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.
