ITHIEL DE SOLA POOL

565

so entirely distinguishable in the eyes of the Vietnamese peasant.) Adjudication of rents and enforcement of rent payments could be easily made a hamlet-level matter, reducing the prospect of use of government military forces for that purpose. Military forces have frequently been used in Vietnam to collect rents, with the military commanders receiving a certain amount of profit thereby. Denying any cloak of legality to this activity would have many of the same effects in increasing security and good relations with the troops as would the abolition of agricultural taxes.

These are not novel ideas. The Vietnamese government has been edging toward them. The law as it exists today is much more liberal than most people realize. On December 15, 1965, the Minister of Agriculture issued a circular defining tax and land policies in contested areas. These were restated in a new circular of March 28, 1967, sent by Prime Minister Ky to Corps Commanders, Province Chiefs and Sub-sector Chiefs on May 18. It relieves farmers from obligation for uncollected back taxes and rents in those insecure areas where Viet Cong influence prevented their collection. The same circular specifies that

> In any military operation, the commanding officers are strictly prohibited from helping the local officials or military personnel who have land for rent, to collect back rents accruing during past insecure years in areas which have been exempted from payment of land taxes to the Government.

In addition, the basic law governing tenant farming, Ordinance #2, dated Jan. 8, 1955, limits rents to 25% of the crop and exempts the tenant from any land taxes.

These measures, however, are only starts in the right direction. The 25% rent limit is generally honored in the breach. In those areas where landlordism prevails, 40% may be a more common rent than 25%. Also, the recent circular on taxes and rents is only a moratorium and in limited areas. Current and future taxes and rents are to be collected. That and the continued obligation in secure areas makes it clear that collection is the basic government policy which the peasant must anticipate if he does not let the Viet Cong keep his district in turmoil. Furthermore, the ban on use of the military to collect rents also applies only to rents in insecure areas and to rents due officials and military personnel. It would not illegalize the use of the military to enforce legal rents due private landlords, for which activity there would often be a payoff.

A drastic total abolition of all agricultural taxes (tolls as well as land taxes) and all enforcement of rent collection by the military would have a quite different effect than the well-intentioned but ineffectual partial measures taken so far. For one thing, such a total measure would be a politically symbolic act that would be communicated to the countryside in ways that the fine print of carefully drawn legal documents are not. The peasants would get the message.

566

POLITICAL ALTERNATIVES TO VIET CONG

There is one exception to a total measure, however, that should be seriously considered. Should villages have the right to set agricultural taxes for their own use? The loophole provided, if they are allowed to do so, threatens to let back in a cover for all the abuses that we are trying to inhibit. On the other hand, home rule without the power to tax is likely to be a sham. Furthermore, the abolition of agricultural taxes would make local officials dependent upon GVN subsidy payments and thus tie them to the government despite the grant of autonomy which is apparently promoted by this measure. The village would be freed from the most disliked forms of government intervention at the price of a basically increased dependence upon the central government. The merits of allowing village agricultural taxes can be argued both ways depending on whether one attaches higher importance to tying the village indirectly to the national system or to promoting its real autonomy. The merits of district, provincial, or national government support by agricultural taxes can hardly be argued.

Abolition of non-village agricultural taxes and of non-village government enforcement of rent collections would have one additional advantage. This measure would cut through many of the complexities of land reform. It would make land reform a decentralized hamlet matter for it would make a collection of rents dependent essentially upon the moral sense of each community. Those rents which the hamlet itself viewed as just would be collected. Those rents it disapproved of would lapse into desuetude. Land reform is such a complex thing that it is difficult for any centralized program to be right in the hamlets. For example, one of the issues that will inevitably arise when the war is waning is which land to restore to returning refugees. It is more than difficult from outside to distinguish that refugee who was an exploiting landlord whom the community does not want back to disturb now-established relationships, from that refugee who was an innocent victim of Viet Cong plunder who should be allowed to justly take back what a bully took from him. Only a rash politician would choose to commit himself to a national program to resolve such issues. Local self-determination would seem to be the only ideological symbol which can effectively incorporate the variety of patterns of response to the variety of situations that will exist in Vietnam.

Home rule might thus provide a safe entry into the political life of Vietnam for former Viet Cong cadres to the extent that they had developed genuine influence, while at the same time depriving the central government only of sensitive issues that it is better off without, and leaving to the central government crucial powers over commerce, money and the armed forces, without which stability is impossible.

ATHIEL DE SOLA POOL is Chairman of the Political Science Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a member of the Center for International Studies, M.I.T.

Note:

The next three papers try to answer two questions. How can the Viet Cong continue undefeated if they do not represent the population among whom they live? What kind of program in the rural areas would produce effective pacification.

The Edmund James Lecture on Village Violence and Pacification focuses more narrowly on Viet Nam while the two Peace Research Society Papers place the matter in the general perspective of the problem of village violence in developing countries. However, the two sets of treatments repeat substantial portions of the same material

"Further Thoughts on Rural Pacification and Insurgency" appeared in Walter Isard's (Ed.) *VIETNAM: Some Basic Issues and Alternatives*.

VILLAGE VIOLENCE AND
PACIFICATION IN VIET NAM

Tonight I want to do a difficult thing — to talk about Viet
Nam as a political scientist, not as a politician. If I achieve that
goal, then the things I say could be agreed to equally by supporters
and critics of the present American policies, or conversely, both sup-
porters and critics might disagree on scientific grounds.

I must admit to you that I have tried to do this before, and my
experience has not been happy. It makes people angry. The true
believer will not listen to a discussion of the facts, until you have first
proven to him that you are on his side by proclaiming what he re-
gards as the central moral truth. Unless one first says "Get out" or
"Beat the communists" one is somehow regarded as having been
derelict in one's duty.

I do have strong views on Viet Nam, and I have no hesitation
in stating them, but what I want to discuss tonight is why violence
is rife there, why the problem of guerilla war besets us — not the
problem of what steps the United States should take to unwind the
whole set of dilemmas that history has bequeathed to us. I want to
look at Viet Nam and only slightly at American policy.

We live in an industrial America, in which over 70 per cent of
the population is now urban, and in which the farm bloc, once the
most powerful political force in the country, has almost vanished as
a congressional force, and in which the great domestic political issue
of our times is that of our cities. It is an irony of history that in
this environment our greatest international problem is how to cope
with unhappy peasants. It is ironic that we even have to think about
pacification of barefoot peasants in thatched huts, and it is not very
easy for us to do so. We find ourselves forced to solve problems that
arise in a kind of life that we as individuals have never experienced
— problems that arise in a state of development at the opposite end
from ours on the scale of societies.

It is ironic, too, in that 200 years ago we thought of ourselves
as experts on guerrilla warfare. We scoffed at the Redcoats who in
serried ranks assembled and marched across the fields to be harried
and tricked by American farmer snipers. We were then the people
who understood irregular political warfare.

Isolationists may say that we should not think about this prob-
lem, and that we should have no commitments beyond the limits of
our borders, or at most, beyond Europe. As I said before, I am not
tonight advocating or opposing any particular national policy. Iso-

3

lationism is certainly an alternative. It is an alternative which has a substantial, though not easily measurable, price in terms of what may easily happen around the world over the next thirty years. There is a case that can be made for such isolation. However, it represents a drastic reversal of the course of American policy since World War II. Rightly or wrongly, we came at that time to see America's future as dependent upon a healthy development of the whole world. We came to believe that progress towards higher living standards everywhere was good for us. We came to believe that establishment of more stable political systems, with greater political participation by the people and greater freedom of expression was something that made America more secure. Our foreign policy has been predicated upon these assumptions. We have spent a few billions of dollars on economic aid to countries all around the world because we felt that thereby we could buy some of this progress. We have also spent many more billions of dollars on military measures in Korea, the Middle East, Latin America, and now Viet Nam, for the same objectives.

One more point needs to be added about the isolationist alternative. The case for isolating America from concern with the backward peasant countries of the world must take account of a fact which China has now dramatically illustrated — the fact that thirty or fifty years hence, such countries, too, will have the capability to deliver nuclear missiles upon us if they wish.

Thus, without arguing the case, we must recognize that there has been a strong presumption in the American public mind, and in the American government, that we could not be indifferent to chaos, violence, backwardness, disorder, communism, or fascism in any part of the world. There has been a consensus that we should be concerned. The issue has been how we should go about doing something about it.

And so we find ourselves in the ironical situation that as a great urban industrial nation, which has no peasantry of its own, we try to answer the question of how to handle peasant violence and peasant discontent.

Peasant violence is nothing new. All through human history, intimidation, brutality, and violence have been endemic in most of the village societies in which men have lived. We have lost our perspective on this in the United States because we have become so conscious of violence in our city streets. As a matter of fact, cities in urban industrial advanced countries are probably the most peaceful environment that mankind has ever known. We have brought

4

private violence under control to an extraordinary measure. I am
perfectly aware of the riots of last summer. Compared with the
general record of riots in American history, however, which we tend
to forget have been almost continuous through our national life, the
number of victims of physical attack was minimal. Eighty-three lives
were lost last year in 75 riots. These riots, which so upset us, were
mostly addressed against property.

However we may assess our own situation, to believe that the
peasant villages of the past were peaceable communities is clearly
one version of the phantasy of the happy savage. Let me illustrate
the common state of rural violence by some examples from a couple
of other countries before we turn to Viet Nam.

The quality of violence and terror in Turkish villages is vividly
documented in the novels of Yashar Kemal (such as *Memet, My
Hawk*), which describe the factionalism, murders, feuds, and bullying that take place. Less dramatic than these fictional descriptions, but more conservative, are some data from a survey of Turkish villages conducted in 1963 under the direction of my colleague, Professor Frederick Frey. We interviewed 6,433 villages in about 450 villages that constituted a cross-section sample of rural Turkey. Forty-one per cent of the respondents lived in villages which had had land disputes with neighboring villages in the previous years. The mean number of persons committing in the previous year crimes that were reported came to about one recognized criminal in that year for every 75 adult males. Policemen enter the villages of 57 per cent of the villagers at least once a week. The only other outside official who enters anywhere near that often is the postman. Twenty-eight per cent of the villagers are served as much as once a week. Only 7 per cent are served by health officials as much as once a week (and that is the next most frequent visitor). Thus the government, as seen by the villager, is essentially the police force. While some sporadic violence is thus found in the majority of villages, blood feuds and vendettas are a problem in 8 per cent of the villages.

A similar picture emerges from descriptions of factional violence
in India where our stereotype, derived from Ghandi, is one of non-
violence. Rastogi gives a typical description of life in two Indian
villages.¹

¹ P. N. Rastogi, "Polarization at Thakurpur: The Process and the Pattern," in *Sociological Bulletin*, March 1966. See also "Factionalism, Politics and Crime in a UP Village," *The Eastern Anthropologist*, Vol. 17, No. 3, Sept.-Dec. 1964, "Anatomy of Factional Conflict," *Sociological Bulletin*, March 1967.

5

Social life in the last decade and a half at Thakurpur has been punctuated
by . . . arson, destruction of crops, thefts, costly litigations, violent fights
and even murders. Factionalism, politics and crime in this field situation
appear to form a nexus.

He tells of an election in 1949. The election issue was formu-
lated as a struggle between poor peasants and rich and hated zamin-
dars. The village chief "obliged some of his low caste supporters
by permitting them to occupy pieces of public land in an unautho-
rized manner" and appropriated some of it for himself, through
alteration of land records. After a new chief was elected, a Brahman
friend of the new chief "was beaten up by low caste villagers for
his alleged attempt to rape a low caste woman." The new chief also
refused a license to sell fireworks to a young Muslim tough whose
livelihood depended upon this trade. In consequence, the new chief
"was publicly beaten by nine persons . . . the Brahmans were
furious at this outrage and they threatened the families of the mis-
creants with . . . burning down of their houses." In retaliation
"a gang of twenty-five persons armed with country-made pistols,
spears, axes and lathis . . . roamed the village . . . beating and
insulting about a dozen of the close Brahman associates of the chief.
They also burned the houses of two of them, and destroyed the crops
in the field of a number of them."

The story continues through a third election, ultimately leading
to a murder.

The picture in the second village that Rastogi describes is much
the same. In that village, also, there was a faction that instigated
murder with no convictions. As a result "in the year 1955, there
was a spate of cases of arson, and as many as 30 incidents were
reported."

The picture in Vietnamese villages is similar, with one addi-
tional element. An over-arching intervillage organization has been
able to bring together one set of factions, thugs, and terrorists into a
highly organized movement with an ideology and a logistics train. In
the Indian and Turkish cases, no one has mobilized the propensity
to violence on more than a strictly local and transient basis. In Viet
Nam, the Viet Cong has done so with enormous skill and resources.
It is that situation that I wish to describe at some greater length
tonight.

In doing so I would like to draw in part on some historical
material, and also, in part, on what I have observed myself in the
course of about five months in Viet Nam over the past couple of
years. My comments are partly based upon a series of more than

G

eighty two-day intensive interviews with ex-members of the Viet
Cong, conducted in the summer of 1966.

What can we say about the structure of the Vietnamese village?
It was never a peaceful place. For 900 years, from the 10th to the
18th century, the Vietnamese pressed by conquest ever southward,
driving the Chams and Khmers back into the hills and jungles, until
finally, about the time of the French Revolution, they reached the
end of the Ca Mau Peninsula. As Paul Mus, the great French
authority on Viet Nam puts it:

Viet Nam did not just happen; she occupied her territory only at the price of incessant wars. . . . The army did not merely defend the country . . . it also organized the territory behind the front of its advances. As it conquered the land, it established a network of military villages, or villages of veterans, then a penal colony, especially suitable for political exiles, and finally a solid blanket of free villages of the ordinary sort.³

These ordinary villages were usually ruled by a council of elders
whose formal purpose was religious — the so-called cult committee
—but who were also the leading citizens and most prosperous
farmers of the village. They dealt with the mandarins from the
Court in a way that has often been described in perhaps the most
quoted single proverb about Vietnamese society "the Emperor's
writ stops at the village gate." To quote Mus again, "the state's
power extended only to the imposition of the tax or other obligation
on the village as a whole. Central authority did not deal with the
individual . . . except when criminal matters were brought be-
fore it."

Even water works, which in more complex systems of irrigation
required central control, were handled in the Delta of Viet Nam, in
a largely decentralized manner.

But decentralization did not imply that the villages were left
in peace. Does the following quotation sound familiar?

This country once so rich and fertile is now almost totally ruined and lacks
everything. . . . War and famine have caused such ravages that half the
inhabitants of the country have perished.

