Stephen J. Morris: The New Left Was Wrong About Vietnam and Today Is Wrong About Iraq

[Mr. Morris is a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC and author of "Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia" (Stanford University Press, 1999).]

Thirty years after the fall of Saigon the received wisdom among large sections of Western academia and journalism is little changed. The successive U.S. administrations that intervened in the Vietnam War are widely portrayed as foolish or immoral, while the activist opponents of the war are seen as wise and morally courageous. This simple picture is transposed to the Iraq war by many of today's antiwar generation. Yet the widely held image of the two sides is a crude misrepresentation. The Vietnam War provides few analogies for the Middle East, except as a demonstration of how so many in the West are willing to champion the cause of totalitarian states and movements that the U.S. opposes.

American intervention in Indochina was part of the strategy of containment of totalitarian communism -- a patient strategy that realized a major victory in Europe with the collapse of the Soviet empire from 1989 to 1991. After Mao Zedong conquered China, and North Korea invaded the South in 1950, then President Harry Truman began a deep commitment, pursued by four subsequent U.S. presidents, to prevent Communist takeovers in Southeast Asia.

There was much about the U.S. conduct of the Vietnam War for reasonable people to be critical of. For example, during the Johnson administration the war was conducted with ill-conceived and unworkable military strategies. Yet these were failures of means, and of political judgment, and do not bear on the worthiness of the goals of American intervention. Moreover President Johnson's misconceived strategies were overturned by the assertive military strategy and subtle global diplomacy of the Nixon administration.

Unlike in World War II, the U.S. never pursued a policy of targeting innocent civilians in Vietnam. This contrasted with the communist strategy of terror against their own people. The single major confirmed American atrocity of the war -- when depraved elements of the U.S. army killed hundreds of innocents at My Lai -- was dwarfed by the many confirmed massacres undertaken by the communists, resulting in the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians. Yet these moral distinctions between the two sides were lost in the public debate, in which emotive critics increasingly portrayed the U.S. as the primary cause of suffering for the innocent.

The Vietnam War coincided with the global rise of the New Left and the radicalization of Western campuses. By 1968, free debate in the U.S. about the war had been stifled by the intimidation of sanctimonious and intolerant radicals, who supported communist victories and American military defeats world-wide. The radical left also formed the hard core of the antiwar movement street demonstrations, which often provoked the police into harsh reactions. In this political climate some younger journalists abandoned objectivity in favor of advocacy journalism.

Tragically for the South Vietnamese people, and for the South Vietnamese and U.S. soldiers who had fought so bravely, the Johnson administration's failed policies also generated a cynicism among the American public that imposed severe constraints on the foreign-policy options available to President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Yet, despite the difficult hand they were dealt, Messrs. Nixon and Kissinger did well. Their counterinsurgency policies were sufficiently successful that by 1972 the guerrilla insurgency had been defeated. Moreover, after years of training, the South Vietnamese army became responsible for all ground combat, and was able to defeat a massive North Vietnamese conventional offensive in 1972 with U.S. air and logistical support. The end of the draft and removal of American combat troops from Vietnam drastically reduced public opposition to administration policies.

But for the declining but vociferous antiwar movement, reduced to a hard left core, the gradual withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Vietnam, was not enough. Only a communist victory would satisfy them. Lacking mass public support for their goals, but encouraged by weakening of the White House by the emerging Watergate scandal, the antiwar left took their battle from the streets to the corridors of the U.S. Congress. Guided by leaders lobbying in Washington, the small force of some 6,000 antiwar activists in major states, were able to pressure substantial number of congressmen into legislating against the military options available to the U.S. Inflamed with a hatred of American foreign policy, and a romantic infatuation with America's communist enemy, young activists like John Kerry spoke of systematic atrocities being conducted everywhere by U.S. forces, actress Jane Fonda warned of U.S. bombing North Vietnamese dikes to drown hundreds of thousands of civilians, while New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug spoke of hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in South Vietnam....

In the Middle East the task for the left of finding a political cause to serve has been made more difficult by the weakness of communism and the ostensibly religious nature of so much anti-American politics. Radical leftists prefer their utopian and messianic totalitarian movements to have a secular cast. Prosperous and democratic Israel today is the main enemy, as it was even before the expansionist settlement movement evolved. That is why the cause of some Palestinian factions has been embraced. But the bottom line for the radical left everywhere is the undermining of American global power, and undermining rule by America's friends. If local people have to live under repressive movements or regimes as a consequence, such as the Baathists tyrannies in Iraq or Syria, this can always be rationalized or justified.

From such people policy makers can expect no wisdom on how to pursue the war against Islamic terrorists, nor how to encourage political orders compatible with human freedom. Thirty years after the left celebrated the American retreat from Southeast Asia, this much is clear.