Dominoes with a difference
Richard West
It was President Eisenhower, 25 years ago, who coined the telling metaphor about what would happen in South-East Asia if Vietnam succeeded China in falling to the communists: 'You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.' Two years later, in 1956, Senator John F. Kennedy told the "Friends of Vietnam' that 'Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia arc among those whose security would be threatened if the red tide of communism flowed into Vietnam.' It is four years now since Saigon fell to the communists, and so far. South-East Asia has not followed the domino theory; and yet it is not at peace.
Senator Kennedy's list of threatened countries now makes curious reading. Burma, Japan and the Philippines do not seem seriously threatened, and India indeed is one of the few Asian countries sympathetic to Vietnam. Thailand has seen a Vietnamese army approach her eastern frontier but, although a few rockets were fired across, there has not been serious fighting. Laos is under the domination of Vietnam, as she has • been for several hundred years — but Cambodia? For at least three years after 1975, communist Vietnam was actually under attack from communist Cambodia, particularly in the area around Tay Ninh where the hero of Graham Green's The Quiet American is nearly killed. In that scene in the novel, Alden Pyle, the Quiet American, preaches the wisdom contained in his favourite book The Advance of Red China. It was in effect the domino theory, with China winning first Vietnam and then the rest of South-East Asia.
This year, 25 years after Greene published his novel, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and was in turn invaded by communist China. The domino theory was put in reverse, as Vietnamese troops, armed with superb artillery and the latest MiG fighters, hurled the Chinese back into China, to the dismay not only of the United States but of Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and all the other supposed dominoes. The domino theory is not dead but has undergone transformation. From 1954 until as late as 1974, it was assumed that Vietnam was the first of a line of dominoes to be pushed by communist China, which is by far the largest power in this part of the world. Some time before the fall of the old South Vietnam, it had grown clear that North Vietnam was no longer friendly with China and was getting its arms and financial support from China's rival, Russia. Many American politicians, and Margaret Thatcher too, have recently tried to suggest that Vietnam is now a subject state of the Russians; that Brczhnev is hoping to set in motion that long line of dominoes in the East. There is yet another school of thought among scholarly and sober Americans, that Vietnam is itself an imperial power, hellbent on conquest.
One American diplomat whom I met in Thailand had brought this idea to the edge of absurdity: 'I have a theory, I offer it to you, that Vietnam is not really a nation, it's an army. Fighting is the thing they really like and are really good at. Do you know why the Chinese didn't put any planes up over Vietnam in January? They'd have been shot down. The Vietnamese had the latest MiGs and the Chinese planes are 20 years old. The Chinese got a rude surprise trying to invade Vietnam. And those Americans who want to play the Chinese card are on a loser. China isn't an ace, it isn't even a face card. It's nearer a deuce. Vietnam is the card to play in this part of the world, as the Russians know. When Vietnam went into Cambodia, there were Americans who said they'd bitten off more than they could chew. They took out the maps — Americans in this part of the world love maps—and they pointed to the Mekong River. No army could cross the Mekong, they said. It took the Vietnamese an afternoon to cross the Mekong. All it needed was lots and lots of bamboo. They weren't even fired on from the other bank . . And this sending out refugees was a stroke of genius. They couldn't have thought of anything that would so destabilise South-East Asia and make these countries quarrel with the United States and other Western powers.' This notion of the Vietnamese as a race of military supermen is comforting to the pride of a country that suffered defeat at Vietnamese hands. Some Americans now talk as though Vietnam had won by virtue of numbers. Americans also comfort themselves with every story of harshness and arrogance on the part of the government in Hanoi. Have not the Vietnamese trampled down Laos and Cambodia? Have not the northerners replaced the old Vietcong in Ho Chi Minh City, former Saigon? Do not the re-education camps, the brutality and the torture prove that America was right all along to fight for democracy in Vietnam?
Some of these arguments that you hear from Americans now are disingenuous. Although anti-war propagandists often described the Vietnamese as a 'small peace-loving people', those of us who had been there knew them to be both brave and martial. Even the army of South Vietnam, so sneered at by its American allies, fought on up to and even after the fall of Saigon in 1975, by which time some of its officers had been fighting the communists for more than 25 years. The army of South Vietnamese also invaded Cambodia in 1970, and from all accounts behaved with appalling ferocity; without wishing to try and justify the undoubted cruelty of the communist Vietnamese, it must be said that the noncommunist Vietnamese also behaved very unpleasantly at times. It is true that South Vietnam is now dominated by men from the north, but so it was under the old regime. The two million refugees, most of them Catholics, who fled to the south in 1955, held a high proportion of top government jobs, thanks to their education and industry. Americans who knew Vietnam cannot pretend to be surprised by what is happening now. The gradual emptying of the cities and sending of people to work in the farms is doubtless a cause of dreadful injustice and hardship to millions of decent people; but how could they be fed with American aid gone? Cities like Saigon had grown to five or ten times their economic size.
Bad enough though life undoubtedly is in modern Vietnam, it is surely incomparably less bad than life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime, for reasons I want to discuss in next week's article. Yet Americans reserve all their bitterness for the Vietnamese, and their government may be arming the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. The explanation of this has something to do with America's long and close emotional involvement with the Vietnamese from the time that John F. Kennedy was addressing the Friends of Vietnam, through to the debacle, and now the dilemma posed by the refugees. The story of this relationship Is much too strange to be told in an article; the best book on the subject remains The Quiet American; suffice it to say that many Americans feel betrayed by the people in whom they invested so much energy ,and enthusiasm, for whom they laid down so many lives. The former friendship, strained though it may have been, has turned int outright enmity. Tens of millions of cans have acclaimed a film, The Deer Hunter, which shows the Vietnamese as a race of murderous sadists, far more detestable than the Japanese in World War II. The film was a travesty of a people who, though they are sometimes cruel (what people are not?), retained much .dignity and humanity throughout decades of war, and I hope will retain these qualities under the harsh new regime.
The domino theory has not yet proved to be true. Laos and Cambodia are now in the communist camp, but the latter fell two weeks before Vietnam, and largely thanks to American interference. The other South-East Asian countries may be unstable, though largely due to the oil crisis, but seem to be under no threat from Hanoi. The lesson of Indochina (and of East Africa and perhaps eastern Europe) is that when countries go communist, they tend to fight not the capitalists but each other. The Vietnamese, the Cambodians and the Laotians are all Marxists and fighting each other. The same thing has occurred between the Somalis, the Ethiopians and the Eritreans. The same threat still hangs over the Balkan states of Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia. They not only squabble among themselves but might, one day, get drawn into the big or final war between the two communist giant powers.
This is the second of four articles by Richard West on the American war in Vietnam.
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