A Sense of the Enemy by Shore Zachary

Author:Shore, Zachary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

The Escalation Paradox

Le Duan argued repeatedly that America faced a dilemma. The more troops it deployed, the weaker it became. He articulated this and other assessments of American constraints at the close of 1965, as the escalation was fully underway. In December 1965, when Le Duan addressed the Twelfth Plenum of the Party’s Central Committee, he explained more fully the policy of protracted war. His address began by observing that the war had developed precisely along the lines that the Party had laid out in the Ninth and Eleventh Plenums. (Those comments, however, were highly hedged, offering possibilities, not definitive futures.) He then noted that the situation had developed more rapidly than expected. In mid-1965, he alleged that the puppet army of the South had been on the verge of disintegration but that the Party did not have the necessary means at that time to force its collapse. Had the DRV been able to push the ARVN to the breaking point, he maintained, then the Americans might not have deployed massive ground troops. The lessons from this episode, he said, bore directly on the policy of protracted war.

The policy of protracted war, Le Duan explained, was to use weakness against strength. Even if the enemy deployed 400,000 troops to Vietnam (the United States ultimately sent more than a half million), the Vietnamese would defeat them by bogging them down in a stalemate. That policy, however, did not entail an orderly, step-by-step advance. Instead, it required massing forces against the enemy under specific conditions. The Americans are warmongers by their nature, Le Duan frequently declared. That was why they continued to escalate and expand the war. These appear to be Le Duan’s true beliefs: that the Americans would continue to expand the war if the resistance was insufficient to deter them: and a protracted war would grind them down because it would increase American casualties, which in turn would bolster opposition to the war both within the United States and abroad.

The Politburo was not in complete agreement on these matters. In a rare admission of internal Party disagreement, Le Duan commented that differences of opinion on these matters still remained despite their lengthy, ongoing discussion. The First Secretary stressed that the Politburo was unanimous in its view that no matter how many troops the United States should send, the Vietnamese would defeat them. Further, they all agreed that the Politburo “must firmly maintain and study and digest even further our formula of fighting the enemy using both military and political means.”31 Le Duan insisted that unanimous agreement was essential, crucial to the success of the movement. And then the hint of dissent emerged:

However, in a limited period of time we have not been able to carefully and thoroughly discuss every aspect of each individual issue, and therefore we may have some slight difference on one aspect or another, such as on our assessment of the American imperialists, on the nature and the form of the war, on the formula of a

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