That was written by a French priest in 1776, when conditions
were even worse than now, for he continues,

Whole families take poison in order to die immediately and to avoid slow
death by starvation. Mothers eat their babies. One often sees human flesh
sold in the market.⁴

³ "Viet Nam: A Nation Off Balance," *The Yale Review*, Vol. 51, Summer 1952, pp. 524-33.

⁴ Joseph Buttinger, *The Smaller Dragon*, Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., New York, 1958, pp. 264-65.

7

Out of these conditions grew a massive peasant rebellion headed by the three Tay Son brothers who succeeded in controlling part or all of the country for about three decades. These revolutionists described as "malcontents, smugglers, bandits" were expected by the peasants, as Buttinger tells us, to reduce taxes and forced labor and to redistribute rice fields concentrated in the hands of the landlords. But like every rebellion since, including the Viet Cong rebellion, the peasants were disappointed. As has happened in every instance, the taxes were increased, and the rebellion lost its voluntary support. Nonetheless, like some of their successors, the Tay Son rulers retained their power for a while by military force, and by the claim to be nationalist opponents of the foreign invaders. In this instance the Chinese: "When they entered Saigon in March 1782, they burned and pillaged the Chinese shops of Cholon and massacred more than 10,000 Chinese of that city."⁴

All of that happened even before the French occupation. The years from then on continued to be punctuated by innumerable guerrilla movements.

The bases for these uprisings were problems in the villages, but the revolts that showed the greatest viability were ones that unified the discontent from village to village by providing an ideology, such as that of the Bu Son Ky Huong, the Hoa Hao, the Cao Dai, and the Communists.

The first three of these movements were all religious. The Bu Son Ky Huong was founded in 1849 by a young man who came to be known as the Tay An Buddha. In the midst of an epidemic of the plague, one day after being seized by a vision, he proclaimed that one could be safe from the disease if one truly had faith in the Buddha and carried a yellow piece of paper with four Chinese symbols. Within months he had gathered hundreds of thousands of followers in the Delta. This new sect was anticlerical, opposing worship in the temples and opposing the power of the Buddhist priesthood. They favored simple home worship. Their communities, as observed in the decades following, were cleaner than those of their neighbors; their adherents worked harder. To those of you with some background in the sociology of religion, I suggest a comparison with Max Weber's description of the Puritan sects in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Bu Son Ky Huong sect gradually turned into a guerrilla movement against the French, and by 1916 they were destroyed by the French.

⁴ *Ibid.*

8

The Cao Dai sect was founded in 1926 and was also a combina-
tion of religion, political reform, and an army. The principal gods
that they worship from the present era are a Vietnamese poet born
in 1492, who represents the modernizing movement in the develop-
ing countries, and Victor Hugo, who represents for them the French
radical tradition. They, too, became an armed nationalist move-
ment.

The Hoa Hao were founded in 1939. Like Tay An Buddha,
Huynh Phu So, their founder, was also a young man seized by
visions. He prophesied in 1939 that a great nation would conquer
Viet Nam, driving the French out, and that they, in turn would be
defeated, leaving Viet Nam finally free and happy. When World
War II broke out, So's prophesies seemed confirmed, and within
a few months he, too, had hundreds of thousands of followers in the
Delta. His preachings, too, were anticlerical, advocating simple
worship in the home. He, too, founded a movement that was reli-
gious and political, and which also maintained a guerrilla army. To-
day the Hoa Hao are, next to the Viet Cong, the most successful
political organization in Viet Nam. They have a million and a half
followers. The province that they control is fully pacified. There
are no Viet Cong operations in it. Of their villages, too, one can
say that they are cleaner, and that the members work harder than
the neighboring peasants. There has been no land reform among
them. The Hoa Hao ideology is not equalitarian, but the peasants
are not cheated, and grievances are heard through the channels of
the Hoa Hao organization. The Popular Forces in the Hoa Hao
villages are well organized to keep the peace.

In each of the above three cases a mystical religion has pro-
vided some organization extending above the village level and per-
mitting armed villagers to organize their own communities.

This is the pattern in which the Communists also found that
they could succeed in Asia. In China, in the 1920's and early 1930's,
the more orthodox Communists (such as Li Li San) tried to build
an urban proletarian Marxist movement; it failed. The urban
workers in the developing countries have seldom been Communists.
In Viet Nam today the labor movement is one of the strongest bulwarks against the Viet Cong. Mao Tse-Tung discovered a new
formula for Communist organization, and in Viet Nam Ho Chi
Minh followed the Chinese model. The Communists can readily fit
into the traditional mould of the peasant guerrilla movement.

9

The two developing countries in which the Communist movement was most successful in the 1930's were China and Viet Nam. Viet Nam has a long history of Communism and therefore a long history of anti-Communism; the two go together. The Communist movement in Viet Nam is not, as some would like to believe, a Titoist moderate reformist peasant movement. It is, on the contrary, one of the most dogmatic, left-wing militant Communist parties of the now multicolored Communist world, and it has been so for a long time. The blood purge has been one of its standard instruments. The North Vietnamese government has exterminated tens of thousands of peasants in North Viet Nam who resisted the collectivization of agriculture there. Ho Chi Minh purged all the Trotskyist leaders in Viet Nam in a night of long knives in the 1940's. The Viet Minh assassinated Huynh Phu So as they have since systematically assassinated any rival local leadership that looked as though it might become effective. Obviously the Viet Cong are ruthless, that is clear. But that is not the secret of their success. The important point is that they have used Communist ideology to channel and control violence that already was in part endemic in the situation.

That Communist channelling of village violence has created a new kind of situation in which village violence and modern international warfare interact on a world scene. Today village thugs, if they line up with a major power, can get recoilless rifles, shaped charges, rockets, and other devices that escalate terror much beyond what their ancestors could do with sticks and stones, bows and arrows, or rifles. With this escalation, village violence can now become a fuse to international warfare. Under these circumstances it behooves us to study the problem of rural violence, and to acquire some sophistication about this dangerous trigger to bigger things.

So far we have established the fact that movements which offer some promises to the peasants and which organize the thugs and terrorists who are there anyhow onto a broader basis than the individual village may be quite effective in a traditional peasant environment. That conclusion raises more questions than it answers, however. Why do the peasants believe the promises that are never kept? Since it is the peasants in the end who suffer and die, what is the attraction of guerrilla life? Why are the guerrillas so hard to defeat? Most of the cliché answers that you will read in popular articles such as the assertion that the guerrillas offer land reform or are motivated by nationalism or idealism are at least 80 per cent wrong.

10

At best they play on relevant details which are part of something quite different.

Our present low sophistication about village violence is illustrated by the wide and easy acceptance of the cliché that local terrorists and guerrillas must have the support of the local population to operate. The presence of a successful guerrilla movement is frequently offered by otherwise sophisticated observers as evidence that the population supports the rebels.

The cliché that the people support the rebels is of course part of the ideology of guerrilla movements. It helps a guerrilla's morale for him to believe that he is the spokesman of the people. The Maoists and their followers have turned this into a self-confirming prophecy. They have promulgated the notion that the guerrillas are as fish and the people as the water and that the life of the guerrilla depends upon this hospitable environment. This ideological cliché whose lack of foundation we must insist upon serves many useful purposes. It helps the rebels' leadership to impose discipline on their fractious terrorist followers to maintain good public relations toward the populace. It provides a basis for indoctrinating violent peasant boys into avoiding the enmity of the local population by maintaining polite and correct behavior. In that way they limit their confrontation to a rather narrowly defined enemy whom the movement wishes to engage rather than to the broad public.

The myth that the rebels are the voice of the people helps the terrorist feel self-justification as he taxes and exploits the local population. When he goes in to take food at the point of a gun he feels differently about it if he can politely educate the victim of his theft that he should really be happy to make his little contribution to the people's cause. The wise victim, in the face of the gun, does not give the guerrilla reason to doubt his acceptance of this thesis.

This too is nothing new in Vietnamese life. There are proverbs that describe how the Vietnamese peasant, faced with civil disorder, bends with the wind to whichever side is there with force.

Even so, we who live in modern urban society may find it hard to believe that it need not be true that a successful band of terrorists, who dominate a rural area, somehow are favored by the people amongst whom they live. Under the circumstances of preindustrial society, however, the village terrorist can function despite local dislike of him because his society is so lacking in the facilities and resources which we take for granted as instruments for catching and restraining the aggressive bully. We are talking of a society

11

in which there are no telephones, where there are hardly any roads, where the number of people employed in organizing the society, as distinct from the primary tasks of farming, herding, hunting, fishing, etc., is trivial. In a Vietnamese village there may be half a dozen merchants, a school teacher, and half a dozen individuals who represent the total political function of the state. The village budget for communal activities including control may be measured in hundreds of dollars rather than in thousands. The district town where there is a military post and some significant kinds of organizational activity may be in terms of time and effort more remote from the village than Washington is to various American cities today. The result is that when an act of terror is committed in these typical rural environments, most of the population shrug their shoulders in fear and regret, watch the known perpetrator going around freely in the community, and rely at most upon the possibility of revenge by blood feud if the victim has not been chosen well and there remain strong and daring potential avengers. That is the case for the individual bully. When bullies become highly organized in a gang their capability of continuation of domination is, of course, even greater.

In the typical Vietnamese village, local authority is exercised by a village council and a village chief, with a few specialized cadres, such as perhaps a medical corpsman, a representative of the Ministry of Information, and a few hamlet chiefs for clusters of residential units of which the village is composed. This village organization does not have a police force. Police activity is directed from the district level. The village often will have a Popular Force post, but the function of the Popular Forces is security against Viet Cong attacks. They are not used for policing.

These Popular Force soldiers are local villagers. They are generally recruited from the bottom of the village hierarchy, being neither landowners nor even tenant farmers, but only casual laborers. Nonetheless, they are local boys and get along with their fellow villagers. Unlike the regular army or, indeed, unlike the PF themselves when on rare occasions they are in villages far from home, they do not steal nor do they abuse their neighbors. On the other hand, almost without exception, they have little role in the life of the village. They see their job as protecting the fort in which they live.

What I am describing is a village under some measure of government control, or at least partially so. Before the Tet offensive,

12

perhaps one-fifth of the hamlets (and note that a hamlet is only a portion of a village) were under full Viet Cong control and quite outside the operation of the government system. Despite rather panicky news stories, that number probably has changed only moderately. These Viet Cong hamlets are cut off from the larger society as much as possible. Peasants are discouraged from going to market. Access roads are torn up. Man traps are dug and mine fields laid around. Newspapers from the city are prohibited, and radio listening limited to Hanoi and to Radio Liberation.

Even in that large majority of the villages in which government organization exists at least by day, however, the government has a rather limited capability for maintenance of order or prevention of terrorism by the Viet Cong at night, as was abundantly demonstrated at Tet.

The ineffectuality of the police and armed forces partly accounts for their unpopularity. It is a vicious circle. Unless they are effective they will not get popular support, and unless they have popular support they cannot work well. Where these forces offer a real increment in security, they are found to be quite popular. That, however, has been the exception in Viet Nam, as in peasant societies generally. More often they have not had the means and resources to effectually keep terrorist bands out of the village. Skirmishes result in damage to bystanders without clear beneficial consequences.

Lacking efficacy, therefore, the police and armed forces in Viet Nam historically have been viewed not as conveyors of order but rather as exploiters apt to misbehave individually and apt to enter the village primarily for the collection of taxes. Local acts of expropriation are expected by the Vietnamese peasants, as by most peasants throughout world history, as more or less inevitable in the nature of things. The peasant has long since learned to yield some portion of his property to any armed men who demand it. Legitimacy may be accorded by him to such bands of armed men if they make good on their promise of protection in return. Neither the Viet Cong nor the government has established that capability yet. The two sides are still referred to by almost all Vietnamese peasants as rival governments and are primarily viewed as rival tax collectors. The Viet Cong differ from other collectors and bandits and government representatives only in a number of secondary characteristics. They are more ruthless than the government representatives and therefore more to be feared. They are, however, at the same time more disciplined, and therefore the possibility of erratic individual behavior

13

is less to be feared. They are trained to be polite. Let me quote a
few relevant comments by ex-Viet Cong:

The VC soldiers will even help you to build your house. They will even take out their handkerchief to wipe the nose of a kid. In the beginning the VC collected taxes and land rentals at low rates, but soon they increased the rates and daily the villagers had to pay all kinds of taxes. Even on the occasion of a fighter's marriage the villagers had to contribute sums of money — the same on the occasion of a fighter's death or of anything. The propagandists used to say that the Liberation Front was organized by the people. It stood for democracy, that these methods were needed to carry on the war against the dictator, that they were really just a part of the people . . . in fact . . . how else can we keep up the effort to feed the troops? Our 50% tax compared to a 20% tax by the government is necessary.

By imposing rigid order and discipline in the exercise of their\extortion, the Viet Cong create for themselves the aura of a tyrannical government rather than allowing the normless violence that
otherwise pervades the villages. They recruit the same young element that would otherwise be violent village toughs and give them
an outlet for their impulses and passions, but under tight control.
As one ex-Viet Cong said in criticism of a leaflet:

What the leaflet said was true except that they said that the VC came into
the villages and shot to death the civilian population, which is not true . . .
they would arrest only people reporting to district cadres as acting as spies
... and they would decapitate, not shoot them. . . .

Another said, talking of the provincial party secretary,

Every act of terrorism that happened in that province . . . is the work of
the Party secretary, because he is the only one who is responsible for this
kind of action. He directs all the security agents to commit such acts of
terror.

Q. Do I understand that the rules of the Party provide that no act of terror can be approved without his approval?

A. As far as killing or slaughtering is concerned, I can say that that sort of thing is done entirely by the decision of the higher authority. Of course in every country or in every region there are some bad guys who act upon their own will. In the Front such a person would be subjected to punitive measures.

The party policy was indeed to kill all government agents or
employees in a hamlet except usually the school teacher and medical
cadre. It was the policy of the Front to destroy all the government
organizations and all the individuals among their officials who did
not choose to resign.

Note that I have said almost nothing up to this point about

14

land reform. It is of some importance. It is, perhaps, the third or
fourth most important issue to the villager. Typically taxes, rents,
and physical security are a more acute problem to him than land
title, desirable as that would be in the best of all possible worlds.
What the Viet Cong, or any movement that appeals to the peasants,
offers him, in promise at least, is all of these things. By cutting the
village off from the predatory action of urban-based officialdom, the
peasant is protected from the tax collector, the rent collector, and
the undisciplined bands of armed men. That protection from urban
predators is the main thing that a guerrilla movement can offer to
the peasants.

