A Fire in the Lake

 

A Fire in the Lake

Peter Schultz

 

                  In her book, Fire in the Lake, Frances Fitzgerald analyzed America’s involvement and war-making in Vietnam. The following are some of her and some of my reflections on that enterprise.

 

                  “Americans … assumed [that] the Vietnamese [would] trust them, to take their advice with gratitude, to cooperate in their mutual enterprise of defeating the Communists. The Buddhist crisis came as a terrible shock …. Not only the Buddhists but also General Ky and Colonel Loan seemed to resent American interference. The crisis exposed the contradiction between the American desire to get the GVN [Government of Vietnam] on its feet and their desire to maintain some control over GVN politics….” [368]

 

                  “Did their [the Vietnamese] view of the United States as a ruthless, omnipotent force have something to do with their long history of colonial rule? If so, could the Americans, whatever their intentions, cope with these suspicions any better than the French…?” [ibid]

 

                  What are we witnessing here? Are we witnessing the impossibility of a cooperative colonialism? Of a peaceful colonialism? Of a progressive colonialism? Are we witnessing why the United States’ “involvement” in Vietnam, like the French involvement, was bound to fail; that is, to fail to achieve the United States’s best intentions?

 

                  Regardless of how well-intentioned US elites may have been, there was “no possible basis for cooperation between the two governments or between the Vietnamese government and the rest of the non-Communist groups in Vietnam.” [ibid] War was the inevitable so long as the US chose to involve itself in Vietnam. It was the only possible outcome. Colonialism, imperialism, regardless of the intentions of the colonizers or imperialists, inevitably lead to war. As Fowler (in The Quiet American) put it: Innocence should be treated as madness and the innocent should be treated as lepers.

 

                  And this includes the best and the brightest. The most crucial knowledge is knowing the limits of the political. Only with that knowledge can well-intentioned but ultimately inhuman politics, such as that the United States practiced in Vietnam, be avoided. Ironically, those with the best of intentions, viz., the best and the brightest, are the most dangerous politically. They are like a “fire in the lake.”