05/04/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
Just barely made that in the nickel of the dime there, finishing up with Phil Drawley.
Boy, I've been blowing every break lately.
Well, actually, I've been making the middle break, but then blowing the end break on virtually every single interview.
This can't bear to interrupt these great guests and all the great stuff that they say.
Also, I'm just really bad at timing.
Anyway, we move on now to our friend Eric Margulies.
And his great article, The Ghosts of Vietnam Should Haunt Us, But Don't.
Eric, as you know, is the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And if there was a conflict any time in, say, I don't know, the past 40 years or something, he was there and knows all about it.
And so that's why I have him on all the time to explain, because he knows better than pretty much everybody.
And right now it's the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of a major part of Vietnam.
I guess I still bombed him for a few years after that, but mostly that's considered the end of the Vietnam War at that point.
And so now it's the anniversary.
So Eric has this piece, The Ghosts of Vietnam Should Haunt Us, But They Don't.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Eric?
I'm fine, Scott.
Glad to be with you.
All right.
So what do you know about this Vietnam thing?
Well, Scott, I know that I enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War in 1967.
I was a mere youth and I felt it was the duty of every American citizen, as in the old Roman Republican style, to do his military service when his country was at war.
It was a great theory.
I enlisted.
I was proud to wear my country's uniform.
By the way, I still fit into it the other day.
I was trying it out.
And off I went to in the Vietnam War scenario, but I quickly, like many Americans, became disillusioned.
All right.
And so what was your role in the war then?
My role was very, very minor.
I was originally, well, it's a long story.
I won't go into it now.
I was heading for Vietnam as a pioneer of the combat engineers.
This was a unit that had a 50 percent casualty rate.
You'd rappel down off helicopters and then to create landing zones and kill all the enemy, clear all the mines, let the infantry come in.
Well, my military status was abruptly changed six days before I was shipping out of Fort Leonard Wood, and I was reassigned to a Army base in Massachusetts where I spent the rest of the war doing some intelligence work, giving command briefings at the Pentagon, and teaching military history and strategy, believe it or not, to field grade officers, that is colonels and above.
So you had Bill Clinton hook you up with that or what?
How did that work?
No, I did it all on my own.
You know, I could have stayed out of the military because I'd been offered to do a PhD in history at Cambridge, and that would have given me a deferment, but I didn't.
I'm just joshing with you.
I honor draft dodgers, man.
Screw that.
Well, I enjoyed my first year in the Army, but I felt the second one was a tremendous waste.
But more important than that, my role was tiny, but I am sorry to this day that I didn't go to Vietnam, and I look back on the thing as what a big mess, a waste of life and money.
But we keep seeing these recurring, hence the title of my column, The Ghosts of Vietnam Should Haunt Us But Don't.
Yeah, but why should you regret not going?
You wish you'd been in the position where you would have had to kill those people resisting invasion of their land?
I don't get it.
Quite right, Scott.
Well, it's a mixed feeling, because I'm sorry to have missed this historical event.
As someone who writes a great deal on military affairs, I've covered 14 wars as a war correspondent, so I've been under fire many times since.
But half of me regrets it, half of me doesn't, because you never know what could have happened to you.
Yeah.
Well, I guess it would have been fine if they sent you as a reporter, but that would have been a different thing.
Well, I would have probably ended up in some administrative position.
It's funny, when I was in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, I was immediately made the company clerk, because I was the only soldier there, only enlisted soldier, who could read and write.
It was horrifying for me, from New York City.
I didn't know there were people in my country who couldn't read.
But there they were, and there they were in the army.
Yeah.
Well, all right.
So anyway, let's talk about this thing here, because World War II ended, and the French had quote-unquote, owned Indochina, as they called it.
And then they got beat by the people who lived there, and were forced out.
So why then did the Eisenhower, I guess even the Truman, and then Eisenhower administrations take the side of the French, and why do they continue to fight, instead of just recognizing?
I think I even remember reading that Ho Chi Minh had declared independence, and had cribbed all the language from Thomas Jefferson, was really trying to suck up to the Americans.
We can do business, you know, kind of a thing, but they just wouldn't have it.
Why not?
I think that, that wasn't very good thinking at the time, but I think that the Americans first wanted to retain France as a close ally in Europe, and secondly, because there was the feeling throughout the government that the whole Viet Minh run by Ho Chi Minh was really a fronting for the Red Chinese.
And there is no doubt that Communist China was deeply involved in supporting the Vietnamese nationalists slash communists.