In Viet Nam, as in most peasant societies for thousands of
years, the villager tends to look upon the government as simply one
more predator who, while it may promise protection against other
predators, is primarily to be feared. The government is the tax
collector, the policeman, the marauding soldier, and in the best of
all possible worlds these will be kept out of the village. To villagers
in Viet Cong villages, the Viet Cong is the protection association
against the government. It has the advantage of being local, but
to sustain itself it must tax and be punitive, too. Indeed, as the Viet
Cong has suffered reverses, its taxes and its draft have become more
severe than the government's. Initially it could offer a bargain, but
this was a loss leader it could not long maintain. Like all new
bidders for power in peasant society, the Viet Cong offered to keep
the government out at lower taxes and with less severe behavior, but
eventually it, too, became just another government.

As in the case of the Tay An rebellion, Viet Cong taxes have
become much higher than government taxes; the Viet Cong draft at
fifteen compares to the government's eighteen; nor has land reform
proved much of an asset to the Viet Cong. Land reform has, indeed,
simply been a kind of patronage. Land is taken from government
supporters and given to Viet Cong supporters. Needless to say, Viet
Cong support has some relation to previous wealth. Those who had
land already do not generally support the Viet Cong's reshuffling
of it. Those who supported the Viet Cong tended to be people with
less land, so in a sense it was taking from those who had and giving
to those who had not, but it was not a matter of taking from all of
those who had and giving to all of those who had not. It was taking
from their enemies who had and giving it to their party faithful who
had not. This is not as attractive a prospect to a peasant as it seems
to have been to some American journalists, particularly if the

15

peasant realizes that on the next round the government is likely to
punish those who have seized land via the Viet Cong, giving it back
to their own supporters. Most peasants, it turns out, would like to
leave the issue of title unresolved for the moment, and simply be
assured of the right to farm with low taxes and low rents. The Viet
Cong has largely dropped land reform in recent years because it,
too, discovered that it was a hornet's nest.

We have said enough now in presenting the problem. We see
why there does not exist in a primitive peasant society those re-
sources which we take for granted, which are used for effectively
repressing violence. We see why the peasant is relatively willing to
see that violence which has largely been exploitative in his experi-
ence channelized against the urban outside world. We see how
movements that can formulate that promise as an ideology (and
particularly if they can provide a mystical sanction for it) can co-
ordinate and mobilize the violence that is endemic there anyhow.

We have tried, with our description of the violence and injus-
tice in villages and the depradations rather than correctives that
come from outside, to explain why a local violent group running
an effective protection racket may have some attraction to villagers.
We left unanswered, however, another question: What is the attrac-
tion of the guerrilla movement to those who join it? Of course
most who join the Viet Cong are drafted. They do not join alto-
gether voluntarily. The enthusiasts who join up freely are very few
indeed. Even in the case of the draftees however, there is a certain
minimum element of voluntariness. They may recognize that it is
a matter of being drafted into one army or the other, then they let
themselves get drafted into the army of their choice. After being
drafted, they accept the Viet Cong draft with the same resignation
with which soldiers everywhere accept a draft from their govern-
ment. Relatively few try to escape. This serving in the guerrilla
army is acceptable widely enough to suggest a need for some ex-
planation. There is, of course, the element of excitement that has
attracted a few young men to every guerrilla movement since Robin
Hood. That, however, is a very minor factor. What is more im-
portant is the fact that the guerrilla life, by peasant standards, is
not too bad. Until the Americans took the initiative and started
attacking in 1966, the average guerrilla fought only about one day
a month. The rest of the time he spent in his jungle hideout in train-
ing, preparatory activity, and planning. The few fights they had
were carefully planned attacks on points where they would have the

16

predominance of strength and where casualties could be expected
to be low. There were, of course, hardships to the guerrilla life in
the jungle, but to a peasant for whom the alternative is to dig in the
fields in the tropical sun, the hardships were not so striking. Further-
more, for the ambitious peasant boy, the Viet Cong offered a kind
of middle-class existence in the sense that he no longer had to be a
farmer with sweat and toil entailed. He was now a politician, a
cadre, to use their own word, a kind of lower level local bureaucrat,
who administered and organized things instead of working. This,
indeed, was one of the great attractions of the Viet Cong for an
uneducated peasant boy who couldn't make it up the ladder on the
government's side. Viet Cong politics offered the way out of peasant
life, the way to become a minor official.

What then is the prospect of pacification? How can a Com-
munist movement that has all these advantages be defeated? Clearly,
it will not be defeated simply by large numbers of heavily armed
troops. These may destroy conventional forces on the other side,
what we call in Viet Nam the main forces of the enemy. However,
in Viet Nam even that is made difficult by the special circumstances
that the really powerful, well-organized, and well-armed enemy
troops are also a regular army being sent in from the outside through
conveniently located sanctuaries across conveniently located frontiers.
That, however, takes us outside of our issue of tonight, for we are
not talking about the war between the U.S. forces and the North
Vietnamese army. We are talking about the village insurgency, which
the North Vietnamese army is backing up.

The answer clearly is that the Communist organization, at the
village level, can be defeated only by a rival organization at the
village level, such as has been provided in parts of Viet Nam by
the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai, and in some villages by the Catholic
church. Despite the attacks that the North Vietnamese army and
the Viet Cong were able to launch on the cities during the Tet, it
is quite wrong to contend, as some do, that the Viet Cong in the
villages is substantially unbeatable. That would be true only if it
had the solid support of the villagers, which it does not. It prob-
ably is true that it is unbeatable by sheer military action. It is beat-
able only on its own terms, that is, by the organization of the village
in a way that mobilizes the arms in the village on behalf of a wider
organization that the villagers adhere to.

The arms are there in the village. There are an average of
sixty Popular Force soldiers in every village in Viet Nam. These

17

local men live there among their fellow citizens. They are in theory
backed up by regional forces and Army of Viet Nam units, in case
of crisis. In practice they are generally ill-armed, ununiformed and
not backed up in time of need.

Above them is a village government which until last spring was
appointed from the outside; now, in one of the most important re-
forms that could possibly happen, they are where possible elected.
That is a turning point in Vietnamese events which we, in this
country, have tended to minimize. About a third of the incumbents
were defeated in the election — an extraordinarily high proportion
for elections anywhere and certainly testimony to the fact that these
elections were not controlled.

These local officials, however, now report up to a structure
which does not respond to their needs. The district and province
chiefs above them are career officers serving out a military assign-
ment. Reforms that reach down to utilize and raise the status of the
popular forces to make them a significant factor in the life of their
villages and that also reach up to provide district and province gov-
ernment that reflects and responds to the village and hamlet officials
would create a new situation indeed. More accurately, it would
not create a new situation; it would create on a wider scale the
situation that already exists in An Giang Province where the Hoa
Hao dominate.

Lest I leave you with the wrong impression that I think this is
easy, let me close by pointing out that this is the kind of reform
for which peasant revolts have been asking for hundreds of years
and which urban based Mandarin regimes have never wished to
give. But the fault lies not only in Saigon; the fault lies much more
here with us. We have not understood the problem; we have only
just begun to try to understand the problem. We have tried to
lecture the Vietnamese as though they were already a modern, de-
veloped country and have given them much irrelevant advice. We
have said to them, "Get yourself an honest, idealistic government in
Saigon and all will be well," when half the population in Viet Nam
does not even know who the head of the government in Saigon is.
We have scolded them for lack of patriotism and idealism, being
unwilling to fight communism in their country, when most of them
were preoccupied with the problem of protecting their lives and
their food in their villages. Most important of all we have assumed
that the central problem was a war in which the decision would be
made by the dominance of forces and fire power between opposing

18

sides, when we should have been worrying about organization of
political machines at the village level. When we came to realize
that the war was a political war, we thought it could be won by
improving living standards so as to "win the hearts and minds of
men." We have actually done a remarkable job at improving living
standards. One thing that few people in the U.S. realize is that Viet
Nam, in the midst of war, has also been in the midst of an economic
boom. At least it was until the events of Tet. Everywhere you look
in the lowland villages, radios, sewing machines, motorcycles, ferti-
lizer, new strains of rice, and pumps are transforming the Viet-
namese way of life. The boom has not been limited to the profiteers
or businessmen. It is also in the boondocks. But economic progress
alone will not change the political balance of power in an anomic
society ridden by fear. We still, however, have missed the essential
point, which a Tammany Hall politician would have understood.
Organization in the boondocks in terms of local self-expression is the
missing ingredient. The conditions for political organization are all
there; they have simply not been used. The fear of the VC is there.
The PF are there ready to form a security network. The tradition
of village organization is there. What has been missing so far among
the Vietnamese and the Americans is an intellectual and emotional
grasp of the significance and conditions for political organization in
the boondocks.

19

PEACE RESEARCH SOCIETY: PAPERS, IX, CAMBRIDGE CONFERENCE, 1968

VILLAGE VIOLENCE AND INTERNATIONAL VIOLENCE

by Ithiel de Sola Pool*

All through human history intimidation, brutality and violence have been endemic in most of the village societies in which men have lived. Today in the urban, industrial, advanced countries private violence has been brought under control in extraordinary measure despite continued pockets of violence among the most disadvantaged, least socialized, urban elements (often, in fact, recent migrants from the country). The cities we are referring to are modern cities. Underdeveloped cities are also the scene of much violence. (How they compare with their rural hinterland I do not know, and that is a question worth some study). In consequence, western urban intellectuals, such as peace researchers, are apt to think of the problem of violence solely in terms of the continuing highly organized area in which we conduct our relations outside of the realm of law and by mutual threat, namely, international conflict. The enormity of the danger of violence between nuclearly armed superpowers draws our main attention and leads us to neglect the fact that in the world today a majority of the population still live in areas of relatively uncontrolled local violence.

The problem of village violence is brought back sharply to our awareness when two kinds of violence—village terrorism and modern armed warfare—come to interact. Today village thugs can line up with major powers to get recoilless rifles, shaped charges and other devices that escalate terror much beyond what their ancestors could achieve with sticks and stones, bows and arrows, or even rifles. When escalated village violence can become a fuse to modern international warfare, it would be well for peace researchers to study the problem of rural violence and to acquire such sophistication about it as students of arms control have in recent years acquired about the problems of nuclear deterrence.

The present low sophistication among urban scholars about village violence is illustrated by the wide and easy acceptance of the cliché that without the support of the local population terrorists and guerrillas cannot operate. The presence of a successful guerrilla movement is frequently offered by otherwise sophisticated observers as evidence that the population must support the rebels.¹

The cliché that the people support the rebels is, of course, part of the ideology of guerrilla movements. It helps a guerrilla's morale for him to believe that he is the spokesman of the people. The Maoists and their followers have turned this into a self-fulfilling prophecy. They have promulgated the notion

* The author is associated with the Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

¹ For a rare statement of the contrary view, see Charles Wolf, *United States Policy and the Third World*, Boston: Little Brown, 1967, p. 46.

88

that the guerrillas are as fish and the people as the water and that the life
of the guerrilla depends upon this hospitable environment. This ideological
cliché, whose label of foundation we must insist upon, serves many useful
purposes. It helps the rebels' leadership to impose on their fractious terrorist
followers, discipline and the maintenance of good public relations toward the
populace. It provides a basis for indoctrinating violent peasant boys into polite
and correct behavior that avoids the enmity of the local population. In that
way the rebels limit their confrontation to a rather narrowly defined enemy
whom the movement chooses to engage rather than to the broad public. It is
a familiar fact that in Viet Nam today, as in China earlier, the Communist
troops show more discipline in their treatment of the peasants than do the
regular armies. This provides a shadow of evidence for the theory of the fish
and the water for it is to some extent a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if the
population is not ideologically for the rebellion, they may recognize that the
rebel troops are less to be feared than the more poorly disciplined government
forces.

The myth that the rebels are the voice of the people serves a second
purpose in that it helps the terrorist in feeling self-justification as he taxes and
exploits the local population. When he takes food at the point of a gun he
feels differently about it if he can politely educate the victim of his theft that
he should really be happy to make his little contribution to the people's cause.
The wise victim, in the face of the gun, does not give the guerrilla reason to
doubt his acceptance of this thesis.

Modern guerrilla movements have refined the populist ideological basis for
their morale considerably, but there is nothing new to it. I recommend to
modern students of rural violence a rereading of *Robin Hood*. That idealized
band of merry men were according to the fable always doing good for the peo-
ple and explaining patiently to their victims how they should mend their ways.

Persons who live in modern urban society may find it hard to believe that
a successful band of terrorists, who dominate a rural area, need not be favored
by the people amongst whom they live. People who live in well organized
polities may find it hard to conceive how an unpopular terrorist band can
survive. It is true that the best support for what Marx and Lenin called
"special bodies of armed men" is consensus as to their legitimacy. The police
and armies with which we are familiar can, in most cases, walk around freely,
unarmed, one at a time, because the population accepts the constitutional legiti-
macy of these special bodies of armed men, even if in some cases (such as
that of the speeder looking through his rear view mirror) they fear them as
concrete individuals. The village terrorist seldom enjoys this advantage of
well-established recognition of his legitimacy (though sometimes, as where the
terror is exercised by a hereditary aristocracy, he may) but under the circum-
stances of pre-industrial society he can function nonetheless. He can do so
because his society is so lacking in the facilities and resources which we take
for granted as instruments for catching and restraining the aggressive bully.
Peasant societies are societies in which there are no telephones; there are hardly
any roads; the number of people employed in organizing the society as distinct
from engaging in the primary tasks of farming, herding, hunting, fishing, etc.,
is trivial. In a peasant village there may be half a dozen merchants, a school

POOL: VILLAGE AND INTERNATIONAL VIOLENCE

89

teacher, and two or three individuals who represent the total political function of the state. The village budget for communal activities including control may be measured in hundreds of dollars rather than thousands. The district town where there may be a military post and some significant kinds of organizational activity is in terms of time and effort more remote from the village than Washington is from various American cities today. The result is that in these typical rural environments, when an act of terror is committed, most of the population shrug their shoulders in fear and regret, watch the known perpetrator going around freely in the community, and rely at most upon the possibility of revenge by blood feud if the victim has not been chosen well and there remain strong and daring potential avengers. This is the case with the individual bully. When bullies organize in a gang their capability of continuation and domination is, of course, even greater.

So far I have stated a set of propositions and argued them a priori. Full evidence would require a rather extensive program of studies of violence in peasant societies. That remains to be done, but today I would like to offer some illustrative data from three peasant societies, namely, Turkey, India, and Vietnam.

