Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [13]
VIETNAM, LAOS, AND CAMBODIA
VIETNAM: WAS THE UNITED STATES A VICTIM OR AN AGGRESSOR?
In chapters 5 through 7, we show that media coverage of the Indochina wars fits the propaganda model very well. The United States first intervened in Indochina immediately after World War II in support of French recolonization, after which it carried out a twenty-one-year effort (1954–75) to impose a government in the southern half of Vietnam that U.S. officials and analysts consistently recognized as lacking any substantial indigenous support, and in opposition to local nationalist—though Communist—forces that were understood to have a mass base. U.S. leaders operated on the belief that their overwhelming military might would not only enable them, but entitled them, to force submission to a minority government of U.S. choice.
By normal word usage this would make the U.S. effort in Vietnam a case of “aggression.” The mainstream media, however, rarely if ever found U.S. policy there to be other than highly moral and well intentioned, even if based on miscalculation of its costs—to us (see chapter 5). The media readily accepted that we were protecting “South Vietnam”—a U.S. creation ruled by a dictator imported directly from the United States—against somebody else’s aggression, vacillating in their identification of the aggressor between North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, or the resistance in South Vietnam engaging in “internal aggression”! It is compelling evidence of the propaganda service of the mainstream media that throughout the war they accepted this basic propaganda assumption of the war managers, and from that era up to today, we have never found a mainstream editorial or news report that characterized the U.S. war against Vietnam, and then all of Indochina, as a case of aggression.
After the United States terminated the military phase of the war in 1975, it maintained and enforced an eighteen-year boycott of the country that it had virtually destroyed. According to Vietnamese estimates, the war had cost them 3 million killed, 300,000 missing, 4.4 million wounded, and 2 million harmed by toxic chemicals; and its land was left ravaged by bombs and Rome plows as well as chemical weapons. With 58,000 killed, the U.S. death toll from the war was under one-tenth of 1 percent of its population; Vietnam’s death toll was 17 percent of its population, and only Vietnam’s people were attacked by chemical warfare and had their countryside devastated.
Nevertheless, U.S. officials and the mainstream media continued to view the U.S. role in the war as creditable, the United States as the victim. President George Bush stated in 1992 that “Hanoi knows today that we seek only answers without the threat of retribution for the past.”59 That is, the Vietnamese had done things to us that might justify retribution on our part, but we only seek answers regarding our men missing in action.60 New York Times foreign affairs commentator Leslie Gelb justified classifying Vietnam an “outlaw” on the grounds that “they had killed Americans.”61 This reflects the common establishment view, implicit in Bush’s comment, that nobody has a right of self-defense against this country, even if it intervenes across the ocean to impose by force a government that the people of that country reject.
U.S. CHEMICAL WARFARE IN INDOCHINA
It is also of interest how the media have treated the massive use of chemicals during the Vietnam War and the horrifying aftermath for the victim country. In 1961 and 1962 the Kennedy administration authorized the use of chemicals to destroy rice crops in South Vietnam—in violation of a U.S. tradition as well as international law (Admiral William Leahy, in response to a proposal to destroy Japanese rice crops in 1944, stated that this would “violate every Christian ethic I have ever heard