We misinterpreted it, it was a big mistake.
We should have supported Ho Chi Minh from the beginning, however, that was the era that anybody who wasn't with us was against us, and you know, everybody was a communist.
We have the same thing today, where everybody, you know, is an Islamic terrorist.
Just change the labels on it, you get the same idea.
All right, now, so, but the CIA decided that the domino theory was bogus by 1961, three years before the big escalation.
So was it, was it really that or was it more cynical than that?
I think people believed the domino theory right till the end of the war, and it was certainly in Congress and in part of the media, certainly right-wing circles in the US, military believed in it, and once again, it was, you know, our troops are in Vietnam, we can't allow them to be defeated by some third world raggedy guerrillas.
Same thing we hear in Afghanistan today, we can't bear the humiliation of this happening.
So, as I said, you know, the song remains the same.
All right, now, so, well, I don't know how much time we really have to get into this, but you know, I had heard this all along, I guess, at different times, but it took until I read Nick Terce's book, Kill Anything That Moves, before I really, my understanding shifted to America protecting anything independent about the South from the North at all, to simply America invaded Vietnam, and they conquered the South, and they installed a puppet government in the name of having somebody to ask us to stay, basically.
And then the war was against the peasant population of the country for daring to resist us, and that was the war.
They knew they couldn't invade North Vietnam and conquer it without risking escalation into a full scale war with China or Russia or something like that, so they had to settle for the Korean model, and then, but the people of the South were never on the side of the puppet government.
It had less popular support than Karzai ever had in Kabul, kind of a thing.
The whole thing was just an American war against the civilian population of South Vietnam.
You see it any different than that?
Oh, I do.
I don't subscribe to that view, Scott.
It's overly simplistic.
We Americans were fighting against, so the American military was fighting against, were very well trained, very tough Viet Cong guerrillas, who originally had Chinese advisers, and against the units of the North Vietnamese army, which was battle-hardened, which defeated the French like the 324th Division, and they were armed with heavy weapons, heavy artillery, tanks in some cases, so this wasn't a simple guerrilla struggle against the Vietnamese people.
We had a very, very hard, tough opponent in the Vietnamese communist movements.
Yeah, but I mean, the Viet Cong just means South Vietnamese fighting-age males, right?
Well, that had enlisted or been enrolled in the movement, yes, and they were fighting both the puppet South Vietnamese government and the Americans who got drawn in because their puppet government was collapsing all the time.
Yeah, so I mean, that's kind of my point there, is that there is no real natural power holding up the puppet government in Saigon.
It was held up first by the French and then by us, but without us, it would have collapsed in an instant, right?
Yes, well, maybe a little bit longer, but it would have collapsed as it eventually did.
But was that just because of the force of the North Vietnamese communists, or because they really had no support among the people of the South?
They didn't want to support the Saigon government to keep them independent from North Vietnam.
They preferred the government in North Vietnam, right?
The government you don't know is always the better one.
I think that's true, Scott.
The South Vietnamese government had no loyalty except among South Vietnamese Catholics who rallied to the government and stood with it right to the very end.
So the majority of South Vietnamese just wanted to be left alone and duck and get the hell out of the way in this awful war.
Yeah.
Well, you know, when I read about these Harvard geniuses up there in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and their strategic Hamlet policy, it sounds like Stalin's five-year plan.
We'll round up everybody, steal them all away from their farms, and put them in barbed wire concentration camps and call it a collective farm, and then we'll give our sock puppets wheelbarrows full of money to pass out among the people that we kidnap and round up and put in these prison camps.
But of course, they never get it.
Our local sock puppets keep it all and it wouldn't have worked anyway.
And I mean, what kind of madness is this?
How in the hell is that winning hearts and minds when the theory is that as long as these people own a farm and can stay on it, then they're going to be the communist enemy against us?
I mean, that goes against the entire, you know what I mean?
They own property.
So we're going to have to separate them from their property so that they won't become communists.
And then we'll put them on Stalinite collective farms in order to keep them in the freedom camp.
Well, it sure didn't work, Scott.
This notion of segregating the people from the insurgents was actually built by the Italians, the Italian fascists in the 1930s and 1920s and 30s in Libya.
And where the first of the Libyans were rounded up, the British used the same policy during the Boer War in South Africa in the 1880s.
So it's not a new concept, but it's a wrong concept because it didn't work and strategic hamlets were a big fiasco.
