Kissinger: Facing Down the Vietnamese

"However we got into Vietnam, whatever the judgment of our actions, ending the war honorably is essential for the peace of the world. Any other solution may unloose forces that would complicate prospects of international order."

-Henry Kissinger in Foreign Affairs, January 1969.

If there were a single apt image for Henry Kissinger's role in Vietnam, it would be one of the global diplomat clinging to stability, maintaining order, concerned with honor and prestige. And it is in Vietnam that the Nixon-Kissinger policy has reached the limit of its logic and faced the acid test.

There was once a time when the war was not a Nixon-Kissinger enterprise, when it was something the new Administration had inherited and-so it seemed-was publicly committed to dissolve. But with the extension of the ground fighting into Cambodia, Laos, and briefly, North Vietnam-as well as the drastic escalation of air attacks all over Southeast Asia-the war has become very much an ingredient of Nixon-Kissinger policy. And it is a policy that originated not in the bowels of the Pentagon, not in an overweening bureaucracy's forward thrust, but in the clearly visible diplomatic ambitions of the President and his aides.

To begin with, there was the survival of the regime in Saigon. It was a regime that past American policy-makers had installed and then sworn to uphold, and though the new American leaders probably had little real use for General Thieu-and were suffering the domestic consequences of what little use they had-they also felt it essential that no American policy precipitate the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime. For that would impugn their honor and damage their credibility, and those were concepts that did not come cheap to them. And in the absence of the regime's guaranteed survival-a guarantee which Hanoi and the NLF adamantly refused to extend-the only American recourse would be the use of sheer physical might, coupled with the threat of additional force if their opponents did not give in.

Kissinger is fond of calling himself the "Walt Rostow of peace by negotiations"; but in his diplomat's creed, negotiation is merely another tool to enforce one's will, a tool to which overtures, threats, and finally the use of force itself are all fixed as perpetual adjuncts. Kissinger's early advocacy of negotiations, his expressed belief that a compromise could be reached with Hanoi and the NLF, were rooted in the assumption that the overpowering weight of the U. S. military stood behind America's negotiators at every step of the way. And in a situation of fixed objectives-that of the NLF and Hanoi, to bring about a revolution in their country, and that of Washington, to uphold the Saigon regime-the use of force would be bound to increase.

In fact, the very nature of U. S. involvement in Southeast Asia had made the repeated use of force inevitable. For the American mission in Vietnam had long been a calculated, cynical enterprise; despite claims of protecting a "legitimate" government from aggressive Communism, the American goal there had become a frankly neocolonial one. For Kissinger, revolutionary ideology-no matter what its justification-was at best irrelevant and at worst harmful in the context of international conflict; to him, revolution meant not a change in the human condition but a clouding of the prospects for stability.

And so when an American administration dealt with a revolutionary power, Kissinger believed it should attempt to eliminate the ideological element of the struggle by forcing its opponent to behave in more traditional terms. For it was a cardinal rule of balance-of-power diplomacy that when countries entered the international arena, they acted like nation-states. They were compromising, malleable, and-for purposes of conflict-ideologically "clean." They became supple and entered negotiations when threatened with-or confronted by-the use of force.

But with a truly revolutionary liberation force, the United States-in spite of all the military machinery at its disposal-could reach no understanding or mutual trust; her outlook, her diplomacy, her negotiating language were all alien to such a force. And in the absence of common ground, the only way to draw an ideological renegade down to one's level was with the ever-increasing threat and use of force.

IN FACT, Kissinger has constantly underestimated the resistance power of Hanoi and the NLF by failing to take account of their politics and ideology. His calculation of the opponent's strength has long assumed a willingness on the opponent's part to accept a compromise solution and forsake deeply-held, legitimate political and social goals. But if the roots of his failure lie in his application of great power diplomacy in a situation that consistently repudiates it, Kissinger has also been intimately involved in the physical escalation of the war.

For the past two and a half years, his office has supervised the flow of war material in and out of Vietnam. He himself has become a crucial figure in setting defense spending and manpower levels, often overruling Cabinet officials on these matters. And last, he has also dealt in grand military strategy; not that he decides on whether this or that village should be napalmed, but ideas for implementing each of the major escalations have come from Kissinger's office. And he is more acutely aware than most that there are many civilian deaths in a hard-fought guerrilla war.

There was a time, just before his accession to office in January 1969, that many of Kissinger's academic colleagues-as well as many in the government-assumed that he would rapidly seek to extricate the United States from the Vietnam war. They should have known better; Kissinger had been hard and cynical on the issue all along.

