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From: Dan Duffy
Date: Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 5:01 AM
NYT obituary doesn't mention VN.
Dan Duffy
Editor, Viet Nam Literature Project
Chair, Books & Authors: Viet Nam, Inc.
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From: william turley
Date: 2008/12/29
I assume Dan is referring to Huntington's alleged recommendation in his article, "The Bases of Accommodation," Foreign Affairs (July 1968), of forced urbanization as a counterinsurgency strategy. I say "alleged," because Huntington denied that his article advised any such thing. For the exchange between Huntington and Noam Chomsky over what he, Huntington, actually did mean, see "A Frustrating Task" in The New York Review of Books (February 26, 1970). However, I am not at all surprised that the NYT obit omitted mention of VN, as Huntington was far better known to the media, public and a generation of undergraduates for his "Clash of Civilizations" thesis. Political scientists, of which Huntington was one, probably remember him best for his work on civil-military relations and political development, all accomplished before he wrote "Bases," which accounted for very little of his total corpus.
Bill Turley
Dept. of Political Science
Southern Illinois University
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From: Chung Nguyen <Chung.Nguyen@umb.edu>
Date: 2009/1/2
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
I appreciate Dan's notice of this rather ubiquitous absence in view of so many references to Huntington's "forced urbanization" concept in the war literature. Let me just add my two cents in this particular issue, beyond Bill's comment. My guess is that obituary is not customarily a place where controversial issues are raised. Reference to this would one way or another re-open the debate on the war, or its relevance to other situations. Another issue that the obituaries also did not cover - Huntington's anti-democratic view as expressed in the Trilateral Commission's "The Crisis of Democracy."
For "forced urbanization" goes to the heart of the US war strategy in Vietnam - the application of "search and destroy" operations, "free fire zones", the Phoenix program, the body count, the use of chemical defoliants, the massive dropping of various types of anti-personnel/phosphorus/napalm/fragmentation bombs, etc. Michael Peterson reports the following objective, as stated by General Westmoreland in 1965:
"He [Westmoreland] said that as a result of U.S. strategy, the Vietnamese peasant would be confronted with three choices: He could stay close to his land (usually in a free-fire zone); he could join the Viet Cong (the target in that free-fire zone); or he could move to an area under South Vietnamese government control and become a refugee.
"Doesn't that give the villager only the choice of becoming a refugee?" one journalist inquired. "I expect a tremendous increase in the number of refugees." Westmoreland answered." ("Combined Action Platoons: The Marine's Other War in Vietnam, p. 19)
The atrocity generated by such a strategy has been well-documented (Chomsky's "After Pinkville", Jonathan Schell's "Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin," "Vietnam - Destruction-War Damage" [Hanoi, 1977], etc. <http://www.amazon.com/Military-Half-Account-Destruction-Quang/dp/B001H0MY88/ref=sr_1_17?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226960718&sr=1-17> . Or the most recent, Debra Nelson's "The War Behind Me."
Huntington captured its essence matter-of-factly:
"The United States has stumbled upon the answer to "wars of national liberation": The effective response lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization."
(Prof. Samuel P. Huntington. Foreign Affairs, June, 1968).
It is true that Huntington did deny, as Bill puts it, that 'his article advised any such thing' in his response to Chomsky's "After Pinkville" in The New York Review of Books (Feb 26, 1970). It is, however, also pretty clear, at least in my own reading, following Chomsky's reply, that the difference is more semantic than real. Those who would like to check out both sides' arguments to draw their own conclusion could refer to the two letters at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11044.
There was, interestingly, no follow-up rebuttal by Huntington. It would be hard, I think, because Chomsky not only fortified his interpretation with even more in-depth analyses, but also raised another serious issue - the ethical question involved in sociological researches, the view that scholarly research could be, somehow, "value free:"
"I also commented that Mr. Huntington "does not shrink from" these conclusions. This comment could, in fact, have been strengthened. Thus he says that "forced-draft urbanization and modernization," Vietnam-style, may well be "the answer" in general to mass-based peasant revolutions. In fact, he expresses no qualms, no judgment at all about such methods (which clearly involve "war crimes" as defined by Nuremberg Principle VI, for example). His approach follows the principle stated by two counterinsurgency theorists in Foreign Affairs, October, 1969: "All the dilemmas [of counterinsurgency] are practical and as neutral in an ethical sense as the laws of physics." Thus Huntington uses such terms as "urbanization" to refer to the process by which we drive the Viet Cong "constituency" into refugee camps and cities, and he speaks of the "American-sponsored urban revolution," the "social revolution" that we have brought about in this way. So successful is "urbanization," he might have added, that the population density of Saigon is now estimated at more than twice that of Tokyo. Lucky Vietnamese."
By exposing the enormous real-life impact of innocuously phrased policy, beyond the "value-free" naming of scientific jargons, Chomsky had made it, I think, very unlikely that Huntington could prevail.
C. Nguyen
UMass Boston
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