Kurlantzick only used part of the quote, but the full version makes the issue even clearer: It’s from a now-declassified retrospective written by CIA historians years after the war ended. In A Great Place to Have a War, a new history of the largely clandestine American effort in Laos, Joshua Kurlantzick quotes from a passage that starkly captures the moral blindness of U.S. In those “sideshow” conflicts (as the British writer William Shawcross called the Cambodian war) Americans and Vietnamese both pursued their own goals with little regard for the grievous price being paid by the Laotian and Cambodian people. Exactly the same can be said about the Vietnamese Communists, who intervened in Laos and Cambodia for the identical purpose: to support their war in Vietnam. air support and military aid that kept weak, ineptly led local Laotian and Cambodian ground forces in the field long after it was clear they had no chance of winning against their stronger North Vietnamese enemies. operations in those countries, including among the heaviest bombing in military history, were conducted to support American objectives in Vietnam rather than for any achievable benefit for its smaller, weaker neighbors. But Americans looking for some moral comfort could at least tell themselves that they were fighting for a better outcome for the Vietnamese.īy contrast, it is harder to find anything morally defensible in American actions in Laos and Cambodia. That didn’t mean war was a wise choice or that its goal justified the death and destruction it caused. There is an argument - not conclusive, but defensible - that with all its faults, the anti-Communist side offered South Vietnam’s people a freer and more prosperous future than they would face if the Communists won. If you work at it, you can make a case that Americans fought on the right side in Vietnam. Joshua Kurlantzick, A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
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