WHEN AMERICA LOSES A WAR
Even from a remove of 40 years, those last, tragic images from outside the U.S. embassy in Saigon remain a painful reminder of one of the less-noble chapters in American history.
The crush of desperate South Vietnamese begging to be let in. The Marines standing atop the walls, pushing back against the Vietnamese men and women trying to climb over. Finally, on the morning of April 30, the last helicopter takes off from the rooftop, just hours before a North Vietnamese tank breaks through the gates of the presidential palace.
Overseas Vietnamese, many of them former refugees, call this “Black April,” because it marked the end of their nation. It also marked America’s humiliation before the world.
In the 40 Aprils that have come and gone since, Vietnam has become shorthand for a political orthodoxy built on the idea that American military intervention overseas creates more problems than it solves. This thinking feeds an entire industry pumping out tedious lectures about “The Lessons of Vietnam.”
Still, the most obvious lesson of Vietnam is the one hardly ever acknowledged: the terrible price paid—human as well as strategic—when America loses a war.
This is not the received wisdom, which holds that wars are always unwinnable and the best thing America can do is to stay out or get out. The keepers of this flame do not take kindly to dissent, which this reporter saw firsthand as a White House speechwriter in 2007, when George W. Bush challenged this thinking head-on. As we prepared for a Veterans of Foreign Wars speech about America’s role in the advance of democracy in Asia, we both knew he would have to address Vietnam. Here’s what he ended up saying:
“The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech,” said the president. “So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.”
The president went on to quote some of the many observers at the time—a New York Times columnist, an antiwar senator, the novelistGraham Greene—who used their platforms to assure us Indochina would get better if only we left.
Well, America did leave. And President Bush went on to say that whatever you might think about how America got into that war, “one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’ ”
He might have added the strategic consequences, which included more aggressive Soviet intervention in the Third World that included in the invasion of Afghanistan. Because what America left behind on that rooftop in Saigon was something we still haven’t fully recovered: the certainty among friend and foe alike that America keeps its commitments.
Yes, the Soviets would find Afghanistan their own Vietnam—but not until Ronald Reagan rejected the received wisdom and supplied the Afghan resistance with the wherewithal to triumph. Nor does that change the high price that Afghans—and the world—have paid.
Yet the idea that America can just up and leave a war without any serious damage dies hard. On this Vietnamese war anniversary 10 years ago, before President Bush had ordered the surge in Iraq, the argument for the futility of the fight there was filled with Vietnam analogies.
Those making them included John Kerry, then the junior senator from Massachusetts. As a young vet in 1971, he had told a Senate panel that the Vietnamese “didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy,” and that we were only there so President Nixon won’t be “the first president to lose a war.”
In April 2006, Mr. Kerry marked the anniversary of his Senate appearance with a speech at Boston’s Faneuil Hall in which he declared that the “war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq are now converging in too many tragic aspects”—and that the U.S. needed to withdraw all combat troops.
Today Mr. Kerry is secretary of state. The president he serves did as Mr. Kerry wished and withdrew U.S. combat troops from Iraq.
What have been the results? The rise of Islamic State, or ISIS, beheading and burning alive all those in its path. A raging civil war in Syria that is becoming a proxy for the larger Sunni-Shiite sectarian conflict. And a sense by our closest allies across the Middle East that America has left them on their own.
Waging war imposes terrible costs. But losing a war has its costs too, as we are starting to see in the Middle East. Maybe something to think about in a week the Communists in Hanoi celebrate the day they sent America packing.
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com
