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                                                                                AMERICA ABROAD, Page 57

The War That Will Not End


By Strobe Talbott


    In the most eloquent passage of his Inaugural Address
nearly four years ago, George Bush lamented that the Vietnam War
"cleaves us still." He hoped that "the statute of limitations
has been reached" and that "the final lesson of Vietnam is that
no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory." Yet
in the campaign of 1992, there it was, cleaving and sundering.
Bush tried to exploit the issue, but did not introduce it. Bill
Clinton did, by being the first member of the Vietnam generation
to be nominated for the presidency.

    It has been more than 30 years since John F. Kennedy put
American advisers into Vietnam, 17 since Gerald Ford pulled the
last troops out. That should be enough hindsight for a clear
view of the bottom line, especially because the larger, longer
conflict of which Vietnam was a part -- the great twilight
struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union -- is also now
over at last.

    Sometimes it is not until nations understand one another's
motivations that war breaks out. So it was in 1939, when Adolf
Hitler finally convinced Britain and France that he meant to
conquer Europe. So it was in 1990, when Saddam Hussein
established beyond doubt that he wanted more than just a swatch
of desert on the Kuwaiti border.

    Other wars, however, arise because the combatants
misunderstand each other. That was true of Vietnam. The U.S. saw
the Viet Cong as foot soldiers of an international army
commanded by the Soviet Union and, in the crucial early years,
by China.

    But Ho Chi Minh and his followers did not see themselves
that way. Yes, they believed in communism, which provided them
with a combination of mentality and methods well suited to
prevailing in war (but not in peace): discipline and
self-sacrifice, brutally enforced. They were glad to have
support from Moscow and Beijing, but they were not doing Soviet
or Chinese bidding. They were determined to keep Vietnam from
ever again being under the control of a foreign power. They saw
the Americans as successors to French and Chinese imperialists.
That image of the G.I. served Ho better than America's image of
the V.C. as an agent of the Kremlin served Kennedy and his three
successors.

    George Bush still doesn't get it. He keeps saying that the
U.S. lost because "we fought with one hand tied behind our
back." Nonsense. The U.S. used virtually everything it had
except nuclear weapons. The U.S. lost because, in sending troops
8,000 miles from home, its government committed three errors:
it exaggerated the threat posed by a monolithic, expansionist
Red Menace; it overestimated the popular support and staying
power of its corrupt ally in Saigon; and it underestimated the
inherent advantage a guerrilla force has in fighting on and for
its own territory. In short, America was thinking globally and
acting locally, but getting it wrong both ways.

    World communism was a chimera even before Kennedy sent
U.S. advisers to Vietnam. The Sino-Soviet split began in 1960;
later, Mao Zedong refused to let the Soviets send arms to Hanoi
by rail across China. In 1978 Vietnam attacked the Khmer Rouge
in Cambodia and the following year beat back an invasion by
China. This was not the sequence of events that Dwight
Eisenhower had in mind in 1954 when he propounded the domino
theory, the rationale for U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.
Instead, the violent feuding among the region's Marxist regimes
in the 1970s and 1980s in a way anticipated the quarrels that
later tore apart communist Europe.

    Vietnam was a battle in the cold war -- the wrong battle
in the right war, which is why the U.S. lost the one and won
the other. America's lingering bitterness over that regional
defeat sometimes seems more potent than its satisfaction over
the recent global victory. In this campaign there has been more
recrimination over Vietnam than self-congratulation over the end
of the Soviet empire.

    The reason is simple. Like the Civil War, Vietnam pitted
Americans against each other. Even though the military
engagements took place far away and long ago, the political and
psychic scars on the home front will not heal. By the end of the
century, Americans will probably remember the collapse of the
Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. as they now
look back on Normandy and Iwo Jima -- climactic moments in
triumphs for Our Side that have passed into history.

    But Vietnam will live on. Veterans of the war and of the
antiwar movement may never entirely make peace with each other.
In the year 2000, when they gather at conferences marking the
25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, they will still be
arguing over Khe Sanh and Kent State, Tet and the Moratorium,
just as old Union and Confederate soldiers relived and refought
Antietam and Gettysburg well into this century, until they too
had passed into history. That is the real bottom line on
Vietnam: there is no statute of limitations. The war imposed a
life sentence on an entire generation.