J. Enoch Powell on the great American illusion

The United States has just succeeded in terminating — so far as itself is concerned — the most humiliating war not merely in its own history but in that of most Western nations in modern times. It is comparable with the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905, and much more ignominious than that of France in Algeria. One of the peculiar features is that the American government knew by 1967 that they had lost, and admitted as much publicly in 1968. Yet though they fought for over five years to extricate themselves, as against a bare two years under the impression that they could win, the question still remains: will they ever know what hit them?

Reality as perceived and lived by the Vietnamese, North or South, Vietcong or NLF or Saigon, never had more than a verbal overlap with reality as perceived and lived by the Americans. They are now removing their last forces and their prisoners from a world no less unknown and unintelligible to them than when they began to become committed in South-East Asia almost twenty years earlier. It is an ironical juncture for the publication of the only full-scale attempt* by an American to make the Americans aware of their incomprehension and thus of the inevitability of their failure. The authoress, who first went to Vietnam in 1966, deserves the gratitude of her fellow countrymen for an heroic effort to see the realities of Indochina through nonAmerican eyes and then to describe them for Americans. The result is a narrative which has real tragic quality, the quality of a tragedy predestined by the blindness of the principal character.

The objects for which the Americans became entangled in Vietnam were not so much unattainable as non-existent. The containment of Communism, the defence of a small nation's independence, the implanting of democracy, toleration and majority rule, the modernisation of the economy and social structure of South Vietman were aims which existed only in the imagination of the Americans. It has been generally known that of all the oriental peoples those of Annam were the most inaccessible in their thinking, and even in their language, to the European—more so than the Chinese, far more so than the Indians. Whereas, however, the colonial nations of the Old World at least started with the presumption that a gulf existed between them and the nations of the East, which a lifetime of experience and study would barely span, the Americans are predisposed and in a sense obliged by their very constitution and history to assume that all men and all nations are basically similar, if not identical. It is a fundamental act of faith, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence itself, that we are really all Americans under the skin and only need to have our attention drawn to the fact in order to enter into our own share of the American inheritance.

There was trouble in the state of Lu, and the reigning monarch called in Confucius to ask for his help. When he arrived at the court, the Master went to a public place and took a seat in the correct way, facing south, and all the trouble disappeared.

It is an endlessly illuminating Chinese anecdote, popular in Vietnam, which Miss FitzGerald quotes. There is a correct way, rooted in the nature of the universe and of human society within the universe, by which a people lives in peace and order. Its right expression must be found and, if found, universally adopted, and the evidence for it is — that it works; for it can only work if concordant with the Truth. In that order the individual has a ' right ' place, and the generations are linked in it across time.

The Vietnamese, whatever their political outlook, believed in uniformity, not in agreement to disagree. While the Americans were trying to teach the Vietnamese to live with their differences, the Vietnamese were only interested in erasing them. And Marxism-Leninism provided them with one method.

A great light is cast upon the significance of Communism for the North and for the NLF; upon the attractiveness of Communism to the Vietnamese; and upon the sea-change which makes it a mere pun to refer by the same word to Communism in Paris and in Hanoi. The sympathetic American journalist who visited Hanoi in 1968 " saw in North Vietnam what no American official had ever prepared them for: the very foreignness of the Vietnamese. The familiarity of the Communist was in many ways a deception, for the Vietnamese were not like the Russians or the East Europeans." The tragi-comic centre-piece of the drama of the Americans in Vietnam is President Johnson at Honolulu in 1966: "Mr Johnson," said a Vietnamese officer, "we are a small country and we don't have pretendons to building a Great Society. We just want to have a better society." But the irony was lost on Johnson. The idea that the United States could not master the problems of a country as small and, undeveloped as Vietnam did not occur to Johnson as a possibility.

Over and over again, whether it was Djem or Khanh (" he is an able and energetic leader" — MacNamara) or KY the Americans saw ghosts of themselves in one of the mirrors by which they were surrounded in Saigon, and then when the mirror cracked they were bewildered. Here is the US ambassador:

Do all of you understand English? Maybe it is because something is wrong with my French, because you evidently didn't understand. I made it clear that all the military plans, which I know you would like to carry out, are dependent on governmental stability. Now you have made a real mess.

It is not funny; it is hauntingly tragic. I doubt if General Taylor's " French" is all that good anyhow; but in his total incomprehension he was a sublime representative of his fellow countrymen. I must not go on quoting — the book is a treasurehouse where every dip brings up a jewel — but no reader deserves to miss President Johnson addressing Generals Ky and Thieu at Guam in March 1967:

My birthday is in late August. The greatest birthday present you could give me is a nat tional election.