The quality of violence and terror in Turkish villages is perhaps most vividly documented in the novels of Yashar Kemal, such as *Memet, My Hawk*, which describe the factionalism, murders, feuds and bullying that takes place. Less dramatic than these fictional descriptions, and more conservative, are some data from a survey of Turkish villages conducted in 1963 under the direction of my colleague, Professor Frederick Frey. We interviewed 6,433 villagers in about 450 villages that constituted a cross-section sample of rural Turkey. The median village had a population of about 600. Forty-one percent of the respondents lived in villages which had had land disputes with neighboring villages in the previous year. The mean number of persons committing crimes in the past year was reported to be two, undoubtedly an underestimate, but, even if accurate, that is about one recognized criminal in the last year for every 75 adult males. Policemen enter the villages of 57% of the villagers at least once a week. The only other outside official who enters anywhere near that often is the postman; twenty-eight percent of the villagers are in villages served by him as much as once a week. Only 7% are served by health officials as much as once a week (and that is the next most prevalent visitor). Thus, the government, as seen by the villager, is essentially the police. Some sporadic violence is thus found in the majority of villages, and, in addition, blood feuds and vendettas are a problem in 8% of the villages.

There is a rather large literature on factional conflict in South Asian villages.² Rastogi gives a typical description of life in two villages, Thakurpur and Vijaypur, Uttar Pradesh.

² See, for example: Frederick Barth, "Segmentary Opposition and the Theory of Games: A Study of Pathan Organization," *Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute* 89, 5-21, 1959; Oscers Lewis, *Group Dynamics in a North Indian Village*, 1954; P. N. Rastogi, "Polarization at Thakurpur; The Process and the Pattern," *Sociological Bulletin*, March 1966; P. N. Rastogi, "Factionalism, Politics and Crime in a UP Village," *The Eastern Anthropologist*, Vol. 17, No. 3, Sept.-Dec. 1964; P. N. Rastogi, "Anatomy of Factional Conflict," *Sociological Bulletin*, March 1967.

90

"Social life in the last decade and a half at Thakurpur," Rastogi tells us, "has been punctuated by tension-laden" episodes such as arson, destruction of crops, thefts, costly litigations, violent fights and even murders. Factionalism, politics and crime in this field situation appear to form a nexus... The phenomena here also intergrade with the prevalent problem of dacoity.

A Kalar ex-zamindar sought the Pradhan's election in 1949... The election issue was formulated and propagated by the Thakur peasant in terms of a struggle between poor peasants vs the rich and hated zamindars, out to reestablish their supremacy... During his tenure as Pradhan, the Thakur obliged some of his low caste supporters by permitting them to occupy pieces of public land in an unauthorized manner and appropriated about fifteen bighas himself through alteration of land records... A new Pradhan was elected in 1955. A Brahman friend of the new Pradhan was beaten up by low caste villagers for his alleged attempt to rape a low caste woman... The new Pradhan refused "a license for pyrotechnics to a Muslim young man whose livelihood ostensibly depended upon this trade. The Muslim was a village tough, known to be involved in various dacoities... In consequence of these 'partial' actions the new Pradhan was publicly beaten by nine persons... Brahmans were furious at this outrage and they threatened the families of the miscreants with dire consequences, including the burning down of their houses and turning them out of the village. Coming to know of this, the absconding persons organized a gang of twenty-five persons armed with country-made pistols, spears, axes and lathis, and roamed the village, badly beating and insulting about a dozen of the close Brahman associates of the Pradhan. They also burned the houses of two of them, and destroyed the crops in the fields of a number of them...

In the third election in 1960, the Muslim who was instrumental in the public humiliation of the second Pradhan stood up as a candidate for the office... The Muslim won by a majority of two hundred votes... The Muslim, too, soon became enmeshed in a web of violence and intrigue. In 1963, his closest friend, Thakur (S) was brutally murdered, attacked by twelve persons. He himself would have also been murdered at the same time but for his going ahead of the place where Thakur was attacked. He, however, apprehends attempts on his life and does not presently go out often alone and unaccompanied."

The picture in the second village is much the same. There, too, there was a faction that instigated murder with no convictions. As a result "in the year 1955, there was a spate of cases of arson, as many as 30 incidents were reported... both sides indulged in it."

The picture in Vietnamese villages is similar with one additional element. Overarching intervillage organization has been able to bring together two factions, thugs and terrorists, into a highly organized movement with both an ideology and a logistic train. In the Indian and Turkish cases no one has mobilized the propensity of violence on more than a strictly local and transient basis.

My comments on Vietnam are based partly upon a series of over 80 two-day intensive interviews with ex-members of the Viet Cong, conducted in the summer of 1966.

91

In the typical Vietnamese village local authority is exercised by a village council and village chiefs, with a few specialized cadre, such as perhaps a medical corpsman, a representative of the Ministry of Information, etc. This village organization does not have a police force. Police activity is directed from the district level. The village often will have a Popular Force post but the function of the Popular Forces is security against Viet Cong attacks. They are not used for policing.

What I am describing is a village under some measure of government control, or at least partially so. That is the overwhelming majority of all villages. Perhaps one-sixth of the hamlet population is under full Viet Cong control and quite outside the operation of the government system. These Viet Cong hamlets are cut off from the larger society as much as possible. Peasants are discouraged from going to market. Access roads are torn up. Man traps are dug and mine fields laid around the hamlet. Newspapers from the city are prohibited and radio listening limited to Hanoi and to Radio Liberation. The organization and operation of such hamlets has been little studied. It should be studied more. But it is not the role of violence in such villages that I am here describing. I am considering the government or contested villages in which government organization exists at least by day. Even in that fiv-sixths, however, there is rather limited capability for maintenance of order or prevention of terror. As has so often been commented, the government presence does not prevent the Viet Cong from operating in most villages at night. The government effort has been marked in the past two years by much-improved discipline, administration, and welfare programs, but even so the security that the government can offer in an environment without roads, tele-phones, local police forces, or substantial professionally run community organ-ization is very limited indeed. Most of the Viet Cong's violence consists of easily-hidden, small-scale, activity that can be carried on by a few men under cover of jungle or dark. Assassination or planting mines in dirt roads or firing a recoilless rifle from a tree-protected ambush can be the work of a man or two or three. A couple of men can carry a rocket launcher to a site seven miles from the target. These hard-to-detect preparations do need backup by crude cottage factories for mines, a logistic train for ammunition, and the commo-liaison system of couriers for command and control. But even in total the terror organization is the kind of easily hidden underground that flourishes as rackets even in the well-controlled environment of a modern city. It operates even more easily in primitive countryside if the terrorist organization ever gets itself established. The normal violence of village life continues, managed and reinforced by Communist organization. Neither large conventional armies nor the distaste of the local populace serves as an effective check on small bands of organized terrorists in a backward rural environment.

The ineffectuality of the police and armed forces partly account for their unpopularity. Where these forces offer a real increment of security they are found to be quite popular. That, however, has been the exception in Vietnam as in peasant societies generally. More often they have not had the means and resources to effectually keep terrorist bands out of the village. Skirmishes result in damage to bystanders without clear beneficial consequences.

Lacking efficacy, therefore, the police and armed forces in Vietnam have

92

historically not been viewed as conveyors of order but rather as exploiters, apt to misbehave individually and apt to enter the village primarily for the collection of taxes. Local acts of extortion are expected by the Vietnamese peasants, as by most peasants through world history, as more or less inevitable in the nature of things. The peasant has long since learned to yield some portion of his property to any armed men who demand it. Legitimacy may be accorded by the peasant to such bands of armed men if they make good on their promise of protection in return. Neither the Viet Cong nor the government has established that capability yet. Two years ago the Viet Cong seemed to many peasants to offer the better prospect of security and protection from exploitation. Today that expectation has certainly been reversed. The government offers a better prospect on those scores in the eyes of most peasants, but it still has a long way to go to establish conclusively its legitimacy and effectiveness. The two sides are still referred to by almost all Vietnamese peasants as rival governments and are primarily viewed as rival tax collectors. The Viet Cong differ from other collectors and bandits and government representatives only in a member of secondary characteristics. They are more ruthless than the government representatives and therefore more to be feared. They are, however, at the same time more disciplined, and therefore the possibility of erratic individual behavior is less to be feared. They are trained to be polite. Let me quote a few relevant comments by ex-Viet Cong dating back to the period two years ago when the status of the Viet Cong in the countryside was substantially higher than it is today:

> "The VC win the heart of the people. They have a heavy tax but they even make the people glad to pay the heavy tax because the VC are so good to them. The VC soldiers will even help you to build your house. They will even take out their handkerchief to wipe the nose of a kid."

> "In the beginning the VC collected taxes and land rentals at low rates, but soon they increased the rates and daily the villagers had to pay all kinds of taxes. Even on the occasion of a fighter's marriage the villagers had to contribute sums of money; the same on the occasion of a fighter's death or of anything."

> "The propagandists used to say that the Liberation Front was organized by the people. It stood for democracy, that these methods were needed to carry on the war against the dictator, that they were really just a part of the people...in fact...how else can we keep up the effort to feed the troops? Our 50% tax compared to a 20% tax by the government is necessary."

By imposing rigid order and discipline in the exercise of their extortion, the Viet Cong create for themselves the aura of a tyrannical government rather than allowing the normless violence that otherwise pervades the villages. They recruit the same young element that would otherwise be violent village toughs and give them an outlet for their impulses and passions, but under tight control. As one ex-Viet Cong said in criticism of a Government leaflet,

> "What the leaflet said was true except that they said that the VC came into the villages and shot to death the civilian population, which is not true. When some people refused to do things that the VC asked them to do, the VC took them to re-education sessions. They would arrest only people

93

reported to district cadres as acting as spies...and they would decapitate, not shoot them..."

"Every act of terrorism that happened in that province...is the work of the Party secretary, because he is the only one who is responsible for this kind of action. He directs all the security agents to commit such acts of terror.

Q. "Do I understand that the rules of the Party provide that no act of terror can be approved without his approval?"

A. "As far as killing or slaughtering is concerned, I can say that that sort of thing is done entirely by the decision of the higher authority. Of course in every country or in every region there are some bad guys who act upon their own will. In the Front such a person would be subjected to punitive measures."

The Party policy was indeed to kill all government agents or employees in a hamlet except usually the school teacher and medical cadre. It was the policy of the Front to destroy all the government organizations and to destroy those who did not choose to resign.

If one looks back into the history of the Viet Cong, one finds that around 1958, when its reign of terror began, it mobilized a number of quite autonomous peasant terrorist groupings which had their origins in various ethnic, party, and land conflicts. By 1962 all these autonomous groupings had been homogenized into an army under tight Communist Party control. At that time the Viet Cong seemed to have something to offer by way of discipline and politeness toward the peasantry even if associated with exploitation of them. In recent years, however, as the situation of the Viet Cong has become worse, they have become increasingly exploitative and violent. The Viet Cong, for example, draft young men at the age of 15 and sometimes even earlier than that. They impose severe restrictions on the economic and personal activities of the people in their areas. They compel them to come to propaganda meetings, and, most important of all, they tax them very heavily. Under present circumstances the Viet Cong cannot even offer security in exchange for their ruthlessness. As a result it is a standard phenomenon that wherever the Viet Cong is in control, the population declines fairly rapidly as people move out. Wherever the government establishes a security post of any effectiveness at all, the population grows rapidly as people move in. This movement is only partly that of refugees fleeing the war. The movement away from VC areas and to government areas is also visible in voluntary migration.

Are there any conclusions to be drawn from this rather dismal picture of violence in three peasant societies? One conclusion is that in the anomic environment of peasant life, in the absence of highly developed, well-staffed communal organizations, and in the absence of the physical facilities for such organizations to function, violence is likely to go unrestrained and unpunished for long periods of time even though the exercises of violence may represent the action of hated minorities. A second conclusion might be that control of violence and the channeling of it, if it is to be achieved at all, must take place through organization. A third conclusion is that organizations which claim a monopoly of coercion are likely not to be readily accepted by interests

94 PEACE RESEARCH SOCIETY: PAPERS, IX, CAMBRIDGE CONFERENCE, 1968

in conflict with them, and so the right of one claimant group to a monopoly of legitimacy is usually contested by another claimant group, leading to even more violence.

Finally, we might conclude that the only prospect for controlling this proclivity towards continuing village violence is if the organization that exerts the monopoly of force extends well beyond the narrow arena of the village, establishing its legitimacy in the great society, while at the same time having the physical capability to operate efficiently right down to the village level. These conditions are what we mean by modernization and political development. In short, the control of village violence seems to depend upon the ending of underdevelopment and of the isolation and institutional weakness of village life.

CHAPTER 2. FURTHER THOUGHTS ON RURAL
PACIFICATION AND INSURGENCY

By Ithiel de Sola Pool*

The author examines the history of Vietnamese villages to cast light on the problem of rural pacification and governmental structure in South Vietnam. An analysis of the reasons for the success of the Vietcong is made, and a question is asked: "If the government of South Vietnam wished to establish its legitimacy in the eyes of the villager, what practicable measure should it take?" Pool then proceeds to respond to this question. Ed.

Today's paper is a case study of inadvertant commitment to a situation and resulting escalation. Some months ago, at the last Peace Research Meeting, I gave a paper on Village Violence and International Violence.¹ It was a fairly controversial paper so when Walter Isard asked if I had any further thoughts as a result of the discussion that I might offer at the next meeting, I was flattered and said "yes". Thus I became committed to a course of action whose consequences I did not anticipate. The next thing I knew, the program appeared with this paper on it as a solo for a full morning session. That was escalation by the adversary if I ever saw it. Being thus trapped in a situation for which I am not prepared, I struggle on as best I can. To complete the analogy, I suppose you are the innocent victims caught in the cross-fire.

*The author is associated with the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

¹Published in *Papers, Peace Research Society (International) Volume IX.*

24

At least we have learned one thing—how very general is the pattern of inadvertent commitment, escalation, and then involvement in a situation one would not have chosen. It is not Vietnam; it is the human condition, here simulated in a laboratory.

So now let me turn to where we left off six months ago.

In that paper I argued that throughout history intimidation, brutality, and violence have been endemic in peasant society. Such societies lack the roads, telephones, and organized authorities that make it possible most of the time to exercise effective control on violent individuals in modern society. Control is so lacking in peasant villages that terrorists can operate largely unmolested whether or not the local population supports them. When such men of violence organize into gangs the peasant must usually acquiesce. Some such gangs gain legitimacy if they offer moderate treatment and effective protection against worse oppressors. No great distinction exists in peasant eyes between that exercise of force to tax and to keep the peace, which we would call government, and that which we would call a protection racket.