As soon as the war had begun in 1961, Kissinger became an enthusiastic supporter of the American intervention, believing it necessary for the United States to demonstrate its power in that tender spot on the globe. In 1965, he began consulting for the State Department on the government's pacification program, and remained a conventional hawk until 1966, when he traveled to Vietnam at the request of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. As a result of that visit, he decided, as one colleague later put it, "that the thing was un-do-able," and he became convinced of the U. S. need to withdraw.

But he determined then that any American withdrawal would have to meet two requirements: first, that it not cause the collapse of the Saigon regime soon after withdrawal, for otherwise, America's international (and domestic) standing would lose; and second, that the withdrawal have as little adverse effect as possible on the decision-making structure of this country, that particularly the Presidency must be preserved as the leading formulator of foreign policy. In concrete terms, that meant that neither Congress nor public opinion could be allowed to coerce the United States out of Vietnam.

ON THE surface, Kissinger believed that America's withdrawal could best be pursued through negotiation. Part of this belief doubtless sprang from what one colleague later called a "David Susskind syndrome," the notion that on first meeting one's opponent face to face the conflict could rapidly be solved; but Kissinger's optimism was borne of a deeper attitude that the NLF and the North Vietnamese, dedicated revolutionaries though they were, would one day be responsive to the overwhelming power of the American military, that they could be threatened and-if necessary-beaten into submission.

This attitude, however, was not entirely visible on the eye of Kissinger's accession, because in 1967 and 1968 he had privately put forward a position on the war that made him look far more dovish than anyone in academia, let alone government: the notion of the "decent interval." According to this scheme, an agreement permitting the collapse of the Saigon regime would be negotiated privately with the North Vietnamese. The plan was for the United States to begin removing forces at a rapid rate; after all of them had finally departed, the rebel forces would sit tight for a previously agreed-on period of time. Finally, after this "decent interval"-designed to dissociate American withdrawal from the fall of Saigon and thus eliminate the appearance of American failure-the insurgents would then rise up and destroy the South Vietnamese regime. Thus, Hanoi would have achieved its goals, the United States would have been successfully disengaged, and the structure of America's international relations would remain essentially intact.

THE "decent interval" approach would yield startling insight into Kissinger's later policy recommendations on the war. To begin with, the Saigon regime was not being defended out of any real sense of principle. Kissinger was willing and eager to uphold a corrupt totalitarian government with the most brutal possible methods for the mere sake of diplomatic gain. Thousands of lives could be sacrificed and whole civilizations destroyed in the name of opposing a takeover which Kissinger had earlier been prepared-and was probably still prepared-to accept.

Further, it revealed deep ignorance of psychological realities in Indochina. How, after years of American falsehood and aggression, could the NLF and the North Vietnamese trust the United States to keep its part of such a delicate bargain? And why, in turn, should the insurgent forces, after years of being beaten and brutalized by the U. S. military machine, care to allow the continuation of the Saigon regime-however temporarily-for the simple sake of American prestige? For in fact, the liberation forces in Vietnam, after years of struggle and base building, could not be expected to behave like an ordinary sovereign power and give in to compromise-particularly when the compromise was to be struck with a nation whom they had long hated and distrusted.

Kissinger's "decent interval" plan also encountered problems in the government itself. Averell Harriman, who briefed Kissinger regularly on the Paris negotiations, is reported to have found the plan "outrageously cynical"; the idea that the United States could turn around and simply abandon its stated purposes in Vietnam (however perverse and misguided those purposes may have been) was abhorrent to him. And then, of course, there were those who had found U. S. intervention in Vietnam to be essentially worthwhile; to such men, the idea of the decent interval must have seemed an evil and a sellout.

BY ALL accounts, Kissinger vastly overestimated the ability of American leaders to extricate themselves successfully by means of negotiations; it is probably for this reason that he was thought of as a dove, that many of his colleagues felt his influence on Vietnam would be cast in favor of nearly unconditional withdrawal, not threats graduated to force. Nonetheless, on entering government in January 1969, he had few illusions about what an American withdrawal would involve. According to one man who consulted with Kissinger in the preparation of the first Vietnam options paper, "He felt that the threat of escalation was essential. He was very explicit about that. He thought you couldn't negotiate without it."

