Walter Cronkite dies at 92

[A Black Falcon]

More specifically, he made this statement during the Tet Offensive, which was a massive military defeat for North Vietnam, yet was misconstrued by Cronkite to be a defeat for American and ARVN forces. It was, at best, entirely inaccurate given the situation, at worst, a case of a journalist unethically grinding a political ax.

The main reason the war became 'unwinnable' was because of misinformation eroding popular support for the war. Militarily, the North's only strength was numbers. Had the war been prosecuted to the fullest, there is little doubt we would have emerged the victors.

Whether or not you want to argue that the war was ever necessary is one thing. I personally don't think it was. But, I definitely do think it was winnable, and I think it was deplorable for Cronkite to cause an alteration to national policy as he did. A journalist reports the news. He does not create it.

It's delusions like this that cause the US to get into war after war after war, without ever really learning the right lessons from them. The war was not winnable. The definition of 'winnable' requires an actual path to victory, for one thing; there was no such thing in Vietnam.

First, it was against the will of the people. Had there been an election in South Vietnam at any point between 1945 and 1969, Ho Chi Minh would have won handily over anyone the US propped up in the South. The regime was unpopular and the majority of the people never supported us. As a result, we forced in brutal dictators, because of course OUR murderers are better than theirs because at least they're not commies, right? Ridiculous...

The true first problem was the very serious misunderstanding of East and Southeast Asian politics that the US government made in 1945. Essentially, the American government thought that Asia was like Europe -- Commies were Commies, no matter what. As a result, the second that the Cold War started, they thought that Ho Chi Minh was evil and a brainless Soviet drone. They were completely wrong. Actually, he was a nationalist first. I think a very, VERY strong case could be made that the only reason that North Vietnam, and united Vietnam after it, ended up so strongly Communist, in fact, was BECAUSE of US intervention, not despite it.

You see, in 1945 Ho Chi Minh, who had been a US-backed agent during the war, declared Vietnam's independence from France. The Declaration of Independence he read intentially was very similar to the American Declaraction of Independence, and he was hoping for American support, as so much talk had been made during the war about self-determination and the end of colonialism.

Unfortunately, that talk only applied to Europeans, that is white people. As for the rest of the world, America decided that supporting their European allies' determination to retake their empires was more important than upholding democratic ideals. This was even more true for anyone who called themself any kind of communist or socialist, but in general it applied to all nations (except the Phillipines, which was American territory during the war and we actually let go free shortly afterwards). One result of this was full American support for France's efforts to crush the Vietnamese independence movement. By treaty France was able to retake the southern part of Vietnam, but not the north. The resulting war, mostly American-funded and fought with huge amounts of American weapons and materiel if by French and South Vietnamese troops, lasted until 1954, when France finally gave up and left after the disastrous defeat at Dienbienphu.

For the next decade, the war died down a bit as the two rival Vietnamese states faced off, the South backed by American weapons and the North by Soviet. And this gets back to my earlier point about America radicalizing the Northern government. Initially, the revolutionary government of Vietnam was a coalition of factions, some socialist and some not. The leader, Ho Chi Minh, was of course a nationalist communist, but the government was definitely not all communist-run. However, to fight a long war one needs weapons and materiel. As China was a longtime rival and often subjugator of Vietnam (and by longtime I mean centuries), The only place they could turn to was the Soviets. The natural result over time was a Soviet-aligned government in the North, not as bad as the Soviet Russian one but definitely not democratic.

But what if we had, in 1945, been better judges of the situation, and had supported Ho Chi Minh and other peoples who wanted and were willing to fight for independence over the desires for our European allies to get their colonies back? The same thing could have happened, but most definitely not necessarily. Things could have, and I think most likely would have, turned out much better.

