James Willbanks
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U.S. forces invade a distant country in order to disarm an international threat to American security. They fight well, and win every major battle decisively. They become occupiers, and find themselves engaged in a low-level guerrilla war against a determined though shadowy enemy. The American-backed government has a tenuous hold on power, and it is unclear whether it can survive without significant U.S. military aid. Nevertheless, the American political climate favors rapid withdrawal. The U.S. forces are ordered to prepare the country’s military to take over “major combat operations.” The results of these efforts are mixed. No one seems to know what will happen in the country, but one thing is sure: the Americans are leaving.
That was the situation in Vietnam in 1970; so too is it the situation in Iraq today. Thus there could be no more timely moment to revisit Lt. Col. James Willbanks’ (ret.) outstanding Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War (University of Kansas, 2004; reissue, 2008). Lt. Col. Willbanks is uniquely positioned to tell the tale. He is an excellent historian with a gift for plainspoken, even-handed analysis. But not only that: he was also there. Lt. Col. Willbanks served as an adviser to the South Vietnamese forces during the era of “Vietnamization” in the early 1970s. In Abandoning Vietnam, Willbanks shows just how the Nixon administration’s plan to win “peace with honor” won neither. There are lessons here. Let us hope that whomever is charged with the unenviable task of extricating the U.S. from Iraq will heed them.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s striking how often American analysts place faith in training and leadership of their proxy forces in countries such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The author describes the variability in quality of the leadership of the South Vietnamese armed forces and blames this on corruption and nepotism. This confuses symptoms as causes.
Why didn’t the National Liberation Front (NLF or Vietcong) suffer from the same debilitating faults? They were, after all, every bit as Vietnamese as the Southern Army.
It’s not just a question of organisation, but of ideology because a belief in an ideology (whatever it is) can motivate great sacrifices, minimise corruption, and induce popularity amongst the public at large.
This key reason for the American defeat in Vietnam isn’t mentioned. The Vietnamese were fighting a war of national liberation. The Southern government was a puppet regime. It has vanishingly little popularity. How can one expect its soldiers to be motivated to fight for it?
I’d suggest that the US has the same issue in Afghanistan. They’ve spent close to 10 years building up the much heralded Afghan National Army, and to no apparent purpose. All significant military operations are conducted by NATO.
What ideology does your average soldier in the Afghan army have? What exactly is he fighting for? For western domination? Capitalism? It’s odd that this obvious political question has gone unanswered for so long.
The answer to this question in Vietnam was that the South Vietnamese army was fighting for a mere change in management of the colonial regime; a transfer of power from the French to the US. That was never going to wash, no matter how many military victories the US clocked up. This made all those victories very pyrrhic indeed. And as the war was destabilising American society quite considerably by the late 1960s if the US hadn’t withdrawn, then the domestic consequences could well have been quite severe. If war is politics by other means, then the US suffered a clear defeat.
One can’t separate the political issues from the military ones in these sort of conflicts. And the framing of the title as “abandoning” Vietnam serves to obfuscate as the interviewer at least touches on near the end of the interview.
The US didn’t abandon Vietnam; after all the vast majority of Vietnamese wanted them out, despite the remark in the interview about the the North being “bad guys” (it’s a bit embarrassing for American academics that the good guy – bad guy narrative gets even mentioned; has a Fox news vocabulary colonised US academics). In short the US was defeated politically by an overwhelmingly more popular enemy.
The interview omits to mention that the total estimate of deaths caused by the American invasion of Vietnam was in the region of 2-3 million. I realise that liberal propaganda tends to work by omission rather than through a Pravda-level of crass dishonesty (though the remark about the Vietnamese invading their own country at 48.15 comes close), but if a historian was to talk about, say. the Soviet Great Purges, and didn’t mention the fact that hundreds of thousands were directly shot, one would have to call into question their ability to grasp not only basic facts, but their entire intellectual framework.
Finally, the close of the interview descends into such fawning of the US military that not only is it embarrassing, but one has to question the objectivity of the interviewer. Independent thought is rarely helped by such deeply ingrained nationalism and never by such obsequious kowtowing.
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