The examples I used for evidence were drawn from Turkey, India, and contemporary Vietnam.

Regarding the last of these situations, I argued that neither the government nor the Vietcong could as yet assure enough security against the other side to establish their claim to monopolistic legitimacy in the eyes of the peasants. While the government has been gaining significantly in the contest for legitimacy since 1964, the Vietcong have still succeeded in maintaining for themselves the aura, in the eyes of the peasant, of a brutal and tyrannical dual government, rather than that of mere thugs.

I then concluded by stating some conditions for the control of such village violence. One conclusion was that the control of such violence and the channeling of it, if it is to be achieved at all, must take place through organization. It cannot occur by the sheer weight of superior force on the rival side. Under the conditions of a rural peasant society the facilities do not exist for routing out all the armed men from the jungles, mountain fastnesses, or swamplands.

The kind of organization that can successfully assert its claim to a monopoly of force is one that at the same time has its roots right down at the village level, with members there and the physical ability to operate there, and at the same time extends itself upward well beyond the narrow arena of the village, establishing its management structure and legitimacy in the great society too.

25

It is these conclusions on which I should like to expand today, and with particular reference to Vietnam. An historical view might help put some of the contemporary phenomena in perspective.

The Vietnamese village was never a peaceful place. For 900 years, from the 10th to the 18th centuries, the Vietnamese pressed by conquest ever southward, driving the Chams and Khmers back into the hills and jungles, until finally about the time of the French Revolution, they reached the end of the Ca Mau Peninsula. As Paul Mus, the great French authority on Vietnam puts it,

> Viet Nam did not just happen; she occupied her territory only at the price of incessant wars. . . . The army did not merely defend the country . . . but it also organized the territory behind the front of its advances. As it conquered the land, it established a network of military villages, or villages of veterans, then a penal colony, especially suitable for political exiles, and finally a solid blanket of free villages of the ordinary sort.

These ordinary villages were usually ruled by a council of elders whose formal purpose was religious, but who were also the leading citizens and most prosperous farmers of the village. They dealt with the mandarins from the Court in a way that has often been described in perhaps the most quoted single proverb about Vietnamese society: "the Emperor's writ stops at the village gate."

To quote Mus again, "the state's power extended only to the imposition of the tax or other obligation on the village as a whole. Central authority did not deal with the individual . . . except when criminal matters were brought before it."

Even water works, which in more complex systems of irrigation required central control, were handled in the Delta of Vietnam in a largely decentralized manner.

> This country once so rich and fertile is now almost totally ruined and lacks everything. . . . War and famine have caused such ravages that half the inhabitants of the country have perished.

> Whole families take poison in order to die immediately and to

26

avoid slow death by starvation. Mothers eat their babies. One often sees human flesh sold in the market.¹

Out of these conditions, grew a massive peasant rebellion headed by the three Tay Son brothers who succeeded in controlling part or all of the country for about three decades. These revolutionists with their red flag described by their opponents as "malcontents, smugglers, bandits" were expected by the peasants, as Buttinger tells us, to reduce taxes and forced labor and to redistribute rice fields concentrated in the hands of the landlords. But like every rebellion since, including the Vietcong rebellion, the peasants were disappointed. As has happened in every instance, the taxes were increased and the rebellion lost its voluntary support. Nonetheless, like some of their successors, the Tay Son rulers retained their power for a while by military force, and by the claim to be nationalist opponents of the foreign invaders, in this instance the Chinese.

> When they entered Saigon in March 1782, they burned and pil-
> laged the Chinese shops of Cholon and massacred more than
> 10,000 Chinese of that city.²

The bases for these uprisings were problems in the villages, but the revolts that showed the greatest viability were ones that unified the discontent from village to village, by providing an ideology. Such as the Bu Son Ky Huong, the Hoa Hao, the Cao Dai, and the Communists.

The first three of these movements were all religious. The Bu Son Ky
Huong was founded in 1849 by a young man who came to be known as
the Tay An Buddha. In the midst of an epidemic of the plague, one day
after being seized by a vision, he proclaimed that one could be safe from
the disease if one truly had faith in the Buddha and carried a yellow
piece of paper with four Chinese symbols. Within months he had gathered hundreds of thousands of followers in the Delta. This new sect
was anti-clerical, opposing worship in the temples and opposing the
power of the Buddhist priesthood. They favored simple home worship.
Their communities as observed in the decades following, were cleaner

¹Joseph Buttinger, *The Smaller Dragon*, Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., New York, 1958, pp. 264-5.

²Ibid.

27

than those of their neighbors, their adherents worked harder. I suggest a comparison with Max Weber's description of the Puritan sects in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Bu Son Ky Huong sect gradually turned into a guerilla movement against the French and by about 1916 they were destroyed by the French.

The Cao Dai sect was founded in 1926 and was also a combination of religion, political reform, and an army. The three principal gods that they worship from the present era are a Vietnamese poet born in 1492, who represents the nationalist strain in their thinking, Sun Yet-Sen, who represents the modernizing movement in the developing countries, and Victor Hugo who represents for them the French radical tradition. They, too, became an armed guerrilla nationalist and reform movement.

The Hoa Hao were founded in 1939. As in the case of the Tay An Buddha, Huynh Phu So, their founder, was also a young man seized by visions. He prophesied in 1939 that a great nation would conquer Vietnam, driving the French out, and that they, in turn, would be defeated, leaving Vietnam finally free and happy. When World War II broke out, So's prophesies seemed confirmed and within a few months he, too, had hundreds of thousands of followers in the Delta. His preachings, too, were anti-clerical, advocating simple worship in the home. He, too, founded a movement that was religious, political and was also a guerrilla army. Today the Hoa Hao are next to the Vietcong the most successful political organization in Vietnam. They have a million and a half followers. The province that they control is fully pacified. There are no Vietcong operations in it. Of their villages, too, one can say that they are cleaner, and that the members work harder than the neighboring peasants. These results have been achieved even though there has been no land reform among them. The Hoa Hao ideology is not equalitarian. However, the peasants are not cheated and grievances are heard through the channels of the Hoa Hao organization. The Popular Forces in the Hoa Hao villages are well organized to keep the peace.

In each of the above three cases a mystical religion has provided some organization extending above the village level and permitting villagers with arms in their hands to organize their own communities.

This is the pattern in which the Communists also found that they could succeed in Asia. In China, in the 1920's and early 1930's, the more orthodox Communists (such as Li Li San) tried to build an urban proletarian Marxist movement; it failed. The urban workers in the developing countries have seldom been Communists. In Vietnam today

28

the labor union movement is one of the strongest bulwarks against the Vietcong. Mao Tse-Tung discovered a new formula for Communist organization, and in Vietnam Ho Chi Minh followed the Chinese model. The peasant guerrilla movement is a traditional mould into which the Communists can readily fit.

Organization is not easy in Vietnam. Douglas Pike has vividly described the personal factionalism that rends every organization in the country.

A strong sense of associational linkages combined with feelings of racial superiority and manifest destiny and nourished in the setting of a foreign-power occupation usually yield a collection of blood brotherhoods, militant nationalist organizations, general-purpose clandestine associations, or some combination of all of these. Such was the case in Vietnam. Many of the traditional village groups were, if not clandestine, at least *sub rosa*, the result of native caution. Unless an organization had some reason to be public ... it remained inconspicuous ... the less anyone knew of a group's existence and purpose the better....

The basis of the Vietnamese clandestine organization ... rested on the Vietnamese assumption that society consisted of a host of dangerous and conflicting social forces with which only enigmatic organization and secret "inness" could cope....

Today Vietnamese politics still bear the mark of the clandestine organization. The organization, clandestine and otherwise, is the arena in which the struggle for power takes place. ... The world of organizational infighting is fluid and dynamic, in constant flux. One must keep running simply to hold his own. Daily activity involves negotiation and bargaining, sincere or otherwise, partially or completely in secret, and usually through third parties. The world should never know precisely where one stands; not only should the organization be clandestine but so should its membership. Constantly there are realignments, or revelations as to one's true colors. No position is ever irretrievable, no commitment ever final. It is a system of centrifugal force always tending to fly apart, only to form again. The rule is: Be flexible, be changeable, adapt. No organization is ever completely undisguised. All consist of at least two parts, the overt face and the secret apparatus; but the best, in addition to the covert leadership that "clever" Vietnamese eventually penetrate, has a third layer, which is reality. However, because it is a system of mutation, the reality, even if you discover it, does not last long; soon new alliances outdate your discovery. Sometimes an organization is within an

29

organization, with one organization evincing great hostility for a
second when actually both are controlled by a third. Most have
false patrons; almost certainly the proclaimed leader is not the
wielder of maximum influence. Proselyting is common, and no
opprobrium is placed on one who changes sides, providing he ob-
serves a decent interval. . . . Members assemble around individ-
ual leaders rather than around an ideology or a political platform.
The best leader is paternalistic, sly, skilled at intrigue, master of
the deceptive move, possessor of untold layers of duplicity, highly
effective in the world in which he moves.³

This divisiveness plagues even the successful organizations. There
are two rival Cao Dai Popes. There are four factions of the Hoa Hao.
The Lao Dong Party (the Communist Party of North Vietnam) and the
Vietcong like all Communist organizations, suffer from fierce factional
struggles too. Right now the issue in the North seems to be between a
technocratic wing whose pet phrase is construction and reconstruction
and which seems to want to negotiate an agreement that would stop the
bombing and the fierce manpower drain and allow them to start econ-
omic reconstruction, versus a militant military wing that wants to fight
on.

Nonetheless, in the successful organizations such as the Communists
and the Hoa Hao, the factions co-exist in a structure of mutual negotia-
tion and accommodation. The structure recognizes the localism of the
villages, but also unites them.

The constitutional structure of the Hoa Hao illustrates a number of
the problems and strengths of such Vietnamese modes of organization.
The Hoa Hao church is essentially congregational.

The lowest level is the Branch Association, consisting of 15 families
in a hamlet. The members who pay dues of two piastres (2 cents) a
month elect their officers. The hamlet committee is also elected by the
members.

At the next higher level is the Village Board. The Village Board of
9 members is elected by the members of the previous Village Board,
plus delegates from each Hamlet Board. (Under the new constitution, 3
from each Hamlet Board and one from each Branch Association.)

The next level is a 9 member District Board elected by the members
of the previous District Board plus 5 delegates from each Village Board
in the District. Next comes the Provincial Board of 11 members
elected in parallel fashion by the members of the previous Provincial

³Douglas Pike, *Viet Cong*, pp. 8-10.

30

Board and 5 delegates from each District Board and 3 from each Village Board. At the top of this structure is a 17 member Central Board for the whole country.

The Social Democratic Party, the Hoa Hao political party, has a similar structure and earlier there was also a parallel military structure. Factionalism is promoted by a prohibition on dual office holding. Party officials may not be members of the Church Boards.

Let me carry this description of the Hoa Hao organization a bit further to demonstrate the handling of factions, the linking of participant village organizations, and some of the commonalities between the Hoa Hao and Vietcong and indeed among all the successful rural organizations in Vietnam. Let me quote some passages from the original 1945 Hoa Hao Constitution.

The membership will be divided into two classes.

I. Active Members

II. Support Members

a. Active members—includes all clergy, laymen, or intellectuals who are willing to sacrifice their lives and property in the hope of developing moral principles and helping mankind while it is in its wretched state.

b. Support members—includes all people who are philanthropic of heart but due to their family and occupations can't completely sacrifice themselves, but who praise and support the undertakings of the Association spiritually and materially.

DUTIES OF THE MEMBERS

(1) They must explain the policy of the Association so that the masses clearly understand it, and rapidly expand the Association.

This reminds one of the distinction between the Party and the Front.

Then there is criticism, self-criticism and discipline.

It is required to denounce all unrighteous behavior before the Board of Directors; concealment due to a personal affection is prohibited.

It is required to admit one's errors and to express regret and repentance when the Board of Directors has judged that one has erred.

It is required to accept the control of one's local Board of Directors.

31

Finally, there are a whole series of provisions designed to keep fac-
tional conflict within bounds.

"Each faction will have a representative on the Board of Directors."

"Any clergyman, layman, intellectual or common person with clear
Buddhist tendencies . . . may become a member of the Association.
Even though they have joined the Association all sects may follow the
. . . ceremonies of their teachers or sects."

DISCIPLINE OF THE ASSOCIATION

A. Jealousy, hate, and mockery of each other because of different teachers or religions is prohibited.

B. Exhorting followers of other clergy or sects to abandon their teachers or sects to follow one's teacher or sect is prohibited. . . .

D. Mocking other sects is prohibited.

E. It is required to be peaceful toward all other religions and towards the people.

F. It is required to sincerely love unity and look for ways for mutual instruction.

G. It is required to be loyal to the Policy of the Association.

These structures and the analogous ones in every partly successful guerrilla and political movement in Vietnam tell us something about how a village society can become organized on a broader than single village basis. It will do so, however, only if there is some strong motivating force attracting villagers to the movement. That motivation is often religious. It can also be ideological. It can be ethnic prejudice or nationalism. It can be a combination of all of these. A successful movement must also tap crasser motives of self-interest.

Let us consider the Vietcong. It taps both ideological and national-
istic motivation. I know I will start an argument if I add what must be
obvious to anyone who has interviewed many ex-members of the Viet-
cong, namely that Communist ideology is a much more important factor
in the combination than is nationalism. But since the issue of relative
weight is irrelevant to today's subject, let me not start that argument and
simply concede that both factors enter in.

In addition, there are what Max Weber called robust motives of in-
terest. One of these is land, and I am not talking of land reform. I am
talking of patronage. It is the exceptional Communist Party secretary
whose family has not gained land in the land redistribution that goes
under the misnomer of land reform. These exceptions are singled out

32

for praise by the villagers, but as being exceptions. Even more important, however, is the opportunity the Vietcong gives the peasant boy to become a bureaucrat. For the ambitious peasant boy, the Vietcong offers a kind of middle-class existence in the sense that he no longer has to be a farmer with the sweat and toil entailed. He is now a politician, a "cadre" to use their own word, a kind of lower level local bureaucrat, who administered and organized things rather than worked. This, indeed, was one of the great attractions of the Vietcong for an uneducated peasant boy who couldn't make it up the ladder on the government's side. Vietcong politics offered the way out of peasant life, the way to become a minor official.

Finally, but probably last in importance is the element of excitement that has attracted a few young men to every guerrilla movement since Robin Hood. Guerrilla life, by peasant standards, is not too bad. Until the Americans took the initiative and started attacking in 1966, the average guerrilla fought only about one day a month. The rest of the time he spent in his jungle hideout in training, preparatory activity and planning. The few fights they had were carefully planned attacks on points where they would have the predominance of strength and where casualties could be expected to be low. There were, of course, hardships to the guerrilla life in the jungle, but to a peasant for whom the alternative is to dig in the fields in the tropical sun, the hardships were not so striking.

