Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [137]
It should be noted in this connection that after the long-standing U.S. manipulation of governments in its client state had finally succeeded in its aim, and the United States had placed in power two former French collaborators, Ky and Thieu, whose sole qualification for rule was that they met the U.S. condition of willingness to fight and evade political settlement, the U.S. media continued to pretend that the government of South Vietnam was a free choice of the South Vietnamese people.37 Thus the New York Times commented editorially on June 4, 1966, that “Washington cannot shape the political future in Saigon, but it can continue to urge a search for unity among all the South Vietnamese political factions pending the September elections.” In fact, the rulers at the moment had been imposed by the United States, the election was a U.S. idea, and—needless to say—the South Vietnamese who constituted the only “truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam” (Pike, referring to the NLF) were not considered one of the “South Vietnamese political factions.” As for the “unity” sought by the United States, it was intended solely to provide a base for prosecution of the U.S. war. As that goal could be accomplished only by suppression of all popular movements, later in 1966 the military junta, with U.S. approval and direct assistance, crushed by force the largest non-Communist group, the organized Buddhists, thereby clearing the ground for durable rule by Thieu and Ky. Despite all of this, the U.S. media did not point out that any basis for a free election had been destroyed, and that the unelected government was maintained in power solely because its aims were identical to those of the U.S. administration—that is, that it was a classic example of a puppet government.38 On the contrary, the junta never ceased to be the leaders of free and independent South Vietnam, the word “puppet” being reserved for agents of enemy states.
Returning to the expanding U.S. war, efforts to obtain congressional support succeeded with the August 7, 1964 resolution, after the Tonkin Gulf incident, authorizing the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” by the Vietnamese in Vietnam, “a virtual blank check in waging the war for the Administration.”39
The United States invaded outright in early 1965, also initiating the regular bombing of North Vietnam in the hope that Hanoi would use its influence to call off the southern resistance, and to justify the escalation of the attack against the South, which required something beyond the “internal aggression” by the NLF within South Vietnam that UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson identified as the problem we faced.40 By the time of the U.S. land invasion in 1965, over 150,000 people had been killed in South Vietnam, according to figures cited by Bernard Fall, most of them “under the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and finally vomiting gases,” or victims of the state terrorism of the U.S.-installed regimes.41 From January 1965, the United States also employed Korean mercenaries, some 300,000 in all, who carried out brutal atrocities in the South. The first regular North Vietnamese unit, a four-hundred-man battalion, was thought to have been detected in border areas of the south in late April 1965; until the Tet offensive in January 1968, according to Pentagon sources, North Vietnamese units, mainly drawing U.S. forces away from populated centers, were at about the level of Korean and Thai mercenaries who were terrorizing South Vietnam, all vastly outnumbered