While Lewy carefully avoids the question of US aggression, he insists that “the notion of ‘foreign aggression’ is in itself perfectly justified and supported by the facts,” namely, North Vietnamese aggression. And although an imperial US right to dominate is an implicit premise fundamental to his case, Lewy gives a great deal of attention to an alleged North Vietnamese aggression in trying to legitimize US intervention.

Evidently, the question does not arise in the pre-1954 period. After Geneva, Lewy notes, “The Viet Minh, defending the interests of the peasants and basking in the glory of having defeated the French, not only were popular and in effective control of large parts of the south, but they also had a highly efficient organization ready t take advantage of the democratic liberties proclaimed in the final declaration of the Geneva conference.” For this reason, it was “justifiable” for the US-imposed regime temporarily to institute “dictatorial measures”; obviously, democratic procedures are unfeasible if the wrong people will win. Lewy then alleges that Communist terror “predictably goaded the Diem regime into stepping up its clumsily pursued and often brutal anti-terrorist campaign.” As the basis for this conclusion, he cites Jeffrey Race, who in fact provided substantial documentary evidence to the contrary, concluding that the Communist party held “that, except in limited circumstances, violence would not be used, even in self-defense, against the increasing repressiveness of the government,” even though US-backed terrorism was decimating “the southern organization.” When self-defense was finally authorized, Race continues, government forces collapsed, and even though “the government terrorized far more than did the revolutionary movement, by early 1965 revolutionary forces had gained victory in virtually all the rural areas of Long An” (the province near Saigon that he was studying).

How does Lewy succeed in turning Race’s conclusion into its opposite? By avoiding the main thrust of his documentation and argument and citing only his conclusion that the 1959 decision to initiate armed activity (in response to years of terrorism by the US client regime) was taken in Hanoi, a question that is totally irrelevant to the interaction between US Diem terror and the use of force by the former Viet Minh.

This is a typical example of how Lewy uses documentary evidence. He also cites Joseph Buttinger, failing to mentions his conclusion that “future historians may very likely regard the claims that in South Vietnam the United States was defending a free country against foreign aggression among the great political lies of this century.” Lewy also cites US government specialist Douglas Pike, failing to report his conclusion that the NLF “maintained that its contest with the GVN and the United States should be fought out at the political level and that the use of massed military might was in itself illegitimate until forced by the United States and its client regime to use counter-force to survive.” (NY Times, March 20, 1968)

While Lewy’s government sources consistently regarded the NLF as the only “truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam” (Pike), Lewy concludes that it was “impotent” as revealed by North Vietnamese dominance of the postwar system. He fails to note that this result followed years of US violence that had virtually destroyed the NLF and the peasant society in which “the fish were swimming,” and the bombing of the North that had drawn northern regulars into the war, exactly as planners had anticipated.

In a further effort to establish his thesis of North Vietnamese aggression in the face of the obvious facts, Lewy refers to a captured document reporting the party meeting in Hanoi in December 1963. He fails to convey the contents of this internal party document, which defines the war as “a struggle of the South Vietnamese people,” etc. Its major recommendation is that “the revolutionary people in SVN must promote a spirit of self-reliance,” struggling against “an enemy who is weak politically and morally but strong militarily and materially.” The South Vietnamese people must “settle their own problems” since “revolution is a creative achievement of the masses.” The role of the North is to build socialism and “to increase aid to the South,” which must conduct its own struggle in a spirit of self-reliance.

It is astonishing to see this document offered as evidence for North Vietnamese aggression at a time when US military forces were already devastating South Vietnam. We might add that detailed quotes from this document and analysis of it have long been in print in discussion of earlier efforts by propagandists to misrepresent it in Lewy’s manner.

The evidence is overwhelming that when the United States expanded its aggression to a full-scale invasion in early 1965 it had no evidence of a North Vietnamese troop presence, and thus obviously could not plead “collective self-defense,” ludicrous as the claim is in any event. As late as July 1965, the Pentagon was still concerned over the “probability” that North Vietnamese units might be in or near the South, five months after the initiation of intensive bombing of North Vietnam. Lewy tries to counter such facts (which he nowhere cites) by appealing to a May 1968 State Department study which claimed that elements of the North Vietnamese 325 th Division arrived in the South in December 1964-March 1965, the earliest having left in October 1964 (after the August bombing of North Vietnam). A historian, of course, would seek to determine the credibility of this study, introduced into the Congressional Record in an effort to gain some support for the war. Lewy does not; what emanates from the US government is sacrosanct. But let us take it at face value. Lewy fails to point out that this document states that “at least until 1959, [the 325 th division was] reportedly composed entirely of South Vietnamese” (its later composition is not mentioned). Thus a historian would conclude that quite possibly South Vietnam was invaded by South Vietnamese in early 1965 (three years after US air strikes against South Vietnam began, ten years after the onset of US-backed terrorism in the south, several months after the first bombing of the North after the faked Tonkin Gulf incident of August 1964). Furthermore, simple logic shows that the question is irrelevant to the issue of justification for the accelerated US invasion i n 1965, since its motives must be assessed on the basis of evidence then available, not what was concocted years later to provide retrospective justification for US aggression when domestic support was waning.

