No Peace, No Honor

“Kids are dying who shouldn’t die,” said Robert Beck, a World Vision doctor. “They die in our arms. It’s hard to believe. There’s no excuse for it.” Unending human agony and suffering have become the characteristic marks of the broken lives and devastated lands of the people of Indochina. Millions have now died who should not have. The brutality has always been hard to believe. There has never been any excuse for it.

The Cambodians and the Vietnamese are people of a gentle spirit, people who have mostly just wanted to live their simple agrarian lives in peace, people who have a deep love and respect for their small but lush country, rich in resources and beauty. All that was before the Americans came. All that was before the world’s largest power attempted to impose its own will on the people of Indochina, attempted to control their fate rather than allow them to determine their own. The consequence of that intervention has been the sacrifice of millions of human lives on the altar of American ideological necessities.

It has been too long for any Vietnamese to remember what peace must be like. Their lives have been shattered by the imperial designs of the French, the Japanese, the French again, and, finally, their once-beautiful country has been almost destroyed by the Americans. As always, it is the people and the young boys turned into soldiers who pay the price of war while those who prosecute and benefit from the fighting advance their purposes.

In Cambodia and Vietnam, the horrible scenario of human suffering and anguish is again upon us and points to the meaning and consequence of Americans in Indochina -- a legacy of agony, destruction, and death. It is a legacy that the American people have tried desperately to forget, to brush it aside without the repentance that might come from facing what we have done and from recognizing that we have become a nation of war criminals. It has been far easier to worry about inflation or to be preoccupied with who might win the Super Bowl. It is a legacy that the American government has always covered up with deception and lies about why we were there and what we were doing there and, in a grotesque distortion of language itself, claimed a “peace with honor” for the genocide it had committed. The high sounding rhetoric and lofty justifications for American involvement have never borne a resemblance to the realities of U.S. policy and behavior in Indochina and elsewhere. There has never been any honor in what Americans have done in Indochina. There is only blood on our hands. And now, another American president calls for a continuation of those same policies, uses the same repugnant and discredited rationales, seems not to have learned anything from the last 20 years, and, in effect, calls for more prolonging of the agony, more dishonor, more blood on our hands.

“Cambodia before the war,” writes Sydney H. Schanberg, the New York Times correspondent in Phnom Penh, "was so rich in her food produce that even the very poor were never hungry ... Now it is a country of landless nomads with empty stomachs--human flotsam living amidst damp and filth ... The countryside is a charred wasteland ..."
The Lon Nol coup which ousted the Sihanouk government in March 1970 was at least encouraged by Washington and the C.I.A. and many suspect more.

Whatever its role, the U.S. intervened quickly thereafter and it was the American invasion and beginning of bombing in the spring of 1970 that brought full-scale war to the once peaceful country. Again, the U.S. has identified its interests with a corrupt and rootless regime, has provided $1.8 billion in aid so far, and entirely supplies its war effort. The conflict in Cambodia is conceded to be a genuine civil war: Cambodians against Cambodians, with the incompetent and deeply corrupt Lon Nol regime totally dependent on the U.S. for its existence and support. The stark contrast between the affluent lifestyle of the U.S.-supported elite and the wretched condition of the masses is appalling. Some Cambodians have grown rich on this war by the corrupt profiteering of the regime while the masses of refugees, villagers, and urban workers have been reduced to abject poverty and watch their children die of malnutrition. The $222 million in supplemental aid now being sought by the Ford administration is all for military purposes and will only prolong the killing, the pillaging, the starvation, the refugee problem, the ruination of the Cambodian countryside, and the destruction of a once-peaceful society. Further aid for the present regime blocks a political settlement that could end the fighting. The United States must step out to allow the Cambodians to arrange their own ceasefire, determine their own political future. However, by the use of demagogic rhetoric -- by dramatically speaking of “aggression,” “abandoning a small country in its life and death struggle,” Cambodia will “fall” or cannot “survive” without our help -- Ford has only confused the issues and prevented a political transition that could bring about a truce, making a more bloody military solution inevitable. American presidents still believe they can make the will of the United States prevail wherever they try and are willing to prolong fighting and bloodshed to a bitter end if necessary in that attempt.

