Third World Quarterly

Redirecting the Revolution? The USA and the Failure of Nation-Building in South Vietnam Author(s): Michael E. Latham Source: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 1, From Nation-Building to State-Building (2006), pp. 27-41 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4017657 . Accessed: 23/08/2011 20:05
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Third World Quarterly are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Third World Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

ThirdWorldQuarterly,Vol. 27, No. 1, pp 27-41, 2006

1.

Taylor&dFrancisGroup

the Redirecting and the failure South Vietnam

MICHAEL E LATHAM

Revolution?
of

The

USA

nation-building in

ABSTRACT This article will examinethe ideologyand practiceof the USA' s nation-building campaignin South Vietnamin the 1960s. Specifically,it will analyse the way in which US officials and social scientists conceivedof developmentand promoted it as a weaponfor anti-communist counterinsurgency. Convinced that they couldmodernise South Vietnam in ways that wouldundercutthe sourcesof the revolution and create a liberal,capitalist state, theyembarked on a comprehensive programme of socialengineering with disastrousresults. The article will also reflect on the reasons why, despite growing evidence of policyfailure, US officialscontinued to promotea strategy thatignoredVietnamese history.In closing,it willreflecton thedegreeto which US assumptions about the basic malleabilityof the Vietnamese and their institutionshave found echoes in the recent US attempts to reconstruct Afghanistan and Iraq.

The presidentialpalace in Saigon was a long way from his office in East Lansing,but Wesley Fishel had little doubt about the path to progressin South Vietnam. A political scientist at Michigan State University (Msu), Fishel becameone of PrimeMinisterNgo Dinh Diem's closest US advisors and confidantsduringthe late 1950sand early 1960s.Between1954and 1955 he servedas a liaison betweenDiem and GeneralLawtonCollins,President Eisenhower's personalenvoy to South Vietnam. From 1955 until 1962 he helpedlead an MSU team that assistedDiem's government with trainingand advice on mattersof refugeeresettlement, civil serviceeducationand police administration. But above all, in a flood of government memoranda, public speeches,scholarlyarticlesand popularessays,Fishelconveyedto American audiencesan optimisticvision of Vietnamesemodernisation that elided the increasing repression of Diem'scorrupt,dictatorial regime.As he concededin 1961,Diem'sgovernment was not yet a modelof liberaldemocracy. The press remainedsubjectto governmentintervention, the executivebranchheld far greaterpower than either the judiciaryor the legislature,and the country's constitutionincludeda clausepermitting the abrogationof the bill of rightsin conditions of emergency.It was important to understand,however, that
Michael E Latham is at Fordham University, New York, USA. Email: latham@,fordham.edu. ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/06/010027-15 ? 2006 Third World Quarterly DOI: 10.1080/01436590500368743

27

MICHAEL E LATHAM

South Vietnam was in the midst of a great nation-building struggle. French colonialism had devastated Vietnam, and 'the resultant society was a product of political miscegenation: one with a traditional base, influenced by Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist ideas and values, topped by a weighty superstructureof Western organizations, principles, laws and techniques'. The stunning defeat and departure of the French in 1954 had also 'left a sudden, and nearly disastrous political vacuum' as the new government sought to defeat a dangerous revolutionary insurgency. Yet Diem remained committed to programmes that would 'stimulate a rapid development of national consciousness and engender strong support' and he knew that the keys to victory were to be found in the countryside, among a peasantry caught up in a sweeping transition away from the narrow, traditional loyalties of family and village towards a modern desire for higher living standards, economic growth and active political participation. By 'journeying about their zones of responsibility, learning the problems of the people', Fishel claimed, Diem's province and district chiefs would bridge the gap between the central government and the rural masses, build an educated electorate, and 'bring every district in the country into contact with its neighbors and with the capital'. The new South Vietnamese state, he concluded, would overcome both the colonial legacy and the communist threat. With US guidance and support, it would seize the moment to build a nation where none had existed before.1 Fishel's interpretation reflects the extent to which US social scientists and policy makers envisioned nation-building in South Vietnam as part of a universal process of modernisation that, once it gained sufficient momentum, would become an inexorable force, sweeping all before it. Colonial systems, advances in communications and transportation, and new systems of trade and commerce, the argument went, shook 'traditional' peoples out of their typical fatalism and complacency. They created tremendous instability as older social relationships and values decayed in the face of modern organisations and aspirations. Revolutionaries might prey on the anxieties and frustrations created by the loss of familiar worlds, yet this critical window in time also presented a moment in which the USA might effectively accelerate a natural transition towards the creation of a modern, liberal capitalist state. In this vision of nation-building the South Vietnamese were also framed as essentially malleable and their history and culture were relegated to a seemingly irrelevant past. As 'traditional' peasants became 'modern' citizens, US policy makers expected that a new, distinctly South Vietnamese nationalism could be created to undercut Ho Chi Minh's revolutionary appeal. The condition of war, moreover, was hardly an obstacle to the process. The Viet Minh and the National Liberation Front (NLF) could certainly challenge Diem's regime, but the sheer violence and disruption of war also appeared to provide a setting in which state-driven development might prevail. Even as evidence of policy failure accumulated, moreover, the ideology of modernisation held firm. During the 1960s US social scientists and policy makers became increasingly frustrated with South Vietnam's leadership, but they were slow to recognise the fundamental flaws embedded in an evolutionary model that reduced
28

