Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [128]
Because the North Vietnamese were unquestionably the first to violate the neutrality of Cambodia—as the Germans were of Belgium in 1914—the current controversy about American violation is a false issue. American guilt lay in extending the war to a non-participating land and people and in requiring our Air Force deliberately to falsify the record. Kissinger’s strained defense—on the ground that it was necessary to keep silent in order not to force the necessity of a protest on Prince Norodom Sihanouk or provoke North Vietnam to retaliate —is not impressive. Keeping silent is one thing; extreme precautions of secrecy (which Kissinger omits to mention), to the point of transgressing our own military code, are quite another.
Equally, the justification on the ground that American soldiers were being killed by North Vietnamese based in Cambodia seems inappropriately indignant. Kissinger fulminates about an “unprovoked offensive killing 400 Americans a week” and the “outrage of a dishonorable and bloody offensive.” Is an offensive supposed to be bloodless? Is there something peculiarly shocking about killing enemy soldiers in war? When it comes to “dishonorable,” I cannot follow Kissinger’s thinking at all.
He talks a lot about honor in these pages. “American honor” and “American innocence” are terms that recur as often as “realities” and “realpolitik,” with which they consort oddly. The United States is said to have entered Vietnam “in innocence, convinced that the cruel civil war represented the cutting edge of some global design.” One fails to comprehend why containment of communism is described as innocence. Elsewhere he says we entered the war out of “naïve idealism,” which sounds strange coming from Henry Kissinger, the unsentimental dealer in hard realities. Why is he trying in this book to make himself appear something he is not, to wear a Roman toga, as it were, over a coat of mail? Perhaps, with an eye on office, it is to legitimize himself with those on the right.
The vicious tyranny that has descended upon Chile, with the assistance of the United States, belongs to the period after this book closes in January 1973 and presumably will be dealt with in Kissinger’s next volume. Here he includes a chapter on the decision by the so-called 40 Committee, of which he was chairman, to authorize expenditures by the Central Intelligence Agency to influence the Chilean elections of 1970. Here we come to an outright instance of American illegality in a cold-war cause, even if in the first instance it was ineffectual.
With copper and ITT in the background, Kissinger eschews reference to American innocence and concentrates instead on making a fervent case of the danger represented by Salvador Allende, who is credited with the “patent intention” to accomplish the transition to communism. His predicted electoral victory (by a plurality but miniority vote) would establish another Castro in the Western hemisphere. He “would soon be inciting anti-American policies, attacking hemisphere solidarity, making common cause with Cuba, and sooner or later establishing close relations with the Soviet Union,” with profound effect “against fundamental American national interests.”
If such was the case—and Kissinger can be very persuasive—a legitimate question arises. In the national interest, was it not an American duty to do what it could to fend off a second communist state in Latin America? The answer, in this case, must be no, for, whatever the threat, Allende’s approaching presidency was to be accomplished by constitutional means. For the United States to interfere in the domestic affairs of a neighboring state in an attempt to thwart