And the American attempt to kill all the communists that they could find, the Phoenix program also did not work.
And as you rightly point out, Scott, this was done by pointy headed intellectuals led by the odious Robert McNamara, the most disastrous official in modern American history, who were whiz kids who thought they knew better than anybody and implemented these policies from their ivory towers in Washington.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, you do know, I don't know that much, but it sort of seems like the one of the threads all along here from the Pentagon papers and from the the audio tapes of Lyndon Johnson on the telephone and this kind of thing was that they knew they couldn't win all along, but well, let it be somebody else's problem.
Like George W. Bush said about Iraq, let some other presidents figure that out because I'll be retired by then kind of a thing.
And they just went on and and, you know, we look at 5000 dead in Iraq on our side.
I mean, that's a lot of 58000 dead on America's side in what they knew was a no win war.
Was it really that blatant for that long?
It was, unfortunately, and very few people dared to admit that the war was lost, even though a lot of people would say it to their dogs when they got home or their wives.
The but we see this problem again and again, because politicians cannot accept the owners of defeat.
No American politician wants to accept that the Afghan war was lost or has been lost.
The congressmen and senators who voted for this foolish, stupid, mistaken war can't admit that they sent all these American soldiers to their deaths and wasted, you know, I don't know, two trillion dollars in the process.
So they're hoping that something will happen and blame somebody else.
But it is is the most important factor, in my view, in perpetuating these lost wars is the fact that nobody wants to blame.
Yeah.
You know, I remember being pretty shocked and and, you know, I was not raised as any kind of right wing nationalist or anything.
But I remember being pretty shocked when I was, I don't know, a teenager, probably when I first heard Martin Luther King call the U.S. government the greatest purveyor of violence on the face of the earth.
And really, I think he probably could have said Mao's China.
But still, I mean, second place to Mao is not a very good like pat on the back, you know, kind of a thing.
And you know, I just never heard anybody say it like that.
And then it's St. MLK that nobody can ever say a bad thing about him kind of a thing.
Who's the one saying it at the time?
And I think it's really hard for and I'm talking about when I was a kid, but I think when I was a kid goes for the average American now, it's really, really difficult for people to get behind the idea that their side was in the wrong, even if the leaders of their side are caught on tape saying, boy, we can never win this thing, but let's keep going anyway.
Scott, I agree entirely with you.
Even when I was in the military, and I couldn't, I could never accept the fact that the U.S. was wrong in this war.
And the feeling came over me slowly, but I never saw the U.S. as really as a bad guy or a despoiler of nations.
You know, I was always a good American, and my country couldn't do anything terribly bad, but it was doing a lot of things wrong at the time.
But I remember, I was in the mid-1980s, I was in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and I met with Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, who was the teacher of Bin Laden, Bin Laden's mentor.
And the Sheikh said to me something that shocked me.
He said, you know, he said, after we have defeated Soviet colonialism in Afghanistan, we are going to go and liberate Saudi Arabia from American colonialism.
I was shocked.
I'd never heard anybody refer to my country as a colonialist power.
So that certainly started me thinking at the time.
And of course, now, fast forward 30, 40 years, America unfortunately has emerged as the world's greatest power and also the greatest enforcer of its Pax Americana.
That's not always a pleasant thing.
Yeah.
You know, I think probably the Vietnam War, even though I was born a couple of years after it, well, really like a year after it finally ended, I think it probably has a lot to do with kind of my very formative brainwashing as a young kid against war.
Because I knew people, you know, friends, parents, and that kind of thing.
My parents never talked about it all that much.
But, you know, I knew, I remember one of my friend's moms just so mad about it in 1985 or something.
Just so upset.
And it was a civil war and it was none of our damn business and slam her fist down on the counter kind of a thing.
Because people that she knew and cared about died in that thing.
And so she still wasn't over it.
And it, you know, hey, you can't really argue with that when they lost anyway.
The whole thing was a big for nothing.
So, you know, that was kind of, for me, a good example of, you know, and really nobody disagreed with that.
Right.
Like that was the consensus was, man, wish that had never happened when I was a kid kind of just in the in the decade after it.
So it was always OK for me to be anti-war.
And also everybody in my neighborhood was Democrats when Reagan was in power when I was a kid.
So that was nice, too, that it was OK for everybody to be anti-government in my formative years in in a democratic kind of a way.
You understand.
But in opposition to the current regime kind of way, in opposition to warmongering kind of way.
But so that's the Vietnam syndrome, right?
