More thoughts on the US, Vietnam, and the Middle East
Eric Paul Nolte
Yesterday was Veteran's Day. I posted a blog piece with some thoughts on my experience as an Army veteran during the Vietnam war. A friend upbraids me for not commenting more knowledgeably on the history of Vietnam, but the history of Vietnam was not the point of my essay.
Of course there is much more to be said about the sad history of Vietnam and whether we should have gone into Vietnam in the first place after France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
Here I have some more thoughts on the Vietnam War and our wars that followed in the Middle East.
Now, Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam during the war, turns out to have been an interesting character with whom we might have dealt as an ally. Yes, he was a communist, but growing up at the time when Marx's idea of "scientific socialism" could have seemed most plausible, Ho came of age and embraced his socialist politics during his studies in Paris, in the years from just before and after the First World War. After his studies in Paris, he came back home to Vietnam filled with a passion to make his country a better place. He does not appear to have been a doctrinaire Marxist because his ideas also included an admiration for the intellectual origins of the American project, and especially for Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.
In the early 1960s, the US government blew the chance to establish a good relationship with Ho, apparently because of the widespread fact that communism was rapidly spreading throughout the world and because we were becoming increasingly afraid of the communist menace, based on the facts then emerging about the genocides that were taking place in communist regimes like the Soviet Union and Red China.
And yet Ho Chi Minh was a saint, compared to Pol Pot and some other Asians who came of age in the early 20th century, when a Marxian ethos hung over Paris. While Ho came back to southeast Asia as a communist, he also had a broadly humanist conception of what a good society might look like.
On the other hand, Pol Pot's dogmatic Marxism focused on establishing an absolute equality of outcome, and when his faction grabbed the levers of power, they gave us the killing fields of Cambodia.
On the other hand, Pol Pot's dogmatic Marxism focused on establishing an absolute equality of outcome, and when his faction grabbed the levers of power, they gave us the killing fields of Cambodia.
The US approach to the war in Vietnam seems to have been, as I said in my last blog post, a confused, sometimes cynical, sometimes merely dizzy, pose intended to… intended to do what? Until the last year of the war, it was certainly not strategically or tactically set up to win a decisive victory in Vietnam.
The US has long been sadly committed to rules of engagement that are guaranteed to get our soldiers needlessly killed. Another factor was that our will to win was never plainly established. We never actually declared war in Vietnam. It was considered to be a police action. The problem with suicidal rules of engagement for our troops would become even worse when the US became involved in the wars in the Middle East.
When we somehow lurched into peace talks with the North Vietnamese in 1972, they walked away from the table.
As I cited yesterday, Bruce Herschensohn, senior fellow at Pepperdine University, provided this account of what actually happened at the end of the Vietnam War and afterwards.
After North Vietnam walked away from the Paris peace accord in 1972, the Nixon Administration found its way to mounting a serious effort to achieve a decisive victory in Vietnam: the US therefore started bombing Hanoi and Haiphong with the intention of crippling their industrial and military power.
The effectiveness of this bombing shortly brought the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table and they signed the peace accord that ended the war and gave South Vietnam the assurance that they could continue as an independent country recognized by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong.
This peace stood without challenge for more than a year.
Then, after the disgraced Nixon was ousted from the White House in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Democrats won both houses of Congress and immediately put an end to our supply of military goods to South Vietnam, thereby reneging on the US promise to help South Vietnam remain an independent country.
The North Vietnamese attacked the South and shortly defeated them while the US officially abandoned them with the consequences I described in my essay, leading to the deaths of some half a million South Vietnamese as a result of summary execution, death by starvation, disease and, among the refugee Boat People who were attempting to escape from Vietnam by sea, death by drowning, exposure, and murder by pirates in the South China Sea.
As for all our other foreign military adventures since Vietnam, I largely agree with the libertarians who state that the purpose of government is to protect every individual's right to life, liberty, and justly acquired property. This purpose must include a constitution to spell out these rights, a police force to restrain domestic predators, courts to adjudicate disputes between even well-meaning parties, and--to the point here--a military to protect us from foreign attack.
