Lewy And Vietnam

[DominO123]

Please guys, don't ask me where I found this, I'm not obsessed I promess. I just came accross it after some research about his so-called investigation regarding the marines from the Naval Investigative Service, an investigation that he probably fabricated since it is nowhere to be found and that he is the only person having recorded its existance and that he claim not remembering if he saw it or someone told him about it.

 

If anyone here has read his book about the Armenians, this will sound familiar.

 

Marilyn Young, Vietnam Rewrite, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 10, 1978 pp.79-80

...

 

Still, most Americans continue to feel badly about the war. The bombing, the refugees, Mylai — all that. To resanctify America's imperial will, something will have to be done to take the bad taste away. There are academics equal to the task. Guenter Lewy, a political scientist at U-Mass.-Amherst confronts the problem directly. In a long essay in Commentary, Lewy examines the issue of war guilt and dismisses it. ‡ His purpose is clearly stated:

 

Examined dispassionately, American actions in Vietnam lend no support to the accusations of criminality or of gross immorality with which America's conduct of the war is charged. . . . Today it is more urgent than ever that this be understood, for the simple reason that Vietnam continues to haunt our minds and continues to exert a powerful influence on our conception of ourselves as a nation and of our role in the world. The task of clearing away the cobwebs of mythology which have helped to create the national trauma over Vietnam must begin — for the sake of historical truth as much as for our own self-confidence, our moral strength, and our future capacity to act responsibly in world affairs.

 

It is important to reflect on how Lewy conceptualizes his job: Vietnam was not a trauma because of what happened there, but because of the alleged mythology that has grown up about what happened. And Lewy will set the record straight so that we may face forward with confidence and a full count of moral fibers. Even the most 'presentist historian' would blush at the overtly political intent of Lewy's analysis. Few have so explicitly acknowledged the function of rewriting the past.

 

Lewy's overall interpretation of the war does not emerge until the very end of the article. There, in the course of criticizing American military policy on pragmatic grounds, he asserts that "high technology warfare created a widespread feeling of resignation, war weariness, and an unwillingness to go on fighting against the resolute opponent from the North." The destructiveness of the way the U.S. fought the war was discouraging to "our" Vietnamese, So it was not a people's war at all, but standard aggression from the North. And the spirit of resistance in the South could not survive Northern ferocity or, for that matter, American tactics. Furthermore, domestic revulsion against those tactics "undercut the willingness of America as a nation to prosecute the fight. . . ." In a democracy, Lewy rather regretfully notes, reliance on such weapons may be counterproductive.

 

Nowhere in the essay does Lewy approach a critical appraisal of the purposes of the war — his harshest judgment is that the U.S. was insensitive to political costs, too rigid in its "doctrine" (which he never defines) and unwise in its choice of tactics. Had we achieved what the Soviet Union did in Czechoslovakia, a relatively bloodless, inexpensive repression of a popular insurgency, everything would have been fine.

 

But bloody and expensive as it was, for Lewy Vietnam was neither illegal nor immoral. His main effort is to demonstrate that, under international laws governing the conduct of war, the United States fought a good clean fight. He admits that the existing body of laws was not really written to deal with the sort of warfare which actually occurred in Vietnam, but he makes do. There is something nightmarish about arguing with the particulars of Lewy's case. As he goes through the relevant laws of war one is not struck, as he wishes us to be, with the legality of American conduct but with the barbarity those rules allow. At all points he evades the central question: can a war against an entire population (he specifically condones drying up the water in which the guerrilla fish swim) be anything but criminal and grossly immoral.

 

A few examples will give the flavor of his whole approach. Take napalm. The rules of land warfare prohibit the use of weapons which cause "unnecessary suffering." The real criterion, Lewy tells us, is whether the suffering is disproportionate to the military advantage to be gained by its use. On this basis, no militarily decisive weapon has ever been ruled as causing unnecessary suffering. Then why continue the discussion? The rule is obviously a ludicrous one and his time might better be spent in thinking how to revise it. Instead, Lewy proceeds to defend the use of napalm. Discussing the 400,000 tons of it dropped during the war, Lewy notes that "fire as a weapon of war has a long history." Napalm, he argues, is especially effective against bunkers and fortified positions and not easily replaceable by other weapons. He does not discuss its use against other targets, nor does he mention the addition of white phosphorous to the basic mixture, or the development of weapons like fiber-glass CBUs, whose specific purpose was to cause maximum suffering and injury.

 

What about refugees and free-fire zones? Lewy argues that neither violate the Geneva Convention of 1949. Under that convention, the U.S. had the duty to remove the population for its own security. Would it have been right to leave them in a combat zone? Backhandedly, however, he recognizes that the relocation had other ends — to deprive the NLF of its base of support. This too seems reasonable to him, though one wonders what he would have thought of the removal to squalid refugee centers of, say, the population of Paris, in order to deprive the maquis of its base.