There was one aspect of the policy of threat, however, which was not then entirely clear even to those who realized that Kissinger would not be soft on the issue of Vietnam. Kissinger did not think that, if the other side were successful in its resistance, the United States should then move toward compromise; for he had long believed that the ultimate strength of the United States lay in its monopoly of physical force, and that if the military were exposed to defeat, if her troops were bullied and thwarted by a group of Vietnamese guerrillas, then the last strain of American credibility would be irretrievably lost. And the result was that as the NLF and Hanoi continued to prevent final U. S. victory, Washington would become bolder in its threats and more willing to engage in the wholesale use of military force.

On entering office, Kissinger abandoned the idea of negotiating a "decent interval" with the North Vietnamese. Many factors could have contributed to his change of position: the North Vietnamese may have met such a suggestion with skepticism and distrust; and it was unclear that Nixon had ever approved of the interval idea at all, that he was willing to sacrifice the Saigon regime in talks with Hanoi. In any event, the decent interval was transformed into what was known in White House jargon as "firebreak"; the United States would leave Vietnam in a show of military force, and only after Saigon had been sufficiently shored up so that it might survive on its own. With the "decent interval," the South Vietnamese would only have been given a year or two to last after the final American withdrawals; but now, under "firebreak," Saigon would be guaranteed a minimum of three to five years-a guarantee which the American administration proposed to keep, if necessary, by physical force.

IN FACT, the new administration began almost immediately to treat U. S. involvement in Vietnam as a military contest. In March 1969, a contingent of U. S. Marines entered Laos in a mission new known as Dewey Canyon I-a mission which even a number of close Kissinger aides didnot know of at the time. The bombing of predominantly civilian areas in Laos was vastly stepped up, and the U. S. air command began the use of B-52s in raids on Cambodia that May. Throughout this period, Kissinger was telling visitors-particularly student groups-that the war would be over soon, that the Administration needed only nine more months to master the situation and begin to move the U. S. out.

But then, it was not so surprising that Kissinger would consciously misrepresent the Administration's position. For it was part and parcel of great power diplomacy that one must lie and distort to attain one's ends. And in fact, it was Kissinger who-more than anybody else in the White House-perpetuated the myth to colleagues and friends that the United States was gradually extricating itself from Indochina and would continue to do so regardless of the circumstances. In private meetings with visitors-and in background sessions with the press-Kissinger continued to imply that American withdrawal would soon be final and unconditional. "He never said it that way," one former Defense Department official said recently, "but in a way that he gave people the impression that the President was really getting us out of Vietnam."

It is a central lie, one which has confused and irritated dozens of colleagues and succeeded at times in stifling Congressional and public criticism of the war. And for a time, it actually capitalized on a widespread willingness to disbelieve Nixon, who, in his speeches and statements, was far more truthful in public than Kissinger had been in private. Last January, for example-months after Cambodia and days before Laos-Kissinger told a group of colleagues at Harvard that by the time the U. S. finally pulled out of Vietnam, "you'll have nothing to criticize us for except that we didn't do it sooner"-implying that complete withdrawal was a foregone conclusion. But shortly thereafter-when Nixon made a nation-wide statement indicating that full withdrawal was still a highly conditional proposition-several of Kissinger's Harvard colleagues felt deceived and angry.

BUT THE signs had long been there. By the fall of 1969, it had become clear to critical observers that the new Administration was not going to opt for immediate extrication; the removal of ground troops was slow and inconclusive, and the rest of the war machinery continued to pound away at all of Indochina. President Nixon's November 1969 nationwide address-the Vietnamization speech, largely of Kissinger's design-was an attempt to buy time for the war by neutralizing domestic opposition, time which would be spent to practice strategy and tactics against the NLF and Hanoi. As one former White House consultant recently put it. "It then occurred to people that what he [Kissinger] basically had in mind was a policy of threat." And the U. S. invasion of Cambodia some months later demonstrated clearly that the political strategy had remained the same, regardless of military conditions.

Not that Cambodia made any sense from a military point of view. In fact, each of the major reasons which the Administration cited as provoking the invasion was a greater falsehood than the next. Nixon claimed in his speech that South Vietnam was threatened by the sudden appearance of the North Vietnamese on its Cambodian flank; yet subsequent reports have shown that the North Vietnamese had in fact been drifting westward and waiting cautiously to see what action the rightist military junta of Lon Nol-who had overthrown neutralist Prince Norodom Sihanouk the month before-would take against them. And a major ex post facto rationale for the invasion-that it closed the port of Sihanoukville-is an even greater fabrication: authoritative Administration sources now state that Sihanoukville was closed to the Communists by Sihanouk himself in late 1969 in an effort to force the North Vietnamese in Cambodia to recognize Sihanouk's territorial rights at the end of their war with the United States. According to sources in the Administration's intelligence network, all the correct information had been placed on Kissinger's desk in the form of intelligence reports some time before the decision to invade.

