The American War in Vietnam. John Marciano
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Although the French CP was to become the largest political party in France, it was afraid of losing votes if it “acquiesced in the liquidation of France’s overseas empire.” It remained in the French cabinet and aided the effort to regain control over Vietnam. This support continued until late 1949 “when the party finally adopted a policy of demonstrations and strikes aimed at obstructing the movement of troops and supplies to Vietnam.”31 The claim of an international and monolithic Communist solidarity on behalf of the Vietnamese struggle against the French, therefore, is wrong.
According to historians Michael Hunt and Steven Levine, at the close of the Second World War the United States was far and away the most powerful nation in the world, “approaching the [peak] of their domination in eastern Asia” at the same moment as the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in 1945. But Washington did not listen to the vast majority of Vietnamese who had great expectations that it would support their anticolonial struggle against France. What happened in Vietnam, as earlier in the Philippines and South Korea, was that the United States “would take the place of one colonial power and set to work with collaborating in yet another exercise” to maintain the empire. When it came to policies that enhanced national self-determination, the rhetorical “support for independence movements was so blatantly violated by on-the-ground U.S. policies that it generated damaging charges of hypocrisy.”32
Hypocrisy is a mild term, however, given the death and destruction caused by French colonialists and the refusal of the United States to support the Vietnamese resistance. Whether it was Woodrow Wilson’s championing of “democracy” at the same time that U.S. authorities at the Versailles Peace Conference refused to hear Ho’s plea for recognition of the Vietnamese, or opposition to nationalist movements after the Second World War, one should never listen to what American officials say about colonialism and nationalism. Rather, one should always see what they actually do.
According to Gabriel Kolko, it was the Chinese Revolution in late 1949 that caused the United States to reconsider the importance of the French-Vietnamese conflict, even though Washington had supported the French from the end of the Second World War. His view is that Vietnam was a “global” concern for Washington; and it was for this reason that after 1950 it “became the most sustained and important single issue.… Victory rather than a political settlement was necessary because of … other basic and more permanent factors in guiding U.S. policy.” U.S. officials were “convinced that the ‘domino’ theory would operate should Vietnam remain with the Vietnamese people,” that is, other countries in Southeast Asia would collapse if the Vietnamese independence struggle won.33 The dominant perspective thus allowed powerful U.S. officials and their corporate media allies to accuse the Vietnamese revolutionary movement of being controlled and directed from Moscow, a false assertion.
A CIA report, however, revealed that the Viet Minh army represented the “vast majority” of Vietnamese, including “a majority of the generally anti-Communist Catholics” who supported Ho Chi Minh against the French. This report had no influence on U.S. policy, because early in the French-Vietnamese war, leaders in Washington became “wholly convinced” that the Soviet Union was behind the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle and other revolutionary nationalist movements around the world—and would subvert Washington’s “attainment of its political and economic objectives of a reformed, American-led capitalist world order.”34
The long struggle for liberation from French colonialism ended at the battle of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954, when the Vietnamese, led by the Viet Minh, crushed the French forces and gained a historic victory for the independence movement, the first major battlefield defeat of a European colonial power after the Second World War. Through a powerful nationalist appeal the Communist-led Viet Minh “had organized and inspired a poor, untrained, ill-equipped population to fight and ultimately win against a far better equipped and trained army.” On the fifth anniversary of the battle at Dien Bien Phu, General Giap, who led the revolutionary forces, wrote about its “great historic truth: a colonized and weak people, once it has risen up and is united in the struggle and determined to fight for its independence and peace, has the full power to defeat the strong aggressor army of an imperialist country.”35
Almost a hundred thousand French soldiers—including colonial troops from Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—died in what the Vietnamese call the Anti-French Resistance War, as well as an estimated 300,000 Viet Minh soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of civilians perished.36 This staggering human toll was a prelude to an even greater loss of life in the American war. The end of the colonial war also affected the French empire, as Algerians who fought in Vietnam returned to their own country to resist French colonialism there. Remarkably, large numbers of exploited French colonial subjects fought and died for their colonial master, once again revealing the power of rulers to get those they exploit to fight for the very system abusing them.
The Geneva Conference and Agreements
As the French-Vietnamese military struggle was ending, a conference met in Geneva, Switzerland, to settle the conflict. The Geneva Agreements established a cease-fire line in Vietnam, behind which both sides withdrew their military forces, the French to the south, the Viet Minh to the north. The French were to withdraw from Vietnam, and by 1956 an election would be held to reunify the country. All knowledgeable persons knew that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would win, something the United States would not allow. It blocked the election it was sure to lose, a decision that shaped all else that followed in Vietnam after 1956. The National Security Council (NSC) understood the propaganda issue involved: “The overall U.S. position in the world would be harmed by U.S. identification with a policy which appears to be directed towards avoidance of elections,” and “world opinion, and for that matter, domestic U.S. opinion, would have difficulty understanding why the U.S. should oppose in Vietnam the democratic procedures which the U.S. had advocated in Korea, Austria and Germany.”37 This internal NSC admission was not shared with the public.
British filmmaker and journalist Felix Greene reports that the deadlock over issues at Geneva was broken when Ho’s government made some far-reaching concessions. Although the Viet Minh controlled much of the country, they agreed to a temporary division of Vietnam that would give them only about half of it. They specified very particular conditions, however: the temporary separation was not to be permanent; elections were to be held by 1956 for reunification; and neither of the temporary zones could establish “international alliances or receive military help from the outside.” Every government at Geneva accepted these provisions, except the Americans and the French-installed regime in the South.38 The United States refused to sign the final agreements, but it pledged that it would not “disturb or interfere with what had been settled there.” It also stated that it favored the principle of free elections under United Nations supervision and that countries in the region should determine their own future. In fact, the United States would kill nearly four million Vietnamese to keep them from truly exercising such self-determination.
As is now known, at the time of the Geneva Agreements, CIA agents under the direction of Colonel Edward Lansdale were engaged in sabotage in and around Hanoi. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who covered the war for two decades, reported that Ho Chi Minh “was aware of secret aggression against the North, immediately after the Geneva Accords went into effect.” He and the former Viet Minh were “aware of the American hand behind false rumors—such as those, spread by the Lansdale team, of Chinese troops raping North Vietnamese girls—and the propaganda campaign to scare Catholics into fleeing to the South to escape the A-bombs [that] would be used against the ‘pagans’ who remained in the North.” Burchett reminds us that Lansdale wrote with pride how one of his teams “had spent the last days of Hanoi in contaminating the oil supply of the bus company … and in writing detailed notes of potential targets for future paramilitary operations.” In other words, the United States used a covert operation to disturb the Geneva Agreements that it solemnly pledged it would not disturb.39
The head of the French delegation in Geneva, Jean Chauvel, put U.S. actions and intentions around the proposed 1956 elections—that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would have won hands down—in their proper perspective: “As far as they are concerned, the general elections must be prevented by any excuse