Real War (19 page)

One of the hidden costs of our abandonment of South
Vietnam may well be the proliferation of nuclear weapons to the small nations faced with overwhelming hostile forces who used to trust the U.S. guarantee and no longer do. Those who protested against Vietnam to avoid a nuclear war may have helped to bring one closer.

In Indochina the consequences of the American defeat have been tragic and profound. The United States got out of the war, but the killing did not stop. In Cambodia, it accelerated massively when the Pol Pot regime launched the most brutal bloodbath in recent history.

Estimates of deaths have been staggering; so too has been the brutalization of the populace. Refugees reported that for “serious mistakes, such as stealing a banana . . ., you would be executed immediately.” Other reports indicated that the Khmer Rouge had set aside a period of two days, once or twice a year, as the “mating period.” It was only during this time that men and women were allowed to talk to each other, “except for talk about developing the country.” As for those who violated this statute, a refugee reports, “I knew of about twenty young men and women caught flirting, who were executed.” Complaining about food also became a capital crime in the brave new world the Khmer Rouge was building, one in which they boasted, “Our Communism will be better than in Russia or China, where there are still classes. . . . ” So did joking; one refugee told of a person who was executed because he was “too jovial.” At one point it was announced that holding hands was henceforth a capital crime.

In 1979 a new wave of disaster overcame Cambodia as Pol Pot's scorched-earth tactics and North Vietnam's starvation policy caught the Cambodian people in a vise of horror. The world watched aghast as the communist factions tore the remnants of the country to shreds. Some estimate that half of Cambodia's population may have perished already.

In South Vietnam the communists were more subtle in their methods, but they moved just as relentlessly to uproot the old order and replace it with their own. The thousands of boat people have served to remind us starkly of the terrors of life under that new order, especially since one fourth or more of the refugees, it is estimated, drowned before reaching shore.

In June 1979 U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, speaking
in Bonn, West Germany, stated that “There is no sense in trying to cast blame or condemn anyone” for the atrocities practiced by the new communist governments of Southeast Asia. He went on to suggest that these atrocities “automatically” could be traced to America's involvement in Vietnam. This is malevolent nonsense. Worse, it is self-serving nonsense. Many of those who wish to close their eyes to today's horrors in Southeast Asia also wish to close everyone else's eyes to their own sabotage of the American effort there, and the ghastly effects that sabotage has brought about. But like the blood on Lady Macbeth's hand, it is a permanent stain.

•  •  •

The U.S. failure to keep its commitments to South Vietnam led to national tragedies as the countries of Indochina were engulfed in a modern-day holocaust. But the effects on the leadership class of the United States may make the loss of the war in Vietnam an even greater international tragedy. Some think the “lessons” of Vietnam are: it is dangerous for the United States to have power because we may use it wrongly; we should avoid more Vietnams in the future by not getting involved when small nations, even those that are friends and allies, are threatened by communist aggression; the United States is on the “wrong side” of history in opposing communist revolutionary forces in Asia and Africa and Latin America; it is impossible to win wars against communist-supported guerrillas; we should look after ourselves and leave the responsibility for leadership of the free world to others.

These are the wrong lessons, and if our leadership class follows them, our country and the West will go down the road to destruction. These lessons confuse the abuse of power with its intelligent application.

Since our failure in Vietnam, Americans have been unduly gun-shy about using force, an inhibition the Soviets and their proxies have not shared. We have stood aside and let the Soviets go unopposed into Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf. They have not become stuck in a quagmire; unfortunately for us, they are expert practitioners in the arts of war and have used their power skillfully. Unless the United States shakes the false lessons of Vietnam and puts the “Vietnam
syndrome” behind it, we will forfeit the security of our allies and eventually our own. This is the real lesson of Vietnam—not that we should abandon power, but that unless we learn to use it effectively to defend our interests, the tables of history will be turned against us and all we believe in.