Political organization, ideology, and motives of self-interest for the underprivileged thus are all combined to make viable the Vietcong as a political movement aiming at imposing its claim to the exercise of force over large stretches of the countryside. The same thing can be said of the Hoa Hao. But what of the government of South Vietnam? Does it have any basis for establishing effective organization in the countryside?

While it is far from clear that the Government will seize its opportunity, the answer to the question of feasibility must be in the affirmative. There does exist a basis for political organization that would link self-determined villages into a broader national entity. This prospect is the result of rather remarkable political development in South Vietnam since 1964.

Once again I realize I am heading straight into an irrelevant controversy. The unmitigatedly hostile attitude of many American intellectuals towards the present government of South Vietnam would probably lead many persons present to the conviction that that government

33

neither seeks to represent its people not does so in any way. I would
rather avoid arguing that question today for it is not 'our subject. Let
me pose the question in this form, which might avoid some arguments:
If the government of South Vietnam wished to establish its legitimacy in
the eyes of the villager, what practicable measure should it take?

The usual American answer is to say: 1. Get yourself an honest, idealistic government in Saigon and 2. Win the hearts and minds of the people by making them better off. That is not an adequate answer because it disregards the irrelevancy of Saigon and the government there to the villager in the countryside. It fails to answer the need for a structure of organization based in the village itself but also reaching up to Saigon.

Both in the village and in Saigon the bases for legitimate government
now exist but linkage between them does not.

In the village the basis for stable political organization lies in the
elective village and hamlet chiefs and in the Popular Force troops. The
reinstitution of elective village and hamlet chiefs just over a year ago
was a major step forward in political development in Vietnam and very
meaningful to the villagers themselves. In 1956 the Diem regime striving
to achieve greater unity in the country replaced the system of elective
chiefs by ones appointed from above. No single measure of that
dictatorship was more of a favor to the Vietcong.

With the restoration of locally elected chiefs in a large part of the
country, the villagers came to feel once more that their officials represented them. That the elections were for the most part genuine is attested to by the fact that about a third of the encumbants failed to be reelected.

The largest element of power potentially available to the village
officials is the Popular Force contingent, averaging 60 men per village in
Vietnam. Paid barely enough to survive, not issued uniforms, armed
with old M2's or less, given little or no compensation if wounded or
killed, they nonetheless have a better record in casualties inflicted on the
enemy than the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Although a start has
been made now, they are still seldom trained beyond the most casual introduction on the job.

Most of these 150,000 to 175,000 men are poorly led. There is no
higher organic level above the platoon, offering jobs to which a good
leader can be promoted. Being platoon leader is a dead end. Most
platoons are not aggressive against the Vietcong, usually confining
themselves to defending their own post and therefore not inhibiting Viet-

34

cong infiltration even in their own village; but some platoons patrol and ambush aggressively.

Popular Forces unlike the Army of the Republic of Vietnam seldom abuse the villagers. They are living in their own home village, which is why they joined Popular Forces rather than the regular Army, and their basic relations with their fellow villagers are good. On the other hand, in insecure areas they and their fellow villagers tend to avoid close contact with each other because the Vietcong may penalize someone who associates too closely with the Popular Forces.

To make them the backbone of the local government structure they should be better paid and armed and made directly responsible to the village chief who should be encouraged to use them as his political machine for civic action, local administration and various functions in addition to defense.

At the national level too, there has been great progress towards legiti-
macy. After a period of repeated coups, a stable government has ex-
isted since 1965, changing in an orderly legal fashion. A Constituent
Assembly was elected and adopted a Constitution not very much liked
by the military authorities, but forced upon them. Last fall, elections
were held under this Constitution. In the Senate elections the military
government backed three slates, all of which were defeated. The House
elections especially resulted in a remarkably representative body. The
first cabinet was a weak one but now a widely representative cabinet has
been installed headed by one of the leading opposition candidates. The
extraordinary inadequacy of American reporting on these matters is il-
lustrated by the fact that the *New York Times* did not bother to carry
the list of new cabinet members. They did not regard it as news, for
example, that the Minister of Information is Ton That Thien whose ex-
cellent and outspoken newspaper was closed down by the military re-
gime less than two years ago. His first act was to abolish censorship
which had been reinstituted at the time of the Tet offensive after having
been abolished during the elections. Candor compels recognition that
for a country in civil war there is a remarkable amount of civil repre-
sentative politics at the Saigon level.

But between the beginnings of village self-government and the begin-
nings of national responsible government there is no interface. Between
these two levels is a structure of appointive province chiefs and district
chiefs who are virtually all army officers. The elective village chief sees
the Government of Vietnam in the form of a Captain or a Major who
calls him in from time to time to issue orders, to whom he addresses re-

35

quests for money, cement, fertilizer or forces in case of attack. It is a
master-client relation, sometimes good, sometimes bad, depending on
personalities, but still master and client.

The next needed step, in what has been a rapid progress of Vietnam
towards representative government, is the establishment of District
Councils with power so that the relationship of the District Chief to the
elective village officials becomes much more that relationship of bar-
gaining, tension, and responsibility which is normal between political ex-
ecutives and elective policy making bodies.

I present this proposition not because it represents our American
democratic political bias, as indeed it does, but because it is relevant to
our topic today, which is how pacification can be achieved in turbulent
village societies.

The requirement for pacification is that the villagers and the authori-
ties have shared notions about the legitimate exercise of force. Another
requirement is that the villagers have available at their call when needed,
a modern technology of force to supplement that which they can provide
themselves out of their meager resources. Such requirements can be
met if, but only if, there exists the kind of organization that we have
been describing, representatively rooted in the village but fanning out to
higher levels.

Note:

What comes next is the author's remarks included
in the volume No More Vietnams, (Harper and Row, 1968)
edited by Richard Pfeffer. The volume was a conference
report, so the various pieces cut off from the remarks
of other participants may start obsucrely. However, all
the explanation that the reader really needs is that my
assignment was as a commentator on a paper by Stanley
Hoffman.

The description of the Vietnamese government that
I gave was accurate as of that date. Unfortunately, the
three years since have seen relatively few steps toward
broadening of the base of the national government, and
some retrogression such as the re-imposition of newspaper
censorship. The development of provincial and village
government has progressed significantly, but at the
national level it has not.

If there is any point in the remarks that recent
developments have underlined it is the unacceptability
to a democracy of the brutality of unprovoked war. The
moral revulsion to bombing, to creation of refugees, to
defoliation, and to My Lai, has reached such a ground-
swell as to make past American military policy in Viet
Nam impossible even were it defensible on other grounds.

The final article is a brief adaption printed
in *Life* magazine, July 4, 1970, from a long critical
analysis of the Cambodian invasion.

§§ ITHIEL DE SOLA POOL: First of all, I want to go on record as rejecting the entire formulation of the issue we are here discussing. It is entitled "Vietnam: Misconceptions in Action." This is like being asked whether one has stopped beating one's wife. It seems to be simply assumed here that the American role in Vietnam has been based on misconceptions. Of course there have been many misconceptions. No complex policy is ever right in all details. However, the basic conception that American national interest was at stake in Vietnam, that the people of South Vietnam oppose the Viet Cong, and that we should not allow a forced communist takeover was sound and remains sound.

Now I want to return to some of the other points raised by Professor Hoffmann. What Stanley Hoffmann has offered us is for the most part a declaration of political faith. Each of us will agree with some parts and disagree with others. But the main factual content of the argument is a single prediction stated as a fact. The prediction is of the failure of the American effort in Vietnam. He has frequently used the word "failure" to describe the American situation there, supplemented by uses of such synonyms as "fiasco," "disaster," and "tragedy."

Perhaps I misinterpret Professor Hoffmann's point. Perhaps by "failure" he means something other than military defeat. Perhaps he

142 / No More Vietnams?

means only that we have not achieved our goals easily and quickly,
as we hoped and expected. Perhaps he means that we are paying an
inordinate price for our goals. In that sense we certainly have failed
—but more in the United States than in Vietnam.

The agonizing political lesson that racks this country is that there
has been a failure of our own political system. The intensity of dissent,
the lack of public understanding of our national policy, and the
divisions that rack American society today have thrown into some
question the stability of government in the United States, the capacity
of our political system to govern effectively, the basic commitment of
the American people to the payment of the costs of our national
goals. These are failings of which we usually accuse the Vietnamese,
but the criticism is more fairly addressed against ourselves.

But let us not exaggerate the gloomy performance of our political
system, disappointing as it may be. There is no evidence that either
the government or the majority of the public are ready to withdraw
abruptly in disarray from Vietnam. The passionate critics would
like to believe that the curtailment of bombing and the beginning
of the Paris talks represent a reversal of Administration policy and
a decision to accept defeat. Since they did not believe the President
earlier when he said he wanted negotiations and a political settlement,
they are forced now to perceive him as reversing his course. I cannot
read the mind of the President. But as a supporter of the Administra-
tion's basic policy I feel the negotiations are a culmination we have
long desired. I feel no sense of any major shift in policy. To negotiate
at this point despite the continuation of the war is a logical course in
pursuit of our goal of a political settlement that will assure a non-
communist South Vietnam. That is a very limited goal, one that does
not call for more than the suspension of fighting with roughly the
present balance of power and authority in the south. As far as I can
see, the communists do not have basic dominance of the noncom-
munist regime in the south. I cannot see that we have failed yet in
pursuit of our goal of a political settlement reflecting the real present
balance of power in the population of South Vietnam.

Clearly the situation in Vietnam is a disaster and a tragedy for
its many victims, and it has been of advantage to neither side. Clearly,
also, major tactical and strategic mistakes have been made, and there
is a question, as Hoffmann points out, whether our difficulties in Viet-

VIETNAM: MISCONCEPTIONS IN ACTION / 143

nam mostly represent wrong policies, as he is inclined to feel, or valid concepts clumsily applied. In either case, criticism and self-criticism are clearly called for. But to recognize the problems and misery that accompany this war is not the same thing as purporting to know what its outcome will be while it is still raging.

The war is not over, despite the talks in Paris. There is no reason to assume that either side is yet ready to give up its major goals. Casualties are higher than ever. Critical battles loom on the horizon. At this stage it would still take a soothsayer, not a social scientist, to know what the outcome will be.

In the nature of war, each side sees the likely outcome differently. No rational government would fight which did not believe that by so doing it might obtain a significantly better outcome than it would get peacefully. Clearly there are differences of prediction within the two sides just as there are between them. Within the Lao Dong party in Hanoi the more technocratic wing, using the slogan of "construction and reconstruction," looks with dismay at the devastation of their economy, the desperate drain on their manpower, the overwhelming force of American fire power, the presence of half a million American troops, the inability of the NVA and VC to win any battle militarily, the continuation and even consolidation of the so-called "puppet regime" in the south, and last but not least, at the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in the ally to the north. In this light, this faction favors seeking a better settlement than they can foresee gaining on the field of battle. But there are also those in Hanoi who still believe that the balance of forces is moving their way, that the American people will not tolerate war much longer, and that with continued resolute combat all Vietnam will be theirs. Clearly there is enough optimism left in Hanoi for them to fight on fiercely for a while.

Divergences in prediction on our side are no less great. At one extreme there is General Westmoreland, who has just once more told us that the foe in Vietnam "seems to be approaching a point of des-eration" and that enemy forces are "deteriorating in strength and quality," having lost a hundred thousand dead this year already. The Viet Cong, General Westmoreland tells us, are now recruiting only three thousand men a month in the south, though he puts infiltration from the north at fifteen thousand a month. At the opposite extreme

144 / No More Vietnams?

[w]

is Stanley Hoffmann's view that the war is already lost. A certain
reserve about both these extreme statements seems to be in order.
Hoffmann's argument is proof by assertion; Westmoreland at least
presents some data which, if true, would lead fairly heavily to his
conclusion.

Past experience, however, would justify a certain appropriate skepticism regarding that evidence. It would be the height of hubris however, to borrow one of Dr. Hoffmann's epithets, to dismiss a priori all the evidence of what the other side is suffering. It may be of some interest to note that while all of us here, including myself, regard the Tet offensive as a major defeat for our side, the opposite view, that it was a defeat for the Viet Cong, not only is propounded by a few government propagandists but is the widely held view of the Vietnamese man in the rice paddies. In considering the ultimate outcome of the war in Vietnam, a healthy agnosticism is still very much in order.

Having asserted that the war in Vietnam is a failure, Dr. Hoffmann
next tells us that "the root of the tragedy is the demonstrated absence
in the south of the capacity for sustained self-government." The
Viet Cong is asserted to be the only national movement that cuts
across religious and social lines. In fact, the Viet Cong is an over-
whelmingly rural and Buddhist organization. Its recruitment base is
primarily among the 35 per cent of the population in that social
stratum. Among them the VC may well claim the sympathy of a ma-
jority, but VC success among other social strata, such as the urban
population, has been negligible.

Nevertheless, one must concede the gross inadequacies of self-
government in the south. South Vietnam shares a lack of political
development with Bolivia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Iraq, and nearly one
hundred other countries in the underdeveloped world. However, the
incapacity for self-government is less in Vietnam than in most of
them, for Vietnam has a long tradition of sophisticated politics. It
has largely been the politics of personal intrigue, but in the last three
years we have seen a remarkable development of representative po-
litical institutions. However dismaying the continued military strug-
gle, Vietnam's rapidity of political development in the recent past is
hard to parallel elsewhere in the underdeveloped world, and that
despite the continuous ravages and emergencies of civil war.

For two years following the Diem dictatorship, there was utter

VIETNAM: MISCONCEPTIONS IN ACTION / 145

instability. For the last two years, however, Vietnam has had a stable government which has shown the ability to change its top leadership without destroying the basic national coalition. During this recent period a military dictatorship evolved into a comprehensive civil-military regime giving voice and representation to virtually all elements not on the enemy side and giving participation in the government to a majority subset among them. This evolution began with the election two years ago of a constituent assembly to draft the constitution. That assembly was able to make their document stick despite the opposition of the ruling generals to a number of key points. The elections held under the new constitution had extremely significant results.

Passionate critics of Vietnam hold the idée fixe that these elections were stolen, for they are unwilling to recognize that the government of South Vietnam may legitimately represent the general tenor of the people. Electoral practices of local bossism or fraud, which in areas like India or Chicago they deplore but recognize as the by-product of the painful evolution of democracy in any domain ruled by the culture of poverty, became for the critics an excuse to dismiss the elections as a nullity. All evidence to the effect that fraud did not deny the people their voice has been brushed aside by them.