NATION-BUILDING IN SOUTH VIETNAM

profound questions of history, culture and politics to matters of administration and technique.2 The USA and South Vietnam as a 'test case' In the immediate aftermath of World War II the fate of Vietnam was not yet a central concern for the architects of US foreign policy. Americans knew little about the region and, while claiming to reject imperialism, they 'relied almost exclusively on the writings of French scholars, colonial officials, and journalists in forming their judgments of the largely unfamiliar Vietnamese'.3 Viewed through a framework emphasising the gap between the backward nature of non-white, traditional societies and Western progress, the Vietnamese appeared to be a people motivated more by immediate self-interest than adherence to principle, driven more by emotion than logic. Such a people, most US analysts concluded, were incapable of self-government and vulnerable to foreign subversion. The need for French co-operation in the reconstruction of Europe and the formation of an anti-Soviet, cold war alliance, moreover, led US policy makers to ignore Ho Chi Minh's 1945 declaration of independencein favour of the preservation of French sovereignty over Indochina. The Chinese Revolution and war in Korea only amplified American anxiety about the dangers of communist gains in Asia, and by 1950 the USA began to provide millions of dollars in military aid to support French counter-insurgencyefforts. When the revolutionaries decisively defeated France at Dien Bien Phu, the subsequent Geneva Accords of 1954 partitioned Vietnam into northern and southern halves, pending national elections to reunify the country in 1956. Worried that Ho Chi Minh's stature as anti-colonial hero would almost certainly enable him to prevail at the ballot box, the USA rejected reunification and began its long nation-building effort, an attempt to create a viable, distinctly South Vietnamese state with a growing economy and enough political legitimacy to redirectthe revolution into liberal, capitalist channels. Determined to back Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti-French Catholic with an influentialAmerican lobby, 'most American policy-makers and opinion leaders believed that the United States faced a stark choice should nation-building fail: either see communist regimes throughout Southeast Asia or enter Vietnam with large numbers of US soldiers.'4 Between 1955 and 1961 the USA poured $1.65 billion into South Vietnam, making that country the fifth largest recipient of US aid at the time. The US mission in Saigon was also the largest in the world.5 Yet, rather than engineering a new sense of national solidarity, Diem and his US backers were most successful in alienating the South Vietnamese public. At the time of the Geneva settlement, one-quarter of 1% of the rural population owned a full 40% of rice land in the South. Some 57% of the peasantry was forced to rent the land they cultivated, often at rates requiring them to give up over half of what they produced.6 Saigon's conservative land reform programme, however, did little to address that inequality. By placing a very high limit of 100 hectares for land ownership per family, about 30 times the maximum allotment in other US-advised programmes in Asia, it affected fewer than 10% of the tenant 29

MICHAEL E LATHAM

farmers in the South and utterly failed to compete with the revolutionary practice of directly redistributing landlord holdings. A US sponsored Commercial Import Program proved equally unproductive as US dollars and import credits funded consumer purchases by wealthy urbanites and did nothing to promote local industrialgrowth. The USA also backed Diem as he mounted a ruthlesscampaign to suppressany and all dissent against his regime. Armed with US military aid, Diem created a powerful secret police, killed, imprisoned and tortured Viet Minh sympathisers, and effectively 'pushed the most varied social, political and religious forces in Vietnamese society into each other's arms in a desperate search for survival'.7In December 1960 an alliance of Diem's southern opponents, led by Communist Party members but also including Viet Minh veterans, professionals, intellectuals, students and peasants, created the National Liberation Front to lead an armed revolt. As George Kahin insightfully put it: 'the Eisenhower administration and its successors sought to rationalize their policies at home by advancing for an American audience the myth that-those Vietnamese who happened to dwell below the seventeenth parallel had their own sense of nationhood and patriotism, distinct from whatever sentiments were possessed by those living under the communist regime in the North.'8 By 1961 it was also increasingly clear to US policy makers that their attempt to create a sense of popular loyalty to a separate, southern Vietnamese nation-state was failing miserably. Edward Lansdale, an American CIA operative and veteran of the campaign against the Hukbalahap rebels in the Philippines, had hoped that Diem might become a 'Magsaysay for Vietnam'. But it soon became obvious to him and many other American advisors that the USA and the South Vietnamese were losing the crucial war in the countryside. 'It was a shock to me', he wrote to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, 'to look over maps of the estimated situation with US and Vietnamese intelligencepersonnel' and find that the NLF 'had been able to infiltrate the most productive area of South Vietnam and gain control of nearly all of it except for narrow corridorsprotected by military actions.'9 Other assessments that year were similarly bleak. As the prominent journalist Theodore White reportedfrom Saigon in a letter to his friend John F Kennedy, 'the situation gets steadily worse almost week by week ... Guerrillas now control almost all the Southern delta-so much that I could find no American who would drive me outside Saigon in his car even by day without military convoy ... What perplexes the hell out of me is that the Commies, on their side, seem able to find people willing to die for their cause.'10 By this point, moreover, Vietnam had emerged as a crucial 'test case' of America's ability to combat 'wars of national liberation'. A loss there, Kennedy and his advisors feared, would do immense damage to US credibility around the world. Yet US officials remained reluctant to commit American combat troops in the field. Diem's hold on his own government remained tenuous at best, and he had narrowly survived a coup attempt against him in 1960. To deploy US soldiers, Kennedy worried, might create an irreversible public commitment to a figure whose leadership ability now appeared questionable at best. It might be necessary to send US troops at some point in the future, Kennedy believed, but the fact that neither France 30