One might ask, well, we were attacked on 9/11/2001, so shouldn't we defend ourselves? They attacked us! Okay, but now who are "they?" Hmm. Seems like the attackers were mostly Saudis backed by a lot of Iranian money. Oh, right, so now we should attack Iraq, of course! And Afghanistan, although their government policy had nothing to do with the attackers. Afghanistan was merely a place in the desert where Bin Laden's guys set up a training camp.
Another thing should be clear: we should not be engaged in the hopeless and ruinous effort to make ourselves into the world's police force. We can lend moral support to those who are fighting the bad guys (and citizens can do more) but unless the United States is threatened, we should not get involved in foreign entanglements. Had we held to such an idea of the purpose of government, we might never have suffered the horrible attacks of 9/11, and we certainly would not have so many American troops committed abroad. (Footnote: According to a 2016 Pew Research Center report that draws on US Defense Department data, we have more than 1,000 troops deployed in each of 16 countries around the world, with only one of these, Afghanistan, being in an active war. An interesting fact is that only about 9,000 of these troops are in Afghanistan, while 38,800 are in Japan, 34,000 in Germany, 24,000 in South Korea, 12,000 in Italy (for crying out loud--Italy has a third again more troops than in Afghanistan!), and 8,300 in the UK (almost as many as in Afghanistan, the actual war zone.) Of our 1.3 million troops on active duty, 193,000 are deployed abroad, 15% of the total number of troops.) While it seems clear that our efforts were crucial to defeating ISIS, in the long run, it seems likely that our wars in the Middle East are hopeless, given our benighted understanding of the Islamic part of that region. One might ask, but shouldn't we have struck back at our attackers of 9/11/2001? Yes, of course, we should defend ourselves against them! Hmm... but exactly who are "they" who attacked us? Seems like the attackers were largely Saudis backed by a lot of Iranian money. Oh, right, it was Saudi Arabia and Iran, so, of course, we should attack Iraq! And attack Afghanistan too! But it was not the Afghan government's policy to attack us, it simply happened that a bunch of Bin Laden's Islamists chose a place far out in the desert to make a training camp that was beyond almost anybody's awareness. In 1977 (just before the Iranian revolution) I spent a year working for a Saudi company, flying over much of the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. I am here to tell you that an appalling number of Muslims hate each other's guts, want each other dead over trivial differences of religious opinion, which they treat as unforgivable differences that must be punished by death. But one thing unites many of them: the belief that the US is, as the late Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini put it, the Great Satan, and Israel, the Little Satan. Nothing we do will turn these Muslim countries into models of liberal democracy. We should leave them the hell alone unless they attack us, and hope that they will create an Islamic reformation and an enlightenment comparable to the secular European Enlightenment that largely lifted the brutal Christian factions out of the devastating wars which in the 16th century alone resulted in the deaths of something like a third of the population of Europe--every man, woman, and child--murdered in the name of God. We can hope that a Muslim reformation and enlightenment will affirm such basic ideas (not yet universally affirmed among their most faithful adherents) as these: That flourishing and rational happiness are better than suffering; That truth is discovered by the light of logic applied to the evidence of experience, and that such knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance; That a mere difference of opinion is not a legitimate reason for killing somebody; That health and life are better than sickness and death. Osama bin Laden famously said that those in his circle love death more than the infidels love life. That there are many more powerful life-serving ideas to be found in the works of such thinkers as Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises. Not to point fingers at the Muslim world as singularly benighted, I should point out that Alex Epstein has recently commented that never before in history has so much astonishing and life-serving knowledge been available to humanity.
The existence of this cornucopia of true knowledge is the good news.
