MORAL ANTICOMMUNISM (1982)

 NORMAN PODHORETZ

 After the war the editor of Commentary magazine, Norman Podhoretz, became one of the stoutest defenders of America's involvement in Vietnam against those who accused it of immorality. 

. . . . [S]tupid though the American way of war no doubt was in the political context of Vietnam-where it served to arouse the hostility of the very people whose "hearts and minds" were being courted and whose support was a necessary ingredient of victory-it could not reasonably be considered immoral. Nor could it even be considered extraordinarily brutal. Writing in 1970, not, obviously, to defend the United States, but out of the expectation that things might yet get worse both in Vietnam and elsewhere, Daniel Ellsberg warned his fellow activists in the antiwar movement that "an escalation of rhetoric can blind us to the fact that Vietnam is. . . no more brutal than other wars in the past-and it is absurdly unhistorical to insist that it is...."

 Even granting to writers like the sociologist Peter L. Berger that "the war was marked by a distinctive brutality . . . flowing in large measure from its character as a war of counterinsurgency,"2 Ellsberg's point was so obviously true that it poses a difficult intellectual problem. One can easily enough understand how the young of the 1960s-who were in general notoriously deficient in historical knowledge or understanding, and who therefore tended to look upon all the ills around them, including relatively minor ones, as unique in their evil dimension-would genuinely imagine that never in all of human experience had there been anything to compare in cruelty and carnage with the war in Vietnam. But how did it happen that so many of their elders and teachers, who did have historical perspective and had even lived through two earlier and bloodier wars, should have taken so "absurdly unhistorical" a view of Vietnam? The answer is, quite simply, that they opposed-or had turned against-the American effort to save South Vietnam from Communism. Being against the end, they could not tolerate the very means whose earlier employment in Korea and in World War II they had not only accepted but applauded.

 In World War II, as Lewy says, "despite the fact that the Allies...engaged in terror-bombing of the enemy's civilian population and generally paid only minimal attention to the prevention of civilian casualties-even during the liberation of Ital\ and France-hardly anyone on the Allied side objected to these tactics." The reason was that "the war against Nazism and fascism was regarded as a moral crusade in which the Allies could do no wrong.... "

 So, too, with the Korean War, in which practically all the major population centers were leveled, dams and irrigation systems were bombed, napalm was used, and enormous numbers of civilians were killed. Vet there was no morbidly fascinated dwelling on those horrors in the press, and very little moral outrage expressed. For the Korean War was seen as an extension of World War II not merely in the strategic sense of representing a new phase in the resistance to aggression through the principle of collective security, but also in being part of a moral crusade against Communism. As such it was a continuation of the struggle against totalitarianism, whose first battles had been fought and won in the Second World War.

 The fact that this aspect of the Korean War was rarely emphasized in the official pronouncements, which tended to dwell upon the strategic element, does not mean that it was considered less important. It means rather that it was taken so entirely for granted as to need little if any explicit stress. The consensus of the period was that Communism represented an evil comparable to and as great as Nazism. This was the feeling in the country at large, and it was even the prevalent view within the intellectual community where Communism was regarded-not least by many who had earlier embraced it-as the other great embodiment of totalitarianism, the twentieth century's distinctive improvement upon the despotisms and tyrannies of the past. In one of the most influential books of the Korean War period, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt brought Nazism and Communism together under the same rubric as systems of total control (in contrast to the traditional despotisms which exercised lesser degrees of domination over the individuals living under them). Indeed, Arendt went even further, arguing that Hitler, for all his anti-Communist passion, had looked admiringly to Lenin and Stalin for lessons in the practical implementation of his own brand of totalitaranism.

To go to war in order to contain the spread of Communism was therefore on the same moral plane as going to war against Nazism had been, "and those who fought such a war could do no wrong" either. "There was hideous bloodletting in Korea," wrote Richard H. Rovere in 1967, "and few liberals protested it"; he himself. . . celebrated the Korean War as "a turning point in the world struggle against Communism."  Having then believed that "we had an obligation" to go to the aid of the government in South Vietnam when it was threatened by a combination of internal and external Communist aggression, by 1967 he had come to feel that the American role was indefensible. "People who used to say there are things worse than war now say there are things worse than Communism and that the war in Vietnam is one of them." Rovere himself was clearly one of those people, and their number was now legion. It was because they no longer thought that Communism was so great an evil that they saw the American war against it as a greater evil than it truly was, either by comparison with other wars, or more emphatically, in relation to the political system whose extension to South Vietnam the war was being fought to prevent.