 

Lewy defends the use of Agent Orange (no proof positive it's toxic), the tiger cages (prisoners were not chained all the time, he points out, but only between 5 p.m. and 6 a.m. — and that was just because it was an old jail and they might have escaped), the tonnage used against north and south, and so on. His refutation of the charge that the U.S. was engaged in genocidal warfare is typical of his general logic: medical care in Vietnam improved with various AID programs; other programs worked to develop South Vietnam's economy; and this, combined with a "substantial rise in the standard of living," led to a population increase — so where's your genocide? Thus not only was the war not wrong, its side effects for the people of Vietnam were positively beneficial.

 

Another approach to defusing Vietnam is to wash its specific evils in the general blood of War Itself. War, you must remember, is hell — the generals are always the first to say it. Legitimacy is sought by associating the horrors of Vietnam with the horrors of such conflicts as World War II. If even World War II has its moral ambiguities — as indeed it does — then what can you expect of Vietnam?

 

Or consider the role of movies in the rewriting of history. The movie "A Bridge Too Far," which purports to be about the war in Europe is really giving us messages about Vietnam: wars are full of individual heroism on both sides, individual venality (especially among senior officers) on both sides. Why these individuals, good, bad or indifferent, are engaged in combat is not addressed. Two things are thereby achieved. The U.S. need never face the concrete issue of war guilt in Indochina, and war itself, as a hard but heroic arena, is preserved.

 

"The Boys in Company C" is frankly about Vietnam, and a more pornographic movie on the subject would be hard to imagine-though Hollywood may yet deliver. A typical Marine squad (updating the bomber crews of yesteryear) consisting in part of one street-smart and heroic black, one wimpy intellectual who writes it all down, one gung-ho country boy, and one hippie, goes to Vietnam after being humiliated and consequently toughened in boot camp. (The bad treatment is explicitly for their own good and the drill instructor has a heart of solid gold.) Their ship is rocket-attacked as they disembark, and while neither they nor the viewer ever see the enemy, we are treated to a scene of civilian panic and terror. The Vietnamese in the film are as typical as the Americans: lots of smiling prostitutes, one fat and corrupt ARVN general, one ARVN soccer team comprised of skinny and incompetent players and one village. The village is Roman Catholic and after having destroyed it at the behest of their incompetent and body-count crazy officer, the boys enter to discover a) not one civilian casualty and a young boy with a home-made bat. At once Company C drops its weapons and gets a sandlot baseball game going. Everyone is laughing and cheering amidst the smoking ruins of their homes. And then the fat and vicious ARVN general arrives, the Americans must leave, and while they are still within earshot, the fat general shoots the good kid they'd just played ball with. The boys are very depressed by this.

 

The point is that we lost the war because our good clean bascball-playing soldiers were led by incompetent officers allied with fat Vietnamese generals. Well-led, on our own or in alliance with a more decent, and perhaps thinner, ARVN officereorps, our boys would have cleaned up 'Nam in no time flat.

 

Memoirs about the war, and the reviews they receive, add to the war-is-brutal-but . . . school. Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War and Michael Herr's Dispatches received rave notices from just about every magazine and newspaper reviewer. Both focus sharply on how terrible it was: the heat, the dying, the heat, the fear, the heat, the killing and so on. There is real pain and anguish in both books and I do not wish to denigrate them. But they are also more than half in love with war itself. And for Caputo, at least, an American victory in Vietnam would somehow have made acceptable the atrocities he describes. War, Herr and Caputo tell us, is awful, just awful — but boy you should have been there!

 

There arc important cross-currents to the tide of revisionism I have been describing. Among journalists, Gloria Emerson 's Winners and Losers, in memoirs, Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, and Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, in fiction, O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, in political analysis, Noam Chomsky's most recent journal articles and his book, 'Human Rights'and American Foreign Policy. It should come as no surprise that they are minority voices. To grapple fully and honestly with the deepest meanings of the Indochina war would be to subject every institution in America to a corrosive scrutiny which they could not possibly survive intact. Jane Kramer, discussing post-war Germany, has remarked of Adenauer that he was "someone who could protect the country from its history. . . . He turned their evasions into something positive, and persuaded them, with his stern calm, that rituals of guilt and expiation could be undermining and indulgent." Allowing for differences in political culture, Ford and Carter and what Chomsky calls their "secular priesthood" of journalists and academics are trying to achieve the same result here.

 

We cannot expect anything very different from those whose chosen task it is to maintain the system. The job is ours, as it was during the war itself. We must learn the right lessons and get them heard: to oppose the war on the narrow ground that it didn't work is to condemn us to repeat the past. The lesson is not that you can't win against a people's war, but what the hell are you doing trying? And there are other lessons that must be remembered: aggressive military imperialism can be successfully defeated — by the people it seeks to oppress and by the citizens of its own country. To ensure that it stays defeated is an ongoing struggle.

Edited June 6, 2006 by QueBeceR