Literary Views & Reviews The Vietnamese Enigma

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31730, 13 July 1968, Page 4

Literary Views & Reviews The Vietnamese Enigma

Government and Revolution in Vietnam: By D. J. Duncanson. Oxford University Press for Royal Institute of International Affairs. 442 pp. and map. Witness to Vietnam, the Containment of Communism in S.-E. Asia. Johnson. 316 pp. and map. Mr Duncanson’s qualifications for writing a book on Vietnam sound promising. He spent five years in the country from 1961 to 1966, first as’ a member of the Advisory Mission sent to help apply in Vietnam some of the lessons learnt from the successful containment of Communist insurgency in Malaya, and later as Councillor for Aid in the British Embassy in Saigon. He reads Vietnamese as well as being fluent in Chinese and French, and has obviously' had the benefit of lengthy interviews with many influential contacts in Saigon. We are not disappointed. Mr Duncanson’s “Vietnam" takes a well deserved place in the aeries which the Oxford University Press has published for the Royal Institute of International Affairs besides such valuable earlier books as Dennis Austin’s “Ghana" and Catherine Hoskyn’s “Congo". It is a welcome relief to read a book on Vietnam which is concerned to analyse and not to preach, to help us understand and not to tell us what to think. Much of the book is concerned with the history of earlier intervention in Vietnam in the colonial and precolonial periods. Indeed, it is one of the merits of the book that it puts the present interventions in perspective as being the latest in a long line of foreign interventions, most of them at the request of the Vietnamese, and most of them with the best interests of the Vietnamese at heart. Most interest, will, however, inevitably centre on Mr Duncanson’s account of developments since 1954 when the Americans succeeded the French as the most influential foreigners in Vietnam. It is indeed a

depressing story, and as the I author wryly comments, “it lis hardly surprising to find I that (the present situation) I has been brought about otherj wise than by display of I heroism and exercise of wisdom.” [ Yet Mr Duncanson finds no i easy scapegoat. He gives the I Americans credit for the ■ “unprecedentedly altruistic” | motives for their intervention, and in general he sup- , ports their aims. At the same I time he shows how their I frequent over-simplifications of the problems, their reluc- ■ tance to learn from French I experience, and their i “inability to sever the sym- | biotic relationship between the Government and revolutionary forces” frustrated the I aim of the development of an , independent viable South Vietnamese State. Similarly, Mr Duncanson recognises the mistakes and ■failures of Ngo Dinh Diem, that most unlikely candidate ifor the role of guardian of I the free world, commenting < that under his rule “the ramI shackle edifice of factional ; allegiance, vested interest | and patronage, resting on the shifting sands of foreign aid, opposed to the Communist threat not a shield of national unity, but a host of additional internal contradictions waiting to be exploited by the revolution in accordance with Leninist doctrine.” At the same time, he deplores the tendency since 1963 to place all the blame for earlier failures on Diem personally, noting that within two years of his death many Vietnamese were prepared to admit that, if he had not been killed, he would by then have been President a second time: and that none of the faults of his patriarchy had been remedied. Mr Duncanson offers no easy hope for the future. “Sooner or later the conflict must come to an end, for all conflicts do: and yet it can be demonstrated with almost mathematical certainty that no viable settlement is possible. So baffling is the Vietnamese enigma that public opinion in many countries is tempted to fall back on proposals to leave the Vietnamese to come to terms among themselves. . . . Yet at the stage now reached, non-intervention is itself a form of intervention . . .: in the Vietnamese conflict there is no longer a neutral position.”

Perhaps the whole tragic situation is most aptly summarised in the anonymous eleventh centuiy commentary on the defeat in Vietnam of a Chinese army which Mr Duncanson quotes as a frontispiece: Dare you, against Fate, Thrust in, his turbulence to quell? Beware!—for you will sound the knell. If the first step to a solution in Vietnam is an understanding of the complexity of the problem, confusion has been worse confounded, as Mr Duncanson’s publishers suggest, by the frequent oversimplification of the Vietnamese conflict in “cold war” terms. The continued validity of this warning is well demonstrated by a perusal of Dr Glyn's “Witness to Vietnam: the containment of Communism in S.-E. Asia.” Like Mr Duncanson, Dr Glyn has had a varied career, having qualified as a doctor and as a barrister, having undertaken operations with the French Foreign Legion in Africa and having spent five years as Conservative M.P. for Clapham. As regards Vietnam, which he visited briefly in 1967. he is a member of that rather rare species, a British “hawk.” His style of writing is in general reminiscent of an earlier period in the Cold War. The Korean War demonstrated for Dr ■ Glyn that “the Chinese dragon had woken from its temporary slumbers and was breathing the fire of Communist expansion once again.” In the late sixties, “the tentacles of Chinese Communism, as everyone knows, extend through Asia, but their fingernails, as long as those of the old mandarins , and cutting into the flesh of Black Africa. . . .” For Dr Glyn, as for the late John Foster Dulles, “there is no place today for neutralism." Some of his speculations about possible solutions to present problems are also alarmingly reminiscent of General Macarthur’s plans for ending the Korean War, and of Dulles’s plans for extricating the French from Dien Bien Phu. Dr Glyn is generously donating half his royalties from sales in Australia and New Zealand to charitable organisations in aid of disabled members of the armed forces serving in Vietnam.