Joseph Heller’s famous book “Catch-22” — in which people find themselves in paradoxical situations from which there is no escape — resulted from his experience in World War II, but it might also apply to America’s role in the Vietnam War, which ended ignominiously this week (April 30) in 1975 when South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, fell to Communist forces from North Vietnam. The “Catch-22” is as follows:
Eleven years earlier, in 1964, virtually every nation with any stake in Vietnam — China, the Soviet Union, France, every nation in Indochina, including both North and South Vietnam — favored a negotiated settlement of the war. The only nation opposed to this was the United States.
Why? Because the United States’ one condition for a negotiated settlement was that it and its ally, South Vietnam, must negotiate, as President Lyndon Johnson put it, “from a position of strength.” That could only happen, said the U.S. government, if the South Vietnamese army was winning militarily against the North.
Of course, that could only happen if there was a stable, popularly supported South Vietnamese government directing that army. But in 1964 South Vietnam’s government — the Government of Vietnam (GVN) — was neither stable nor popular. In fact, it was hated by virtually every segment of South Vietnam’s society — peasants, students, Buddhists (South Vietnam’s dominant religion) and even much of the army.
And what caused this hatred? One factor was the systemic corruption and incompetence of the GVN, but the biggest problem was the South Vietnamese people’s belief that their government was merely a puppet whose strings were being pulled by the United States. And the reason the people believed this was the fact that, after some 20 years of war, the vast majority of the South Vietnamese people wanted the fighting to end, yet their government, pressured by the United States, refused to enter into negotiations. “Had our government been independent,” the South Vietnamese people thought, “it would have responded to our will and begun negotiations with North Vietnam.”
In other words, since South Vietnam was weak the United States wouldn’t allow it to negotiate an end to the war. The reason it was weak was because its people didn’t support it. The reason its people didn’t support it was their correct belief that it was a puppet government controlled by the United States. The reason the people believed this was because the United States wouldn’t let it negotiate an end to the war.
Thus there was never a hope of a stable, popular South Vietnamese government, so there was never a hope of winning the war on the battlefield, meaning there was never a hope of negotiating “from a position of strength.”
Joseph Heller would have been impressed.
