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Alright y'all, introducing Robert Freeman.
He writes about economics and education.
He is the author of the Best One Hour History series, which includes World War I, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and other titles.
That sounds very interesting.
And especially because in the aftermath, I guess, of the Vietnam War documentary series by Ken Burns playing on PBS, there's been a lot of writing about it.
And I think this is the most interesting article that I've read about the Vietnam War in the last few weeks here.
And I've read a lot of them.
I'm the opinion editor of Antiwar.com.
But this one has a lot of really unique insights in it.
So that makes it seem to me like the rest of what you write must be very good too.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm well, thank you.
Really great work here.
Why the U.S. lost the Vietnam War.
Well, they got all kinds of things wrong here.
They got all their premises wrong.
Never even mind the morality of the whole thing.
They didn't understand the war that they were fighting.
That's very true.
Well, it was well more than a decade.
The U.S. actually started supporting the French fighting the Vietnamese in 1946.
And, of course, the war ended in 75.
So it was almost 30 years.
All right.
So if you could, please take us back then to the end of World War II.
Well, the end of World War II, it was kind of a schizophrenic time for the United States.
It was the only power in the world that had been untouched during World War II.
It ended up with the greatest economy, the largest Air Force, the largest Navy in the world, the monopoly on the atomic bomb.
All the other countries were devastated, including, very importantly, the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union lost 70 men for every one that the United States lost during World War II.
So the U.S. was more disproportionately powerful relative to the other countries in the world than any other country in the history of the world.
The U.S. was like a giant astride a world of pygmies.
And yet the U.S. managed to convince itself that it was at risk from a global communist conspiracy.
And so it began to react violently and irrationally anytime anything with a communist taint popped up anywhere in the world.
Now, it didn't help that the U.S. was unable to defeat the Koreans and only could fight Korea to a draw.
In 1947, India went socialist, threw itself into the Soviet camp.
In 1949, the communists won the Civil War in China.
And so within only a couple of years of the end of World War II, it really looked like the U.S. was losing the war.
More than half of humanity, four-fifths of the land mass of Asia, had thrown itself in with the Soviet camp.
And so in 1946, Ho Chi Minh, the president of Vietnam, came to Harry Truman, the president of the United States, and he said this.
He said, Mr. Truman, would you please help us get these French people out of our country?
They've been occupying our country as a colony since the 1860s.
You yourself, America, were one time a colony of a foreign European colonist.
So you understand where we are.
Would you help us please get the French out?
Unfortunately, Truman said, no, we're going to help the French.
That was the original sin that made it impossible for the U.S. to ever win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.
So the war may have been even lost as early as 1946 before the fighting ever started.
Does that make sense?
Sure.
So then, now you talk about the creation in the Eisenhower years of the state of South Vietnam, and the fact that the dictator that they put in charge, Diệm, was a Catholic, and, you know, to rule over a Buddhist population.
Yes.
And that, as they were, I think, you know, I wasn't around then, so you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this was basically under the guise of clear, hold, build, and protect the population counterinsurgency strategy, we got to confiscate all your property and herd all of you guys into strategic hamlets and all this stuff, when really that was just an excuse to steal all their farmland and give it to people connected to the central government in Saigon.
Well, there's a lot to that.
The strategic hamlet program, the clear hold strategy, all that didn't emerge until the 60s.
But you're correct.
In 1954, the Vietnamese defeated the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, and the French said, we're out of here, we're going to leave.
There was a conference, and the conference said, we're going to make a setback line, the 17th parallel here.
Now, you communists, you stay to the north of that.
You French, you're going to have a place to regroup so you can exit the country.
It was specifically not a line of division into two countries, but the conference also stipulated that in 1956 there would be national elections to choose a leader.
Eisenhower said in his memoirs bluntly, if that election had gone ahead, our guys would have lost.
And so Eisenhower brought in a guy from New Jersey.
You're correct.
His name was Neo Diem.
He was a rich Catholic Mandarin in a land of poor Buddhist peasants.
Totally inappropriate.
No consent of the government.
He was imposed on these people.
And Eisenhower set up a new country in the south, south of the 17th parallel, and he called it South Vietnam.
After North Korea, South Korea.
North Vietnam, South Vietnam.
That was the second cardinal sin.
