We Blundered into Korea and Vietnam

We Weren't Trying to Take Over The World

I am writing this in response to a letter headlined “What have wars brought our nation?” that appeared in Appleton’s Post-Crescent on March 24, 2014. The letter is by Ed Hodges, and he is right to ask the question. He is right when he says that we have engaged in some amazingly stupid wars that have caused immense damage and brought us little in return, but he is wrong about the reasons why we did so. It is important for us to understand the reasons correctly if we are to learn from our experience.

The Korean War Was the Result of a Bad Deal at Yalta

Mr. Hodges’ first error concerns the Korean War. He says, “The gold stars of World War II were still in our windows when America invaded Korea.” This is false. We didn’t invade Korea. Korea had been a part of the Japanese Empire, and we occupied it as a part of defeating Japan. We allowed the USSR to occupy the northern half of the peninsula as a part of a deal that we made at Yalta to persuade the Russians to enter the war against Japan. Remember that when that deal was made, the atomic bombs had not yet been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we were facing the invasion of the Japanese home islands. It was estimated that as many as half a million Americans would die in that invasion. So, we made the deal, and the USSR occupied the northern half of  the Korean peninsula. Thus, the countries of North Korea and South Korea came to be.

In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, and the United Nations went to its defense. The UN was able to do that because the USSR was boycotting the UN then and did not attend meetings of the Security Council. So, the Korean War (officially called the “Korean Conflict) came about not because of a “quest for world dominance” (Mr. Hodges words) but because of a bad deal that we made with the USSR. If we had occupied the whole Korean peninsula, there would have been no war. We won that war in the sense that we successfully turned back the North Korean attempt to take over the whole Korean peninsula. Unfortunately, we were not so successful in Vietnam.

The Debacle of Vietnam

Mr. Hodges says, “A handful of years [after the Korean War], we invaded Vietnam.”  This is also false. We did not invade Vietnam.  At the end of World War II, France tried to reestablish its control of what was then known as French Indo-China. We helped the French, but in 1954, they were driven out.  The terms of France’s withdrawal were settled at the Geneva Conference of that year.  A unified Vietnam was to hold elections to determine who was to rule.

The United States refused to accept the terms of the Geneva Agreement because it was obvious that Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party would win. Instead, we supported a puppet government in South Vietnam. We did this extraordinarily stupid thing because these events occurred during the anti-communist hysteria of the early  nineteen fifties.

Today, it is hard to imagine the political climate of that time. In the wake of the communist victory in China in 1949, we undertook a witch hunt to determine who was responsible for “the loss of China” as if China had ever been ours to lose. A number of the State Department’s most experienced “Asia hands” were drummed out of the Foreign Service. Senator McCarthy conducted hearings to find “communist sympathizers” in the Pentagon. Any politician who opposed our policy in Vietnam was accused of being “soft on communism.”

So, we became the new colonial power in Vietnam.  Once we had done that, it became hard for us to back out, and the more resources we invested in supporting South Vietnam as an independent state, the harder it became for any president to say, in effect, that he and his predecessors had blundered. The colossal stupidity of our policy in Vietnam may be measured by the fact that when we finally withdrew in 1975, we got the same deal that we could have gotten for free in 1945, in 1954 or in 1965.

I get angry every time I think about the lives we wasted in Vietnam, but it is important to understand that we blundered into that war. We weren’t trying to take over the world, but we had no real policy in Southeast Asia except to contain communism. So, we entered a war in which we had no clearly defined objective that could be attained by military means, and a war that has no objective can never be won.

The Situation Today in Afghanistan

Today, we find ourselves in a similar situation in Afghanistan, and fortunately, our president understands the situation we are in. There are no military means by which we can make Afghanistan into a democratic opponent of Islamic extremism. Perhaps this time, we will withdraw from Afghanistan and allow that country to sink back into the obscurity, which it so richly merits.