Timothy J. Lomperis - From Peoples War to Peoples Rule: Insurgency, Intervention, and the Lessons of Vietnam

Insurgency, Intervention, and the Lessons of Vietnam

1996
The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lomperis, Timothy J., 1947

From peoples war to peoples rule: insurgency,
intervention, and the lessons of Vietnam / Timothy J.
Lomperis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8078-2273-6 (cloth: alk. paper).
ISBN 0-8078-4577-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975United States. 2. VietnamHistory19451975. 3. Asia, SoutheasternPolitics and government1945- 4. InsurgencyAsia, Southeastern. 5. United StatesForeign relations, 19631969. I. Title.
DS558.L64 1996
959.7043373dc20 95-36667
CIP

00 99 98 97 96 5 4 3 2 1

Publication of this book was supported by generous grants from the Earhart Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.

This book is inspired by the fact that the Vietnam War is not a good source for the lessons of Vietnam. Indeed, whenever it is placed in a group for comparison, it is always the different one, the one that doesnt fit. It was a conventional war like Korea at times, but it was more often a guerrilla war. Although it was a guerrilla war like Malaya or Greece, it was the conventional war that carried the day for the communist guerrillas. Vietnam is a hard war to define. Taken from a group to stand by itself, its legs go rubbery. Was it a single war whose single society was convulsed by revolution, or was it two wars involving two states in which one state was caught up in a guerrilla war within its boundaries while it was simultaneously the victim of aggression from the other? Beyond troubling boundaries, people and ideas within them are hard to separate. In Vietnam, nationalists could also be communists and vice versa. One of South Vietnams presidents, the Roman Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, was also called the last Confucian. Though every war is complicated, few can lay claim to so much confusion. For that reason, lessons can be found for Vietnam only if they come from somewhere else.

In this elsewhere quest, this book is a blend of theory, policy, and history. Theoretically, the usual way to account for something like Vietnam is to propose two or three candidates for explaining the war and, through a books many pages, conduct an intellectual shoot-out to declare one of them the winner in the conclusions explanatory power awards ceremony. This book does not do that. Rather, it takes a fundamental belief about the warthat the Vietnam War was centrally a crisis in political legitimacyand sees how far such a single explanation carries through a typology of eight cases. Hence, through a comparison of cases, it is a test of a single paradigmatic presupposition by means of a special analytical framework. As such an explanation, legitimacy works well for five of them but not so well for the remaining three.

Indeed, it works the poorest for the Vietnam War. This has prompted an appendix that provides an alternative explanation, one based on strategy. However neatly this appendix charts the strategic twists and turns of the Vietnam War to a communist victory, as an explanation it is surprised by an ambush. That is, as a demonstration of the efficacy of the revolutionary strategy of peoples war, the communists, for purposes of explanation, helpfully followed this strategy to their defeat in the Tet offensive but then muddied this explanation by abandoning peoples war and opportunistically seizing on an American conventional war strategy to gain their victory. As a peoples war, then, the communist victory was a fraud. This strategic resolution creates a philosophic impasse. For some, a victory is a victory, however it is achieved. For others, more concerned about the conformity of ends to means, a victory can be claimed only if there is such a relationship. Thus the effect of this strategic explanation is only to revisit the murkiness of the war itself.

Any single explanation carries the risk of becoming a tautology. This book avoids that problem by differentiating the concept of legitimacy into three levels of intensifying commitment: legitimacy of interest, legitimacy of opportunity, and legitimacy of belief. An analytical framework based on these levels of legitimation is employed comparatively to diagnose the achievements of the two sides to an insurgency in their competitive struggle for the prize of legitimacy. There are some challenges to the use of this framework. First, the levels have an apples-and-oranges quality. Interest and opportunity levels of legitimacy can be defined deductively according to ready-made concepts of individual response (interest level) and group interactions (opportunity level). But beliefs about political legitimacy can be defined only by inductive historical discovery. This, second, imposes the responsibility of tracing the historical context in which these definitions emerged. They emerged in two intertwining strands: a general one of systemic transferral whereby European states (both democratic and Marxist) bequeathed their standards of legitimate governance to the developing societies of the Third World under the rubric of nation-building or revolutionary transformation, and a specific one whereby this traditional to modern transition was defined in terms of the historical set of political principles unique to individual societies. Indeed, it is my thesis that insurgencies in the Third World arose out of the stresses of these definitional transitions. Finally, there is the limitation for some scholars that this is macro-theory. That is, in treating legitimacy as a general, countrywide phenomenon, the opportunity for fine-grained micro-theory is lost.