Lessons of Vietnam Revisited

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I'm just back from Vietnam and Cambodia, after two weeks in Thailand. I imagine you would not recognize much anymore—but perhaps I am wrong about that. The famous hotels of Saigon that you may have known have all been redone, plus myriad new ones have sprung up. In a sense this "Communist" state is more capitalist than George W. Bush's fondest dreams. People who were in Hanoi five years ago told us it had been a bicycle city then; now it is motor scooters—millions of them. And they are being added at the rate of thousands a month, even in a few days. That is the basic signature item of Vietnam's youth culture—scooters and cell phones.

Government bigwigs are in on the bonanza of land values, because they know where investment will go next. Outside Hanoi—which remains an ugly stepsister to Saigon—huge factories have sprung up employing thousands of Vietnamese, who do not have labor unions to protect them, or unemployment compensation or good health plans supplied by the employer. And, we are told, the population which is 65 percent under 30, have little interest in politics. A major source of income for Vietnam comes from foreign remissions of the overseas Vietnamese—family members of the boat people. These funds will dry up, but tourism has become a major factor with more than 5 million Americans visiting last year. In addition, the U.S. invested (we are told) $10 billion last year.

A classic scene of the way Vietnam has gone would be China Beach and the Danang area—on the ocean side of the main road are (quite literally) miles of luxury hotels. Cemeteries have been moved, with a small compensation to families, who then can't buy new houses because values have gone up. On the other side of the road, the ruins of the old airbase. And this is true of several of the cities we visited, Nha Trang, Dalat, etc. We had dinner at a luxury hotel on the beach at Nha Trang near Cam Ranh Bay—and it was out on the beach that could have been Hawaii. One entrepreneur purchased an island near Nha Trang for less than $100,000. Now his hotel and spa and the island are worth $7 million. People sunbathe while Vietnamese wait on them with cold drinks, and facial massages. Above you, near the beach, people soar off in hang gliders.

We had dinner in one of the newest luxury restaurants in Saigon…. I asked [the owner] if it was difficult to get permission to build and open up. Looking around he said, no, and indicated by gestures that it was money under the table. I did not see a single Vietnamese eating in the restaurant, but the waiters seemed very happy. The key to becoming something or somebody in Vietnam is to be found in learning English. That is crucial. You can't fight your way up to the top without English.

Fifty years ago the operative assumption in Washington was that the Vietnamese people were incapable of managing their own affairs. To allow them to do so would yield dire consequences. Were the United States to step aside, the results would be twofold. First, in Southeast Asia, totalitarianism would surely triumph, with millions enslaved as a result. Second, according to the domino theory, that triumph would surely embolden America’s adversaries in the global Cold War, thereby endangering the security of the United States itself.

Faced with this prospect, Americans had no choice but to draw a line in the rice paddies and make a stand. So insisted several successive administrations and any number of pundits.

The woeful results of that insistence remain painful to contemplate even now.

Today, of course, presidents and pundits insist with equal assurance that various and sundry populations in the Islamic world—Afghans currently occupy the spotlight—are incapable of managing their own affairs. Further, were the United States to allow Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, Pakistanis—the list goes on—to self-determine themselves, we would surely open up ourselves to attack, at least on the scale of 9/11 if not far worse.

So the United States finds itself engaged in a war that has gone on longer than the Vietnam War, with no end in sight. Much like their predecessors back in the 1960s, the Wise Men (and women) of present-day Washington are unable to conceive of an alternative to open-ended conflict on the other side of the world.

Although the discomfort that many Americans feel in recalling Vietnam is all too understandable, our present circumstances demand that we make the effort.

When the Vietnam debacle finally ended, discerning its “lessons” became for a time a cottage industry. Yet only now, decades later, are the war’s real lessons becoming evident. Two lessons in particular cry out for our attention.

First, peering across a vast cultural and historical divide to discern what it is that others “want” (or “need”) is exceedingly difficult. To imagine that American power, wealth, and know-how offer a neat recipe for reducing those difficulties is surely a delusion. American tutoring serves primarily to squander lives and money while annoying, if not altogether alienating, the subjects of our ostensible beneficence.

Second, allowing others to exercise real self-determination just might serve U. S. interests better than insisting that things be done our way. In Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay, the Americans came and went, leaving behind a few ruins. Vietnam remains stubbornly Vietnamese. And yet when offered the chance, the Vietnamese take from us what they find useful for their own purposes. They choose, rather than having choice shoved down their throats. As a result, the Vietnamese people today have gained for themselves what American nation-builders once aspired to create: a dynamic, increasingly prosperous society that poses little threat to any of its neighbors and none to the United States.

Is the result a Jeffersonian democracy? Maybe not. Yet the outcome—which the U. S. war and all that it involved merely served to retard—works for the Vietnamese and works for us as well.

The Vietnam War was unnecessary and counterproductive. Is it not at least possible that the same might be said of the Long War as well?