This article was originally printed on June 24, 1967
We have cried to the world that we seek only "an honorable peace" in Vietnam, but it becomes more and more apparent that a peace which accords with our concept of honor is a peace which can be imposed only on a defeated enemy. General Westmoreland's purpose in coming to address both houses of Congress and to talk with the President was to appeal for even more troops, in order, as Rep. Mendel Rivers (D, S.G.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, affirmed, "to bring the armies of North Vietnam to their knees."
The contradiction between our ideal aims of a peace of conciliation and such an imposed peace, which only a defeated enemy would accept, can be understood only in the light of an ironic self-deception--ironic because we are the victims of our own ideology. We are a democratic nation whose power has grown to imperial proportions. We have made the mistake of being drawn into a civil war in an obscure nation of Southeast Asia, a mistake that has imperiled our imperial prestige. But in a democracy, particularly one with nostalgic visions of an early innocence, it is necessary to veil imperial and strategic interests behind "democratic" and ideal goals. Hence, this war is interpreted as an ideological struggle between the "free" world and the forces of communism. That means we must carve out of a nation which was united in its struggle against French imperialism, a new nation out of the southern sliver of a nation, the partition of which was ordained in the 1954 Geneva conference. Ho Chi Minh, regarded by the peasants of Vietnam as the George Washington of his nation, submitted to the partition because he hoped that the plebiscite promised in two years would result in the unity of the nation. But Ho Chi Minh is both a national patriot and a communist.
The communist ideology makes room for this double vocation in its concept of a "war of national liberation." Our ideology, on the other hand, defines him simply as a communist. We are rather unclear, since the Sino-Russian division, whether he is a tool of China or Russia. The more ignorant of our patriots make him a tool of China. Our former ambassador, Mr. Lodge, for instance, implied that he was a Chinese tool, though Vietnamese patriots have always regarded China with hatred and fear. More recently, when Chinese anarchy gave Russia the advantage in Asia, Russian sponsorship of the Vietnam "war of liberation" has become more obvious. Our airplanes have become increasingly the victims of Russian missiles, and the Russians have warned us that our escalation would prompt them to increase their aid to North Vietnam. So the war has become a contest between two nuclear imperial powers, who are, or have been, ironically, the tacit partners to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.
This irony is made more vivid if we remember that these two super-nations, both with power of imperial proportions dwarfing that of the 19th-century empires of European nations, are ideologically, that is, by definition, anti-imperialist. The USSR considers itself anti-imperialist because its dogma affirms that imperialism is the final fruit of capitalism; as it has abolished private property, it is therefore, by definition, innocent.
The US, on the other hand, believes itself anti-imperialist because its mass production in a hemispheric economy has made foreign markets unnecessary. We have forgotten our early expansive mood of "Manifest Destiny" and our brief period of overt imperialism after the Spanish-American War, when the Spanish possessions of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii were thrown inadvertently into our lap. There was also the ideology, running from Jefferson to Wilson, which defined democracy as innocent of imperial moods and methods, much in the same way as communist ideology simply regarded its anti-capitalism as proof of its innocence of imperialism.
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