Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The intensity of the struggle in Vietnam increased fairly steadily in the years following 1947. The creation of the Cominform and the subsequent Communist withdrawal from the coalition governments of Europe, including France, freed the Kremlin to support anticolonial movements in Europe’s overseas territories. At the same time, the reestablished French Army was left with a wounded pride which became, in some cases, a neurotic drive to wipe out the stains of 1940-1942 by subsequent victories in colonial wars. The growing aggression of Communist China and Dulles’s fantasies about liberation all contributed to build the Indochina confusion into a flaming crisis. The final step came from the Korean truce of 1953 which freed Red China’s hands for more vigorous action in the southeast. The defeat of the Communist risings of 1948 elsewhere in Malaysia turned the new Chinese activities full into Indochina, which had an open frontier for passage of Chinese Communist supplies and advisers.

This intensification of Chinese-supported Communist activities in Vietnam in 1953-1954 was quite contrary to the desires of the Kremlin, which was just entering the post-Stalin “thaw” and already moving toward the “Geneva spirit” of 1955. At the same time, the readiness of Dulles and the French Army to force a showdown in Vietnam was equally unacceptable to the British and to many persons in divided France. Out of these confusions came, on February 18, 1954, a Soviet suggestion for a conference on Indochina to be held at Geneva in April.

By the early months of 1954, the Communist guerrillas were in control of most of northern Indochina, were threatening Laos, and were plaguing the villages of Cochin-China as far south as Saigon. About 200,000 French troops and 300,000 Vietnamese militia were tied in knots by about 335,000 Viet Minh soldiers and guerrillas. France was being bled to death, both literally and financially, with little to show for it, but the French Army was obstinate in its refusal to accept another defeat.

The French strong point at Dien Bien Phu was invested by Viet Minh on March 13, 1954, and by the end of the month its outer defenses were crumbling. The French chief of staff, General Ely, flew to Washington and found Dulles willing to risk an all-out war with Red China by authorizing direct American intervention in Indochina. As usual, Dulles thought that wonders could be achieved by an air strike alone against the besiegers of Dien Bien Phu, where the conflict increased in intensity daily. For a few days the United States, at Dulles’s prodding, tottered “on the brink of war.” Dulles proposed “a united action policy” which he described in these terms: “If Britain would join the U.S. and France would agree to stand firm, . . . the three Western states could combine with friendly Asian nations to oppose Communist forces on the ground just as the U.N. stepped in against the North Korean aggression in 1950 . . . and if the Chinese Communists intervene openly, their staging bases in south China [will] be destroyed by U.S. air power.…”

President Eisenhower agreed, but his calls to Churchill and Eden found the British government opposed to the adventure. The foreign secretary hastened to point out that the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1950 bound Russia to come to the assistance of China if it were attacked by the United States as Dulles contemplated. Discussion at Geneva, said Eden, must precede any such drastic action.

Few international conferences have taken place amid such external turmoil as the Far Eastern Geneva Conference of April 25-July 20, 1954. During it, two American aircraft carriers, loaded with atomic weapons, were cruising the South China Sea, awaiting orders from Washington to hurl their deadly bombs at the Communist forces besieging the 15,000 exhausted troops trapped in Dien Bien Phu. In Washington, Admiral Radford was vigorously advocating such aggressive action on a generally reluctant government. In Paris, public outrage was rising over Indochina where the French had expended 19,000 lives and $8 billion without improving matters a particle. At Geneva, delegates from nineteen nations were talking and stalling to gain as much as possible without open warfare. The fall of Dien Bien Phu on May 7th opened a vigorous debate in the French Assembly and led to the fall of Premier Joseph Laniel’s government, the eighteenth time a Cabinet had been overturned since the end of World War II in 1945. The new prime minister, Pierre Mendes-France, promised a cease-fire in Indochina or his own retirement within thirty days. He barely made the deadline.

The Indochinese settlement of July 20, 1954 was basically a compromise, some of whose elements did not appear in the agreement itself. A Communist North Vietnam state, with its capital at Hanoi (Tonkin), was recognized north of the 17th parallel of latitude, and the rest of Indochina was left in three states which remained associated with the French Union (Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam).

The new state system of Southeast Asia was brought within the Dulles network of trip-wire pacts on September 8, 1954, when eight nations of the area signed an agreement at Manila establishing a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The eight (United States, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines) made no specific commitments, but set up a council, to meet at Bangkok and operate on a unanimous basis for economic, social, and military cooperation in the area. By special protocol they extended their protection to Laos, South Vietnam, and Cambodia.

The Geneva agreement, in effect, was to neutralize the states of Indochina, but neutrality was apparently not acceptable to the Dulles brothers, and any possible stability in the area was soon destroyed by their activities, especially through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seeking to subvert the neutrality of Laos and South Vietnam. This was done by channeling millions in American funds to Right-wing army officers, building up large (and totally unreliable) military forces led by these Rightist generals, rigging elections, and, when it seemed necessary, backing reactionary coups d’état . These techniques might have been justified, in the eyes of the CIA, if they had been successful, but, on the contrary, they alienated the mass of the natives in the area, brought numerous recruits to the Left, gave justification for Communist intervention from North Vietnam, disgusted our allies in Britain and France, as well as many of our friends in Burma, India, and elsewhere, and by 1962 had almost destroyed the American image and the American position in the area.

In Laos the chief political figure was Prince Souvanna Phouma, leader of the neutralist group, who tried to keep a balance between the Communist-supported Pathet Lao on his Left and the American-subsidized politicians and militarists led by General Phoumi Nosavan on his Right. American aid was about $40 million a year, of which about $36 million went to the army. This was used, under American influence, as an antineutralist rather than an anti-Leftist influence culminating in a bungled army attack on two Pathet Lao battalions in May 1959, and openly rigged elections in which all the Assembly seats were won by Right-wing candidates in April 1960. In August 1960, an open revolt in behalf of the neutralist Souvanna Phouma by Captain Kong Le gave rise to a Right-wing revolution led by General Phoumi Nosavan. This drove the neutralists into the arms of the Pathet Lao and to seek direct Soviet intervention. The SEATO Council refused to support the American position, the Laotian Army was reluctant to fight, and the American military mission was soon involved in the confused fighting directly.

The American bungle in Laos was repeated, with variations, elsewhere in southern and southeastern Asia. In South Vietnam, American aid, largely military, amounted to about two-thirds of the country’s budget, and by 1962, when it was running at about $400 million a year, it had reached a total of $2 billion. Such aid, which provided little benefit for the people, corrupted the government, weakened the swollen defense forces, and set up a chasm between rulers and people which drove the best of the latter Leftward, in spite of the exploitative violence of the Communist guerrillas. A plebiscite in 1955 was so rigged that the American-supported Right-wing candidate won over 98 percent of the vote. The election of 1960 was similarly managed, except in Saigon, the capital, where many people refused to vote. As might have been expected, denial of a fair ballot led to efforts to assassinate the American-supported President, Ngo Dinh Diem, and gave rise to widespread discontent which made it possible for the Communist guerrillas to operate throughout the country. The American-sponsored military response drove casualties to a high sustained figure by 1962 and was uprooting the peasantry throughout the country in an effort to establish fortified villages which the British had introduced, with success, in Malaya.