SwiftVets.com

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Omaha World Herald, August 8, 1995 Tuesday


An unlikely source provides partial vindication for America's attempts to prevent the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The source is Bui Tin, who served as a colonel in the North Vietnamese army and was a member of the Hanoi government's general staff. After the war he was editor of a communist newspaper before becoming disillusioned with communism and emigrating to France. There, he spoke with an American human rights activist about his observations of the Vietnam War. Parts of the conversation have been published.

Among his observations: The Hanoi government relied heavily on the American anti-war movement to help win the war. "Those people represented the conscience of America," he said, referring to people in the anti-war movement, "and we were turning that power in our favor." Aid from the Soviet Union "made the war possible." South Vietnam's National Liberation Front wasn't the home-grown revolutionary movement that it claimed to be. It had been set up by the North Vietnamese Communist Party as part of a unified effort to bring the two Vietnams together under communist rule.

The Tet Offensive was a response to a fear that the United States was in position in 1967 to win the war. The offensive was designed to further turn American public opinion in favor of Hanoi. Militarily, the offensive was a disaster - Hanoi's fighting forces in the South were nearly wiped out, requiring three years to recover. Bui Tin said, however, that "we gained the planned advantage when Johnson agreed to negotiate and not to run for re-election." Later, when Watergate began to drag down the presidency of Richard Nixon, the North Vietnamese realized that they could hang on and win.

It's good for Americans to see these things from the other side. The picture created by anti-war commentators during the war was based on distortions. Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese dictator, was presented as the George Washington of Vietnam. The South Vietnamese revolutionaries were good-hearted agrarian reformers. The fiction still persists that Tet was a military disaster for America and that a pullout was the only responsible option after 1968.

In the 1990s, the war protesters appear in the politically correct history books as moral heroes. Bui Tin said his government was greatly encouraged by the visits of anti-war leaders to Hanoi. He said the North Vietnamese listened to the world news at 9 o'clock every morning to find out how the war protests were going. "America lost because of its democracy," Bui Tin said. "Through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize and win." His comments don't end the debate over Vietnam, of course. Some Americans may always believe the myth of Hanoi's uprightness, ignoring the migration of the boat people who fled after the war rather than be "re-educated" in government camps.

But what an indictment when America's treasured right of dissent becomes a wartime weapon to be used against the United States. Hanoi's successful exploitation of that weapon has shown other potential enemies how to make war more effectively against an open, democratic society.

This is a "lesson of Vietnam" that America forgets at its peril.


This story from 1995 pretty much says it all and that last sentence is the absolute truth. Is this not what the Left is trying to do today? Do you think our enemies are not using Vietnam as their Playbook?

Take a good hard look at this because this is the "lesson of Vietnam".

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I will post a another article about this subject from the Los Angeles Times of all places.

This is a link to a page from his book
Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel
http://www.vwam.com/vets/buitin.html

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Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1995

August 6, 1995, Sunday, Home Edition

DAVID HOROWITZ: A PRIMER ON WHY WE LOST VIETNAM;
A VIETNAMESE GENERAL CONFIRMS THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT'S ROLE IN THE U.S. DEFEAT.

BYLINE: By DAVID HOROWITZ, David Horowitz is president of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

In an interview published in the Wall Street Journal that will hardly be noticed outside conservative circles, the North Vietnam general who received the unconditional surrender of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975, has confirmed every argument made by the right about the war in Vietnam: It was a war to stop an aggression from the North, not to suppress a revolution in the South; it was a war that America could have won -- by cutting off the Ho Chi Minh Trail through which North Vietnam was invading the South; it was a war that the left and its "anti-war" movement caused America to lose by sapping its will to fight.

The general who confirmed these conclusions recently to Stephen Young, a Minnesota attorney and human rights activist who interviewed him in Hanoi, is Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam's army and who, after the war, became the editor of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of communist Vietnam. Young asked Bui what Hanoi's strategy was to win the war. Bui quoted Ho Chi Minh: "We don't need to win military victories; we only need to hit them until they give up and get out."

Young asked if the anti-war movement was important to Hanoi's victory. General Bui answered: "It was essential to our strategy. Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American anti-war movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses."

Bui further explained why the American anti-war movement was so strategic in creating a communist victory: "Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest, it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win."

Bui acknowledged that the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam was a creation of the communist government in the North, and that "there was only one party, only one army to liberate the South and unify the nation" under communist rule.

Young asked Bui how America might have won the war. The general answered: "Cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail inside Laos." The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the invasion route along which the North Vietnamese Communists infiltrated the South with men and supplies. The military head of U.S. forces, Gen. William Westmoreland, asked for permission to cut off the trail early in the war. But President Johnson refused the request. "If Johnson had granted Westmoreland's requests to enter Laos and block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Hanoi could not have won the war," Bui said. The bombing of the trail, he added, was "ineffective" because even when real damage was caused "we put so much in at the top of the trail that enough men and weapons to prolong the war always came out at the bottom."

In short, the liberal policies of the Johnson Administration -- its refusal to "compromise" the "neutrality" of Laos by blocking the invasion route -- denied America the possibility of victory. The anti-war agitation and collaboration of the American left undermined the war effort from within and gave victory to the communists.

In the first three years of the communist peace, more people were killed in Indochina than had been killed in the 13 years of the anti-communist war.

Gen. Bui Tin is a Vietnamese Robert McNamara without regrets. He is happy that the communists were able to conquer South Vietnam. But unlike Johnson's defense secretary -- and the veterans of the American left who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing all these years -- he understands why the communists won.


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