NATION-BUILDING IN SOUTH VIETNAM

nor Britain were likely to assist in a direct military campaign and the danger that the Soviets or Chinese might respond to US combat forces by sending in their own troops led the president towards another approach.1' How, US advisors asked, would it be possible to cut off not only the resources of the insurgency but also its popular appeal? How could the USA engineer a sense of nationalistic identification with the newly created state of South Vietnam? How might it be possible to develop institutional links between Diem's regime in Saigon and the population in the countryside? How, ultimately, could the USA accelerate the movement of Vietnam through the dangerous and destabilising transition in which the revolution might triumph? While amplifying US support for Diem's army and radically increasing the number of US military advisors, the Kennedy administration would ultimately seek to answer those questions through a dramatically expanded nation-building programme. Modernisation, they concluded, could prevail as a means of counter-insurgency and a weapon of war. Modernisation and cold war nation-building As Nils Gilman has recently argued, theories of modernisation embodied a 'peculiar combination of anxiety and confidence about American ways of organizing the world'. Modernisation theory reflected a sense 'that the United States should be a universal model', yet it also 'arose at a moment when Americans felt both unsure about how to define themselves, and challenged by geopolitical competitors'. A conceptual framework for global social change, modernisation also outlined an array of practices to manage and direct its eventual course in opposition to the danger of communist subversion. US modernisers firmly believed that they could chart the future of a developing world along a single, universal path to genuine modernity. Yet their worry that modernisation required "'the right kind of revolution"' also 'represented the intellectual equivalent of hitting the gas pedal on a skidding car: an attempt to accelerate out of a problem. As moderate solutions to development failed again and again, hard-core solutions found more and more advocates.'12 Nowhere was that tension between liberal aspiration and dictatorial, violent result clearer than in South Vietnam. During the 1950s theories of modernisation appeared to promise a kind of 'unified field theory' for the social sciences. Put forward most clearly in the work of American sociologists like Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils and Daniel Lerner, modernisation was also promoted by political scientists Lucian Pye and Gabriel Almond and widely popularised at the hands of economist and national security planner Walt W Rostow. While a full treatment of its varied interpretations is well beyond the scope of this article, and not all theorists would be likely to embrace such a summary, the central tenets of modernisation theory can be distilled down to four overlapping principles: 1) 'traditional'and 'modern'societies are separatedby a sharp dichotomy; 2) economic, political, and social changes are integratedand interdependent; 3) developmenttends to proceed toward the modern state along a common, 31

MICHAEL E LATHAM

linear path; and 4) the progressof developingsocieties can be dramatically acceleratedthrough contact with modern ones.13 Modernisation's emphasis on the ability of an 'advanced' society to catalyse the rise of a 'stagnant' or 'backward' one up the universal socioeconomic ladder resonated strongly with both cold war foreign policy concerns and broader cultural understandings, and the resonance between social theory and government policy was hardly coincidental. Since World War II US social science had received a great deal of state support as policy makers eagerly sought ways to confront the challenges presented by a world of 'new nations' and decolonising states. The architects of modernisation theory, moreover, eagerly claimed that their work promised both analytical rigour and immediate policy relevance. As their research received government support, they also took government positions, providing reassuring, instrumental answers to the dilemmas of promoting development. Harvard economist Lincoln Gordon, for example, served on Kennedy's Latin American task force and later became US ambassador to Brazil. MITpolitical scientist Lucian Pye mixed his scholarly endeavours with service as an advisor to the Agency for International Development and work as an instructor at State Department counter-insurgency seminars. Stanford economist Eugene Staley led a development mission to South Vietnam and, most dramatically, Walt Rostow left MIT's Center for International Studies to become the chair of the State Department's Policy Planning Council under Kennedy and national security advisor under Lyndon Johnson. As important as they were, however, such personal connections only reveal part of the story. Modernisation was most influential in crystallising and articulating a set of widely shared assumptions and convictions about the Cold War and the USA's task in fighting it. As the world's most modern nation, the USA stood at the apex of a universal developmental scale, and its contact with the retrograde could produce stunning transformations. Because contact with the West produced a 'demonstration effect' in which external values of discipline, respect for achieved status, social mobility, and even human empathy might drive fatalistic, traditional societies towards progress, history itself was on America's side. Looking into the past, Rostow explained that, although imperial powers 'did not always optimize the development of the preconditions' for a society to 'take-oW, 'they could not avoid bringing about transformations in thought, knowledge, [and] institutions... which moved the colonial society along the transitional path'.14 As one critic later pointed out, theorists maintained that 'human progress was possible because the more backward of the races at least had the ability to imitate'.15 But in the cold war context modernisation remained especially attractive because it implied that the USA did not have to wait for the emulation its proponents believed it deserved. US planners also believed that they could identify the fundamental levers of social change necessary to direct external investment, build infrastructure, provide scientific technology, teach democratic ideals, and even instil a new, rational spirit. Countries on the receiving end, moreover, had little choice in the matter and thinkers like Rostow were 32