•  •  •

More nuclear power in our arsenal would not have saved Vietnam. More U.S. conventional forces would not have saved Vietnam. Vietnam was lost, not because of a lack of power, but because of a failure of skill and determination at using power. These failures caused a breach in public trust and led to a collapse of our national will. Finally, the presidency was weakened by the restrictions Congress placed on the President's war-making powers and by the debilitating effects of the Watergate crisis. The South Vietnamese demonstrated in 1972 that they could effectively stop an invasion on the ground if they were adequately armed and provided with air support. Revolutionary wars cannot be fought and won by outside armies. But if those within a nation threatened by guerrillas are adequately armed, trained, and supplied, they can meet and defeat a guerrilla attack, provided they are fighting for their own independence and freedom. Under the Nixon Doctrine we should certainly do as much for those who are fighting to defend their independence as the Soviet Union does for those who are attempting to destroy it.

Vietnam did
not
prove that guerrilla wars are unwinnable or that “revolutionary” forces are invincible. Quite the contrary: our side won the guerrilla war, and it was winning the conventional war—until the United States pulled the rug out from under its ally by drastically cutting back supplies while the Soviets poured huge quantities of arms and ammunition into the arsenals of their ally. When that happened, Vietnam finally fell to the same kind of large-scale conventional assault we successfully repelled in Korea.

•  •  •

As
William Colby has pointed out, “In an ironic asymmetry, the Communists initiated the war against Diem in the late 1950s as a people's war and the Americans and the Vietnamese
initially responded to it as a conventional military one; in the end the Thieu government was fighting a successful people's war, but lost to a military assault. The Presidential Palace in Saigon was not entered by a barefoot guerrilla but by a North Vietnamese tank with an enormous cannon.”

Revolutionary war will remain in the Soviets' repertoire, but now—partly as a result of Vietnam—they have been emboldened to a greater use of more direct means as well.

The Soviets started out in Vietnam by giving matériel to the communist guerrillas; they later graduated to supplying massive arms for North Vietnam's conventional invasion of the South. Then in 1975, having succeeded in Southeast Asia, they stepped aggression up a notch by shipping Cuban proxy troops across the Atlantic to achieve the conquest of Angola. On Christmas Eve in 1979 they escalated to a new level, sending the Red Army itself into Afghanistan, the “hinge of Asia's fate,” to crush a rebellion against a communist government imposed by coup less than two years earlier. The next logical Soviet step is use of the Red Army against a friend or ally of the West.

Hanoi seems as determined as ever to fulfill its long-proclaimed ambition to conquer not only South Vietnam but all of Indochina. In Cambodia the Vietnamese are pressing what may be the final offensive against the Cambodians opposing them. In Laos they have dropped poison gas on hill tribesmen who oppose their rule. Thailand is feeling the heat of Vietnamese ambitions; its armed forces of 216,000 are outnumbered 5:1 by the North Vietnamese war machine. Vietnam's armed forces now approach the size of India's—the second most populous country in the world. This medium-sized country now has the fifth largest armed forces in the world, half the size of the American forces. If they complete the conquest of Indochina and then decide to move on to the rest of Southeast Asia, it will take an enormous effort to stop them.

Had the United States stayed the course and taken the action necessary to ensure adherence to the peace agreement of January 23, 1973, the Soviet leaders would have been less tempted to engage in their aggressive probes in other parts of the world. Our friends and allies would have less doubt about
the reliability of American will as well as the effectiveness of American power. And most important, the American people could look back on ten years of sacrifice of men and money in Vietnam with pride rather than with apology and frustration, which lead so many to say, even where America's vital interests may be involved, “Do nothing—no more Vietnams.”

China? There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world.

—Napoleon

Seek truth from facts.

—Deng Xiaoping

China now is awakening, and it may soon move the world.

