VETERAN'S DAY, ALSO KNOWN AS ARMISTACE DAY, is hardly a holiday anyone talks about anymore. Few people are off that day, and fewer participate in celebrations. Some know it celebrates the end of World War I, called, the Great War at a time when nations thought that maybe, that war was so great that it would be it -- and that the armistace was to be the end of such modern destructive mechanized killing. Most of us know the phrase that acommpanies this day On the eleventh month, the eleventh day, the eleventh hour, the eleventh minute.
Armistace Day celebrates how world War I ended. And in a way, it was a strange ending. No army was smashed to pieces (though the Germans were battered), no capital was captured and Germany still had forces on the field of battle. While its true that a land and a civilian population was ravaged, it was actually that of France, on the winning side.
WORLD WAR I ENDED IN A WAY WE AMERICANS are not supposed to like anymore in a negotiated stop to the fighting. Germany could have fought more, but exahusted, overwhelmed, facing fresh American forces who had only seen scantly a year of fighting, Germany sued for peace. Soldiers on the field got the orders but weren't so sure that they wouldn't get orders reversing those orders. Mortars were being fired up until that fateful hour. And then, no more.
Thinking about the way World War I ended leads to a question. How do you end a war?
If you listen to the current debate in Washington over Iraq, you will hear that everyone seems to want an end to the fighting, its just a question of when and how. Leave now. Leave in a year. Leave when a government is established. The somewhat scary part about American rehtoric on Iraq is that it is exactly where American political rhetoric was on Vietnam in 1969 or thereabouts.
1969 was a bit of a fork in the road. At this point, U.S. troop levels peak at 543,400. There have been 33,641 Americans killed by now. The public was questioning the goals of American involvement in Vietnam. The contentious 1968 election had been held, complete with street protesters being clubbed by Chicago police. Yet American involvment in the conflict would last four more years and the war would not end for six. Twenty thousand more would die.
Iraq is not Vietnam in every way, certainly the proportionate percentage of US males involved in the war is dwarfed by the utter at-home impact of Vietnam in which nearly every town in the U.S. was affected. Yet it is close enough to be instructive. So how did Vietnam end?
The beginning of the end for the Vietnam War was in the snows of New Hamphsire in 1968. Eugene McCarthy, an unkown Senator from Minnesota, came a extemely close second to President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson saw the writing on the wall and announced peace talks as well as declining a second term. Johnson's taped phone calls would reveal that while he maintained a very pro-war stance all along, privately he may have known that his administrations war strategy could not work, that South Vietnam could not held. We are left to speculate on what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson stayed in office or even if his successor Hubert Humphrey beat Nixon, It's likely either one would have pursued peace talks with vigor. Its possible that as they were known quantities without a need to prove anything, fresh from a re-election and reconfirmation of their party's lock on power, they might have made 1969 the last year of the Vietnam War. This seems very evident in the case of Hubert Humphrey, since after all he did come out for withdrawal at the end of the campaign.
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THE LINCOLN QUOTE, paraphrased, that voters don't choose to 'swap horses while crossing streams', voters will not change administrations during war was somewhat tested in the 1968 election -- while the President wasn't running his party did lose. Richard Nixon offered voters something different, he campaigned on a pledge of "peace with honor." Richard Nixon narrowly won the election over a Democratic Party torn by hawks and doves.
"...the greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons America..."
-Richard Nixon, 1969.
Before we get to what Nixon does, let's establish that his situation is not alone among historical US Presidents. Let's take a step backward in history. President James Polk, who oversaw the Mexican War, wrote in his diary about a visit he received from Senator Critchenden, a Kentucky Democrat. Critchenden was a friend of Polk's from his neighboring state, also a slave holding state and one of his peers. He came to see him about a war, in which Americans were doing well, making progress and close to capturing Mexico city, and the war was not even a year old.
By the way, we should think about Critchenden's 1847 visit to Polk when we think that Americans only recently have come to like wars to be short rather than long. Polk assured Critchenden that he was looking for an end to the war, but that he watned a show of force first. Just like Nixon, though Americans were tired of the war, he wasn't willing to just back down without some honor. But its also clear there was some pressure to wrap things up, that Americans in the 1840's weren't happy with sons in places that had funny-sounding Spanish names.
Later in an 1848 entry to his diary, and at this point the new Congress having been elected on opposition to the war,Polk instructed his Cabinet that the recent elections going against the administration, and his read on the new Congress, they weren't going to appropriate more fo the war, and it would be better to look for a peaceful way out and not try to aquire mexican land south of the disputed texas territory, as a few Democrats wanted him to do. In Polk's diary we see that without any public resolution, Congress had its influence on a war President. Polk would pursue the Treaty of Hidalgo which would end the Mexican War. The opposition Whigs voted for the treaty.
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AS PROMISED, NOW-PRESIDENT NIXON GETS TO work on Vietnam. Nixon first attempts to negotiate by TV. He presents a peace plan in which America and North Vietnam would simultaneously pull out of South Vietnam over the next year. By the standards of the now passed 2006 rhetoric, Nixon was a 'cut and runner.' Then Nixon attempts to negotiate by mail. President Nixon, through a French emissary, sends a secret letter to Ho Chi Minh urging him to settle the war, while at the same time threatening to resume bombing if peace talks remain stalled as of November 1. In August, Hanoi responds by repeating earlier demands for North Vietnam participation in a coalition government in South Vietnam. In August, he opts for in-person. Secretary of State Henry Kissenger begins secret peace negotiations in Paris.