NATION-BUILDING IN SOUTH VIETNAM

particularly emphatic on this point. A 'reactive nationalism', he explained 'has been a most important and powerful motive in the transition from traditional to modern societies, at least as important as the profit motive. Men holding effective authority or influence have been willing to uproot traditional societies not, primarily, to make more money, but because the traditional society failed-or threatened to fail to protect them from foreigners'.16In that framework modernisation emerged as an unstoppable force, a means of driving the 'emerging' countries created by the collapse of European empires in liberal, capitalist directions. Third World nationalism itself, moreover, was defined as purely 'reactive', as matters of culture, history or local politics fell out of a universal equation in which the only genuine forces of change arrived from outside the 'traditional' world. The challenge for the USA in Vietnam, modernisers believed, was to create a nation-state capable of driving that society through the transitional window before communists might direct it down a dangerous false path. Strategic hamlets, warfare and social engineering That problem remained central throughout the USA's war in Vietnam, but it can be illustrated most clearly by focusing on the early 1960s, when American strategists envisioned nation-building as a way to redirect the revolution and avoid a wider war. In thinking about the challenge they faced, US planners also drew on previous cases of counter-insurgency in Southeast Asia, and the British struggle against the Malayan communists seemed especially important. As Frederick Nolting, the US ambassador to South Vietnam, reflected, 'the Malayan experience was something of a counterpart to Vietnam, and we could learn from it'.17 Lucian Pye, one of the most influential proponents of modernisation, agreed with that assessment. From late 1952 until early 1953 Pye conducted fieldwork in Malaya, seeking to learn the reasons why Malayan Chinese joined the Communist Party. His conclusions, based on interviews with 'surrendered enemy personnel', focused less on matters of the distribution of resources, economic conditions or political repression and more on the universal dynamics of modernisation itself. As he argued, the phenomenon of 'People's Liberation Communism' was 'intimately related to a general process now going on in most underdeveloped areas of the world. Large numbers of people are losing their sense of identity with their traditional ways of life and are seeking restlessly to realize a modern way.' Communism, in this setting, appealed to those caught up in the transition, those who 'feel isolated from, and even hostile to the ways of their forefathers', but not yet 'personally a part of the new; they are anxious to belong to the future, but they are concerned lest it pass them by'. For those whose worlds were destabilised by increasing violence and rapid economic change, the party offered a vital element of stability and a vehicle for their recently awakened ambitions. Revolutionaries, Pye reported, believed that 'in the structure of the party they can find a closer relationship between effort and reward than anything they have known in either the static old society or the unstable, unpredictable new one'. 33

MICHAEL E LATHAM

The colonial government, moreover, had completely failed to meet these social and psychological needs. 'Indeed', Pye commented, 'over 70 per cent of the respondents indicated that they perceived the colonial administration as existing completely apart from the Chinese community in Malaya... The possibility of a central government effectively and consistently concerning itself with the well-being and activities of the great masses of the population was apparently a completely foreign idea to them.' In Pye's terms, therefore, the key to competing with a revolutionary insurgency lay in an expanded state structure reaching from the capital into distant provinces and villages, one that could meet the needs of an alienated, anxious peasantry more effectively than the revolution could.18 WW Rostow, on a visit to South Vietnam in autumn 1961, arrived at a similar conclusion. After interviewing captured NLF soldiers, he determined that the revolution appealed most to 'young men in a developing region who had been caught up for the first time and found various degrees of satisfaction and disappointment in a modern organizational structure reaching beyond family, hamlet and village'.19 NLF recruits, he determined, did not join the revolution because Marx, Lenin or even Ho Chi Minh inspired them. They did not fight because they espoused a historical vision of a united Vietnam or because they were alienated by Diem's repressive regime. Instead, they were dislocated, rootless young men who wanted above all to become part of a larger, modern institution and pinned their hopes on the Vietcong. The solution, therefore, was to promote a pattern of nation-building that would replace the institutions of the insurgency with those of the state and give the peasant, caught in the 'transition' to modernity a renewed sense of the potential for personal advance. As the State Department's Vietnam Task Force concluded in mid-1961, the problem was to 'bring the rural people of Vietnam into the body politic'.20 Nation-building from the bottom up and from the top down, US officials concluded, would convert 'traditional' peasants into 'modern' citizens, and once that happened the revolution wouldn't stand a chance. Inspired by those arguments, and convinced that the war would be won or lost in the countryside where the vast majority of Vietnam's population lived, in early 1962 the US government made the Strategic Hamlet Program the centerpiece of its nation-building efforts. Based roughly on population resettlement plans used in Malaya and promoted by Robert GK Thompson, head of the British Advisory Mission in Saigon, the programme aimed to condense South Vietnam's roughly 16000 hamlets (each estimated to have a population of slightly less than 1000) into about 12000 'strategic hamlets' more easily defended against incursion, subjected to military control and made the target of a battery of government programmes intended to create a new and vital nationalism. The plan also built on Diem's own sense of what security required. In 1959 and 1960 his government had started to relocate peasants into 'prosperity and density centers' or 'agrovilles' in which they could be more closely indoctrinated and controlled.21 Designed to resettle some 15 million people, the Strategic Hamlet Program was, in Vietnam 34