If we assume that events in the 40s happened the same as they did, however, the US had another chance to avoid getting involved in the 1960s. Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower had sent in the "observers", but it was Johnson who really sent in the troops. Why did he do it? One reason was because they had misjudged Ho Chi Minh, just like all the administrations before them, but another was because Johnson, a Democrat, thought he had to prove his toughness in the face of pressure from the right. It can be harder for a Democrat to resist such pressure than a Republican, and the other way around -- see Nixon and China, for example. I think the common assumption that a Democrat could not have done that and politically gotten away with it is a good one. This is one reason Johnson invaded Vietnam. However, he did also believe that not doing it would allow Communism to spread, as part of the old "domino theory" charade that never had any actual truth to it but many people believed, and to hurt the Soviets because of another delusional American belief, the idea that all Communist countries were the same, that is that Moscow controlled them all utterly in every way and they had no independence. This was not true, as we only started to realize after the Sino-Soviet split, but took much longer to fully accept. So, he tried to find an excuse to start a full-fledged war instead of the minor border and intelligence service conflicts between North and South Vietnam in the previous decade.

That excuse was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of 1964, where American ships were supposedly attacked twice by North Vietnamese ships. The second incident never happened, though it took the US government many decades to admit it. The first may have, though the ship was almost certainly providing intelligence support for South Vietnamese attacks on North Vietnam (the US tried to deny it at the time, though this was another lie), which seems like some justification for attacking it despite it being in international waters, though this is of course a controversial point. But the fact is, at least half of the so-called incident sold to the American congress and public was a lie, and the other half was only partially true. And that's a justification for war and massive bombing? Not exactly!

It's exactly this kind of thing that so inflamed the antiwar movement, and has proven to a great many people (such as my parents) to be a lasting memory that you can't ever fully trust the US government, or the military in particular, because they're probably lying to you. And the more you look into the whole Vietnam thing, the more lies you see and the more proof for the rightness of that distrust you get. I could keep going through the years and years of lies on top of lies on top of lies, but I don't want to do that all right now... but the US lied about where it was bombing, who it was bombing, how much it was bombing, whether the bombing had any effect, whether they were winning the war, whether the war was winnable, how many people were being killed, etc, etc, etc.

Some terms -- the NLF (National Liberation Front) is what the Vietcong called themselves. They were the South Vietnamese resistance against the Americans and South Vietnamese government. The NVA is the North Vietnamese Army, and the SVA is its opposite. The NLF was not controlled entirely by the North in the early years of the war, contrary to American belief; it was actually an independent, broad-based organization. As the war continued however the North Vietnamese Communist establishment took more and more control over the NLF, forcing them to follow orders even when they didn't really want to.

Anyway, early in the war America had hopes for bombing and invading the North. However, this was in not too long ruled out for the most part, for China warned the US that if they invaded the north or used nukes, China would get directly involved in Vietnam. America had ignored exactly such a warning in Korea a few decades earlier, and paid dearly for it in the resulting two year long meaningless bloodbath. We didn't want to do that again, particularly because China now had nuclear weapons. So, the US held back on bombing the North a lot of the time and never invaded most of it. Instead, almost all of the troop actions and bombing was on the SOUTH, not the North. That is, we were bombing the country we were "protecting", not the one we were supposedly fighting.

The result of this was the total destruction of the villages and small towns in the South. The constant bombings and raids forced essentially the entire rural population of the South, a large majority of who supported the NLF and not the South Vietnamese government it must be admitted, to abandon their homes for refugee camps. Agricultural production ground to a halt. American planes had to drop their bombs somewhere, though, so they bombed incessantly, and the war was spread to Laos and Cambodia too, destabilizing those nations and, in Cambodia, giving the Khmer Rouge the opportunity to begin their campaign of terror and mass murder. The goal was destroying NVA supply lines, but at least as much damage was done to the countryside of those countries as to actual enemies... and in the case of Cambodia, Nixon didn't even tell the congress that he was doing it, he just bombed the country in secret.

So, to get to the issue at hand, the Tet Offensive. Indeed, you are right, tactically -- the Tet Offensive was a tactical and battlefied disaster. The NVA had ordered the offensive as a general attack by all available NVA and NLF forces, over NLF objection. The NLF was proven right, as the aftermath left it much weaker than it had been before, thanks to all losses from the largely futile attacks. It never regained its strength from before that point, the NVA was more strongly in control after that.

However, this does not mean that had the American people not seriously turned on the war at this point we could have "won". As the fact that the war did continue for years more proves, that was not the case... America won all the battles, sure. But it couldn't win the war, not when the majority of the people were so opposed to our continued presence. How do you 'win' when you and your proxy rulers are hated, you cannot really completely attack the main source of opposition (the North) as much as you want to thanks to the certainty of more Soviet or Chinese involvement if you did that, and more. Even with the South Vietnamese people all in cities or refugee camps and the NLF broken, no signs of "victory" were in sight. Eventually the American government finally realized that, acceded to popular demand, and pulled out the troops.

