著者

松岡 完

出版者

一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2002, no.130, pp.160-174,L15, 2002

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The Vietnam War had hardly ended when intensive efforts to &ldquo;correct&rdquo; the war narratives were commenced within the United States. The challenge to the once seemingly established fact that the United States had suffered a humiliating defeat came to its peak in the middle of the 1980s. Revisionists such as the former and incumbent Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan aimed to cure the Americans of the Vietnam syndrome, and to help them regain their self-confidence and a sense of national integrity.<br>The withdrawal of American troops, the revisionists insisted, should never be portrayed as a surrender, instead merely as an American unilateral decision to leave Vietnam. The defeated, if any, were the South Vietnamese, not the Americans. The United States was actually a winner there, for it helped the anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam survive for two decades so that other nations in Southeast Asia could develop their economic and political strength. Moreover, American soldiers were always victorious in any encounter with the Communist guerrilla or regular forces.<br>The revisionists believed that the United States could have won at an earlier stage if only it had used its military power in an overwhelming way. The United States was on the verge of triumph by the end of 1972, almost forcing the leaders in Hanoi to accept American terms in peace talks through its massive bombing attacks in central North Vietnam. Then, suddenly, the revisionists argue, the U. S. Congress, intimidated by an unjustified fear of United States inability to win the war, threw in the towel.<br>Political leaders in Washington came under the attack of the revisionists. The United States lost this war for several reasons, namely because the government was unable to offer the American people a definite war objective, placed exceedingly unnecessary restrictions upon the military, failed to demonstrate sufficient will to win, and was unsuccessful in fully mobilizing the public behind the war effort.<br>American mass media, including television, was another target. The correspondents were criticized for being too young and too inexperienced to grasp the reality of battleground and sometimes too naive to shelter themselves from the influence of the Communists' propaganda. Hence, their reporting across the Pacific contributed to serious increases in anti-war sentiment back home, which in turn caused extreme damage to the American war strategy.<br>The majority of the American people were, however, far from being persuaded by such revisionist arguments. They knew that they had never fulfilled their objective of building a strong and viable anti-Communist regime in Vietnam, that they had been responsible for the South Vietnamese deficiencies, that winning in a shooting war had been irrelevant to the political future of the country, that the results of truce negotiations could hardly have been American triumph, and that blaming politicians and reporters merely was a means to protect the military from further criticism. That is why, to the regret of the revisionists, the memory of defeat in Vietnam still haunts the American people.