defend itself. The U.S. Seventh Fleet, which could have pulverized the invaders, was strictly forbidden to intervene.

South Vietnam’s collapse in April 1975 led swiftly and inevitably to the Khmer Rouge takeover in Phnom Penh, notwithstanding Senator Kerry’s artless attempt to put as much distance as possible between that disastrous event and America’s abandonment of its allies.

Senator Kerry’s moral calculus is as disturbing as his historical revisionism. I suppose that, if South Vietnam had surrendered to Hanoi in 1963, the aggregate death toll there would have been lower. Similarly, if Europe had declined to oppose Hitler, millions of lives, a great many of them American, would have been saved. And we could avoid a lot of future deaths by hailing Osama bin-Laden as the Caliph of Islam and submitting to his beneficent rule. Resistance to tyranny costs lives and fortune. By Senator Kerry’s implicit calculations, it isn’t worth it: The murders carried out by communist Vietnam or Ba’athist Iraq are weighed equally with the sacrifices of soldiers in combat against them.

In his final paragraph, Senator Kerry writes of “the agony of exiting a quagmire”. In Vietnam, we didn’t “exit a quagmire”; we abandoned an ally, at a point where very little was needed from us. In Iraq, we are at an earlier stage, best compared, perhaps, to South Vietnam circa 1963. Of course we can “exit”, saving a few American lives and a little American money, at the price of inspiring all of our enemies with confidence that we won’t fight anywhere else either. The people of Iraq can’t exit so easily, but Senator Kerry seems to care as little for them as for the South Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. A few years from now, he will be smilingly at work to normalize relations with post-democratic Baghdad, or will sponsor the establishment of a “genocide tribunal” for the Middle East. That was, after all, a great comfort to the dead in Cambodia.

Further reading: I haven’t footnoted this post, because two remarkable histories contain all the needed references and background: Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 by Mark Moyar and A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley. Eventually, when history supersedes contemporary politics, America’s treatment of Vietnam will be recognized as an unmitigated national disgrace.

Update (8/8/07): Best of the Web published readers’ responses to Senator Kerry on August 6th and 8th. The second set adds an important point: Senator Kerry compares the number of post-war murders by the Vietnamese communists to “1.1 million soldiers” killed during “the preceding eight years”. He does not note that three-quarters of those casualties were enemy troops.

[C]onsider what Kerry is claiming: that it [would have been] worth sacrificing the lives and freedom of the South Vietnamese – our ally – in order to prevent casualties on the enemy side. Imagine what the world would look like if we’d taken that approach during World War II – or, for that matter, what it will look like if we take it with Muslim terrorists.