FORWARD OBSERVER

Here We Go Again

Mon. Apr. 14, 2008


Former House Armed Services Chairman Mendel Rivers, D-S.C., who died in 1970, had a favorite expression that Congress should keep in mind when warned that there is certain to be a bloodbath in Iraq if U. S. troops leave too soon: “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.”

Relying on figures that turned out to be flimsier than rice paper, President Nixon and other government officials during the Vietnam War gave Congress and the rest of America the first bloodbath kick whenever lawmakers demanded that U.S. troops be withdrawn from South Vietnam. Then and now, war critics argued that America had given enough blood and treasure. It was time for the beneficiaries to defend their own country.

“If the United States were to fail in Vietnam, if the communists were to take over,” Nixon said at a White House news conference on April 16, 1971, “the bloodbath that would follow would be a blot on this nation’s history from which we would find it very difficult to return. I think of a half million, by conservative estimates, in North Vietnam who were murdered or otherwise exterminated by the North Vietnamese after they took over from the South.”

Challenged by Asian scholar and Vietnam War critic Gareth Porter to document the “half million” figure Nixon used in predicting a bloodbath if U. S. troops left South Vietnam, the President’s National Security Council cited a book by Hoang Van Chi published in 1964, “From Colonialism to Communism.” Chi was a former North Vietnamese land owner, had received money from the CIA through an intermediary organization and was employed by the State Department when I questioned him in 1972 about the disputed bloodbath figures in his book. I was a military reporter for The Washington Post at the time.

Chi told me that he arrived at his bloodbath figure by making the shaky assumption that the 5 percent of the 200 people whom the communists killed in his own North Vietnamese village — that is, 10 people, one of whom the author said was executed and the other nine killed by such “other means” as starvation — was also true of all the other villages in North Vietnam during the communist takeover of the North. So he wrote in his book that there was a “massacre of about 5 percent of the total population” in North Vietnam. Nixon’s National Security Council said this “would be about 700,000” people massacred.

When I told Chi that his arithmetic would not qualify as a scientific method of reaching such an alarming conclusion, he replied, “It was just a guess, an estimate that nobody could figure.” He said he did not wish to discuss the issue further.

Porter, in a study circulated by Cornell University in 1972, termed Chi’s figure a myth. Porter charged back then that “this bloodbath myth is a result of a deliberate propaganda campaign by the South Vietnamese and U. S. governments to discredit” North Vietnam. He further charged that Chi’s book, which the Nixon administration relied on so heavily, was rife with “gross misquotation” and “fraudulent documentation.”

The North Vietnamese after conquering South Vietnam in 1975 did not commit the massive bloodbath Nixon and so many others in the government and Congress had warned about. The North Vietnamese victors did send thousands of South Vietnamese to harsh re-education camps, according to field reports, but there was no mass murdering of hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese as Nixon and others had predicted.

The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia did commit mass murder, but that was an entirely different story with different underlying causes, distinctions presumptive GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona does not make in sounding his bloodbath warnings about Iraq.

After Senate Foreign Relations Chairman J.W. Fulbright, D-Ark., had left the Senate — where he drove presidents nuts by using his position to attack their Vietnam War policies — I asked him whether he was surprised that the North Vietnamese did not carry out the widely predicted massacre of South Vietnamese. “No,” he replied. “They’re not a bunch of madmen in Hanoi.”

Today, of course, Vietnam is booming and the United States is one of its major trading partners. The whole region has not gone communist, as former Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other government officials had predicted during the Vietnam War. “If we lose in South Vietnam, you can kiss Thailand goodbye,” Rusk told editors and reporters at The Post with great conviction.

So why, in the light of today’s reality, did 58,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines die in the Vietnam War? Why have we forgotten that war’s lessons, including watching out for that second kick from the same old mule?

If U.S. forces leave Iraq precipitously, said Sen. Christopher (Kit) Bond, R-Mo., “there would be chaos and slaughter of innocent civilians, both Shia and Sunni. There would be a tremendous increase in the deaths of civilians.” Others have joined in, with Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., warning “that the whole region will be destabilized.”

So the bloodbath drums are beating again. Congress would serve itself and the American people well if it found a way to examine the bloodbath warnings in a bipartisan, credible way to assess their validity before believing them again.

by George C. Wilson

Mon. Apr. 14, 2008