The Kissnger Qiestion Essay Example for Free

The Kissnger Qiestion Essay The Vietnam War resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million to 3 million Vietnamese and other Indochinese and 58,000 Americans. It was the catalyst for Richard Nixon’s self-induced disgrace. Henry Kissinger played a pivotal role in guiding America’s foreign policy as the war torn nation reeled under the loss of one president to assassination and another to fraud. The Vietnam War singed the conscience of the world and Kissinger found himself where foreign policy and national security converged. National Security Advisor is the one that holds the most strategic meetings at the highest levels of US administration. External and internal threats to the nation’s security and well being should be calculated well in advance; otherwise the entire fabric of security planning lies in shreds. There must have been some constructive and sensible proposals to avert the Vietnam fiasco. It’s fair to ask what alternative course Americas critics would have followed. Some serious people argued for complete withdrawal, on the grounds that the war was already lost. Some have argued that Nixon, after taking office, should have declared that the situation in Vietnam was far worse than he had thought, blame it on the Democrats and seek a deal with the North Vietnamese like the one that was ultimately reached. Meanwhile, the argument goes, Nixon could have used tough rhetoric at home to appease the foreign policy makers. Whether the approach would have worked can’t be known, but had it worked, it certainly would have been preferable to what happened instead. Once in office, Kissinger and Nixon said they were seeking peace with honor: the abandonment of our South Vietnamese allies would be a dishonorable betrayal and would undermine our credibility in the world. America ended up abandoning them anyway. Even overlooking for the moment how the whole thing turned out, the peace with honor formulation was riddled with flaws. And the South Vietnamese regime was known to have been inept and hopelessly corrupt. In writing about the importance of our allies in South Vietnam, Kissinger gives minimal attention to the Vietnamese people but a great deal to South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu, calling him a great patriot and a dauntless leader. McNamara and Kissinger, not unlike some American presidents, including Nixon, had myopic affinity for strongmen like the Shah of Iran, Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos. A student of Metternich, the 19th-century Austrian statesman, Kissinger was a practitioner of the realist (or realpolitik) school of diplomacy, which places emphasis on the state’s interests and the use of military power to achieve them, and he preferred to deal with the strong leaders of nation-states who could deliver. The US administration’s complicity in the 1963 overthrow of South Vietnam’s leader General Ngo Dinh Diem conferred legitimacy on the North Vietnamese claim that the South Vietnamese government was illegitimate. Ironically, when all this was happening in Vietnam, the rest of the world could only look and expect. Even the Nobel society that conferred the peace prize to Kissinger made almost no mention of the American lives lost during the Vietnam War, and none of the fact that USAs pursuit of what many saw as a patently hopeless cause may have damaged Vietnam permanently. To see the US side of the story, Nixon had a peculiar governing style. He hated to give direct orders and sometimes issued orders he hoped or expected would not be carried out. He had an aversion to controversy among his advisers. And after Vice President Spiro Agnew said in one meeting that the South Vietnamese, with American support, should attack two North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia rather than just one, as had been proposed, Nixon agreed. But, according to Kissinger, Nixon was so annoyed that Agnew had staked out a more hawkish position than his own that he excluded Agnew from the next meeting on the war. Even Kissingers colleagues are portrayed as politically astute Mel Laird, secretary of defense, to be slippery. Though, Laird was often proved right about the likely public reaction to proposed U.S. actions. Unfortunately, the men surrounding the president were accomplished charmers, masterly manipulators in a field where manipulation was the job requirement. The Vietnam War was not without its tragicomic aspects. There was the futile hunt for the elusive COSVN, supposedly the North Vietnamese military headquarters in Cambodia—and a leading rationale for U.S. military incursion into Cambodia in 1970. The South Vietnamese troops and their American advisers found only deserted huts. Nevertheless, USA describes the attack as a success, leading to the capture of documents, arms and ammunition, which, according to Karnow, were quickly replaced. There was also the raid by American commandos on the Son Tay prison in North Vietnam, which was believed to hold American prisoners of war but turned out to be empty. U.S. intelligence had said the prison was closed. The war did infuse sacrifice, though not entirely based on moral lines. Historians omit several relevant matters or deals with them in triumphs of understatement. The two senior members of the National Security Agency, Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, quit in 1970 in protest over the expansion of the war into Cambodia. And as for the national upheaval and constitutional crisis that was Watergate, Nixon felt unappreciated for his effort to withdraw troops, that antiwar sentiment touched Nixon on his rawest nerve and that he saw enemies all around him and so engaged in methods of all-out political combat. That’s it. No mention of Nixon’s enemies list; of the White House’s hiring a goon squad (the plumbers) to conduct break-ins; or of Kissinger’s supplying names to the FBI for wiretaps of his own aides and of journalists, to trace leaks about the war. Vietnamese people had to face brutalities of warring factions and deceit of their power hungry leaders. Many years on, we still cannot confidently classify the leaders who could have been true to the national cause or the people of Vietnam. Some critics persisted in believing that given enough time and resources, Americas Vietnam policy would have succeed. In 1975, after Ford had taken office as president with sole card to prevent Saigon’s collapse was additional money from Congress to fund the war effort—an appropriation that Congress was resisting. The denial of the money may well have sped the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, but how long it could have been sustained is another matter. If leaders truly continued to believe in enforcing the type of government, one is forced to conclude that USA would have deluded the world. Kissinger and Nixon were in a bunker of their own, clinging to the false promise of Vietnamization, holding to a misbegotten concept of national honor and railing at the war’s opponents. Great nations have the intent to make the right decisions in critical circumstances. Unfortunately, the reputation of USA is doomed to carry the fact that they failed to take a timely decision in Vietnam. References    John Prados, LOST CRUSADER: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby, Oxford University Press, 2003