If Truman saying we're going to help the French was the original sin, I division of the country into two in 1955 was the second cardinal sin possible to ever win the hearts and minds of the people.
Now, let me ask you this.
Just from the point of view of the American empire, never mind morality or anything like that, do you think it's possible or likely that if Truman or Ike had gone along and said, you know what?
This guy Ho Chi Minh likes quoting Thomas Jefferson and everything.
And yeah, he's a red.
But the Vietnamese, they have a proud tradition of fighting off the Chinese and they don't want to be under the dominance of Mao Zedong.
And so maybe they could be red, but maybe we could keep them more or less in our orbit anyway.
And actually, you know, there's a famous clip or I don't know how famous it is.
It should be famous.
I think it's in War Made Easy by Norman Solomon of Ike Eisenhower saying, oh, no.
See, if Vietnam goes red, then we might have to pay the market price for tungsten.
And we can't have that.
So I was just thinking, you know, maybe they could have said I don't want to, you know, sound like naive and stupid and utopian.
But so it's the question is if they had said, look, Ho Chi Minh, we'll let you go ahead and have independence.
But you're going to be friendly with us, not with them.
Would he have gone along with that, you think?
It's very likely that he would.
Ho Chi Minh was not a deeply ideologically committed communist.
He was primarily a nationalist.
He wanted the white foreign colonial occupiers out of his country.
Now, there's a very good precedent.
Well, let me say this before that.
Ho Chi Minh had actually helped the Americans against the Japanese during World War II.
He was already working with the Americans.
And all he wanted was to get the French out.
Now, there was another precedent of the Americans being able to work with communists.
And that was Yugoslavia.
Marshal Tito had defied the Soviet Union and decided to go his own way in making a communist state.
And he worked very well with the Americans and with all the Western Europeans.
So you're absolutely correct.
There were precedents and there were reasons why we could have worked with Ho Chi Minh.
I'm sorry to change the subject, but it sort of seems like the same thing from at least my understanding of the history of America's relationship with Nasser, the nationalist in Egypt, that if they had just treated him fairly at all, he would have far preferred to be in America's orbit than the Soviet Union's orbit.
And then, you know, it wouldn't have been an absolute sock puppet dictatorship like under Sadat or Mubarak or Sisi.
But it would have been good enough if the Americans had been willing to settle for good enough.
And instead, CIA went ahead and threw in their lot with the Muslim Brotherhood, you know?
I don't know.
It just seems like they suck at being imperialists.
That's all.
Anyway, so back to Vietnam now.
So, well, tell me what you think of this.
And sorry, audience, I'm repeating myself a little bit, but I think this is important.
I guess I had heard Noam Chomsky and whoever had said different times in my life that, you know, it wasn't even really a civil war.
The U.S. invaded Vietnam.
And then, yeah, they created a sock puppet government to give us permission and ask for our help and all these things.
But all those things get ironic air quotes, scare quotes, because it's all BS.
America invaded this nation, that's all.
And, yeah, you know, I don't know.
And I guess I'd always heard of it.
Even anti-war people say it was a civil war.
It was none of our business.
It was a civil war.
And so, I don't know.
But then I read Nick Turse's book, Kill Anything That Moves.
And I saw, OK, so what happened here was America invaded Vietnam.
That's really it.
And the war was never really a war to protect anything like the people of South Vietnam from communism.
It was a war against the people of South Vietnam.
And then, yeah, so they found, you know, some people to back, mostly those who had been the Vichy puppets of the French before, right?
But so I just wonder, you know, it's a matter of categories and conceptions and whatever.
But I wonder what you think of that as a framework for looking at it.
It's almost the matter that the labels don't matter.
The fact is the United States inserted itself into Vietnam in violation of the Geneva Accords that were written to settle the war with the French.
The U.S. inserted itself and set up a government.
That's a nation that's 9,000 miles away from Washington, D.C.
The United States had never been attacked.
The Vietnamese never attacked the U.S.
They never tried to attack.
They never wanted to attack.
They never had the capacity to attack.
But the U.S. inserted themselves and then began subordinating the people through Diem and ultimately in 1965 with their own forces because they would not remain subservient.
Yeah, but what a great catch, though.
If if no, we're we're not invading the place.