That's what the first Gulf War, Robert Perry says, had as its number one goal, actually was winning over the American people to the efficacy of military force.
How much fun it can be for us all if we can go into war every once in a while.
It's true.
And don't forget, I should have mentioned earlier, we had been through the Korean War and that ended only a decade before we got deeply involved in Vietnam.
And Korean War shocked the hell out of everybody because here we were, the omnipotent United States that had defeated Nazi Germany and Japan and everything.
And yet we were fought to a standstill by North Korean and Chinese infantry with practically no air cover.
The thought was wrong.
We were the good guys.
I mean, we still had this aura of World War II propaganda that infused everything.
But it was very hard for Americans, as I recall, to accept that their their country was doing something bad, particularly or wrong, particularly since it involved the communists who were held up as, you know, as today we talk about Islamic terrorists.
Well, it was the commies back in those days.
And a lot of people believed there were reds under every bed.
Some still do.
Do you think that kind of making up for the stalemate in Korea was part of the motivation behind Vietnam, that this is kind of a do-over?
We'll go, you know, if we can't beat the champ, we'll beat the runner up.
Try to.
Well, I think so, because in both wars we were fighting the red Chinese.
Communist China was deeply involved in supporting North Vietnam.
It sent all its supplies and logistics, weapons, advisers, intelligence information.
So we were back fighting the red Chinese again.
It was interesting.
The U.S. Air Force used to, quote, stray off course, unquote, and bomb the Chinese railroads leading into North Vietnam pretty regularly.
And I remember the Beijing issued the 9,124th serious warning to the United States, cease and desist or else.
But it was like a big game.
Both sides knew the limits that they could go to.
Yeah.
You know, and then it's funny that it was easy enough for Nixon to just go to China, shake hands with Mao Tse-Tung, and then it didn't matter if, in fact, it was in our interest for Vietnam to cozy up to China to whatever degree, because we're turning them capitalists now.
Well, fascists, but anyway, into the mass starvation all the time, that kind of thing, and split them off from the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
And so even if the domino theory had been correct, they made it a moot point.
They could have just gone and shaken hands with Mao in the first place, you know.
Kennedy could have gone taking care of the whole matter in 1961 or whatever.
Now, hey, help us negotiate with this Ho Chi Minh guy and keep him on the side of the trade agreement or whatever imperial interest, you know?
I think so, Scott.
But I don't think that the Red Chinese were in a mood to talk to us back in 61.
But certainly President Nixon, who I've always considered one of our better presidents, seized the initiative and made this momentous decision, which went against everything we believe in.
Imagine today President Obama flying and meeting the head of ISIS or Al-Qaeda and sit down and talk to them.
It was that big a thing.
It was an earth-shaking change.
It was certainly the right thing to do.
It was another example of the CIA so busy worrying about what to eat for lunch that they missed this huge event of the Russian-Chinese split.
And that should have been taken advantage of earlier.
But Nixon gets kudos for having finally done so.
Yeah.
Well, you think LBJ could have done it?
Wait, wait a minute.
The part about Nixon being great.
What about his high treason in 68, where he sent Anna Chenault to screw up the peace deal that LBJ was working on in order to prolong the war and have a talking point that he had a secret plan to end it?
Well, that was Henry Kissinger's influence on him.
And Nixon was right in the sense he did not want to go into peace negotiations until he had some kind of leverage and until he felt that the U.S. was at least on top and that was not negotiating from defeat.
That's my understanding.
And that's why Nixon prolonged the war.
And of course, like any good politician, he didn't want to accept the onus of defeat, which was eventually laid at his feet.
Yeah.
Well, that was a pretty damn dirty trick to do that when he didn't have any official government authority whatsoever.
Right?
Him and Kissinger were just private citizens at the time, screwing up Johnson's negotiations for their own gain in the campaign.
I mean, that's pretty bad.
I think I worked for Nixon as a speechwriter during that period, or maybe it was a few years after.
And now, even though he wasn't in the government, he was still very influential.
Yeah.
Yeah, certainly in that case, it seems like.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much.
Come back on the show, Eric.
I appreciate it.
See you for the next war, Scott.
Yeah, we got plenty.
So we'll be around.
That's the great Eric Margulies, everybody.
Eric Margulies dot com is this website spelled like Margolis, Eric Margulies dot com.
And you can find him at Unz Review.
That's UNZ Unz dot com.
And yeah, oftentimes the American conservative as well.
Lou Rockwell dot com as well.
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