IT IS TRUE that the White House received vastly conflicting reports on the military and political situation inside Cambodia. But the certainty with which Nixon presented the invasion to the American public was in itself a bold-faced lie. And the political motivations for Cambodia clearly originated with Nixon and Kissinger. On an international level, America's great nemesis and North Vietnam's principal supporter-the Soviet Union-had moved now, powerful missiles into the Middle East. The North Vietnamese were posing an implicit threat to the regime of America's ally, Lon Nol. At home, Congressional liberals had repudiated the White House on Judge Carswell and the Family Assistance Plan. Nixon and Kissinger wanted to show all these forces that the Administration was strong, manly, and unpredictable. And without consulting either Congress or-at any great length-the Secretaries of State and Defense, the White House moved ahead and made the decision with full speed.

Because Kissinger's conversations with Nixon are secret, it is unclear precisely what role he played in the decision to invade Cambodia. It seems evident, however, that he recommended some form of escalation-such as the bombing of North Vietnam-and it is well-known that he supported the decision that Nixon finally made. And it is certain that the action was perfectly consonant withKissinger's notions of the use and threat of force.

THE INVASION of Cambodia was an incontestable expression of a policy that the Administration had been following all along: escalation and graduated threat. As a result of the action, allied forces are now fighting in Cambodia, and the United States has been committed to a defense of Lon Nol as well as Thieu-Ky. And the invasion was a jumping-off point for other aggressive actions by which the United States has simultaneously attempted to demonstrate its strength and unpredictability: a brutal bombing raid on North Vietnam last November and the ground invasion of Laos by the South Vietnamese last February.

The Laos invasion-the first real test of "Vietnamization"-was a miserable failure; one ex-staff assistant remarked recently of Kissinger, "His policy is in the same position as Johnson's was in '68, and he knows it." Nonetheless, the failure in Laos has merely deflected the U. S. effort to escalate the war. For although U. S. ground troops continue to pour out of South Vietnam, Nixon's and Kissinger's refusal to set a deadline for withdrawal seems to indicate plans for leaving a residual force-one that will be small enough not to offend the American public and yet large enough to sustain Saigon indefinitely. And with the machinery of American involvement in South Vietnam-the bombers, the spy planes, the computers and automated battle-fields-left intact, further escalation may well take the form of renewed bombing of the North, and, perhaps, the destruction of Hanoi and Haiphong.

For his own part, Kissinger is certainly willing to escalate further. He is hard-line and uncompromising. The more frustrated a problem gets, the more vindictive and personalized his judgment becomes. And he has yet to recognize that it would require little less than wholesale slaughter to defeat Hanoi and the NLF in their active lands. "Henry," an ex-aide said recently, "is not willing to accept the imbalance of power which is there as a reality."

Yet wholesale slaughter does not stray far from describing current U. S. policy in Indochina. For years American bombers have pounded the land and people of three countries in Southeast Asia. They have murdered hundreds of thousands, created millions of refugees in South Vietnam and Cambodia, and forced much of the population of Laos to live in underground caves. And the bombing policy is not something which Nixon and Kissinger merely inherited from their predecessors. They have broadened and intensified it. And it is not so much that the bombing has been a successful military tactic as part of the policy of threat-witness the use of South Vietnamese ground troops on the Ho Chi Minh Trail after weeks of sustained pounding by American B-52s.

THE regimes which Nixon and Kissinger seek to defend in Southeast Asia are among the most cruel and totalitarian in the world. Their leaders imprison their political enemies, commit indiscriminate murder, and impose a rule of terror and dictatorship on their native populations. And it is not out of some perverted sense of fairness or democracy that these regimes are being defended. It is out of a harsh, brutal calculation of what an imperialist, power like the United States must do to maintain itself in the world.

If smaller, more vulnerable men like Lt. William Calley can be sentenced for killing women and children in Vietnam, then there must be a higher tribunal for statesmen like Kissinger, who uphold the policies which make such atrocities necessary. But then, there is always the danger of lapsing into academic exercises about old atrocities when other deeper lying ones have yet to surface. And if Henry Kissinger can be accused of anything, it is playing his power game so well that his policy threatens to explode the very balance of forces which he has so ruthlessly defended.