NATION-BUILDING IN SOUTH VIETNAM

expert Bernard Fall's estimation, the 'most mammoth example of "social engineering" in the non-Communist world'.22 At Kennedy's direction State Department intelligence chief Roger Hilsman, himself a Yale-trained political scientist and veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, outlined a design for the programme in a February 1962 'Strategic Concept for Vietnam'. On one hand, the plan heavily emphasised security measures. As Hilsman proposed, 'each strategic village will be protected by a ditch and a fence of barbed wire. It will include one or more observation towers, guard posts and a defense post for central storage of arms ... The area immediately around the village will be cleared for fields of fire and the area approaching the clearing, including the ditch, will be strewn with booby-traps (spikes, pits, explosives, etc) and other personal obstacles.' Hilsman proposed that each hamlet be defended by a 'self-defense corps' of 75 to 100 men, armed with carbines and shotguns, but he also made it clear that hamlet watchtowers would face inward as well as out. Security forces were charged with 'enforcing curfews, checking identity cards, and ferreting out hard core Communists' to achieve what Thompson referred to as 'the physical and political separation of the guerrillas from the population. One must get all the "little fishes" out of the "water" and keep them out; then they will die'.23While conditions varied from case to case, in practice hamlet construction generally involved a series of steps. South Vietnamese government 'Rural Reconstruction' teams of 10 to 20 men would take a census of an existing village and make a map identifying families and their apparent loyalties. Villagers would then be broken into work groups, given labour schedules, and required to build fortifications for the new settlement. Houses outside the perimeter of the new hamlet would be brought in or destroyed and a hamlet militia would be selected and trained. Finally peasants would be issued identification cards, photos of families would be posted on the walls of homes, a hamlet administrative centre would track all population movements, and curfews would be enforced.24The zone inside the hamlet would become a realm of heightened surveillance, while the territory outside it became a free-fire zone. US planners, however, believed that, beyond such security benefits, the strategic hamlets would be most crucial in promoting the essential task of nation-building. As Hilsman emphasised, 'the problem presented by the Viet Cong is a political and not a military problem-or, more accurately, it is a problem in civic action'. 'Civic Action teams' of Vietnamese backed by US supplies and advice were the 'most important element in eliminating the Viet Cong' because they were to build an 'essential socio-political base', by forming a new set of ties between the rural peasantry and Diem's regime. Hilsman's goal was to 'set up village government and tie it into the district and national levels assuring the flow of information on village needs and problems upward and the flow of government services downward'.25 The government provision of livestock, rice seed, cooking oil and schools, in this vision, was expected to do more than raise peasant morale. It would also transform rural consciousness, and become part of a process in which 'traditional' loyalties to family and formerly isolated, largely autonomous 35

MICHAEL E LATHAM

villages would be replaced by 'modern' identification with a specifically South Vietnamese nation-state. While a few figures within the US government remained sceptical of such an effort, and some military officers strongly dissented in favour of a more orthodox 'search and destroy' approach, the plan met with widespread approval. As one Joint Chiefs of Staff Report argued in early 1963, 'historically the central government in Vietnam has not reached down and made itself felt to the peasant. Likewise, the peasant has not truly identified himself, his activities, or his future with his government nor has he thought in terms of national political issues as we know them.' The Strategic Hamlet Program, however, would change that: Followingthe electionof a hamletchief and a hamletcouncil,the new officials, and living of the well-being decideon projectsfor the improvement themselves, conditions of the people. It is through this 'rice-roots'program that the frameworkfor a democraticpolitical process is being developed. It is the intention of the governmentto extend this process from the hamlets and villages up through the districts and provinces, whose officials are now appointedby the centralgovernment.26 Nation-building, in this vision, would steadily move forward: one hamlet at a time. In contrast to such lofty expectations, in practice the programme was a disaster from the start. Serious efforts to implement it began in March 1962 with 'Operation Sunrise', a plan to create new hamlets in part of Binh Duong, a province to the north of Saigon that was heavily infiltrated by the NLF. South Vietnamese troops swept through the area to drive the guerrillas out and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) provided $300 000, about $21 per family, to compensate resettled peasants for their property losses and to equip civic action teams with medicine, fertiliser, farming implements and ID cards. According to one report, 70 families agreed to move while 140 others were resettled at gunpoint. All were forced to build new homes and dig trenches in the new hamlets while South Vietnamese soldiers burned their former dwellings. By May even the government newspaper admitted that after six weeks only about 7% of the district's 38 000 peasants had permanently relocated either voluntarily or by force. The fact that the NLF enjoyed substantial local support also became clear as guerillas ambushed a government convoy with help from villagers who sabotaged roads and prevented reinforcements from arriving.27 Throughout 1962 and 1963 further evidence also accumulated demonstrating that the programme was failing dramatically. CIA field reports, USAID officers, and RAND Corporation studies all documented the degree to which peasants resented being forced off ancestral lands, put on corvee labour teams, and losing access to their crops and fields. As Bernard Fall reported, not much nation-building took place in such a repressive environment: give the egressand ingresscontrols upon which the systemhinges necessarily strategicvillagethe aspectof a detentionarearatherthan that of a harmonious 36

