Why Were We in Vietnam? "The cause of democracy was of no real importance at all."

WP: Why Were We in Vietnam?
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

....Confronted with such appalling squishiness (in China), what's a good, cost-cutting American business to do? Many are fleeing south of the border -- not our border (Mexico costs way too much) but China's. They're bound for Vietnam....

***

According to a report by Keith Bradsher in the New York Times last month, such multinational companies as Canon (the printer and copier maker) and Hanesbrands (the North Carolina-based underwear empire) are expanding or building factories in Hanoi, where they churn out products for Wal-Mart and other American retailers. Foreign direct investment in Vietnam increased 136 percent between 2006 and 2007, while it increased just 14 percent in China.

The reason for the move south is straightforward: Vietnamese factory workers make about a quarter of what their Chinese counterparts earn. But why Vietnam and not, say, Thailand, where labor is similarly cheap?

Vietnam's edge, it seems, is political. "Communism means more stability," Laurence Shu, the chief financial officer of Shanghai-based Texhong, one of the world's leading manufacturers of cotton fabrics, told Bradsher. This view, Bradsher reports, is common among Asian executives and some American executives, too, though they have the presence of mind never to say so on the record. After all, Vietnam, like China, outlaws independent unions. Absent free speech and free elections, no radical shifts in the government's economic policies are likely to be sprung upon unsuspecting American businesses.

Now, far be it from me to begrudge the Vietnamese their moment in the sun before global capital finds them too costly and moves on to Bangladesh and Somalia. But didn't we fight a war to keep Vietnam from going communist? Something like 58,000 American deaths, right? And now American business actually prefers investing in communist Vietnam over, say, the more or less democratic Philippines? In all likelihood, it would prefer investing in communist Vietnam to investing in a more chaotic, less disciplined democratic Vietnam, if such existed....

...(W)e could argue that our onetime opposition to communism was noble and all that but that, unburdened by the illusions of the past, American business, backed by the American government, has realized that the problem with communism wasn't that it was undemocratic but that it was anti-capitalist. And that once communism was integrated into a world capitalist system, its antipathy toward democracy not only wouldn't be a bad thing but would actually be good. That is clearly the political logic that underpins our involvement with China. It's a little dicier to say this about our growing involvement with Vietnam, since all those Americans whose names are on that wall on the Mall probably didn't realize how compatible with global American enterprise Vietnamese communism would turn out to be or how the cause of democracy would turn out to have been of no real importance at all.

I guess a note from the American establishment to those men and women with their names on the Wall would be in order. Something like: Say, guys -- sorry 'bout that!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/08/AR2008070802462.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

""In Oliver Stone's JFK, mystery man "X" (portrayed by Donald Sutherland and based largely on L. Fletcher Prouty) claims to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) that President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed the Vietnam policies of his predecessor, and did so mere days after the assassination:



X (VOICE OVER)
Only four days after JFK was shot, Lyndon Johnson signed National Security Memo 273, which essentially reversed Kennedy's new withdrawal policy and gave the green light to the covert operations against North Vietnam that provoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident. In that document lay the Vietnam War. . . .(1)

I keep thinking of that day, Tuesday the 26th, the day after they buried Kennedy, LBJ was signing the memorandum on Vietnam with Ambassador Lodge.

FLASHBACK TO: the White House, 1963. Johnson sits across the shadowed room with Lodge and others. His Texas drawl rises and falls. He signs something unseen.

JOHNSON
Gentlemen, I want you to know I'm not going to let Vietnam go the way China did. I'm personally committed. I'm not going to take one soldier out of there 'til they know we mean business in Asia . . .

(he pauses)

You just get me elected, and I'll give you your damned war.

X (V. O.)
. . . and that was the day Vietnam started.(2)""....

""What about LBJ's statement, "I'll give you your damned war"?

Context can be crucial. Stone's cited source is historian Stanley Karnow's book, Vietnam: A History. Here is what Karnow actually says:



Johnson subscribed to the adage that "wars are too serious to be entrusted to generals." He knew, as he once put it, that armed forces "need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic," and that they would drag him into a military conflict if they could. But he also knew that Pentagon lobbyists, among the best in the business, could persuade conservatives in Congress to sabotage his social legislation unless he satisifed their demands. As he girded himself for the 1964 presidential campaign, he was especially sensitive to the jingoists who might brand him "soft on Communism" were he to back away from the challenge in Vietnam. So, politician that he was, he assuaged the brass and the braid with promises he may never have intended to keep. At a White House reception on Christmas Eve 1963, for example, he told the joint chiefs of staff: "Just let me get elected, and then you can have your war."(3)""

http://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100lbjnam.html