The bad news is that never before in history has it been so damned hard for average people to figure out which is the true and life-serving knowledge and which are the claims to true knowledge that can only lead us ultimately to destruction. Never before in history have there been so many crazy, destructive, and false claims to true knowledge! We have to work on ourselves first, of course. And we should beware of trying to convert other parts of the world when we ourselves still have such a long way to go. In the end, much of our foreign policy in the Muslim world is akin to taking a meter-long hardwood dowel and beating up on a buzzing hornet's nest as if it were a pinata. E P N 2018.1112
Rev. 2018.1201
Another thing should be clear: we should not be engaged in the hopeless and ruinous effort to make ourselves into the world's police force. We can lend moral support to those who are fighting the bad guys (and citizens can do more) but unless the United States is threatened, we should not get involved in foreign entanglements. Had we held to such an idea of the purpose of government, we might never have suffered the horrible attacks of 9/11, and we certainly would not have so many American troops committed abroad. (Footnote: According to a 2016 Pew Research Center report that draws on US Defense Department data, we have more than 1,000 troops deployed in each of 16 countries around the world, with only one of these, Afghanistan, being in an active war. An interesting fact is that only about 9,000 of these troops are in Afghanistan, while 38,800 are in Japan, 34,000 in Germany, 24,000 in South Korea, 12,000 in Italy (for crying out loud--Italy has a third again more troops than in Afghanistan!), and 8,300 in the UK (almost as many as in Afghanistan, the actual war zone.) Of our 1.3 million troops on active duty, 193,000 are deployed abroad, 15% of the total number of troops.) While it seems clear that our efforts were crucial to defeating ISIS, in the long run, it seems likely that our wars in the Middle East are hopeless, given our benighted understanding of the Islamic part of that region. One might ask, but shouldn't we have struck back at our attackers of 9/11/2001? Yes, of course, we should defend ourselves against them! Hmm... but exactly who are "they" who attacked us? Seems like the attackers were largely Saudis backed by a lot of Iranian money. Oh, right, it was Saudi Arabia and Iran, so, of course, we should attack Iraq! And attack Afghanistan too! But it was not the Afghan government's policy to attack us, it simply happened that a bunch of Bin Laden's Islamists chose a place far out in the desert to make a training camp that was beyond almost anybody's awareness. In 1977 (just before the Iranian revolution) I spent a year working for a Saudi company, flying over much of the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. I am here to tell you that an appalling number of Muslims hate each other's guts, want each other dead over trivial differences of religious opinion, which they treat as unforgivable differences that must be punished by death. But one thing unites many of them: the belief that the US is, as the late Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini put it, the Great Satan, and Israel, the Little Satan. Nothing we do will turn these Muslim countries into models of liberal democracy. We should leave them the hell alone unless they attack us, and hope that they will create an Islamic reformation and an enlightenment comparable to the secular European Enlightenment that largely lifted the brutal Christian factions out of the devastating wars which in the 16th century alone resulted in the deaths of something like a third of the population of Europe--every man, woman, and child--murdered in the name of God. We can hope that a Muslim reformation and enlightenment will affirm such basic ideas (not yet universally affirmed among their most faithful adherents) as these: That flourishing and rational happiness are better than suffering; That truth is discovered by the light of logic applied to the evidence of experience, and that such knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance; That a mere difference of opinion is not a legitimate reason for killing somebody; That health and life are better than sickness and death. Osama bin Laden famously said that those in his circle love death more than the infidels love life. That there are many more powerful life-serving ideas to be found in the works of such thinkers as Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises. Not to point fingers at the Muslim world as singularly benighted, I should point out that Alex Epstein has recently commented that never before in history has so much astonishing and life-serving knowledge been available to humanity.
The existence of this cornucopia of true knowledge is the good news.
The bad news is that never before in history has it been so damned hard for average people to figure out which is the true and life-serving knowledge and which are the claims to true knowledge that can only lead us ultimately to destruction. Never before in history have there been so many crazy, destructive, and false claims to true knowledge! We have to work on ourselves first, of course. And we should beware of trying to convert other parts of the world when we ourselves still have such a long way to go. In the end, much of our foreign policy in the Muslim world is akin to taking a meter-long hardwood dowel and beating up on a buzzing hornet's nest as if it were a pinata. E P N 2018.1112
Rev. 2018.1201
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