The ugly agony of Indochina is made all the more tortuous by the delusive refusal of this nation to accept the culpability for decades of a morally indefensible policy whose final failure is now being revealed.
The urge to believe that we have done what was somehow right and honorable leads us to wash our hands of any sin, and then search to place on others the responsibility for the failure of American policy. So the administration blames the North Vietnamese for violating a treaty that was never initially respected by the South Vietnamese. Other diehard believers in the possibility of America’s cause blame Congress, as if, after spending $150 billion in Indochina, it came up $300 million short of the price of success. Congress, indignant over any suggestion of contributing to the collapse of a government it regularly enjoyed castigating, simply condemns that government once again, saying our efforts have been wasted on incompetents.
All this is so pathetic. Have we now no historical memory?
We have refused to admit that we have been wrong. And look at the suffering that has resulted from that pride.
Let us recall what we all know. A Vietnamese nationalist, who was also a communist, led a struggle against French colonialism and Japanese imperialism. He almost succeeded in 1945. But then the French came back. Since Secretary Acheson faced the vindictiveness of those who believed he had “lost China,” we quickly forgot our anti-colonial rhetoric and looked the other way. The costs domestically and internationally of “losing Vietnam,” as if it ever was ours to lose, propelled us to pay for France’s neo-colonial war, and then disregard the Geneva Agreement. Half of Vietnam could still be kept as proof our policy had not failed.
President Kennedy wanted to show Khrushchev he was tough and keep our pride intact, so he chose to “fight on the frontiers of freedom” in a client state whose leader we had installed and then later removed. When the military and political viability of our policy collapsed, in early 1965, we called the Vietnamese civil war a “war of aggression” as if fought between two historically sovereign states. That was the rationale for the troops and bombs of President Johnson’s policy which wreaked havoc over all the land.
President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger never questioned the intent of that policy, but only changed its tactics; Vietnamese deaths were increasingly substituted for American, and we were told that in order to withdraw our troops another peaceful and innocent country -- Cambodia -- had to be thrust into the onslaught of this war. So hundreds of thousands more of Indochina’s innocent ones fled the fury of our devastation dropped from the skies. By Christmas after the re-election in 1972, we bombed again to convince Hanoi we had no constraints about destroying their cities and those still living in them.
These were the costs of a “peace with honor,” which yielded neither peace for the people of Indochina nor any sort of “honor” for this nation.
Indochina has been a malignancy in the heart of this nation. Now, faced with the demise of all our efforts, if we shun from any admission of wrong, our soul will be poisoned by such failure.
So let us hear no talk at this late date about preserving American honor and prestige. Let us not console ourselves with vain assurances that we have “done all we could,” sacrificing so generously for a worthy cause which fate willed to failure.
No, our cause in Indochina has been wrong from the start. It has been a singular moral catastrophe for America, wrong in its initial purpose, and escalated to an outrage as we sacrificed lives in a vain attempt to keep unblemished our national pride.
But then what about our enemy? Are they exempt from any moral culpability for the grief inflicted upon Indochina? Of course not. They have fought brutally for their cause, believing like ourselves that terror and the bloodshed of innocents are acceptable means for achieving ends. That was an assumption shared by both Vietnamese parties in this war. All must be condemned for resorting to the immorality of violence.
So now, when our failure is unveiled before all the world, let us not delude ourselves further with talk of good motives; and let us near no rationalizing murmurs about the ineptitude of those we paid to fight for our policy.
If we are to recover from this dark night of our nation’s soul, it will only come through a clear and frank admission of wrong. Then we can endeavor to reconstruct a relationship with the world built not around our power, which has proved unable to secure the ends it sought, but structured instead upon alleviating the overwhelming human needs in a world divided between rich and poor.
And what do we do now, in these next few days, in Indochina? First, we can stop any further flow of blood and expedite a settlement with the insurgents in Cambodia and North Vietnamese and P.R.G. in Vietnam that recognizes in each case the political power they now possess militarily. The sooner the fighting is stopped, and the existing regimes in Phnom Penh and Saigon relinquish the power they have lost, the better the hope that non-aligned nationalist, neutralist, and “Third Force” elements will have in playing a moderating role in the regimes that will shortly be ruling those countries.
We have witnessed in America a spontaneous outpouring of compassion for those thousands and even millions of displaced people for whom ideology is irrelevant, for they only know the personal anguish that loss of home or family has inflicted upon them during these past days.
The human needs of all these people can become the starting point for the hope of a healed relationship between our people and the people of Indochina.
But above all, as a nation and as individuals, we can face in a spirit of repentance the full weight of the suffering which our collective pretensions, pride, and fear have inflicted upon others, and turn to heal these wounds within ourselves as well as those so injured.
When this article appeared, U.S. Sen. Mark O. Hatfield was a contributing editor to the Post American.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!