The Last Viet Nam War: Who Won?

By Steve Jonas

Ken Burns' self-styled documentary, "The Viet Nam War ," has set off a large number of writers' commentaries, on the film itself and the accompanying book, on the War, on the U.S. role, on the aftermath, and so and so forth. One question about the horror (primarily for the people of Indo-China, most especially Viet Nam) that does not get asked too often has been "who won?" The conventional wisdom on the Right, the Center, and at least some of the Left, is that the U.S. lost. Well, if one goes back into the history of the War and reviews what the United States' original goals were, it becomes very clear that in fact the U.S. won. And here's the case for making that statement.

Ho Chi Minh (a nom de plume[how appropriately French, non/]), the once and future leader of a united Viet Nam, made his first appearance on the world stage at the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference, in 1919. Among other things, he attempted to approach one of the primary Conference leaders, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. He wanted to request support for getting the then French colonial power to establish some basic civil rights for the Vietnamese population. (France had conquered what became "French Indo-China, " beginning in the 1850s.) But the racist Wilson's famous "Fourteen Points " of "self-determination" apparently only applied to nations occupied by white folks. (Wilson, racist, you say? Well yes . Among other things it was Wilson who re-segregated the U.S. armed forces, as well as the bulk of the U.S. civil service.) Ho Chi Minh was simply fobbed off by Wilson. Viet Nam reverted to the French, with no changes made for the status of the local population. Ho Chi Minh (now a nom de guerre) and his allies began an armed liberation movement during the 1920s. 

During the Second World War, French Indo-China was actually administered jointly by the Nazi-collaborationist regime of Vichy France and the Japanese, who had captured the whole of South-East Asia in 1940-42). After the war, Ho Chi Minh and his liberationist forces asked the (non-French) Allies to prevent the re-establishment of the French colonial regime. They were rebuffed, as they had been at Paris in 1919. Then began the French-Vietnamese War, which ended with the surrender of the French at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954. There followed the Geneva Peace Conference, and Agreement, between the French and the victorious Vietnamese forces, of 1954. It was guaranteed by the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. Pointedly, the United States refused to guarantee, endorse, or even accept the Agreement.

Although the Ho Chi Minh-led forces had won the War, there was a pro-French puppet government in the South, headed by the "emperor" Bai Dai. And so, the Agreement divided the country into something that had never previously existed, a "North" and a "South." This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, until national elections --- elections that everyone knew would have been won overwhelmingly by Ho Chi Minh and his Communist Party --- were to be held, in 1956. The U.S. interest, not at all in synch with the Paris Agreement) was led by the fiercely anti-Communist Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his equally fiercely anti-Communist brother, Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. 

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Source: OpEdNews.com