The major issue of South Vietnam's presidential election campaign was negotiated peace—an issue openly and loudly debated despite the ongoing war. The majority vote showed a willingness to persevere, though the peace candidate came up with a very respectable 18 per cent of the vote, an estimate in close concurrence with independent opinion measurements among the two thirds of the population in the government's domain.

In the senatorial election military authorities gave secret orders to support three tickets and to oppose one other at all costs. The three tickets the military rulers supported all lost, and the one they opposed won. In the elections to the house, there was an even more representative result. It is a body truly reflecting the checkerboard pattern of Vietnam's divided population.

Local elections were also held a year ago, restoring to the villages in the government's domain the power to choose their own chiefs, a power Diem had taken from them in 1956. When they voted, the villagers once more demonstrated the high measure of validity of the

146 / No More Vietnams?

elections by defeating an estimated one third of the incumbents.

The first cabinet under the new constitution was a weak one. It has now been replaced by a cabinet that well represents the central tendency of South Vietnamese civil politics as the vote last fall revealed it.

Participant politics is becoming increasingly possible. Censorship has been abolished. Transistor radios are everywhere and have become the country's prime news medium. In the post-Tet period various new manifestations of civic mobilization have begun to appear. Student-organized relief activities for refugees have been impressive and large-scale. Self-defense groups have sprung up in various hamlets and urban neighborhoods. Even corruption, that plague of transitional politics, has begun to come under some repression. The kingpins in the graft syndicate that dominated Vietnam and indeed represented a kind of shadow organization to the government were the four corps commanders. Their position has been smashed and some of them removed.

There is much that remains to be done before Vietnam can be considered to have completed the transition to a responsible, representative, let alone democratic, political regime. The most important remaining reforms are to provide a bridge between the government in Saigon at the top and the autonomous village at the bottom of the political system. Elections at the village and national levels have laid the foundations for representative government at each of these extremes. However, at the province and district layers between, the government continues to be run by army officers who have been assigned the jobs of province or district chiefs. An elected village chief faces his district chief as a servant to a master. He receives orders and may ask the district chief for money, cement, fertilizer, and armed reinforcements. But the power relationship is one-way. The next needed step in the political development of representative government in Vietnam is the establishment of district councils with power. They can provide the milieu of bargaining and negotiation that marks the two-way power struggle between a legislature and executive anywhere. This would be a great step forward in giving Saigon effective political relations with the countryside.

It is no longer true, as it indeed was in 1964, that the only capable political structure in Vietnam is the Viet Cong. It is no longer obvious that except for American forces the Viet Cong

VIETNAM: MISCONCEPTIONS IN ACTION / 147

would take over Vietnam. I do not believe that anyone can now
be sure what would happen if all United States and North Viet-
namese forces were withdrawn. The increasing references to a re-
duced American role and to the gradual transfer of activities to
ARVN and to GVN hands is not, as snide critics assert, simply a
face-saving formula by a noncandid government to camouflage its
defeat. The formula means, rather, just what it says, and is being
stressed now because a Vietnamese structure is emerging which has
the capacity to take over more responsibility. Measures of military
discipline such as desertion rates or combat performance, measures
of public support for the GVN such as intelligence flow from people
to officials—all tell the same story of political progress.

None of these favorable political indicators deny or contradict
the very unfavorable military indicators of continuing harassment by
the enemy. The increased flow of improved enemy arms and of in-
filtrators, the unremitting, harassing attacks on population centers,
the increased casualty rate—all have their reflections in declining
confidence among the public in the government's ability to protect
them. The improvement of governmental capacity in South Vietnam
is far from the whole story of the war and may or may not be the
decisive factor in the outcome.

VIETNAM: MISCONCEPTIONS IN ACTION / 149

the relationship between fact and broad generalization. You have raised a lot of very interesting questions of fact, and this is a level at which I think we can operate. Let's talk specifically about the village elections in Vietnam.

The villager is dependent upon the local hamlet and village chief for a number of things, including, for example, getting his identification papers, which often takes a long period of time and usually costs him a bribe, or getting his deferment from the armed services. According to large numbers of statements made by villagers, the most significant thing about the local election was that it put them into a bargaining position with these local officials. The enthusiasm of the villagers for the elections was not a question of national identification with Saigon; it was a matter of very simple and clear advantage. The power that the villagers gained was shown in the fact that about a third of the incumbents were defeated.

In a short discussion of this kind nothing can be conclusively proved. However, having looked at this problem in Vietnam, I have no doubt that the reactions to the elections were very different from those you have described in Algeria. What bothers me is the tendency to answer difficult questions about Vietnam simply by broad generalizations. Those who say that the people must support the Viet Cong because a guerrilla movement has to have popular support to survive, or who say the Vietnamese must want the Americans out because nationalist Asians are against the Western presence, have bland confidence in these *a priori* generalizations, which happen to be quite contrary to the facts. Backed by these presumptuous generalizations about what the facts must be, the generalizers become impervious to reality.

§§ ITHIEL DE SOLA POOL: Effective intervention—and I predict that there will be a number of effective interventions in foreign crises in America's future—requires exactly the combination of moral stance and political understanding that Professor Hoffmann has so well identified. The immediate problem for American policy in Vietnam is to reduce a nation's suffering: to check killing, terror, and oppression that arise from many sources. Given the double and triple binds of the historical heritage, there is no easy answer even to that immediate problem. Certainly there is no easy answer to the long-term problem of how far, where, and when America should commit itself in the future to involvement in securing international peace and stability. It is the duty of scholars to look objectively and soberly at the various contradictory aspects of reality, not to produce rhetoric in which broad generalizations conform to people's abhorrence of dissonance by portraying the bad as all bad and the good as all good. Vietnam can look that way only from twelve thousand miles away.

The recognition of the complexity of reality brings me to a point which Stanley Hoffmann makes superbly and forcefully. It is a powerful plea for the importance of knowledge as a basis for action. The

204 / No More Vietnams?

high point of his remarks is an attack upon the platitudinous ap-
plication of broad slogans of policy without knowing the actual
facts of the situation. As he says, "From incorrect premises about a
local situation . . . bad policy is likely to follow. . . . There is no
substitute for area expertise, historical knowledge." Unfortunately,
at the time our basic Vietnam policies were set, "our understanding
of South Vietnamese society was poor, the expertise at our disposal
limited. In such circumstances, we tended to distort our analysis by
reducing South Vietnamese uniqueness to elements that seemed
familiar and reassuring—to features that we had met and managed
elsewhere." The true Vietnam experts that this country had in 1965
could be counted on one's fingers. Moreover, as James Thomson
points out, these experts were not called in by the makers of Vietnam
policy, and the more critical the decision, the less so.

Hoffmann's powerful plea for local knowledge instead of platitudes
is unfortunately faulted by an irrational distaste on his part for num-
bers. Many of the things we need to know are matters of amount.
How many of the Vietnamese people sympathize with the Viet Cong
or with the government? Where is major corruption to be found?
What is the rate of inflation? What are the rents that are truly paid?
Many of Hoffmann's statements are quantitative. He describes, for
example, villagers "torn between identification with the Viet Cong
which they respect but fear and identification with a regime for which
they have no respect." Some peasants certainly feel that way, but
how many? Are they 20 per cent? 40 per cent? 60 per cent? Are
they found everywhere or mostly in some regions? The answers to
such questions cannot be dismissed as "swamps of data." Fortunately
the United States government is not a totally know-nothing organiza-
tion. Late, but better than never, it has started putting itself in the
position to answer questions like that.

There has been too much ignorant wisecracking in the press about
the figures being collected on the progress of pacification. The usual
remark (Hoffmann has a more vivid one) talks about running the
war with computers. As every high school graduate knows, any mea-
surement has a margin of error. I happen to have a pretty good
notion of the margin of uncertainty in these particular figures and of
how much effort is being made to reduce it. I also know how much
better our knowledge is now than it was before we had these admit-

EPILOGUE: THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM / 205

tedly approximate figures. But that is only part of the point. The im-
portant point is that the collection of good data, far from mechanizing
the war effort, is humanizing it.

Before the Hamlet Evaluation System was instituted, the typical American district advisor had very little contact with the hamlets in his area. He advised the district chief and had no pressing requirement to get deeply involved with what was on the minds of the villagers. Today he must fill out a monthly report which he can do readily only by getting to the hamlets and talking there. The results have been extraordinary, not in producing magic numbers, but in giving the advisor a sense of his problem.

This is simply one example of the vital importance of applied social science for making the actions of our government in foreign areas more rational and humane than they have been. Right now the anti-intellectuals—and Senator Fulbright, astonishingly enough, with them—are trying to deny policy-makers the capability to learn what they need to know if they are to avoid the disease of overgeneralized reaction that Stanley Hoffmann so well identifies. Without social-science area knowledge to correct their instinctive clichés, our military officers are likely to march us into futile battles and our foreign-policy makers into repeated crises, like the Red Coats who marched according to their rule book against the embattled farmers of New England.

That has been the lesson of every recent intervention crisis. We marched into the Bay of Pigs because those area experts who did know were not consulted. In the Dominican intervention we succeeded, and successes are seldom questioned. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter in retrospect is that we did not know at the time who was on what side. Both our civilian and our military authorities needed good political analysis more than they needed anything else.

Our need for better social-science knowledge can perhaps be iden-
tified as the first lesson of Vietnam. In a world in which we will con-
tinue to be involved in a series of overseas crises located in diverse
and strange cultures, the prime requirement is available social-science
area experts who know the language and the country. They are
needed, not only in the field, but also in the highest policy-making
councils. Until the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and
the President are adequately and directly served by the top experts

206 / No More Vietnams?

on each country in crisis, and until we massively increase our social-science knowledge of crisis areas, we will make drastic mistakes over and over again. That is the first of three major lessons of Vietnam.

The second concerns the conduct of war by a democracy. Man- kind, regrettably, has not yet reached the point of totally rejecting war. But a democracy in the present era cannot deliberately choose war as an instrument of national policy. The people in a democracy will not fight willingly for long unless they believe that combat is forced upon them by an aggressive enemy. Pearl Harbor and the North Korean invasion of the South were signal events to which the American public could and did respond. There has been no such event in Vietnam. The lesson looks clear for revolutionists or aggressors seeking to impose their will on a foreign country; the lesson is to act covertly and gradually. It would be naïve to think that the experience of Vietnam precludes an American military response to future overt dramatic aggressions against our allies. Our response, however, may well be timid if the provocation is not obvious.

To the American government the lesson is that it must find effec- tive ways of responding to limited disruptions by means short of war. We have learned, for example, that divisions of troops are not very effective against undergrounds, and we will have to learn how to use police and intelligence operations.

Our worst mistake in Vietnam clearly was to initiate the bombing of the north. Before that started, it was my view that the United States as a democracy could not stand the moral protest that would arise if we rained death from the skies upon an area where there was no war. After the bombing started, I decided I had been in error. For a while there seemed to be no outcry of protest, but time brought it on. Now I would return to my original view with an important modification, namely, time. Public reactions do not come immediately. Many actions that public opinion would otherwise make impossible are possible if they are short-term. I believe we can fairly say that unless it is severely provoked or unless the war succeeds fast, a democracy cannot choose war as an instrument of policy. Any other sort of war will destroy the cohesion of the democratic community that wages it.

A third lesson in Vietnam is more specifically American. It is that the politics of this country will continue to be polarized between an

EPILOGUE: THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM / 207

isolationist impulse to avoid involvement in other people's problems and an internationalist impulse to promote our own values in the world. We are likely to oscillate dangerously between these extremes. Professor Huntington's remarks identify this oscillation as a lawful cycle, like the business cycle of old. I wonder, however, whether we have not reached the end of such a regular cycle. Time alone will tell whether major exogenous events will push the pendulum dizzily one way or the other.

Right now it is fashionable to say that the American public will accept no more Vietnams. Perhaps that is a partial truth for the moment, but it would take only another catastrophe that occurred because we sat on our hands and avoided intervention to push the pendulum back the other way. Whatever the last catastrophe was, shapes the direction of the public's indignation at the incumbent administration. Just as the fall of Czechoslovakia oriented us toward the Marshall Plan and NATO, and as the fall of China shaped our response to Korea, and as Cuba conditioned us to act in the Dominican Republic, so a passive acceptance after Vietnam of some communist takeover elsewhere—or even there—would be the prelude to a revived activism in American policy.

In the long run, it seems to me sure that the isolationism now so rampant in the McCarthy campaign and in the anti-Vietnam protest is a transient thing. It is transient for two reasons. The first reason is that American money and armed power have been a major stabilizing force in the world. If we cease using them, it is fairly predictable that the result will be a catastrophe somewhere, and with that will come the revival of the internationalist impulse. The second reason is surer though more remote: it is nuclear proliferation. Treaty or no treaty, there are many in this room who will live to see several underdeveloped countries with the means to launch nuclear war. The United States, I predict, will not stay passive in the face of such a threat. When we come to realize that we can live in safety only in a world in which the political systems of all states are democratic and pacifically oriented, the immediate lessons of Vietnam—whether of success or of failure or a combination of the two—will recede into a dimly remembered image.

In the nuclear age the world has become a small place. In various ways we will all become more alike, and more like America as we

208 / No More Vietnams?

know it today. People everywhere want some aspects of American culture, such as automobiles, TV sets, refrigerators, and Coca-Cola. Vietnam illustrates this trend, too. Other aspects of our value system, such as participatory politics, civil liberties, social mobility, pragmatism, and a pacific orientation, are also spreading, but less readily and universally. Were it not for the nuclear threat, the world might well remain heterogeneous in these respects. However, in the era of technological change on the edge of which we now stand, American policy-makers will not be able to view with indifference aggressive dictatorships with nuclear arms, no matter how small or remote they may be. Vietnam, therefore, is not likely to be the last case in which this nation finds itself trying to cope with dangerous armed ideologies in countries far from our area of normal concern and at the potential cost of much American sacrifice. The lesson we must learn is how to cope with such situations by better means than contests of fire power.

ITHIEL DE SOLA POOL: This discussion reminds me in some way of arguments about laissez-faire in the history of economic thought. Like the proponents of laissez-faire arguing against planning, some of those here who criticize the American role in the world make the underlying assumption that the nature of the state and its bureaucracy is such that rationality cannot be expected of it, that no matter what the government does, it is going to be wrong, and therefore the best thing to do is to abandon its international functions.