We've been asked to help defend our friend who is helpless before this terrible enemy.
Now we're fighting a defensive war to save the nice people against themselves.
So with that frame of reference makes all the difference.
Even if, you know, like Ronald Reagan said, hey, it was a noble cause.
We tried our best and whatever.
The whole thing was it was right to do because we were trying to help people who were victims, even though ultimately it didn't quite work out.
Well, that's the way it's framed in all the U.S. invasions of the developing world.
Let's let's let's scope out here for just a second.
The really big context of this whole thing is the fact of more than 400 years, 400 years, the European colonization of the developing world.
Now, at the end of World War Two, the European empires had imploded because they'd committed suicide by inflicting on themselves two world wars in 30 years.
But the fact is that the colonial mindset and the domination of the developing world was a fact of life in 1945.
And the only question was, so who's going to be the new dominator now?
Which Western country is going to pick up the old European empires?
And there was only one Western country in the United States wanted to do that because those empires had been made rich precisely by milking the wealth out of the developing world for more than 400 years.
And so this is not a non sequitur.
It's not an immaculate conception that came out of nowhere.
Our invasion and attack and subordination of Vietnam was perfectly continuous with the colonial legacy of the Western world.
Right.
Well, and see, that's really the that's the key to all of this always is NSC 68.
And that the entire thought process behind that, that we have to be a world empire in order to be prosperous, which is completely crazy and wrong.
And to me seems like a thin excuse.
But I guess these men really believe that.
Well, I pay the market price for tungsten.
Who cares?
You know, well, guess what?
Guess what?
Paying the market price is the essence of capitalism, isn't it?
And what Eisenhower was saying there was we don't want to have to pay the market price, even though we purport to be capitalist.
Right.
In fact, we're not.
We're thugs.
NSC 68, as you said, Paul Nitze and Truman put a fig leaf over.
They gave a rationalization for this is now our right to go and invade anywhere.
We can go overthrow our Benz in Guatemala in 1954, Mossadegh in Iran in 1953.
We can kick out Allende in Chile in 1971, all under the guise of a fighting anti-communist.
But in almost no case, in almost with the exception of Chile, you know, in none of those cases were it were the people communist.
They were simply democratic socialists trying to do the right thing for their people, implementing land reform, education, things like that.
Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think off the top of my head.
I don't know about Murray Rothbard, but certainly I've read libertarians who I think even Rothbard saying that, oh, yeah, no, a lot of these Marxists or, you know, pseudo Marxists in South America doing land reform.
We're right to do so.
You know, they had, you know, a feudal system, not a private property rights system at all.
And that all these so-called socialists were really doing was expanding property rights to the masses of the people in the country.
And in some cases, I mean, not in a perfectly libertarian sense, but not in a Stalinist, you know, confiscation of all property way at all.
You know, it was it really was a redistribution to the peasants, not just as an excuse for the ruling party or whatever it is.
And you had alluded to that earlier.
One of the appeals of Ho Chi Minh in the north was that Ho Chi Minh had taken a great plantation that the French had built up and taken away from the people.
And Ho Chi Minh was redistributing these plantations to the peasants.
While Diem was confiscating all the land.
Exactly.
Diem came in, was confiscating land to give to his rich patrons and friends who would keep him in power.
So why do you think that Diem was so unpopular that he had to ultimately be assassinated to get to get him out of the way?
Well, so, yeah.
Now talk about that, because that was Jack Kennedy's last command as as ultimate director of Central Intelligence was to overthrow America's sock puppet there.
Well, that's a very it's controversial, but the history really is not in doubt.
Kennedy, Lodge, McNamara, McBundy had all decided that Diem wasn't cutting it and that the U.S. could not win the hearts and minds of the people as long as he stayed in.
And so Kennedy basically gave Lodge, Henry Cabot Lodge, the ambassador of Vietnam at the time, gave him the green light to go ahead and have Diem removed, terminated.
And Diem was ultimately killed in the back of an armored personnel carrier a few weeks later.
And then which led to a new regime that had more or less credibility than Diem's.
Well, it had much less credibility in the next two years.
In the next two years after Diem, they had seven different governments and the generals who took over were even less, you know, endeared by the population.
So it and not only that, but everybody knew that the U.S. had been behind Diem's assassination.