But for Lewy, logic is as irrelevant as fact. Thus he is able to write that "the commitment of American troops was defensive in the sense of seeking to forestall a South Vietnamese defeat” in April 1965, before there was any evidence of the presence of North Vietnamese regular units, where his term “South Vietnamese” refers to the US implantation that lacked popular support and was being overthrown by an indigenous rebellion despite massive application of US force.

Lewy’s commitment to a higher truth is shown in his handling of materials long exposed as propaganda fabrications, but convenient to his case. For example, he cites figures of fifty thousand executed during the North Vietnamese land reform and estimates by Hoang Van Chi of one-half million executed. His source is Bernard Fall, who used Chi as his source. In a footnote, Lewy writes that “attempts by the Hanoi sympathizer D. Gareth Porter to deny the scope of this terror remain unconvincing.” This ends the discussion. In fact, Porter demonstrated that Chi (who was employed and subsidized by Saigon and US intelligence) grossly falsified documents and based his estimate of deaths on one village where one person was allegedly executed, extrapolating from this sample to the whole of North Vietnam. The former head of the Central Psychological War Service for the Saigon army at the time later informed the press that the land reform atrocities were “100% fabricated” by Saigon authorities, with the assistance of US and British intelligence. In a subsequent and more detailed study, Edwin Moise notes further that Chi made no mention of atrocities in 1955: “It was only in later years that his memories began to alter,” namely, after the Hanoi regime began producing evidence on “errors and failures” in the land reform which Chi then proceeded to falsify, adding his “extrapolation.” Lewy cites none of this material. To a true believer in the state religion, it simply doesn’t matter. Chi’s evidence, now totally discredited from the standpoint of scholarship, is unchallengeable in propaganda tracts since it supports what the US government would like people to believe.

Similarly in the case of the Hue massacre, Lewy simply accepts government statements as fact, never so much as mentioning the evidence that has been presented challenging them or the assessments by independent observers such as the British journalist Philip Jones Griffiths, who wrote that most of the victims “were killed by the most hysterical use of American firepower ever seen” and then designated “as the victims of a Communist massacre.” Again, evidence and argument are simply irrelevant. The government has spoken. What more is there to say? Anyone who questions the claims that Lewy accepts on purely doctrinal grounds is dismissed as a “Hanoi sympathizer,” whatever his views may be about Communism or “Hanoi.” It must be understood that Lewy uses this term throughout in a technical sense, applying it to anyone who does not meet his standards of servility to the state.

Lewy, in fact, goes beyond the propaganda fabrications of state officials in his desire to put a good face on US actions in Vietnam. Thus, in regard to the Phoenix program, William Colby and other officials have acknowledged that mistakes were made in identifying “Vietcong infrastructure,” and that, regrettably, many innocent people may have been killed. Other analysts and observers have gone further, claiming that the Phoenix program of selective murder was quickly transformed into a system of indiscriminate killing, given the combination of ignorance, total corruption, a bounty and quota system, and the fact that, as one US adviser noted, Saigon authorities “will meet every quota that’s established for them.”

Lewy, however, uses the officially acknowledged fact that most of the Phoenix murders were not originally “targeted” to show that Phoenix was more benign than its critics suggest, as it “undermines the charge that the Phoenix program was a program of planned assassinations.” It never occurs to Lewy that a planned assassination program run amok would kill well beyond “targets,” and his implication that there is something healthy about large numbers of unplanned assassinations is remarkable even for Lewy. Thus, while even a Colby may admit that the killing of untargeted victims suggests something improper, a Lewy turns this into further apologetics. He concedes that the program had “weaknesses” and claims that it was of limited effectiveness for US purposes, but this spokesman for western humanism never suggests that the massacre of large numbers of ordinary civilians is troublesome in itself. The Lewy defense of indiscriminate killing calls to mind congressman William Goodling’s justification for US bombing in Cambodia: “Our bombs don’t single out certain segments or certain peoples in Cambodia. Our bombs hit them all. And whether you thought it was right or I thought it was right, the military at that particular time thought it was right.” Here are a politician and a propagandist on the same wavelength.

Lewy’s scholarly integrity is also revealed by his handling of independent studies of military operations that he examines. This is particularly important, since he relies so heavily on military documents, a valuable but biased source. For example, in dealing with the US command’s version of SPEEDY EXPRESS a historian would make careful use of the published study of this operation by Alex Shimkin and Kevin Buckley, and also of Buckley’s notes, at least those parts that have been in print since 1975. They found that the “awesome firepower” of the US 9th infantry division caused a “staggering number” of civilian deaths in a peaceful province that had largely been under local NLF control. Most of the killings were the result of “a relentless night and day barrage of rockets, shells, bombs and bullets from planes, artillery and helicopters.,” including night attacks. In one village every house was destroyed. A neighboring village was the target center for B-52 raids according to a MACV location plot. Even in deep bunkers, children were killed by concussion—but then, they were not “innocent,” since their parents supported the South Vietnamese enemy.