Essentially, you are buying in to the same theory that Johnson and Nixon both did, as well as Robert McNamara and Henry Kissenger: That bombing a people enough will cause them to break and give in. The Vietnam War is a textbook case proving that this is not true, that people will not necessarily give up just because you bomb them a lot. The Vietnamese didn't, and weren't going to. They had been fighting for 30 years in 1975, they were not going to give up, and winning was impossible. All our actions did was made them hate us more and more as the death toll among the Vietnamese people climbed into the hundreds and hundreds of thousands and then well over a million before it was all over... but despite all the suffering every sign says that they would have kept fighting until we gave up. When you're fighting for freedom it gives you a great deal of purpose and determination... there was little of that on the South Vietnamese side, mostly just American money luring in some people. Of course some people in Vietnam supported America... but when you look at things like how we never allowed an election because we knew we would lose it, you see the true picture. Of course North Vietnam was repressive and autocratic as well, but the South was absolutely no better, and without the war going on far fewer people would be dying.

For instance, when the North Vietnamese army drove into Saigon in 1975, everyone remembers the shots of the desperate crowd of people with ties to the American establishment trying to get onto those few helicopters... but what isn't shown is that elsewhere in the city, huge cheering crowds were welcoming in the NVA troops.

Shortly after the war ended, the new united government started arresting people who had been in the South Vietnamese government and military and sending them to "re-education" camps. However, they also reached out to the United States with an offer to normalize trade relations with us. This would help Vietnam economically recover from the war much more quickly, and would help American businesses as well. They were willing to just forget the whole thing and move on. However, the US was not at all willing to do the same. America can hold a grudge for a long time, and did not want to do anything to help a nation definitely still on our enemies list. So, we implemented a ban on all trade with Vietnam. This American trade blockade crippled Vietnam's economy, as the southern half suddenly was cut off with finality from its overwhelmingly primary source of funding and trade. The result was predictable: Economic collapse. This is what caused the "Boat People" epidemic as floods of people tried to flee Vietnam for just about anywhere else.

The Communist government didn't exactly help matters either, as they implemented a full collectivization program after reunification. Collectivization of agricultures was about as disastrous here as anywhere else, and it was another hit to the nation's economy.

Vietnam had another problem now though, China. Since the Sino-Soviet split had gotten worse by the late 1960s, China and Russia were rivals and Vietnam was on the Russian side of the argument. This angered the Chinese greatly. In 1979, Vietnam invaded Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia, seeking to stop the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign of terror that had killed a huge percentage of the nation's population. They were successful at this and took over most of the country, but at a price. The Khmer Rouge essentially called on their Chinese allies, and the Chinese used the excuse to, later in 1979, invade northern Vietnam. This was the third and final hot war in Vietnam. It lasted only a short time, but many people died and China's point was made, despite taking some casualties. Both sides did declare victory, however, and the Vietnamese occupation of most of Cambodia continued. America can be presumed to have supported the invasion quietly, and almost all of the Western nations supported the Khmer Rouge's successful efforts to hold on to Cambodia's UN seat all the way until 1993, though the Khmer Rouge would not be fully defeated from their last holdouts until 1998.

It was only the end of the Cold War that brought true resolution. In 1994 the US finally dropped its ban on trade with Vietnam, and the Vietnam Wars can be said to finally have come to an end. The tragedy is, as I've tried to show, the whole thing should never have happened in the first place.

As for Robert McNamara, many years later he finally admitted that the US should never have invaded Vietnam in 1964, and that he thought that Kennedy would have pulled out American troops instead of invading like Johnson did. In the '60s though, he had fully supported the invasion, with "domino theory" as his reasoning.

Walter Cronkite, he realized the folly of the war while it was actually going on. It would have been even better if he had realized it before it even started, as some did, but coming out and actually saying truth to power as he did in 1968 was an incredibly, incredibly brave and exceptional thing to do. He did an amazing thing in that and should be praised for it, as many do and have done.