So everybody knew whoever came in was going to be even more of a lackey to the U.S. than Diem had been.
So in a very important way, it destroyed the political legitimacy of any government that we put into South Vietnam.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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All right, now, I think this is so important.
And it's interesting, too, like the incentive structures involved to me.
It's interesting to me, incentive structures involved in the bureaucratic processes where these people get so married to their understandings of a situation, their assessments of how a situation is as it's written on a piece of paper that, you know, it's like once it's decided that Saddam has warehouses full of VX, then we just all know that they're there and can never stop and question it kind of thing.
So in this case, this seems pretty obvious, especially if you're an intelligence or a military commander.
This ought to have made a lot of sense in real time.
But what you say here is that, no, it never did make sense to them.
Here's what I'm getting at, sorry.
What you say about them believing that we're fighting a war or the frame of reference, we're fighting a war to keep the North Vietnamese communists' invasion of the South from being successful, when in fact they weren't doing that.
They were fighting a war against South Vietnamese guerrillas who were fighting to force them out.
And the NVA, you know, they were involved in different times and places to a degree, but not in the way that the Americans looked at it.
But then so as you write here, the American response was to just bomb the hell out of the North, which only, of course, drove their, you know, gave them more incentive to back that guerrilla insurgency in the South in order to drive the Americans out, which ultimately worked at the expense of a hell of a lot of carpet bombing of the North and of the South too, I guess.
But, you know, the part that's interesting to me is how, yeah, stupid, you know, kind of thing.
And yet, no, this goes on for a decade without people, without somebody firing Westmoreland and figuring out a different way to proceed.
Well, it's really important to understand that everybody had been ideologically captured.
Everybody from Eisenhower, Johnson, Kennedy, Nixon, they had all gone through the McCarthy era of the 1950s, where if you were even suspected of being soft on communism, you know, you were out.
And all of them said they were intimidated by that.
They didn't want to appear to be soft on communism.
And they didn't want to be the first American to lose a war.
And so in a very real sense, the strategy was simply, we'll keep putting enough in to not lose, but never put in enough to actually win.
And that's what happened.
Everybody kept kicking the can down the road until, you know, until the streets and the riots.
The country was almost in a civil war by 1968.
Johnson assembled a council of, quote, wise men to advise him on what to do.
And his council said, you've got to get out of Vietnam because you are facing revolution in the United States here itself.
And the Vietnamese knew that.
They knew that they could outlast the United States in a similar way that they had outlasted the Chinese.
They had outlasted the French.
And they were simply going to, you know, play a game of guerrilla warfare until the U.S. people tired of white middle class boys coming home in body bags.
Yeah.
Well, now, so a lot of this, I mean, it's obviously not perfect, but there's so many parallels to Afghanistan here.
And yet the real obvious difference, and there's a lot of bad lands in Afghanistan, no question, mountains and all this stuff.
But, and this has always impressed me ever since I was a little kid.
Vietnam is almost like, it seems to me from what I can tell, almost like a comic book version of the deepest, darkest jungle full of snakes and gorillas, like real gorillas, and danger and other kinds of gorillas, too.
Both kinds.
Just, you know what I mean?
Looking at Charlie Sheen plodding through the mud in Platoon when I was a kid in the 80s and whatever.
Like, this is the worst place you could possibly fight a war in these, in this deepest, darkest, disease ridden jungle where these boys were forced to go and fight.
It's absolutely true.
And the U.S. Army had been trained and American military doctrine had been developed to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe with the Soviet tanks coming across flat plains, the Folda Gap in Poland.
And this was totally alien, both the terrain, the strategy, the guerrilla warfare strategy the U.S. had never encountered.
And one of the problems was they could not distinguish combatants from civilians.
And the consequence was they adopted military tactics, free fire zones, where they just said anything that moves, cats, dogs, cattle, people, will be killed.
And that was the only way they could figure out how to pacify the population.
So it wasn't just the terrain, it was the people, it was the nature of the war that the Vietnamese engaged in totally flummoxed the United States and ultimately defeated it.
Well, you know, think about how attached to our property we are.
I mean, anybody who owns land in any way, whether they bought it or their grandfather left it to them or whatever, you think how much that means.
And then yet their religion is like worshiping their ancestors tied directly to their local cemetery and their plot where they're buried.