He also told them that he looked at the new (paper) constitution "just as proudly as I looked at Lynda, my first baby." The bathos is at the same time the pathos. It makes one weep with anger and pity to think that the head of the most wealthy and powerful nation on earth could speak like that and think like that and be as ignorant and deluded as that, and thereby wreak such havoc upon his own nation and on the people of a "far-off country of which he knew nothing ". Miss

FitzGerald ended her book in 1972, before the concluding stages of the war, which she did not need to see; for the writing had, to her, been 'on the wall' from the beginning.

An American reporter, experienced in Vietnam, once said to me: 'I finally realised we'd never win this war when I noticed that all of the streets in Saigon were named after Vietnamese heroes who fought against foreigners.' Though written in Roman letters and used "very day by Americans, they were perfectly incomprehensible to those who did not know a great deal about Vietnamese history. The xenophoxbia of Saigon was hidden in plain Sight.

A perfect summary and epitaph. But now there is another book to be written, by another Miss FitzGerald — about us, us the Europearfs. Why did we not know, or alternatively why, knowing, did we Pretend that we did not? We had less excuse; for we are not Americans, and we Were onlookers, though how near Britain Came to being a participant will perhaps never be known. In the last days of the General Election campaign of March 1966 I believed this to be sufficiently likely, to extort a disclaimer from the Labour Government in a speech at Falkirk, in Which I referred to "the Americans grinding deeper and deeper into the tragic morass of Vietnam." I did so having What I thought good reason to believe that I Was not only authorised but encouraged in this by Edward Heath personally, though much later I learnt from him by chance that this had not been the case. On the contrary, as I have previously placed on record (Spectator, February 6, 1971), when as late as November 1967 I had reported to my colleagues in the Opposition shadow cabinet, after a visit to the Pentagon and the State Department, that Mr Macnamara (no less) had expressly admitted to me that he knew the Americans had no choice but to "disengage ", the then Leader of the Opposition angrily informed me, in words which might be one of a hundred quotations in Miss FitzGerald's book:

You are absolutely mistaken. The Americans will stay in South-East Asia twenty or thirty years if necessary, and leave only when they have transformed the society and the economy of those countries.

Earlier, much earlier, when Britain's Foreign Office, with Conservative apprcval, had lifted up its voice to approve the American bombing of the Vietcong supply lines and I had advised my colleagues that this would prove futile, I had been told that "someone who had been a General Staff officer in the War ought to know better."

There, in sharp profile, is the paradox to which the companion volume to Miss FitzGerald's needs to be devoted. No

special gifts of prophecy were needed to perceive, from a sufficient detachment, what would be the outcome. For those who do not keep old files of The Spectator handy, I venture a quote from August 119, 1966:

There can come a point where even the importance with which the ,Americans themselves — and largely, as a matter of historical fact, the Americans alone — have endowed South Vietnam is exceeded by the cost, in moral and physical terms together, of the Vietnamese war. After all, they do not live there. The other parties — the South Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese — do live there and will go on living there when the American carrier fleets have dropped below the Pacific horizon again. In this fact there lies an immense, residual, negative strength. For Hanoi, for China, for the Vietcong it is enough not to be beaten; for the Americans it is necessary to win.

If I had to guess how peace may one day come in Indochina, I would imagine the process to commence, not when a Geneva conference assembled again under its co-chairmen after so many years, but when the United• States began to withdraw her forces and, like the snark, ' softly ' (if not ' suddenly ') to vanish away '.

It is worth our while in Europe, as it is for the Americans, to try, with a view to

• the future, to understand 'what hit us '. Was it a deliberate policy of humouring the Americans, on the theory that if they were helped to defy reality in South-East Asia, they would repay the debt with American troops in Europe or an American finger on the nuclear trigger? Was it a genuine participation in the domino theory of "containing Communism ", on the basis that "if Mafeking falls, we shall have the Boers in London in no time at all, spreading fire and slaughter"? I have heard grown men, not, a thousand miles from Westminster, asserting no less, with at least every appearance of believing it. Or, more alarmingly, have we in Europe taken on more than a veneer of the American notion that all mankind is much of a muchness and that nations are made with a little goodwill and democratic institutions, as toys are made with glue and cardboard? I would not care to guarantee' that American governments understand much more about Europe than they did about South-East Asia, or that their incomprehension of Brussels is much less profound than of Saigon. That would not matter, if the Old World does not talk itself unawares into the Great American Illusion.