The socialist Seattle city councilwoman didn’t know what she was talking about when she lectured an audience that included South Vietnamese refugees about the symbolism of South Vietnam’s defunct flag.
Here’s my point-by-point rebuttal. She said:
“The former South Vietnamese government was also a dictatorship.”
Yes, but what did that dictatorship replace? Vietnam has never been a democracy. It’s never had a government I would want to live under. It was ruled by Chinese for a thousand years, then was a monarchy for hundreds of years, then dissolved into a series of power struggles and civil wars, then was invaded and colonized by the French and Japanese in turn, then became a Cold War pawn. Also, Sawant overlooks the U.S. role in overthrowing Diem, South Vietnam’s de facto dictator from 1955-1963. The truth is, America tried to give South Vietnam something better, whether it was realizable or not.
“The US war and occupation in Vietnam was totally undemocratic … “
From whose perspective? Ours? The U.S. Vietnam war policy was carried out by elected Presidents and Congresses, and was supported by a solid majority of the American adult public until late in the war. From a Vietnamese perspective, the ordinary citizens had no say about what was happening in their country, but when did they ever? If Sawant wishes to cast the U.S. intervention as undemocratic from the viewpoint of ordinary Vietnamese people, she should acknowledge that everything which preceded and followed it was, too. This isn’t something our government uniquely inflicted on them. Like many peoples throughout history, they were caught in the middle of a conflict between larger societies.
” … and was fought to suppress the right of the Vietnamese people to determine their own fate.”
That’s baloney. The opposite is true — the U.S. fought to give South Vietnam self-determination and democratic government, and to stop the spread of communist dictatorships to other countries. She can plausibly contend the war was a mistake, but she can’t credibly argue that America’s motives were to conquer or oppress the Vietnamese people.
“The US war in Vietnam, which killed millions of Vietnamese people and tens of thousands of US soldiers, … “
It’s true that roughly 4 million Vietnamese, more or less, were killed during the period of U.S. intervention, but her phrasing insinuates that all of these casualties were inflicted by the U.S. military, which isn’t remotely true. Many of the Vietnamese casualties on both sides were killed by other Vietnamese. Sawant seems to regard the war as a U.S. invasion of Vietnam that pitted American troops against Vietnamese who were defending their homeland against foreigners, which ignores the reality that it was a Vietnamese civil war in which foreign powers (the U.S. and its allies, the Soviet Union, and China) got involved to help one side or the other. (Let’s not forget Australian and Korean troops fought with Americans in Vietnam, and that Russian and Chinese military advisers were there.) On our side, the war killed slightly over 60,000 Americans, including missing and non-combat deaths.
” … was opposed by the majority of Americans and the majority of people in Vietnam and across the world.”
More baloney. The U.S. war policy had broad public support until late in the war, was implemented by two presidents, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, and was supported by most congressmen and senators for most of the war. Significant domestic protests didn’t make an appearance until after the war had been raging without resolution for several years. Anti-war protesters were always a small segment of the U.S. population, mostly young people who didn’t want to be drafted. The war was opposed in other countries, too, of course; mostly in Europe, but there too, the protesters were in a minority and general public sentiment didn’t swing against the war until the later years — and when it did, it swung not because of the moral issues raised by protesters, but due to war weariness and because the war came to appear unwinnable.
Sawant has gotten almost the entire thing wrong. The Vietnam War was a tragic disaster, yes, which exacted a huge human toll and accomplished nothing. Everyone would have been better off if it hadn’t been fought. But would Sawant say the same things of South Korea? The Korean War is exactly parallel to Vietnam: It was a war between a communist North Korean government and an undemocratic South Korean government for control of the whole country, in which the U.S. intervened to prevent a non-communist defeat, the major difference being that South Korea was kept out of the communist fold whereas South Vietnam was not.
Does Sawant believe we also should have stayed out of the Korean War, and let the communists take over South Korea? Does she think today’s South Koreans would be better off under Kim Jung Un’s regime than their government in Seoul?
A more nuanced question is whether keeping South Korea out of communism’s grip was worth the cost. The answer may depend on who you ask. I doubt many South Koreans wish we had stayed out, and I suspect quite a few North Koreans secretly wish we had stayed in until Kim Il Sung and his Chinese allies were driven clear across the Yalu River. I suspect that for many Vietnamese, both those living as refugees in the U.S. and other Western countries, and those who remained in Vietnam, the main fault of our Vietnam policy not its motives or aims, but its failure.
There’s no denying that all warfare is horrible. We all want to live in a war-free world. But that doesn’t make us evil on a par with history’s real evildoers every time we use military force. Since the dawn of human societies, it has been recognized that people have a right to defend themselves, and when violently attacked a forcible response may be the only effective self-defense. The South Vietnamese flag was the symbol of a corrupt and autocratic government, but to many South Vietnamese, it also represented their last, best, failed hope for a future they could choose themselves. The flag waving over their homeland today certainly cannot be considered a symbol of democracy.
Sawant is right to attack war in general as evil. When she attacks the purposes for which this particular war was fought, and the motives of those who fought it, she is wading in over her head.
(Full Disclosure: The author of this piece is a U.S. Vietnam veteran, but that doesn’t dictate his views on this subject.)