In other words, they have such a cultural attachment to place and to immediate localism that it's, you know, Bill Kaufman, eat your heart out, right?
Like these guys are... and so it was, in other words, it's the same as anybody would react to being forcibly resettled, only just go ahead and add an exponent onto it.
Because this is a direct, you know, affront to their religious beliefs, right?
Yes, it was.
It absolutely was.
You're right.
The Buddhist affinity for ancestor worship was profound.
And that's one of the reasons, again, that DM coming in being a Catholic, he had actually been living in a Maryknoll seminary in New Jersey before Eisenhower asserted him there.
So he was alien, our practices were alien, they were an affront.
And the fact of any foreigners, and you mentioned earlier that the Vietnamese had defeated the Chinese over many centuries.
It's true.
And a lot of this knowledge, this is something I object to, some of the stuff going around these days is, well, nobody knew.
Who could have known?
In fact, in fact, almost all of these things, the ancestor worship, the nationalism, had been discussed in detail, academic detail, military detail, by the French.
And a lot of it had been translated into English.
So, in fact, we did know this stuff.
But we went in with an attitude of arrogance and cultural hegemony and imperialism and decided we were going to inflict our way of life on somebody to whom it was completely alien.
And they rejected it.
Right.
Yeah, everybody thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that we have to invade Iraq.
Oh, except for the 50% of the population.
That's 150 million Americans who knew better.
Yeah, but anyway, everybody thought so.
So that's the same kind of narrative, right?
No, everybody knew that we had to do this, except all the people who said that we shouldn't.
Yeah.
Well, this is what you have to get to.
It was in 44 B.C. Cicero wrote the two most important words in all of political forensics, qui bono, who benefits.
And who benefited from the invasion of Iraq?
It wasn't the American people, of course.
It certainly wasn't soldiers.
Somebody did.
Those who were making weapons, those who were selling helicopters, rockets, airplanes, bullets, machine guns, things like that.
There's a tremendous military and financial incentive going into countries like this.
But in the case of Iraq, of course, Scott Ritter is probably one of the most authoritative sources.
He was one of the U.S. inspectors on the ground in Iraq.
And in December of 2002, four months before the invasion, he stated publicly, this is the most inspected country on Earth.
And I can tell you there are no weapons of mass destruction in this country.
And he was correct, of course.
But the powers that be wanted a war.
And so they frog marched the country into a war.
And now sort of an interesting footnote here, of course, is that they always said it was the domino theory they had to an interesting footnote.
That's funny.
They had to stop communism from taking over.
And yet it was the American war in Vietnam that led to the rise of the absolute worst form of communism in the form of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge takeover in Cambodia.
The auto genocide, as they call it, the internal genocide there, the North Vietnamese communists who invaded to crush them.
And then later it was Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan helped back the Khmer Rouge to prevent the Vietnamese forces and their allies from completely defeating them.
But anyway, the ironies abound, don't they?
Yes, it was the U.S. invasion in 1970 and the bombing of Cambodia that destroyed the existing government.
And prior to that, the Khmer Rouge had been a very small sect, about 5000 soldiers.
But by destroying the civil infrastructure of the country when the U.S. did that, the Khmer Rouge were able to take power.
And as you correctly stated, carried out the largest proportional genocide against their own people in modern history.
Killed 25% of the population.
And you're right, the irony is that after the U.S. had been defeated and left Vietnam, it was the North Vietnamese that went in and spanked the Khmer Rouge and took them out of power.
While the U.S. defended the Khmer Rouge in the United Nations because they were against the Vietnamese.
The ironies are actually sickening.
But you know, it's funny because American foreign policy is like, why does America hate Iran so much anyway?
We fight all their wars for them.
You know, what's the big deal?
Just because they overthrew the sock puppet government 35 years ago that we had no right to foist on them in the first place?
It's just childish, right?
What do you mean you back the Khmer Rouge just because you still have hard feelings about losing to the North Vietnamese or the Vietnamese communists?
It's crazy.
Well, the U.S. isn't going to get over that fetish about Iran.
America is Hillary Clinton, the crybaby sore loser who never shuts up, never gives it up.
She never does, does she?
It's true.
No, but it looks to me like Trump is trying to push us into a war with Iran by decertifying the Joint Plan of Action.
