Vietnam, again

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The comparisons between the Vietnam War and the occupation of Iraq (still no official name for it) are inevitable. As with all historical analogies, the differences can be as critical as the similarities. If you find the same relationships between, say, guerrilla strategy and US response, despite the wide differences between conflicts (different countries, terrain, ethnic groups, languages, bones of contention, you name it), there's probably something important about that relationship.

What I have in mind is this post on Lawyers, Guns, and Money, a sharp critique of Christopher Hitchens' opinion piece comparing Vietnam and Iraq. Hitchens has always been one of those pundits whose initial words sound entirely reasonable. (At other times, he has a neat trick of getting your attention through deliberately provocative rhetoric, such as his assertion that Mother Teresa was overrated as a humanitarian.) As plausible as Hitchens first sounds, he quickly undermines his confidence in his statements, once you hear his reasons (sometimes bizarre and specious), or he lays out his conclusions (which frequently don't follow from his original statement).

The idea that the National Liberation Front (a.k.a. the Viet Cong) in Vietnam was a genuine "people's army," using the Maoist iconography of an outraged people taking arms against their government, is ludicrous. The NLF was neither popular, nor particularly gentle with the civilian population. In fact, Hitchens seems to be falling victim to exactly the kind of revolutionary romanticism of the Left that he usually scorns.

First, let's take the "popular" side of the equation. The Viet Cong, as a guerrilla army separate from the North Vietnamese Army, never achieved mass mobilization. The NLF had, at the time of its biggest operation, the Tet Offensive of 1968, the NLF fielded 67,000 fighters, out of a total population of approximately 18 million. That figure largely omits the members not in arms, including the infamous Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) that rooted the NLF in a village or hamlet. The 67,000 statistic does not represent the entire NLF combat strength, but it was the majority of it. (That was, of course, the point of Tet, countrywide attacks that were supposed to incite a mass uprising that never occurred.) The important point is, even if you were to double, triple, or quintuple the size of the NLF, it would still represent a tiny fraction of the South Vietnamese population.

The picture is a bit muddied, since the NLF was never a completely independent movement. People who depicted the NLF as merely the irregular arm of the North Vietnamese Army are just as wrong as those who argued that the NLF was completely independent of the NVA. The NLF depended on North Vietnam for training, equipment, and increasingly through the war, direction. (After the Tet Offensive, whatever independence the NLF had of its North Vietnamese patrons effectively ended.) NLF members used the same followed the same trails through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam that the NVA used.

Even if the NLF guerrillas were not a broad, independent movement, would it still be fair to say that the combined efforts of North Vietnam and the NLF represented "the people's will," "the tide of history," or some great political flood in whose path stood the US and South Vietnamese governments? While it's important not to underestimate the strength of Vietnamese nationalism and anti-colonialism, these are not ipso facto political commodities over which North Vietnam and the NLF had a monopoly. To use the canonical measure of the Vietnam War, the South Vietnamese peasant, the political cadre that had infiltrated the village from the North was just as alien to the average peasant as the propertied district chief.

Finally, there's the question of how the NLF treated the civilian population. While Americans were justifiably shocked over the abuses that South Vietnamese soldiers regularly inflicted on the average civilian, these rarely ever met the level of systematic terror that the NLF applied. Secret VCI members would observe who had cooperated with the American and South Vietnamese authorities when they occupied a village, and then execute reprisal assassinations. An NLF guerrilla commanders forcibly enlisted a young men, just to keep their families' loyalties secure. NLF units bombarded with rockets or mortars villages that had swung in the direction of the South Vietnamese government.

While the NLF did not use suicide bombings in the fashion of Al Qaeda in Iraq or other Iraqi insurgent groups, the NLF was hardly gentle with the civilian population. In fact, many NLF members, particularly ones from the North, were deeply distrustful of "the people," whom they considered to be impossibly ignorant about revolutionary matters.

Compare the NLF with the Continental Army in the American War of Independence, and then with Al Qaeda in Iraq. Which insurgent army does the NLF more closely resemble? And which insurgency—the one commanded by Washington, or the other by Zarqawi—has the better claim to the mantle of "people's army"?

Only a few weeks ago, I was talking to my daughter about the Vietnam War, to help her organize her notes for a class project on the conflict. My advice to her then applies equally now to Christopher Hitchens: "The Vietnam War may have been misconceived from the start, and badly bungled in its execution, particularly in the early years of the war. However, don't think for a minute that the NLF were anything but nasty SOBs."

As the NVA and NLF showed, being something less than a "people's army" doesn't make it impossible to win. However, the Sunni groups in the Iraqi insurgency don't have a patron like North Vietnam standing behind them. However, if the violence between Sunnis and Shi'ites continues to escalate, the Shi'ites can always turn to Iran for help—as they have already.

Comments

[Tom H.]

It's worth noting that the American Revolution was actually a nasty civil war, too. I'm most familiar with stories from the South, but the first thing Google returns that looks well-footnoted talks about the Mohawk Valley (http://www.fortklock.com/hh7thousand.htm):

On the one hand, "Should the Committee of Safety believe the man of the house posed a threat to the area (i.e., by providing food, shelter, or information to British scouts) then that man was jailed. The property and possessions of Loyalists were seized and sold at auction. Their wives and children were incarcerated in homes in Schenectady, Albany, or some other designated location."

On the other, after British and Indian raids, "at least 1,200 farms had been left uncultivated and that 354 families had abandoned their homes and left the county. In some settlements, such as Cherry Valley, Springfield, and Harpersfield, there was no one left."

"Of the estimated 10,000 white population in 1777, approximately 1,000 were killed or taken prisoner. Some 2,500 to 3,000 Loyalists left the valley and about 3,000 Patriots abandoned their farms.19"

[J.]

Well said. I saw Hitchen's article and had a similar reaction to his opinion. He may write well, but what he writes is unpalatable.

[Carlos]

I don't think that estimating the size of the NLF will tell you much about its popularity. The size of the USA army is very small in relation to the total population too, but it's very popular nonetheless. Insurgent organizations are usually small in number, regardless of their popularity.

[MSS]

Implicit here is that the original "classic" Maoist insurgency--that led by Mao himself--was both popular and gentle with the civilian population. Was it?

While it is certainly true that Mao achieved mass mobilization, and even at the end converted the guerrilla force into something resembling a conventional army, what does this really say about its "popularity"? And the guerrillas certainly exercised their own share of terror against civilians they suspected of collaborating with the enemy.

[Alan Mclaughlin]

Apart from ignoring the fact that the US had no right to even be in Vietnam ,let alone creating and then sustaining a completely puppet regime with no legitimacy whatsoever,this piece incredibly omits any mention of the savage violence of the American assault on the whole on the (in comparison)largely defenceless population of the region.
This kind of blinkered ideological garbage masquerading as analysis would be treated with derision in any other country in the world.

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