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PARIS IS THE TYPE OF CITY to sign a treaty in. That is where the peace treaty which is what truly ended the American Revolutionary War was signed. Now of course it was it the battle of Yorktown, that's what pushed the British there, that's what forced a vote of no confidence in the Parliment, the resignation of Prime Minister Lord North, and the installation of a Prime Minister who was sympathetic to Americans. But it was at the treaty table the the British committed to ignore some opinons which were saying they could beat us if they just sent over more ships and a better general than Cornwallis....
Of course it was not in Paris but in the Belgian town of Ghent where the Americans and British concluded the peace treaty in another war, that of 1812, which was still going on in 1814. It's commonly reported by your history teacher that the battle of New Orleans fought by Andy Jackson was a waste, becasue the peace deal was signed. If only there were modern communications! Your history teacher is not totally right. It'ss also probably just as true is that Jackson's drubbing of the Redcoats took in New Orleans is what probably kept us from having a war of 1816 and a war of 1821, and surely what kept them from testing our Western borders. Of course the victory was not inspiring war-weary Americans to 'keep fighting' the war of 1812, either.
A show of force during peace negotiations is what a frustrated President Nixon was thinking about in April 1970- when he stunned Americans who thought he -- like Polk before him, was wrapping this thing up already --and announced a Cambodian operation designed to cut the North's supply lines. The announcement generates a tidal wave of protest by politicians, the press, students, professors, clergy members, business leaders, and many average Americans against Nixon and the Vietnam War. This is now Nixon's, not LBJ's war.
The strategy behind the Cambodian venture and stepped up U.S. bombing raids was what was some aides later revealed to be the Madman Theory. Under no circumstances the other side should be sure what Nixon was to do next. It should not be impossible for them to think, Nixon would be willing to use the strongest possible forces to intervene and bomb. In that Nixon wanted to be considered irrational and unconceivable. "Call me the mad bomber," he told Kissinger
And noone can call what Nixon will do. President Nixon visits China and meets with Mao Zedong. Nixon's visit causes great concern in Hanoi that their wartime ally China might be inclined to agree to an unfavorable settlement of the war to improve Chinese relations with the U.S.
In early 1972, in time for his reelection year, President Nixon announces a proposed eight point peace plan for Vietnam and also reveals that Kissinger has been secretly negotiating with the North Vietnamese. Hanoi rejects Nixon's peace overture. But by May , The madman strikes again. President Nixon announces Operation Linebacker I (the Madman was also a football fan), the mining of North Vietnam's harbors along with intensified bombing of roads, bridges, and oil facilities. U.S. warplanes flew 40,000 sorties and dropped over 125,000 tons of bombs during the bombing campaign.
In October, the long-standing diplomatic stalemate between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho finally ends as both sides agree to major concessions. The U.S. will allow North Vietnamese troops already in South Vietnam to remain there, while North Vietnam drops its demand for the removal of South Vietnam's President Thieu and the dissolution of his government. Now a week before the presidential election, Henry Kissinger holds a press briefing and declares "We believe that peace is at hand. We believe that an agreement is in sight."
On January 15, 1973, citing progress in peace negotiations, President Nixon announced the suspension of offensive action against North Vietnam, to be followed by a unilateral withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, officially ending direct U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Economic aid to South Vietnam continued (after being cut nearly in half), but most of it was siphoned off by corrupt officials in the South Vietnamese government.
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NIXON's AGREEMENT WITH THE NORTH VIETNAMESE was essentially: we will get out of South Vietnam, if you don't send any further troops in. This seems a contract with very little consideration. North Vietnamese soldiers already within the South can stay, and any force that might police further troop movements will be pulled out. If the actual goal was defending South Vietnam, this accord would have been useless. So we must turn to political motivations, Nixon wanted some kind of an accord so he could withdraw and seem like he met his 'with honor' requirement. From a military standpoint, America could have withdrawn in 1969 and the reality on the ground of a helpless South Vietnam about to be swallowed by the North would have been exactly the same.
We are saddened, indeed, by events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world. Some seem to feel that if we do not succeed in everything everywhere, then we have succeeded, in nothing anywhere. I reject such polarized thinking. We can and should help others to help themselves. But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands.
Those words, now blasphemy if said in the halls of Congress, were said by the late President Ford, upon hearing the news of the capture of Siagon. We are not, he says in effect, the world policeman. Just because we end a conflict here or there, because we decide where and where not to send our troops does not tarnish who we are.
We ought to think more about Gerald Ford's words, and more about the true history of ending American wars. Despite the bravado that is associated with American military history, the majority of American Wars have ended not by complete victory and occupation of the enemy capital but in peace deals - the Revolution, the War of 1812, Mexican War, World War I, Vietnam. The Korean War ended in a deal/stalemate that still exists today. Nixon 's election and his insistency on ending with honor may have prolonged the war in the way that a Democratic victory may not have needed to. Twenty thousand more Americans may have paid with their lives for the concept of 'honor.' without any understandable military gain. In ending a war, a change in our perception, as reflected by Ford's remarks, means as much as the policy.