NATION-BUILDING IN SOUTH VIETNAM

socio-economicunit. The Wall Street Journal'slocal observer,a former OSS operative who was wholly sympathetic to the cause of South Vietnam, nevertheless felt that a visit to such a hamlet left one with the impressionof having 'blundered into some sort of prisoncamp'.28 Surveys also revealed that the NLF had successfully strengthened its hold on areas in which the hamlet programme was promoted. As one report on Long An province put it, 'both the hamlet gate and barbed wires are 100 percent destroyed by enemies ... The hamlet hall was burnt down by the vc. . . All the members of the service administration, the hamlet council and all the hamlet armed forces cannot carry on any more work because there is no security and their morale is rather confused, being afraid of enemies.'29In case after case, and in province aftL; province, revolutionaries infiltrated or overwhelmed hamlets, frequently with the co-operation of their inhabitants. Such apparently clear evidence of failure, however, provoked little serious analysis of the possibility that the fundamental assumptions at the core of the programme might be flawed. Instead, the powerful appeal of modernisation as a vehicle for nation-building prevented its advocates from recognising the significance of disconfirming evidence. US intelligence reports frequently cast blame on their Vietnamese allies. Province chiefs, they lamented, embezzled funds. South Vietnamese army officers refused to respond to night attacks. Civic action cadres appointed officials directly or rigged hamlet elections to get the results they wanted. Hamlet officials dictated which 'self-help' projects the community would request. US officials also criticised Diem's desire to implement the programme as rapidly as possible as a means of appointing his political favourites to positions of provincial leadership. These abuses were indeed widespread, yet, by constantly citing administrative matters, such criticism effectively prevented a more thoroughgoing challenge to the possibility that modernisation through a bureaucratic regime, replete with constant surveillance and rigid controls on social and economic life, was something that Vietnamese would desire. The romance of nation-building and the belief that the USA could engineer a transformative revolution to create a viable new state obscured the fact that, in the end, Vietnamese society, culture and nationalism were not so malleable. As one former US advisor to the Saigon government reflected, 'ways I had been taught to think about the problem subsequently proved to be the greatest obstacle to understanding'.30 The possibility that much of Vietnam's population was attracted to the revolution because it redistributedpolitical and economic power, and that Diem's repressive regime was not one that rural Vietnamese were interested in identifying with or participating in at all was rarely considered seriously. By late 1963 the US government would ultimately conclude that Diem was indeed a liability, and US officials would support a coup to overthrow him. By 1965 Lyndon Johnson would also determine that plans for social engineering would have to be backed by additional force, and the USA would begin a deployment that would ultimately station up to half a million soldiers in South Vietnam and drop more bombs on North and South Vietnam than were dropped by all aircraft in the whole of World War 11.31 37

MICHAEL E LATHAM

Yet plans for village-level programmes blending security, violence and nation-building were endlessly repeated in the form of 'New Life' hamlets starting in 1964 and the US programme for Civilian Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) in 1966 and 1967. As CORDS director Robert Komer told the American Political Science Association in 1970, later efforts continued to link 'sustained protection of the rural population from the insurgents' with 'generating rural support for the Saigon regime via programs meeting rural needs and cementing rural areas politically and administratively to the center'. The plans in place from 1967 to 1970, he acknowledged, differed from 'predecessors less in concept than in the comprehensive nature and massive scale of the effort undertaken'.32 Throughout the bulk of the war US officials clung to the hope that they could create a South Vietnamese government with sufficient political legitimacy to win the war. From one leadership crisis to another, from one coup and rigged election to the next, they continued to believe, as historian Marilyn Young put it, that it was possible to 'give a people as rooted in history as the Vietnamese a ready-made set of "beliefs" for which they would be willing to die'.33 And, as nation-building failed, in their determination to destroy the revolution they perceived no other option but to continue to ratchet up the level of sheer violence, settling on a failed attempt to maintain at least a modicum of centralised order in urban areas. As Samuel Huntington notoriously suggested, the massive devastation unleashed by the US military might do more than kill Viet Cong and create refugees. It would also drive rural Vietnamese into cities, where the experience of improved living standards and participation in a modern social order would change their world-views to the point that they would come to identify with the new South Vietnamese state. As he wrote in early 1968, a solution might still be possible, because 'forced-draft urbanization and modernization' could 'rapidly bring the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to come to power'.34 Following the Tet Offensive of 1968, even that fallback position was seriously in question. Conclusion:the ghosts of modernisation Thirty years after Saigon's fall and 15 years after the Cold War's end, the USA finds itself once more engaged in what policy makers have defined as a global struggle of uncertain duration for absolute ends. After decades in which US leaders emphasised the need for more limited, 'realistic' international ambitions, the idea and discourse of nation-building has made a startling comeback. Following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 US policy makers have defined Afghanistan, and especially Iraq, as crucial 'test cases' of the American ability to promote liberal, democratic transitions in countries plagued with brutal, dictatorial regimes. To be sure, the chosen methods for producing transformation are now discussed in different terms. Where development was previously defined as a state-centred process, one that required a high degree of government intervention and co-ordination, the route to progress currently favoured by the USA is a decidedly more 38