As in the economic field, there is a great deal of sense to this argument. But most of us have recognized that in fact large-scale governmental economic policy is going to be with us, and while we may want to reduce it in some ways, we do have to face the problem of maximizing public rationality whenever governmental economic action proves necessary. The same thing applies to the role of the United States government as a stabilizing force in international affairs. Since policy will often be less than perfectly wise, we would like to avoid unnecessary involvement, but unless we accept the necessity of some governmental involvement abroad, we will have a chaotic and dangerous world. We must learn to be as wise as possible in these involvements.

I question the notion of a basic incapacity of government to learn.

214 / No More Vietnams?

There are examples of governmental learning in the economic field. Our government has learned how to maintain a stable economy. Albert Wohlstetter gave a very good example of learning in the political field when he pointed to the improvements during the past eight years in our management and control of strategic nuclear weapons. We have also learned to function overseas relatively effectively in such fields as public health and in certain aspects of agricultural change.

In relation to major issues, such as the nuclear one and the economic one, however, it is unfortunately true that we tend to learn only when we become desperate. It takes a great depression or a war or something of that kind to make us learn. Hopefully, if we can get out of the present mood of self-flagellation about our performance in Vietnam and begin to get more concrete and specific in the lessons we learn, then Vietnam may prove to be another event that leads us to that kind of creative desperation.

What is it that we must learn from the Vietnam experience? We must be specific about the problem of how to influence political outcomes in an environment where conventional military means are ineffective or are excluded to us. Here I would like to reinforce the point Mr. Ellsberg previously made in relation to bombing. In general, we have to find ways of coping with international problems that minimize the use of force. That, of course, means that we have to be skilled in the use of other instruments of influence available to us. The instruments we must use better are largely money, propaganda, political organization, and intelligence.

The notion that we will be able simply to watch the world go by without feeling massively threatened by some of the things that happen seems rather shortsighted. We need to learn to cope with genuine threats and neither acquiesce to them nor respond with inappropriate military devices.

On one thing about Vietnam all sides agree: the Vietnamese must ultimately settle their problems for themselves. That is what Vietnamization is all about. But is it working, and what can we do to speed it? My own answers to these questions are based on three years of research on Vietnam, half a dozen trips there, and hundreds of interviews with the Vietnamese.

Here in America, we usually judge the progress of Vietnamization by how fiercely the army of Vietnam (ARVN) fights. But just winning battles will not keep South Vietnam independent. In the end, if the Vietcong lose, it will be because the people of South Vietnam deny them protection and resources, not because they lose pitched battles.

Vietnamese culture has a well-developed knack for avoidance of violent confrontation. To the dismay of American advisers, Vietnamese on both sides work out their silent accommodations so as to carry on their conflict in an elaborate minuet that evades head-on combat and reduces the danger of being killed.

American policy for the last two years seemed to be moving to awareness of the wisdom of such accommodations. In 1965 and 1966 we sent nearly 400,000 men to Vietnam to fight the only kind of war we then understood, a conventional big-battle war. Gradually, experience changed our strategy to one that limited casualties and emphasized pacification. Elections were held. The elected village officials were given a budget for local improvements and were put in control of their own self-defense forces. Increasingly, the peasants saw that the government could give them more of what they wanted than could the Vietcong. But which side would be more solicitous of their lives?

The side that wins the war in Vietnam is likely to be the side that is most re-

strained in its use of force, and is least violent in its chosen means. Earlier, that side was the Vietcong. Their assassinations were more selective than ARVN's forays or than American bombing and artillery. But that is no longer so. The Tet offensive of 1968 was a turning point. In Vietnamese eyes, in that offensive the Vietcong, without any possibility of winning, used the population as hostage by moving into populated areas and drawing fire upon themselves there. The Vietcong's popularity, which had been slipping for several years, plummeted. Today they have serious trouble recruiting and can count on at most 20% of the peasants, and a mere handful in the cities.

To reduce the level of combat requires the same kind of judgment by the government of Vietnam that a college president must use in bringing police on campus. When a disturbance passes a certain point, he needs police to restore peace, but below that point the police may only inflame a limited turmoil.

Internal war takes the same sort of subtle balancing act. Perhaps General Abrams understands that. Going into Cambodia, however, while it improved security inside South Vietnam, may have returned U.S. and ARVN forces to a conventional military approach.

South Vietnam with a population of 18 million has a million men under arms. They can handle anything the Vietcong or Hanoi has in the South today. The foray in Cambodia will boost ARVN's self-confidence and efficacy further. But the increased prestige of an ARVN with foreign conquests to its record may also accentuate the military character of the Saigon regime. That may, in the end, hinder establishment of a stable non-Communist system in South Vietnam.

It is not so much ARVN as the provincial Regional Forces and the village Popular Forces that protect the population. In regard to ARVN, our main objective should be its reform, not its strengthening. It needs to allow uneducated peasant boys to become officers. It needs a commissary system so that soldiers need not steal the peasants' chickens. Improving the behavior of troops and making promotions more democratic will achieve far more than increasing firepower and combativeness.

To a large degree our side has now won military superiority. The bulk of the Vietnamese population lives in substantial security day and night. In general, roads are open and the writ of the government runs where the population lives.

What can still be done by military means can be done largely without American infantry. When the problem is to cope with furtive guerrillas, little squads with rocket launchers, and terrorists without uniforms, then large, heavily armed military units of foreigners who do not know the language are almost useless. In fact, the presence of American fighting men may do more harm than good. There are no American ground combat forces in the Delta, an area of relative Vietcong strength. But the government of Vietnam maintains control at least as easily there as anywhere else.

As American combat troops depart, they will leave South Vietnam with a government beyond the powers of the Vietcong to overthrow, although endemic terrorism, violence and small-scale warfare will go on for the indefinite future. That much of a victory Vietnamization can produce in the next year or two.

The only way to a better outcome is by negotiation. Only a treaty could end terrorism. If Israel cannot keep guerrillas from crossing her frontier, Vietnam cannot hope to seal a longer, wilder and largely unguardable border. A treaty, such as we seek in Paris, would give amnesty to the Vietcong and allow them a role in Vietnamese life. Without that, victory in Vietnam will mean not peace, but only that the Vietcong no longer can take over populated areas, no matter how many murders they commit, how many mortars, rockets and mines they manage to set off. Victory in that sense is near, but peace depends on a settlement at Paris and a sharing of power in Saigon.

Ithiel de Sola Pool, a professor of political science at MIT, was formerly the chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies.

The Brookings Institution

GENERAL

KISSINGER, HENRY A.

KISSINGER, HENRY A.

1775 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE N.W. / WASHINGTON D.C. 20036 / CABLES: BROOKINST / TELEPHONE: 202 HUDSON 3-8919

Foreign Policy Studies Program

March 13, 1973

The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
Assistant to the President for
National Security Affairs
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500

My dear Mr. Kissinger:

I am writing to request an interview with you about the Nixon Admin-
istration's negotiations with Japan on textile import limitations.

As you may know, Brookings is currently undertaking a broad study of
US-Japanese relations under Mort Halperin's general direction. We are
looking into how each government has actually made policy toward the other
on major issues. On the textile case, we have completed close to a hun-
dred interviews in Washington and Tokyo. These include talks with almost
all major participants.

I recognize that you are quite busy. I recognize also that your
personal involvement in the textile negotiations was intermittent. I
need particularly to talk to you, however, in order to clarify the nature
of Japanese commitments made in connection with the 1969 and 1970 summit
conferences, and the extent to which the White House believed the 1969
commitment was specific and endorsed in detail by the Japanese Prime
Minister. Would it be possible to talk with you on these and related
questions for about forty-five minutes sometime in the next month or two?
I would be willing, I should add, to keep the interview off-the-record.

Enclosed for your possible interest is a description of our larger
project.

TMD/emt

III

# Foreign Policy Processes in the United States and Japan, and Their Interaction:
An Analytical History

## Project Description

### 1. Purpose and Significance:

(a) To provide a major history of US-Japanese relations over the past thirty years. The basis for analysis will be a series of eight case studies of points in the relationship illustrating the progress from the immediate prewar situation to that which exists today. The case studies will deal with prewar efforts to prevent war, war termination, negotiation of the peace treaty, negotiation of the security treaty, revision of the security treaty, Okinawa renversion, China policy, and the dispute over textiles. They will thus provide a complete historical perspective on this period in the US-Japanese relationship.

Existing studies of the postwar relationship are not very numerous; they deal predominantly with only one side of the relationship, usually the Japanese side; few explore the US side in depth. This study will put both sides together.

Because of the method of analysis being used in this study, it should comprise a balanced and detailed history of postwar US-Japanese relations.

(b) To contribute to the development of a new method of examining and analyzing the history of foreign relations. Until recently, most studies of interaction between two or more countries have been based on the assumption that a country can be viewed somewhat as an individual, interacting with those individuals around him. This type of analysis has never provided a fully satisfactory explanation of contradictory events in foreign relations. We propose here to test a method of analysis that systematically takes into account the domestic and bureaucratic pressures acting upon the decisionmaking processes in Japan and

the United States, in the hope that this will provide a new methodology for
historical study, in general, and for study of post US-Japanese relations, in
particular. This analysis is based on the view that the policies and actions of
nations derive mainly from a process of bargaining within the nations, in which
the principal actors focus on their relations with others in their own society,
and in which they respond to external events largely in terms of the effect on
their domestic positions and goals. A body of literature is beginning to grow
up (e.g., Richard Neustadt's recent book on *Alliance Politics and Graham Allister's
Essence of Decision*) which is contributing to the development of a new
theory of international politics based on these premises. One of the main objec-
tives of this study is to test the usefulness of this new method of analyzing
foreign policy.

(c) To analyze what can be learned from these episodes for the future conduct of US-Japanese relations. In illuminating the process by which the behavior of each nation influences the other, the studies should help to identify both the processes that contribute to friction and those that contribute to improved relations. Japan is probably the single most important country, after the Soviet Union, for US foreign policy. But it is probably also the industrialized country about which most Americans know least. This gap in knowledge compounds the risk that substantive problems in their relationship will be translated into growing rift and alienation. This could readily lead to a more nationalistic Japanese view of power and policy, which would make it more difficult to maintain peace in Asia. To avoid this outcome, it will be necessary for Americans to understand that only foreign policy issues which are bound to arise between the two countries, but also the ways in which different US and Japanese attitudes and policymaking processes interact. One way to secure this understanding is to analyze the ways in which that interaction has taken place in the past, as this study proposes to do.

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2. **Expected Result:** The proposed study is expected to result in a book.

3. **History:** This study was approved by the Executive Committee of the Brookings Institution in June 1971, as part of a larger program for the study of problems in US-Japanese relations. This program was launched in recognition of both the importance of the problems and the need for expanded scholarly policy-oriented research concerning these problems. The program includes:

(a) The historical study described in this proposal.

(b) A series of meetings alternating between Washington and Tokyo to permit an informal exchange of views between US and Japanese scholars, officials, and others interested in US-Japanese relations.

(c) Monthly Brookings luncheon meetings at which members of the Congress, executive branch officials, Japanese diplomats, and Brookings staff meet to discuss key problems in US-Japanese relations.

(d) Separate Brookings studies of (i) major future problems in US-Japanese relations, parallelled by a comparable study by the Japan Institute of International Affairs; (ii) the Japanese economy.

4. **Plan of Work:** The framework designed for this research will place emphasis on the facts that individuals in nations are the main actors and that the satisfaction of their interests is overwhelmingly to be found at home: Political leaders of a nation rise and fall depending on whether they satisfy domestic needs; individuals advance in the bureaucracy when they meet the standards set by domestic political leaders or career ladders; organizations prosper or decline depending on domestic support in the bureaucracy and the nation. This is not to say that the actions of other nations do not matter, but rather that they matter most when they influence domestic struggles. A participant's efforts to accomplish:

His objectives--whether to advance domestic political interests, organizational goals, personal interests, or national security interests--frequently are affected by what he and other participants come to believe about the actions of other nations. Actions by other nations can affect the stands that actors take, and thereby affect national decisions and actions.

We will therefore examine how actions of other nations enter into the process of domestic bargaining over decisions and how they affect resulting actions. To this end, the plan of work focuses on the detailed examination of eight specific episodes in US-Japanese relations from 1941 to the present. This examination will center not only on actions which shaped relations between the two countries, but also on the processes within each government by which these actions were decided, and the ways in which these processes interacted and influenced each other.

The study is being conducted under the direction of Senior Fellow Morton Halperin, with the collaboration of Research Associates Priscilla Clapp, Harvard University, and Leon Sigal. The research for the case studies, which is being divided among the members of the research team, is based on both written sources and interviews with government officials active in the respective cases. The interviewing is especially important for the more recent cases (Okinawa reversion, the textile dispute, and the political and economic policies of the Soviet Union), because the written information to date does not allow to illuminate bargaining processes within the bureaucracies involved.

In the eight months that the study has been underway, a substantial amount of preliminary research has been done on most of these cases. Morton Halperin has developed the framework for the research, based partly on a book length Brookings study which he is completing on bureaucratic politics and foreign policy decision-making in the US Government; he has begun research on one case: prewar efforts.

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to prevent war. Priscilla Clapp is nearing completion of the research and interviewing of the American side of the Okinawa case, and has begun collecting materials on two other cases: China policy, and the textile dispute. Professor Fukui has been in Japan since last September interviewing Japanese officials and collecting relevant documents in relation to all eight cases; he will complete this phase of his work in July and return to Brookings for the duration of the study to provide the Japanese input. Leon Sigal is well into his study of the termination of the war, and expects to complete this case study by the end of the summer, at which point he will leave the study. The remaining case studies and the final analysis will be completed in the eighteen months after November 1972.

The research team will work closely with Brookings Senior Fellows Edward Fried, Philip Trezise, and Fred Bergsten on the textile issue, in which each of them was closely involved during recent government service, and with Senior Fellow Ralph Clough on the China question, which he has long studied. In addition, they will draw on the advice of Associate Professor Gerald Curtis of Columbia University, a student of Japanese domestic politics, and other consultants from the academic and official communities. Brookings is well situated to draw on these sources: It has close connections with the academic community, and its Washington location gives it a unique advantage in tapping government sources.

5. **Budget:** A budget is attached showing (i) total cost of the project from November 1972 to completion; (ii) intended cost sharing by Brookings; and (iii) the amount being requested of the Endowment. While we are requesting an outright grant, we would be prepared to accept a gift and matching grant, under which the Endowment would provide two thirds of the sum being requested as an outright grant and the Brookings Institution would seek the remaining one third from a private foundation.