Negotiating While Fighting: Peace Initiatives, British Policy and the Vietnam War
FCO
To take a completely random example, I am collecting different countries‘ materials on the Cuban missile crisis. I teach a graduate course at George Washington University on the Cold War. For the term paper I had a student from Switzerland, who of course knew German, go back to her own country‘s archives and get documents on the Cuban missile crisis. Sure enough, there turned out to be a cable from the Swiss ambassador in Washington saying that at a meeting with a group of ambassadors Dean Rusk took him aside and said, ‗Don‘t put my name on this, but can you have your ambassador in Havana request a meeting with Fidel Castro and say A, B and C?‘ This is completely missing from the American record. This possibility exists for almost any topic you can imagine.
Simon Shelly I am Simon Shelly, currently attached to the human resources directorate in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a self-confessed Vietnam dilettante. I have a sub-O-level exam question for our three academics. Was South Vietnam‘s fate sealed the minute US military presence snowballed into six figures?
James Hershberg It was not necessarily viewed as an arbitrary number, but certainly the decision to ‗Americanise‘ the war helped to de-legitimate a government that never fully became legitimate in the first place, because the Saigon Government was competing with an enemy that had much better nationalist credentials. This was something some US officials recognised. John Kennedy said, ‗We can‘t win the war for them‘, but in the same interview he said he believed in the domino theory. This is another Catch-22. How can we win the war for a country that is not willing to fight it? To be fair, the ARVN, the South Vietnamese Army, lost many thousands of people; they made great sacrifices, but this is a huge debate. Was this a ‗winnable‘ war? There is huge controversy about this. Books on this have been published: Lewis Sorley‘s A Better War and Michael Lind‘s The Necessary War. It is still the contention of admirers of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger that the war was lost in Washington by Democrats, not on the battlefield. I remember a conference in Hanoi of former US and North Vietnamese military people. The US military people said, ‗We never lost a battle.‘ The reaction was, ‗Yes, but that is irrelevant because it was a political war as much as a military one.‘ Was the war inherently unwinnable? I would say probably, but that is intrinsically an unanswerable question.
Matthew Jones I would concur with that. As soon as you start Americanising the war you introduce large numbers of foreign troops and there is an anti-foreign reaction. The strength of Vietnamese nationalism was consistently underrated in Washington. The most crucial year in Vietnamese 20th century history is 1945 when Vietnam declared itself independent. For many Vietnamese, what happened in 1975 was the completion of a process that had begun 30 years earlier.
Andrew Preston I hate to be boring, but I concur with my two colleagues. I do not really think it was a winnable war. Once the war was Americanised it became mostly unwinnable, especially once Westmoreland had opted for the strategy and tactics of search and destroy. It was perfectly counter-productive to the type of war that the US should have been fighting. If you had a better war strategy before in 1965, could the US have won? I am still sceptical for the reasons I gave in my talk. What had been acceptable in warfare was no longer acceptable, not just to the American public but a broad swath of world public opinion.
9 May 2012
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