Similarly, in Vietnam, U.S. policy has served to prevent a political settlement by the Vietnamese parties themselves which could end the fighting and reunite their war-torn country. Instead the U.S. has continually sought to impose its own will in Vietnam -- the creation and maintenance of a pro-American and non-communist nation in the south of Vietnam, separate from the rest of the country. The unity of Vietnam as one nation and one people has been a constant reality despite the efforts of U.S. propaganda and policy to deny that unity and create the opposite impression. The unity of Vietnam was affirmed in the Geneva Accords in 1954.

When it was clear that the then president of the Saigon regime, Diem, had no intention of allowing free elections and a political settlement to occur, the Viet Cong (now PRG) insurgency began again in the South. Only after the U.S. began to pour in ground troops, initiate the bombing, and take over the war effort to defeat the Viet Cong did the North Vietnamese also become directly involved.

The stubbornness of the Vietnamese resistance and the pressure of the American peace movement forced the U.S. to withdraw its troops and end its unrelenting bombing assault in the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. Again the integrity and unity of Vietnam was affirmed and a political settlement agreed to that would end the fighting and restore the unity of the country, a settlement in which all parties and factions in Vietnam were to be involved. But again, the intransigence and totalitarian character of the U.S.-supported regime of General Thieu has been the major obstacle to a political settlement. With a peaceful settlement again denied, the PRG and North Vietnamese again resorted to fighting which has now won them two-thirds of the South. Buddhist, Catholic, student, and other non-communist opposition leaders in the South have denounced President Nguyen Van Thieu as an “enemy of peace.” They charge, “It is impossible to obtain peace with Thieu, because he is a product of war, was nurtured on it, and survived with it.”

What has now happened in South Vietnam is the collapse of the myth of an independent, anti-communist, pro-American country in the southern part of Vietnam. There has never been a viable, self-supporting government in South Vietnam. That has now been shown to be an illusion, sustained only by the full commitment of American power. Without that power, the puppet regimes in the South would have collapsed long ago and given way to a more indigenous political settlement worked out by the Vietnamese parties themselves. One hundred and fifty billion dollars, 50,000 American lives, and untold death and destruction to the Vietnamese people could not make the myth a reality; could not create something that never was or never could be. U.S. policy has been unable to impose American will in Vietnam and has accomplished only the substantial destruction of a society and the way of life of a small Asian nation. And now, President Ford continues to insist that just a little more aid will make things all right, continues to identify America with the corrupt and repressive Thieu regime, continues to pursue the course of creating an American client state in the South of Vietnam, continues to use justifications that nobody believes any more, continues to act in such a way as to block a long-awaited political settlement again making a more bloody military solution inevitable, continues to seek aid to fight a senseless and brutal war to the bitter end.

Thus, the American war in Indochina has been fought against the masses of the people and in support of a succession of puppet regimes created by and dependent upon American power and purposes. There have always been indigenous movements of the Vietnamese which rise up against foreign intruders, against larger powers that seek to dominate their country, and against wealthy elites which act as client states for foreign interests. Thus the United States has been embroiled in a conflict that has the character of both a colonial and a civil war. To justify that kind of war, the government has had to create a number of myths and illusions to hide the real character of the conflict. The myth of “two Vietnams” was created to divide the nation. The myth of a “free and independent South Vietnam” who asked for our help against “aggression from the North” when the dictatorial regimes of the South were never free and were always dependent upon the U.S. for their existence is opposite of the truth which is that the alien aggressors in Indochina have been the Americans.

The U.S., by imposing its will into civil strife in Indochina, has served to intensify the conflict and human suffering to horrible proportions and has made for a policy of endless war and bloodshed. The American presence in Indochina, both in direct involvement and in huge amounts of aid to pro-American factions, has been a barrier to a political settlement being worked out by the competing Indochinese parties in their own nation. Again, this makes a military solution, with all its human costs, more inevitable. Because of the consequences of the U.S. seeking its own military solution and its endless aid to war regimes like Lon Nol’s and Thieu’s, the Americans must bear the major responsibility for the suffering that is now occurring in Vietnam and Cambodia.

