Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [136]
The leading U.S. government specialist on Vietnamese Communism, Douglas Pike, whose denunciations of the “Viet Cong” often reached the level of hysteria, conceded that the NLF “maintained that its contest with the GVN and the United States should be fought out at the political level and that the use of massed military might was in itself illegitimate,” until forced by the United States and its clients “to use counterforce to survive.”31
The Kennedy administration escalated the war in South Vietnam, engaging U.S. military forces directly in bombing, defoliation, and “advising” combat troops from 1961 to 1962 as part of an effort to drive several million people into concentration camps (“strategic hamlets”) in which they could be “protected” behind barbed wire and armed guard from the guerrillas whom, the United States conceded, they were willingly supporting. Douglas Pike assessed indigenous support for the NLF at about 50 percent of the population at the time—which is more than George Washington could have claimed—while the United States could rally virtually no indigenous support. He explained that political options were hopeless, since the NLF was the only “truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam,” and no one, “with the possible exception of the Buddhists, thought themselves equal in size and power to risk entering a coalition, fearing that if they did the whale [the NLF] would swallow the minnow.” As for the Buddhists, the United States regarded them “as equivalent to card-carrying Communists” (Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge), and later backed the use of force to destroy their political movement, to ensure that no independent political force would remain, since no such force could be controlled.32 In a highly regarded military history and moral tract in justification of the American war, Guenter Lewy describes the purpose of the U.S. air operations of the early 1960s, which involved “indiscriminate killing” and “took a heavy toll of essentially innocent men, women and children,” in a manner that Orwell would have appreciated: villages in “open zones” were “subjected to random bombardment by artillery and aircraft so as to drive the inhabitants into the safety of the strategic hamlets.”33
It was conceded on all sides that the government imposed by the United States lacked any significant popular support. The experienced U.S. pacification chief John Paul Vann, widely regarded as the U.S. official most knowledgeable about the situation in South Vietnam, wrote in 1965 that
A popular political base for the Government of South Vietnam does not now exist . . . The existing government is oriented toward the exploitation of the rural and lower class urban populations. It is, in fact, a continuation of the French colonial system of government with upper class Vietnamese replacing the French . . . The dissatisfaction of the agrarian population . . . is expressed largely through alliance with the NLF.34
Virtually all parties concerned, apart from the United States, were making serious efforts in the early 1960s to avoid an impending war by neutralizing South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—the official stand of the National Liberation Front, the “Viet Cong” of U.S. propaganda, essentially the southern branch of the Viet Minh. But the United States was committed to preventing any political settlement.
Unable to develop any political base in the south, the U.S. government proceeded to expand the war. It was able to do this by continually manipulating the political scene in South Vietnam to assure the attainment of its objective: continued fighting until an anti-Communist regime, susceptible to American will, was established in the South. Ambassador Lodge observed in January 1964 that “It is obvious that the generals are all we have got.”35 And we would keep replacing them until we got the right ones, “right” meaning that they were willing to follow orders and fight, not negotiate. One of