Books
Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of James M. Carter's Inventing Vietnam: The United States & State-Building, 1954-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Source: Special to HNN (6-23-08)
[Jeremy Kuzmarov is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell University.]
Echoing the fantasies of conservative policy-makers, a series of revisionist historians have, over the course of the past two decades, attempted to recast the U.S. role in Vietnam as a noble one that might have accomplished its strategic objectives of defeating communist insurgency and established a pro-U.S. client if not for bureaucratic constraints, poor military decision-making and a decline in troop morale facilitated by dissenting journalists and antiwar activists. James M. Carter’s outstanding new book, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State-Building, 1954-1968 systematically explodes the false logic underlying this analysis. He demonstrates through extensive archival research how the American military disaster in South Vietnam was the product of a failed effort at state-building dating from the mid-1950s and America’s support for a series of corrupt rulers who exacerbated the humanitarian crisis bred by U.S. social engineering initiatives and created a political vacuum seized upon by the revolutionary National Liberation Front.
An assistant professor of history at Drew University, Carter generally provides an insightful analysis of the ideology of American policy elites of the Cold War period. They saw Vietnam as a venue for creating a modern westernized state whose economic sustainability could ideally provide a bulwark against Communist expansion and become a model for the developing world. Their universalized vision, however, was divorced from the political realities of Vietnam, in which a popular yearning for national independence and freedom from foreign interference reigned paramount following the era of brutal French rule, as did the desire for more radical land reform and wealth redistribution given pervasive social inequalities.
The U.S. stubbornly committed itself, nevertheless, to constructing a viable “free nation” in South Vietnam following the temporary division of the country below the 17th parallel under the Geneva Accords. While subverting the 1956 elections, the U.S. helped build the military and police forces of client Ngo Dinh Diem in order to promote “security” (in the Orwellian sense of the term given that the South Vietnamese routinely arrested and tortured members of the Vietminh, who had led the liberation struggle against France), and sent an array of civilian contractors and engineers to try to develop the country’s infrastructure and economy along liberal-capitalist lines.
The U.S. introduced a series of commodity import programs and awarded an array of private firms, including Raymond International and Morris Knudsen with massive building contracts for infrastructural projects, including an attempt to dam the Mekong River. This strategy backfired, however, in that it lent itself to massive corruption and graft and did little to promote grassroots development, particularly in the countryside. There, Vietnamese were often forced to work as laborers on infrastructural projects for little pay and later worked on American military bases performing degrading and humiliating tasks. All the while, the U.S. continued to rely on a series of puppets, from Diem to his successors Nguyen Khanh and Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, who utilized American subsidies for their own benefit and to reward political cronies.
Carter focuses on the Strategic Hamlet program as an example of how U.S. development projects backfired politically. The aim of the program was to create model villages replete with schools, health clinics and work opportunities that would dissuade peasants from joining with the revolutionaries. In practice, through coercion and terror, villagers were often herded into the camps against their will, while civic action cadres that the U.S. was training brutalized them and failed to deliver on the promised social programs.
As popular resistance developed and the U.S. began to systematically bomb the countryside to root out the enemy, a massive influx of refugees fled into the cities, creating a public health and humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. Diseases like tuberculosis and cholera became rampant in the teeming urban slums. As Carter ably chronicles, many Vietnamese were forced to work in the burgeoning underground economy, including as prostitutes. Cost of living increases and inflation bred by the war and the influx of luxury goods and U.S. currency into a hollow economic base further made life a living hell for those lucky enough to have escaped the vicious bombing attacks. It was in this context that the revolutionary National Liberation Front gained in political prestige and support with its calls for expelling the occupying armies and their sycophants. Indeed, the U.S. military campaign was in many respects doomed from the outset; its failure was a consequence of the failure of state-building policies and the reliance on politicians and generals who lacked much legitimacy among their own people.
Although Carter’s story is not an unfamiliar one to those who lived through the war years or who are well versed in the subsequent scholarly and eyewitness literature, his book is important given the spate of historical revisionism and distortion of public memory pervading among some elements U.S. society today. Carter has done an excellent job in mining the archives for materials on U.S. nation-building programs and its paradoxes, including a strong chapter on the experience of Michigan State University, which sent professors during the Eisenhower years to build up the police forces and administrative capacities of the Diem regime. Many of the same professors, including Wesley R. Fishel, who headed the operation, would later become cynical about U.S. policies and opposed the war, though probably disinclined to recognize their own complicity. Carter skillfully uses archival material from private companies in demonstrating how its employees believed in the ability of technological innovations to bring progress and modernity to Vietnam. At the same time, he also portrays their detachment from the devastation and suffering caused by the military pacification efforts their labors had helped develop.
Critically, speaking, Carter might have elaborated on how private corporations were major boosters of the war effort as a result of the high profits they earned, exemplifying the role of the military - industrial complex in driving forward government policy. Carter might have also tried to unearth more material on Vietnam’s Hanoi leadership and National Liberation Front – how their vision for Vietnam conflicted with the U.S. and its Vietnamese agents, and how they were able to capitalize on the failure of American initiatives. His conclusion ends somewhat abruptly, and might have included some analysis about the unfortunate continuity of U.S. foreign policies from Vietnam and the failure of its policy-makers to heed its lessons. All the same, Carter has done a great service by setting the record straight on the war and dispelling some of its most pervasive myths, which hopefully can be remanded to the garbage can of history where they belong.
- Excellent article, but too optimistic? by Jeffery Ewener (July 21, 2008 at 8:45 PM)
- the wrong myths by RJ Vecchio (July 21, 2008 at 10:15 PM)
- The War without Nuance by William Nathan Alexander (August 23, 2008 at 5:35 PM)
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