Yeah.
Well, that interview is coming up in just a second.
But all right, so now a little bit more Vietnam here.
And here's all the best criticisms of Ken Burns have said, hey, what about the civilians?
What about the people who, for them, this is the American war, not the Vietnam War.
And these are people who were not not combatants, just men, women and children who had to suffer through this thing, as you pointed out earlier, for decades, really.
I mean, the very worst part of it for the Americans was 10 years.
But of course, the last a lot longer than that.
And and what they had to suffer through.
And I guess, you know, you did mention there about the free fire zones and the onslaught.
I think, you know, I think I don't know.
I'm trying to imagine what other people's imagination is about just how far Americans would go in committing war crimes in a place like that.
Because I think everybody knows that they just called them gooks and they just treated them bad.
And we've seen Hamburger Hill and whatever we got.
We have some context, you know, but what Nick Turse describes in his book and what you referred to there earlier to about these free fire zones, what amounted really to a genocidal war against the civilian population of South Vietnam?
And and this is the part that gets almost completely omitted from Ken Burns, you know, 10 hour thingamajig.
You know, there are isolated examples, but never the context that, you know, when people say it's somewhere between maybe two or three million Vietnamese killed and then we'll get to the Cambodians and the Laotians in a second.
The reason that they don't know the answer to that is because they killed so many people who the all the people who ever knew they existed also were killed.
And nobody even knows it's that the margin of error is a million people.
Well, you've got it exactly right.
We say some we say like three million Vietnamese, you throw in the Cambodians and the Laotians, and it's probably up to four million.
The government of Vietnam says it's actually six million people who were killed, another five plus million who were injured.
And you're right.
You know, Ken Burns is a he's one of a kind.
You know, he's essentially invented an art form there for entertainment.
But we shouldn't confuse entertainment with history.
He's writing a historical novel in the form of a documentary.
The fact is, we killed 69 Vietnamese people for every American that was lost.
That is not a war.
That is a massacre.
It's a massacre on the scale of the Holocaust.
When you're starting to talk four to six million people, there were six million people lost in the Holocaust.
And that is the scale of the massacre that we carried out with our eyes open and with imperial intent.
So Ken Burns likes to write nostalgia about America so we can feel good about ourselves.
Yes.
And baseball and stuff like that.
We need closure.
It's all about us and our feelings.
Right.
It's really a lot of empathy and pathos for those poor Americans in the trenches who had to slog their M60 rifles up the top of the hill, you know, through the rain.
And it's very, very much about let's feel sorry for the Americans.
And that's just you just have to understand.
Ken Burns makes a lot of money doing this.
He doesn't want to alienate his middle brow American populace by causing them any moral angst or any needing have to think about things.
And so it's always easy to make ourselves the victim and feel sorry for ourselves.
But that, in fact, is not history.
That is entertainment.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm about to actually talk with Marjorie Cohn about the results, the lasting effects of Agent Orange and all of that.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
There's legal matters at issue currently in this kind of thing.
But, you know, I saw a really cool thing.
I interviewed the guys actually.
No, no.
Well, I interviewed guys that made the documentary about what they call the bomb bees, the little bomblets of the cluster bomb units just all over the world where hundreds of people are killed every year.
Hundreds of human beings are killed and maimed every year by these leftover duds from LBJ since war there.
And then but, you know, there's this really cool thing.
And I didn't interview these guys, but I should, though.
They're guys and they're cheap enough now that this is a doable thing.
It's not like some crazy future thing on the Discovery Channel.
This is totally doable and affordable.
You have these drones that metal detectors on them.
They go around, they find and they can identify landmines and cluster bomb units and whatever.
And then they hover over and they can drop a tiny little charge on top and then fly away and then detonate the charge.
Destroy these things.
So, like, hey, I have a good idea for what to do with our 700 billion dollar defense budget.
We just spend them all on cleaning up the bomb bees.
And somebody's got to figure out some kind of magic magnet for the depleted uranium dust in the Balkans and in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
We get to cleaning up some of the problems here.
And some of this is doable.
I don't know how how doable a uranium magnet is.
I guess not.
But some.
At least, you know, people wouldn't have thought of that solution for the for the cluster bomb units just a few years ago, either.