NATION-BUILDING IN SOUTH VIETNAM

neoliberal one.35 Lyndon Johnson once heralded a plan to bring the New Deal to Southeast Asia and construct a 'TVA on the Mekong'.36 But George W Bush recently praised 'Operation Adam Smith', an effort in Iraq by the US Army's First Cavalry Division, without the participation of the Iraqi state, for 'setting up local chambers of commerce, providing Iraqi entrepreneurs with small business loans, and teaching them important skills like accounting, marketing, and writing business plans'.37Indeed, the two approaches can run counter to each other. Where one positions the nation-state as an essential planner, co-ordinator and regulator of development, the other idealises citizens acting independently to pursue their own- goals in the marketplace, suggesting that economic liberalisation will necessarily trigger political democratisation. As the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report put it: economic and political liberties tend to be linked. Commerce, especially internationalcommerce,requiresongoing cooperation and compromise,the exchange of ideas across cultures,and the peaceful resolution of differences throughnegotiationor the rule of law.. . Those who develop the practiceof controlling their own economic destiny soon desire a voice in their own communitiesand societies.38 Despite the neoliberal turn, however, on another level the ghosts of modernisation are still with us. Just as in the case of Vietnam, US analysts appear to have once again embraced a universalistic vision of evolutionary change in which questions of culture, history and indigenous politics fall out of the equation. Modernity, now defined as market-driveninstead of state-led, still holds Washington'simaginationas a force that will sweep all before it, capable of reordering'traditional'worlds in an astonishingly short time. Specific historical and cultural contexts, however, continue to matter in ways that such optimistic forecasts ignore. In the case of Afghanistan, two veteran observers note: current policies of market liberalizationrun counter to the needs of statebuildingon many levels. In a countrythat lacks both regulatoryframeworks and the meansto imposethem,suchpoliciesfuel corruptionand encouragethe pursuitof politicalpowerthroughmarketsand accumulation. Meanwhile,the unseemlydash to contracteverything out, in a countrywheremarketchoice is in so many places, bringsfew benefitsto its citizens.39 so meaningless The easy assumptions of transformative nation-building may also help explain the reason why, while the Pentagon rehearsed war games and planned for a range of scenarios for a full 18 months before the Iraqi invasion, 'Washington never provided a prewar blueprint of Iraq's reconstruction' and designated a lead agency to prepare for it 'only two or three months before the war'. The belief that Iraqi ways of life would be essentially malleable, and that questions of ethnicity, religion and a past history of authoritarian control wouldn't matter very much may also have contributed to early expectations that the USA would face only a 'short and relatively easy occupation described as "three months up and out",.40 Nation-building, in current American discourse, also remains a practice defined in universal terms, basically the same in all contexts. As New York 39

MICHAEL E LATHAM

University law professor Noah Feldman discovered while working as a constitutional advisor for the occupation authority in Iraq, not one of his new colleagues 'seemed to need a refreshercourse on Iraq or the Gulf region. Without exception, they were reading new books on the American occupation and reconstruction of Germany and Japan'.41 Calling for patience with US reconstruction plans, George W Bush reached for an even more remote historical point. The USA, too, he reminded his audience, had experienced a difficult first few decades amid the 'years of chaos' of the American Revolution and the failures of the Articles of Confederation.42 Implicit in such arguments, and in theories of modernisation as well, is the concept of development as movement along a single, unitary path, one that the USA travelled first and on which it might now guide others toward the endpoint reflected in its own society. Most troubling of all, recent American nation-building plans in Afghanistan and Iraq, like those deployed in Vietnam, rest on a potent blend of reformist ideals and massive violence. Liberal, participatory governments might indeed be those most likely to meet the aspirations of their citizens, but the USA cannot supply political legitimacy to the governments it seeks to promote. Only the citizens of those governments can do that. And if the American commitment to democratic change runs thin or is eclipsed in favour of bureaucratic, authoritarian solutions, as it was in Vietnam, then the desire for order and a willingness to use force to achieve it will be all that remains.
Notes
1 WR Fishel, 'Problems of democratic growth in free Vietnam', in Fishel (ed), Problems of Freedom: South Vietnam Since Independence,New York: Free Press, 1961, pp 9-28. See also J Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1998; and S Jacobs, America's Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and US Interventionin Southeast Asia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, p 15. 2 For a broader treatment of this argument, see ME Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American in the KennedyEra, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Social Science and 'Nation-building' Press, 2000. 3 MP Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000, p 47. 4 RD Schulzinger, A Timefor War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p 87. 5 JS Olson & R Roberts, Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945-1990, New York: St Martin's Press, 1991, p 87; GC Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996, p 62. 6 James P Harrison, The Endless War: Vietnam's Struggle for Independence, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp 183-184. 7 Nancy Wiegersma, Vietnam:Peasant Land, Peasant Revolution, New York: St Martin's 1988, pp 116, 180- 183, 202-203. 8 George McT Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam, New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1986, p 103. 9 Memorandum, Lansdale to McNamara, 17 January 1961, Lansdale Papers, Box 42, 'Memoranda, 1950- 1961', Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA. 10 Olson & Roberts, Where the Domino Fell, p 87. 11 Ibid, pp 88-89. 12 Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, pp x, 4, 12. 13 Latham, Modernization as Ideology, p 4.