Exotic, mysterious, fascinating—China from time immemorial has tantalized the imagination of Western man. However, even the prescient Tocqueville, who predicted 150 years ago that the United States and Russia would emerge as two great contending world powers, could not have foreseen that the nation that potentially could decide the world balance of power in the last decades of the twentieth century, and that could become the most powerful nation on earth during the twenty-first century, would be China.

China is a nation of almost limitless possibilities that is only beginning to realize those possibilities. The seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries all exist side by side in China. Peasants still stoop over the rice fields as they have for centuries, planting the shoots individually by hand. They walk barefoot along dusty paths with long wooden poles over their shoulders, baskets of produce slung from the poles. Many live in mud huts. In the central cities cars and trucks
share crowded streets with rustic horse-drawn carriages, tractor carts, and bicycle carts, as well as with masses of pedestrians and swarms of bicycles. For all its huge population, China still has only limited military strength, primitive agriculture, and a largely preindustrial economy. But it has enormous natural resources, and some of the ablest people in the world—a fourth of all the people alive today. It could emerge during the twenty-first century as the strongest power on earth, and also one of the more advanced economically—if it successfully completes its transition to the modern world, and if it continues to move away from doctrinaire communist economic theories.

Which of its possible courses China takes might eventually determine whether the West survives.

Getting to know China is more than the work of a lifetime. The most a person can hope for is some understanding of some parts of the Chinese experience, and the more deeply one probes into that experience, the clearer it becomes that the mysteries are infinite. Teilhard de Chardin once advised, “Write about China before you have been there too long; later you would break your pen.”

But if we can never know everything about China, we can learn something about it—particularly what we might reasonably expect in the way of Chinese behavior. China's present leaders are statesmen with a keen sense of the world who think in global terms. They also are communists. They also are Chinese. Since Mao's death they have seemed to grow less communist and more Chinese, less the prisoners of ideology and more pragmatic, less revolutionary and more traditional.

•  •  •

I have visited China three times, in 1972, 1976, and 1979. The first time, in 1972, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were in power. The second time, in 1976, Zhou was dead; Mao and Hua Guofeng were in power. The third time, in 1979, Mao also was dead, and power was shared between Hua and Deng Xiaoping.

In China, as the leaders have changed, so also have the policies—whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen. It could even be said that for China watchers today the key word is
change:
China is changing, and the changes in China, if they continue, may profoundly change the world.

As with Russia, we can only hope to understand present-day China if we know something about its past. Even the changes now taking place have roots in the past, and in some respects are a return to tradition. More than most countries, China is a product of its past, and its history is unique. Other nations come and go, other empires rise and fall, but China endures; China is forever.

China's civilization stretches back four thousand years—the oldest continuous civilization in the world. While Greek and Roman civilizations rose and fell, China's continued. While Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages, Chinese learning, science and philosophy flourished uninterrupted. China is the only large region of the world that has never been under Western rule. Even Japan, which never lost its independence, was run by General MacArthur in the years after World War II. China has repeatedly been invaded, but each time it has absorbed the invaders and eventually converted them. Over the centuries this has produced a sort of stoicism; in 1976 Hua Guofeng commented to me, “Let the Russians come in. They may get in a long way, but they will never get out.”

China's past is distinguished by more than longevity, resiliency, and culture. Historically, the Chinese saw China as “the Middle Kingdom”—as the center of the world, the celestial empire, “all under Heaven.” Other nations existed, but they were barbarian, of no consequence. The Chinese became aware of other civilizations, but these were too remote to be viewed as either threats or alternatives. To the Chinese, theirs was not
a
civilization, but
the
civilization. In 1793 the emperor Qian Long rebuffed a British trade mission by writing to King George III: “The Celestial Empire, ruling all within the four seas . . . does not value rare and precious things. . . . We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country's manufactures.” As late as the nineteenth century, Chinese maps still showed a vast China at the center of the world, with a scattering of tiny islands—with names such as France, England, America—in the sea around it.