Describing the “spectacular” results of SPEEDY EXPRESS, Lewy makes no use of the Shimkin-Buckley study, remarking only that “the assertion of Kevin P. Buckley of Newsweek that perhaps close to half of the more than 10,000 killed were noncombatants remains unsubstantiated.” The assertion was not Buckley’s; he cited a US pacification official. But it is true that it remains “unsubstantiated,” as does the official figure of 10,883 that Lewy cites, which is of course an ugly joke down to the last digit. The US command had no idea how many people were killed by bombs, napalm, and anti-personnel weapons. An honest study would at least have mentioned some of the horrifying material collected by Shimkin and Buckley and would have considered the significance of this murderous US assault on a peaceful region under local NLF control. Lewy, however, keeps to official sources, merely expressing some skepticism as to whether what he calls “the amazing results of operation SPEEDY EXPRESS should be accepted at face value.”

Lewy’s blind faith in his leaders is revealed no less strikingly in his discussion of the bombing of North Vietnam. According to US government documents, the bombing was aimed at military targets and damage to civilians was minimal. Western diplomats, non-Communist journalists, and numerous other visitors have reported that large areas of North Vietnam were totally devastated. The city of Vinh was leveled in 1965 and was so heavily bombed later that not even the foundations of buildings remain. Much of the country is a moonscape, where there is no visible sign of life. (16) But according to Lewy, none of this happened. How can one dare to confront government pronouncements with mere fact? And where something may have happened, he is quick with the predicted defense. The city of Thanh Hoa was bombed, but then there was an important bridge several miles away. As Lewy could easily have discovered, the Thanh Hoa hospital, destroyed by bombing, is miles from the bridge, and the area between was largely spared; the bombing of the bridge was highly concentrated, so that everything nearby was reduced to rubble, including a former village. But of course this fact, even if it were acknowledged, falls under “military necessity.” The result is a form of apologetics for massacre and destruction, often mere denial of plain fact, for which no comparison comes to mind apart from the worst excesses of Nazi and Stalinist “scholarship.”

Wherever one opens this tract one finds comments that would simply be regarded as comical if discovered in enemy propaganda. Thus Lewy writes that “with regard to the years 1965-67 it is possible to maintain that the North Vietnamese merely matched the massive American buildup.” That is, the estimated fifty thousand North Vietnamese “merely matched” the half-million-man US expeditionary force backed by enormous air and naval forces. Had Lewy written that the North Vietnamese “merely matched” the buildup of Korean and Thai mercenaries it would have been almost accurate. Of course, one can discern Lewy’s meaning when the clouds of propaganda are dispelled. He points out elsewhere that the “enemy” was perhaps more than matching the US military buildup in late 1965. A few computations reveal, as other sources have reported, that this “enemy buildup” was overwhelmingly local recruitment by the South Vietnamese revolutionaries in direct response to the full-scale US invasion. To Lewy, however, the South Vietnamese are aggressors in their own villages, while the US is defending the “security” of the population by blasting them out of their homes and driving them to concentration camps where they can be “protected.”

It is easy to demonstrate, as these few examples illustrate, that this work is a parody of scholarship. Intellectually worthless and morally grotesque, it is, nevertheless, important—not for its substance, but for what it reveals about western culture. Imagine that the Russian government were to release documents concerning the invasion of Hungary and that some Soviet “historian” were to use them, dismissing out of hand the question of the legitimacy of the Russian intervention, seriously distorting the documentation he cites, accepting the most ludicrous propaganda fabrications, omitting crucial evidence and historical context, and offering the moral premise that it is legitimate to massacre Hungarians who are not “innocent” because they cooperate with Hungarian “terrorists.” Perhaps such a study would be published by some Russian research center as a specimen of Soviet propaganda. It is inconceivable, however, that it would be published by the Oxford University Press as an authoritative account of the Soviet intervention or described by US reviewers as “sophisticated and profound” (Foreign Affairs).

Thus the reaction to this squalid tract is of interest, though its content is virtually without value apart from some footnotes to military history. Needless to say, this is not the judgment that will be presented by the western media, though it is difficult to believe that such a clumsy piece of propaganda will enter the scholarly record.


While the South Vietnamese who tried to resist the US attack were not “innocent,” the US government was. If, however, one does not postulate with Lewy that South Vietnam was imperial property, but that the South Vietnamese had a right to determine their own fate, then the US presence was illegitimate from the start and we are dealing with unprovoked external aggression (war crimes). This fundamental issue Lewy never addresses directly. It is intriguing to watch the maneuvers. He begins by dismissing pacifists who repudiate resort to military force, then turning to the narrower question of whether US military force was properly used, always overlooking the fact that a non-pacifist may accept the resort to force in self-defense against armed attack in accordance with international and domestic law, while rejecting aggression.

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