Many or Any?

by Cliopatria

From Rudy Giuliani's simple-minded and scary Foreign Affairs outline of his likely foreign policy comes this claim:

"Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South.”

I'm an old-fashioned literalist, I guess. "Many historians" to me implies a large plurality or even a majority of historians writing about a particular subject.

How many specialists in the history of the Vietnam War argue that in 1972, the United States had defeated the Vietcong and that South Vietnam was close to "political self-sufficiency"?

I'm not talking about what conservative bloggers or guys who call talk radio shows think. The article says "many historians". Who are they? Are there really "many"?

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More Comments:

Ralph M. Hitchens - 8/16/2007

May not be an exact response to the question asked, but as I've mentioned before, here & elsewhere, Ronald Spector in his book After Tet expressed his belief that after the failure of the 1972 Easter Offensive the North Vietnamese leadership concluded that they had to get the Americans out of the war at any cost. This points to a conclusion that although we might not have "won" the war, we had successfully frustrated Hanoi's war aims. Sort of like what we settled for in Korea twenty years earlier.

Serge Lelouche - 8/16/2007

I would think at least Lewy would qualify. He may have been trained in Pol Sci, but his work on Nazism is top notch history.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/16/2007

I don't know who yanked your chain on this one, Grant, but are any of those names you're listing recognizable as the name of a historian?

Grant W Jones - 8/15/2007

My bad on Dale Andrade, he discusses the pacification program in Vietnam but doesn't directly reference Moyar's work.

Grant W Jones - 8/15/2007

Ralph:

Mackubin Thomas Owens: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/133ccyfj.asp

Dale Andrade: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/28/AR2005122801144_pf.html

Stuart Herrington: http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/07summer/sum07rev.htm

Guenter Lewy: http://www.nysun.com/article/44100

More here at Mark Moyar's site: http://www.triumphforsaken.com/

Grant W Jones - 8/15/2007

Jeffrey Record titled his critical work "The Wrong War" on the famous quote by General Bradley. Record judged Vietnam to be the wrong war also. However, he states:

“The supreme irony is that control of South Vietnam’s rural population made no difference in the war’s outcome. Even a complete elimination of the communist political base in the country would not have deprived Hanoi of a capacity to launch – or afforded the GVN a capacity to resist – the decisive communist conventional invasion of 1975.” (p. 95)

On South Vietnam's ability to defend itself against communist aggression: "The Easter Offensive" by Col. G.H. Turley

Stuart Herrington, "Peace with Honor?" on why the South fell.

Lewis Sorley, "A Better War" and "Thunderbolt" on the success of Creighton Abrams strategy.

Richard Hunt's "Pacification" has a more mixed view on the success of the Accelerated Pacification Program. Hunt does note that the Easter Offensive was a "juggernaut of nearly two-hundred thousand men, equipped with Soviet tanks, armored personal carriers, long-range artillery, and heat-seeking SA-7 missiles...." comprising of almost the entire NVA of thirteen divisions. (p. 255) If anyone knows how a small, poor third world country could be expected to survive such an onslaught without a great deal of outside help, they haven't shared it.

The standard of "political self-sufficiency" is a red herring. Could South Korea circa 1955 have made such a claim?

Senior Marine generals Lewis Walt "Strange War, Strange Strategy" and Victor Krulak "First to Fight" both judge the war "winnable" with the right strategy and sufficient support for the RVN.

Allen Millett and Peter Maslowski state: "In January 1975 the NVA began the offensive with the capture of an entire province northwest of Saigonand a complementary drive west by the Khmer Rouge toward the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The lack of American reaction was instructive: there were no air strikes. In March, Dung opened the central highlands offensive." (For the Common Defense, p. 600)

http://kalapanapundit.blogspot.com/2007/08/wrong-war.html

Ralph E. Luker - 8/15/2007

Tim, Insofar as its possible that Guiliani actually had anyone in mind, its possible that he referred to Mark Moyar and his Triumph Forsaken: The Viet Nam War, 1954-1965. I haven't noticed other diplomatic, military, or political historians rallying to support Moyar's argument.