So, well, it seems like if we would focus on trying to make it right, there's a lot that could be done.
There's an enormous amount that could be done.
Let's put the numbers into perspective.
At the time we were bombing Laos, which was primarily in the Kennedy era, there were two point four million Laotians.
We dropped two hundred and seventy million bomblets, cluster bomblets on there.
That's one hundred and thirteen bomblets for every man, woman and child in the country.
It's inconceivable.
One hundred and thirteen for every single person.
And so, yeah, we have a moral obligation and the drone technology now makes it practical and cheap in order to be able to do that.
I'm glad I hadn't heard that one that you mentioned about hovering over and dropping a charge.
That's a good idea.
Yeah, I saw this thing.
I don't know what it was anymore.
The report that I saw, but it it looked, you know, absolutely doable.
And there was some foundation that had put some money behind it.
So I really should get those guys on the show.
So here's another thing, too.
And it's ugly.
Everybody, you know, don't play this in front of your kids unless they're old enough.
But you decide.
And we're talking about mass killing.
I don't know why this is worse, but I just read a thing the other day, too, about the rapes and just almost.
It's like when the Soviets conquered Germany, they just had at it.
And that's what sounds like happened when the Americans invaded Vietnam.
Just go right ahead and rape who you feel like.
In fact, that's part of the story of Vietnam.
I've known my whole life because Oliver Stone was brave enough to put it in platoon where Charlie Sheen is the.
If I remember the story right, Charlie Sheen is him.
And he's the college educated guy who volunteered to come.
And the rest of these guys are a little bit less restrained.
And he's intervening and stopping them and screaming, hey, she's a human being.
That's it.
That's the line.
You can't cross it.
What the hell is going on here?
And that was just the way of the war.
And do you remember what the other guys say?
They say you don't belong in Vietnam.
Yeah.
Remember?
Yeah.
Well, and then that's that starts with his whole beef with Willem Dafoe.
That's the whole thing, right, is because he's not down for the rape.
That's how he's he becomes a traitor to the group.
Well, Willem Dafoe isn't down.
Tom Barringer is down.
Oh, Barringer.
There you go.
Yeah, I screw those guys up in my memory.
But you're right.
That's OK.
It was Barringer who was down for because, you know, that was one of the ways they could throw red meat to the men.
You know, keep them, you know, keep them interested.
That's what that goes back to the history of warfare all the way back to forever.
Well, and that's the part of the cognitive dissonance, though, too, is, yeah, sure.
If we're talking about communists or you're talking about Nazis or you're talking about, you know, the Golden Horde or something like that.
But not our boys.
We're the ones who wrote the world law about, you know, what what's a war crime and what's not.
And you're telling me, you know, good old American farm boys drafted off to go fight the godless communists are just going to become criminal rapists just because they have the chance to.
Why?
That doesn't sound right at all.
Robert, are you sure?
Well, you know, it's interesting because I believe that that is in fact what the Ken Burns documentary is for, is to assert a cultural imperialism over the American people where we couldn't do any wrong.
And in fact, in this first episode, he says, well, this was really just a bunch of good intended men who just things went bad.
That's all it ever was.
And you see, by doing that, we can launder it out of our conscience that there was any predation, that there was any intent to, you know, to dominate, that there was any intent to exploit.
And Burns gives us the rationale and the means to say, oh, well, Ken Burns dealt with that.
It was all just a bunch of good intentions gone awry.
We have to be real careful against that.
Yeah.
All right.
So explain to me this thing.
Nixon and Robert Perry's written all about this.
I think people know.
And this is in the Burns documentary, although from what I heard, I didn't watch this part.
But from what I read about it, he didn't mention Henry Kissinger's role at all.
But it's about Nixon thwarting the peace talks of 1968 during the election there and what LBJ quite correctly called treason.
And they did it.
And then so he won.
And then.
But so you know what I wonder, though, is whatever the secret plan to end the war, if it was if he had a plan at all.
If certainly the plan that he implemented was just increase the bombing while you pull the troops out and, you know, increase the arms to the South Vietnamese government kind of as cover for pulling the troops out.
But then I think about who Nixon is and I think, why would Nixon pull the troops out?
Why wouldn't he go ahead and pick up where LBJ left off?
Double him, triple him.