The reason for the bloody American policies in Indochina has been the belief among policy makers that a viable, non-communist, pro-American government in the South of Vietnam is essential to the interests of the United States in the kind of world order which American policy makers are committed to. Liberals and conservatives have argued whether Vietnam and Cambodia are central to those interests or how high a price we should pay for those interests, but few have questioned the top priority of “American interests” or how those interests are decided and by whom. Few have questioned the commitment to the kind of world order where American business, diplomatic, and military interests predominate. In other words, few have been raising the question of justice. The major disputes among American political leaders have been tactical rather than moral.

When the Soviet Union rolled its tanks into the city of Prague and crushed the stirrings of independence in Dubcek’s Czechoslovakia, the Soviets claimed an inherent right to prevent a country from slipping out of its orbit. Americans were scandalized by the arrogance and brutality of the “Brezhnev Doctrine” but have failed to see the similar doctrine and motivation at the heart of American foreign policy in the doctrines of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, MacNamara, Bundy, Rostow, Laird, Rusk, Dulles, Kissinger, and now Gerald R. Ford. The unrelenting propaganda of five presidential administrations, the self-justifying illusions of the American people, and the unprophetic accommodation of the American churches have all served to hide the reality of American policy in Indochina and elsewhere -- that the United States war in Indochina has, like other American ventures, been fought for American purposes and not for the purposes of the people of Indochina. When a new government or insurgent social movement seems to threaten to take a nation out of the U.S. economic, political, and military orbit, the U.S. government’s often-claimed commitment to self-determination for other nations quickly shows itself to be without substance. When American policy makers feel business, diplomatic, or strategic interests to be threatened, the U.S. takes the right to conspire and act against that nation or movement through intelligence, subversive, economic, para-military, or military operations. The conditional nature of the U.S. commitment to self-determination is well expressed by Henry Kissinger in his defense of U.S. involvement in the economic and political subversion of the elected Allende government in Chile, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

In Indochina, the U.S. has continually sought to prevent an indigenous settlement that would imperil perceived American interests in Asia and elsewhere. Similar policies have been pursued in other parts of Asia, Africa, and especially in Latin America. When a government comes to power, with or without U.S. covert help, and brings its country into the U.S. orbit or when a government is already within the U.S. orbit of influence, Washington will do almost anything to support that government and prevent an unfavorable change in it. It will do so no matter how little support that government has with its people, no matter how repressive and dictatorial it becomes, no matter if it is an elite regime of the rich against the poor, no matter if it violates human rights and political freedom, no matter if its jails are full of political prisoners. It is clear from the numerous governments of this sort around the world that are dependent upon the U.S. for support that the often-claimed U.S. opposition to totalitarian regimes is also without substance and is conditional according to the way an autocratic regime treats American interests.

To recognize the reality that the United States acts for the same purposes that other selfish superpowers to recognize the violence and injustice caused by a nation such as ours, is not to naively accept the rhetoric and pretensions of the other ideological forces in the world aligned against American power. Nor does a fundamental opposition to American global designs carry with it a simplistic faith that insurgent movements will bring the liberation and salvation they often claim. To put oneself against the violence of American policy and the violence of the world order it defends is not to put one’s trust in the efficacy of the counter-violence of the wretched masses who rise up in revolt. But when own our own nation is a principal actor and causal agent in creating destruction, killing, and suffering, when the course our own nation has chosen can only intensify conflict rather than to reduce it, then we have to act against the policies of the government and work against the root causes of those policies.

Henry Kissinger is right, and the liberals are wrong, when he suggests that the American loss of Indochina (to the people of Indochina) will weaken the world order to which he is committed and that the U.S. stands for. The question is whether we are committed to a world order where the needs for justice and peace are subordinated to the interests of the American establishment. The other question is whether the violence and injustice of a world order of American dominance will only be overturned by the counterviolence of those who are the victims of the American world order. That is a scenario of endless war, endless revolution, endless death and destruction. That consequence is inevitable unless some of those who have benefited from the American world order withdraw their allegiance from it, resist its designs and demands, repudiate its basic assumptions and values, and begin to construct alternatives to it in a way that might provide a new kind of leadership and direction in the wealthy nations. That is a mission of peace, of reconciliation, of evangelism, of prophetic ministry. That is a mission for the church.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.