40

NATION-BUILDING IN SOUTH VIETNAM 14 WW Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth:A Non-CommunistManifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, p 27. 15 Ali A Mazrui, 'From social Darwinism to current theories of modernization: a tradition in analysis', World Politics, 21, 1968, p 76. 16 Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, pp 26-27. 17 Frederick Nolting, From Trust to Tragedy: The Political Memoirs of Frederick Nolting, Kennedy's Ambassador to Diem's Vietnam, New York: Praeger, 1988, p 37. 18 Lucian Pye, Guerrilla Communism in Malaya: Its Social and Political Meaning, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956, pp 7, 201-202. On Pye, see MT Berger, 'Decolonization, modernization and nation-building: political development theory and the appeal of communism in Southeast Asia, 1945- 1975', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 34 (3), 2003, pp 421 -448. 19 WW Rostow, The Difusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History, New York: Macmillan, 1972, pp 273-274. 20 Memorandum, Sterling Cottrell to National Security Council, 9 May 1961, National Security Files, Box 330, 'NSAM 52, Vietnam', John F Kennedy Library, Boston, MA. 21 Joseph J Zasloff, Rural Resettlement in Vietnam: An Agroville in Development, Washington, DC: US Department of State, 1962, pp 1- 11. 22 Bernard Fall, The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis, New York: Praeger, 1963, p 373. 23 Roger Hilsman, 'A strategic concept for South Vietnam', 2 February 1962, Hilsman Papers, Box 3, Vietnam, 'Strategic Concept', John F Kennedy Library; and Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiencesfrom Malaya and Vietnam, London: Chatto and Windus, 1966, pp 123- 124. 24 William A Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam,New York: Praeger, 1966, pp 99- 100; John C Donnell & Gerald C Hickey, The Vietnamese 'Strategic Hamlets': A Preliminary Report, Memorandum RM-3208-ARPA, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1962. 25 Hilsman, 'A strategic concept for South Vietnam'. 26 Report of visit by Joint Chiefs of Staff Team to South Vietnam, January 1963, National Security Files, Box 197, 'Vietnam, General, 1/10-1/30/63', John F Kennedy Library. 27 Fall, The Two Viet-Nams, pp 376- 379; Memorandum, Sterling Cottrell to Special Group for Counterinsurgency, 22 March 1962, National Security Files, Box 319, 'Special Group (Ci), 1/61-6/62', John F Kennedy Library. 28 Fall, The Two Viet-Nams, p 378. 29 US Information Service, Long An Province Survey, January 1964, Lansdale Papers, Box 23, 'Pacification and Land Reform/General, 1964- 1969', Hoover Institution Archives. 30 Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a VietnameseProvince, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972, pp ix-x. 31 Harrison, The Endless War, p 255. 32 Robert W Komer, Impact of Pacification on Insurgency in South Vietnam, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1970, pp 2-3. 33 Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, New York: HarperCollins, 1991, p 145. 34 Samuel P Huntington, 'The bases of accomodation', Foreign Affairs, 64, 1968, p 652. 35 For a broad overview of this historical shift, see Mark T Berger, The Battle for Asia. From Decolonization to Globalization, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. 36 Lloyd C Gardner, Pay Any Price: LyndonJohnson and the Warsfor Vietnam,Chicago, IL: Ivan R Dee, 1995. 37 Richard W Stevenson, 'Bush says patience is needed as nations build a democracy', New York Times, 19 May 2005, A12. 38 The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, New York: Norton, 2004, p 378. 39 Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie, Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace, London: Zed, 2004, p 212. 40 Jonathan Schanzer, 'Iraq reconstruction', in Michael Knights (ed), Operation Iraqi Freedom and the New Iraq, Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004, pp 310-311. On the durability of modernisation's core assumptions, see Ian Roxborough, 'Modernization theory revisited: a review article', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30, 1988, pp 753-761. 41 Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation-building, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004, p 1. 42 Stevenson, 'Bush says patience is needed as nations build a democracy', A12.

41