And or or invade the north and threaten them that they will be conquered if they don't knock it off down in the south or whatever kind of thing.
Instead, Nixon, Nixon thought, man, I better get the hell out of this war.
Not again.
Not in any decent way.
He increased all the carpet bombing of the north the whole time.
But then he really did pull the troops out by the tens and tens of thousands.
Right.
Well, he did.
But the decision to begin drawing down the war followed the Tet Offensive in January, February of 1968.
And you'll remember in March of 68 when Johnson said, I'm not going to run for election anymore.
The decision had already been made.
We're getting the hell out of here in 68.
And so you're right.
Nixon dramatically, in fact, escalated the bombing of the north during the Christmas bombings in 1972.
And when the Paris peace talks weren't going well, Nixon said, well, we're going to level the goddamn country.
I don't know if I can say that word on the radio, but that was Nixon's actually word.
And in fact, he did.
He dropped more tons of bombs in a one month period that had been dropped in the entire course of the war from 1967 to 1971.
Now, it brought the Vietnamese back to the bargaining tables.
But it's a tremendous stain on the United States, because we were already by that time well, well into the withdrawal and handing over to the fighting of the war, the Vietnamization to the South Vietnamese.
But let me let me go back to your earlier comment.
I think you're right about Nixon interfering with the talks, making a back channel deal with the North Vietnamese to not bargain with Johnson so that Johnson couldn't come up with a breakthrough that would have aided Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election.
Ironically, the Republicans learned the lesson from that.
And Reagan did the same thing against Carter in the Iran hostage crisis in 1980.
That is made a back channel deal with the Iranians to not negotiate with Carter.
That is so that he couldn't have a breakthrough release of the prisoners and which would have been favorable to him in the election.
And then so.
When Nixon came into power, it was never a question of whether he was going to escalate the war against the South Vietnamese insurgency and defeat it.
Well, he I think the proper way to frame it was there was never a question that he was intent on staying and trying to win the war.
He was intent on escalating the war in order to provide, you know, the air, the cover.
And Kissinger has said this in his memoirs.
You know, we wanted to have at least a two year interval where the South Vietnamese government survived after we had left.
So it wouldn't look like we had been defeated and run out of the country.
That was the purpose of the escalation.
So the escalation was always there.
What was not there was the intent to stay and try to win the war.
It was well known by everybody.
McNamara had resigned, had basically had a nervous breakdown at that point.
Westmoreland had been dismissed.
Everybody who knew anything knew that we were getting out of there.
The only question was how we were going to do it and how we were going to cover our retreat.
Yeah.
And then so instead of saying, all right, look, let's just go.
They just had to make everything, turn everything completely to hell on the way out just so that they could buy a year or so.
And of course, that extra year or so of cover, we're like, hey, look, I mean, geez, well, the South Vietnamese government somehow fell and couldn't stand.
Whatever.
That just opened up all the space for the stab in the back argument that, see, it lasted for more than a year.
And if only we hadn't betrayed them, they would have lasted longer.
So it worked.
It worked in that sense that it covered their ass, but it also left open the argument that a little bit more war might have done the trick.
Let's be clear.
The United States turned over more than a million rifles to the South Vietnamese, something like 50,000 jeeps.
When we left, South Vietnam had the fourth largest air force in the world because the United States turned over all of its weaponry to the South Vietnamese.
There was nothing conceivable more that we could have done to help them.
But they couldn't maintain political legitimacy with their own people.
Their own people would not defend the government, which is why it ultimately failed.
All right.
Listen, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it, Robert.
You're welcome.
Good luck to you.
All right, you guys.
That's Robert Freeman.
He is the author of the best one-hour history series, which includes World War I, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and other titles.
This one ran at CommonDreams.com.
It was the spotlight on AntiWar.com the other day.
I told you I really liked it.
Why the U.S. Lost the Vietnam War.
The U.S. was not simply outfought.
It was outthought.
CommonDreams.org.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
4,500-something interviews there at ScottHorton.org.
And check out my book, Fool's Errand.
Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
That's on Amazon.com and at foolserrand.us.
Check out my institute, the Libertarian Institute, at libertarianinstitute.org.
Of course, AntiWar.com.
And follow me on Twitter, at ScottHortonShow.
Thanks.