Here then we arrive at the center of the moral issue posed by the American intervention into Vietnam.

 The United States sent half a million men to fight in Vietnam. More than 50,000 of them lost their lives, and many thousands more were wounded. Billions of dollars were poured into the effort, damaging the once unparalleled American economy to such an extent that the country's competitive position was grievously impaired. The domestic disruptions to which the war gave rise did perhaps even greater damage to a society previously so self-confident that it was often accused of entertaining illusions of its own omnipotence. Millions of young people growing to maturity during the war developed attitudes of such hostility toward their own country and the civilization embodied by its institutions that their willingness to defend it against external enemies in the future was left hanging in doubt.

Why did the United States undertake these burdens and make these sacrifices in blood and treasure and domestic tranquility? What was in it for the United States? It was a question that plagued the antiwar movement from beginning to end because the answer was so hard to find. If the United States was simply acting the part of an imperialist aggressor in Vietnam, as many in the antiwar movement professed to believe, it was imperialism of a most peculiar kind. There were no raw materials to exploit in Vietnam, and there was no overriding strategic interest involved. To Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 Indochina had been important because it was close to the source of rubber and tin, but this was no longer an important consideration. Toward the end of the war, it was discovered that there was oil off the coast of Vietnam and antiwar radicals happily seized on this news as at last providing an explanation for the American presence there. But neither Kennedy nor Johnson knew about the oil, and even if they had, they would hardly have gone to war for its sake in those pre-OPEC days when oil from the Persian Gulf could be had at two dollars a barrel.  .

In the absence of an economic interpretation, a psychological version of the theory of imperialism was developed to answer the maddening question: Why are we in Vietnam? This theory held that the United States was in Vietnam because it had an urge to dominate-"to impose its national obsessions on the rest of the world," in the words of a piece in the New York Review of Books, one of the leading centers of antiwar agitation within the intellectual community. But if so, the psychic profits were as illusory as the economic ones, for the war was doing even deeper damage to the national self-confidence than to the national economy.

Yet another variant of the psychological interpretation, proposed by the economist Robert L. Heilbroner, was that "the fear of losing our place in the sun, of finding ourselves at bay, . . . motivates a great deal of the anti-Communism on which so much of American foreign policy seems to be founded." This was especially so in such underdeveloped countries as Vietnam, where "the rise of Communism would signal the end of capitalism as the dominant world order, and would force the acknowledgment that America no longer constituted the model on which the future of world civilization would be mainly based."

 All these theories were developed out of a desperate need to find or invent selfish or self-interested motives for the American presence in Vietnam, the better to discredit it morally. In a different context, proponents of one or another of these theories-Senator Fulbright, for example-were not above trying to discredit the American presence politically by insisting that no national interest was being served by the war. This latter contention at least had the virtue of being closer to the truth than the former. For the truth was that the United States went into Vietnam for the sake not of its own direct interests in the ordinary sense but for the sake of an ideal. The intervention was a product of the Wilsonian side of the American character- the side that went to war in 1917 to "make the world safe for democracy" and that found its contemporary incarnations in the liberal internationalism of the 1940s and the liberal anti-Communism of the 1950s. One can characterize this impulse as naive; one can describe it, as Heilbroner does (and as can be done with any virtuous act), in terms that give it a subtly self-interested flavor. But there is no rationally defensible way in which it can be called immoral.

Why, then, were we in Vietnam? To say it once again: because we were trying to save the Southern half of that country from the evils of Communism....

In May 1977, two full years after the Communist takeover, President Jimmy Carter-a repentant hawk, like many members of his cabinet, including his Secretary of State and his Secretary of Defense-spoke of "the intellectual and moral poverty" of the policy that had led us into Vietnam and had kept us there for so long. When Ronald Reagan, an unrepentant hawk, called the war "a noble cause" in the course of his ultimately successful campaign to replace Carter in the White House, he was accused of having made a "gaffe." Fully, painfully aware as I am that the American effort to save Vietnam from Communism was indeed beyond our intellectual and moral capabilities, I believe the story shows that Reagan's "gaffe" was closer to the truth of why we were in Vietnam and what we did there, at least until the very end, than Carter's denigration of an act of imprudent idealism whose moral soundness has been so overwhelmingly vindicated by the hideous consequences of our defeat.

From Jeffrey Kimball, To Reason Why (1990), pp.117-21