COVER -> DAY ONE
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Twice in the later Middle ages the chronic warfare between feudal principates was punctuated by massive Mongol incursions which came without warning, making all other territorial disputes irrelevant. And, as they came they went, suddenly and for no apparent reason.
In the late 1950s when the United States began its two decades of involvement in South Vietnam, the skies were darkening. Senator McCarthy had been humiliated by the East Coast suits but this did not lessen democratic anxiety. The Twentieth Party Congress of the USSR Communists and the Soviet invasion of Hungary sent mixed messages, Communist dissidents were beginning to operate in Latin America which was ruled, though never governed, by a bewildering variety of crazed and fragile dictatorships.
China was flexing its muscles and African independence was on the horizon. By the mid 1960s when American involvement in South Vietnam was openly belligerent, Berlin had been divided by a Communist-built wall; Castro's Cuba had already proved its value to Communism and spread its mission to a growing dissident movement on the mainland of Latin America.
Democratic Africa was in ruins, its nations already cold war pawns with a majority in support of Communist Russia or China. Mao's Red Guards were on the march and nothing permanent had come from Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress. China had threatened India's borders and New Delhi had come to rely on Russia; and as Vietnamese peasants ran flaming through the jungle the Russian tanks rolled into Dubcek's Prague.
At the time when Czech democratic resistance was broken I was in West Berlin, frightened, as many were there, that the tanks would keep rolling Westward. The domino theory was not quite so absurd as it looks now. Had South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos fallen quickly to the Communists, what price South Korea? And if that, then how would an isolated, democratically weak though economically robust Japan stand the strain? With India torn between Peking and Moscow how long would its democracy survive?
Had these events taken place, and they all looked perfectly possible in 1968, there would not have been much of the earth's land surface ruled by democracies.
Looked at in this way it is easy to see that the United States would at some point have had to assert itself, to draw some kind of symbolic line. It chose the wrong place, largely by accident and then prosecuted a war without ever making a full declaration and without any attempt to justify itself.
On the basis that democracies always apply a double standard, expecting progressive parties to be more highly principled than conservative parties, the Democrats were punished with the summary end of the Kennedy era and a quarter of a century in the wilderness except for the post Watergate aberration of Jimmy Carter.
As it turned out, the Vietnam war bought just enough time, caused just enough disruption to the onward tide of Communism to allow a variety of forces to come into play that initially led to a moratorium and then to the turning of the tide. Had Saigon fallen in 1965 the world might now be very different. But by the time it fell ten years later the Russians knew they could not afford permanent war, even cold war, with the United States, the Maoist wind had blown out, the Thai Army had developed into a formidable fighting force, South Korea's economy made it too strong to be an easy prey, Japan had steadied and India was strong enough to survive the Indira Ghandi emergency.
All this is not to say that the United States should ever have fought in Vietnam or contemplated fighting anywhere else to stem a Communist advance and until I shuddered in Berlin in the August of 1968 I felt empathy with the anti-war protesters; but never for a moment did they ask themselves what the world might be like without a Vietnam war.
Would communism simply go away or would it, like the Mongol invasion, come to make all other disputes between states look tiny? Was the protest movement in America primarily a matter of principled opposition to the slaughter or was it, deep down, a recognition that no matter how far Communism advanced it would never affect the United States?
There was, too, a healthy amount of middle class fear of recruitment. the prospect of being shot at in a jungle thousand s of miles away from home not surprisingly created fervent pacifists. The European protest movement, which I saw at first hand, was much easier to comprehend; it was largely driven by Communist parties which still had some hope of gaining political power.
There is a widely held view, supported by no evidence whatsoever, (which is the status of many widely held views) that television coverage of the Vietnam War led to its unpopularity and to the failure of American intervention.
As far as one can tell from the voting behaviour in the Western democracies the perfectly natural revulsion felt at the personal level led to no significant action at the political level.
Even though the War was badly explained, badly prosecuted, ignominiously concluded and concurrently and retrospectively reviled there was, I believe, widespread though inchoate support for it. Nobody then could be certain that the tide would recede even more rapidly than it advanced.
Twenty-five years on, as we contemplate a world where democracy and free trade are still expanding at the expense of dictatorship it is a good moment to learn from history rather than simply parrot regret for past deeds. As a European who has never voted for a conservative party, my emotional reaction to anti-Capitalist propaganda such as that in evidence in Seattle last year is sympathetic; but having lived through the dark period when Democracy was a decidedly minority pursuit, my intellectual response is to ask what protesters would put in its place.
