[NYTr] China Hand on Alden Pyle & Bush's Vietnam Fantasy

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Though it deals with the same topic as the article by Frank James just
posted, this one by China Hand is much more about Southeast Asia, the
CIA and Graham Greene than George Bush. Full of wonderful rich detail
also on the self-promoting Edward Lansdale, who used his one
covert-action "success" in the Philippines to launch a string of
spectacular covert-action failures (notably Cuba and especially
Vietnam) and -- along with the other legendary "great success" in Iran
in 1953 -- to help build the CIA's highly overrated, almost
cookie-cutter model for counterrevolution and counter-insurgency. 

But Lansdale's PR for his cookbook was a lot better than its results,
and perhaps that's why -- despite his generally lousy track record --
the CIA is still stewing up his stale old recipes with tiresome
predictability. Even more ironic, the USA's targets are now a lot more
sophisticated and the Amerikans much less capable than in the
1950s. If anything, they are even more gullible than they were in those
days to a good sales pitch -- readier to believe their own hype than
anyone else in the world. Which brings us back to George Bush.  

It doesn't matter what actually happened in Vietnam. It doesn't even
matter what was in Greene's novel -- none of them at the Bush White
House has read it. They just saw the 1959 Manckiewicz movie version,
and they weren't paying real close attention. All they remember is
what they want to believe, and that's reality.

A real treat to start a holiday weekend for covert ops and Vietnam
history buffs -- and we know it has a happy ending since the good guys
won. Enjoy! - NY Transfer


Counterpunch - Aug 28, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/china08282007.html

"I Am Alden Pyle"

Bush's Vietnam Fantasy

By CHINA HAND

President Bush recently attracted considerable attention and criticism
by stating before the Veterans of Foreign Wars that the takeaway from
Vietnam was that we cut and ran too soon, and we should not duplicate
that mistake in Iraq.

Actually, the president had advanced this line of reasoning last
November during the APEC summit in Vietnam.

My comment at the time is still, I think, on the mark:

    Asked if the experience in Vietnam offered lessons for Iraq, Bush
said Friday, "We tend to want there to be instant success in the world,
and the task in Iraq is going to take awhile."

    He said "it's just going to take a long period of time" for "an
ideology of freedom to overcome an ideology of hate. Yet, the world
that we live in today is one where they want things to happen
immediately."

    We'll succeed unless we quit," the president said.

    It seems to me that the lesson of the Vietnam War is we screwed up,
we got beat, tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese
died but, hey, the sun still rises in the East, things got better, and
thirty years later our President is shaking hands with the political
heir of the guys who kicked our ass.

    In other words, the emergence of a prosperous, peaceful Vietnam is
a pretty strong argument for acknowledging the mistake we made in Iraq
and, bluntly, succeeding by quitting.

The new element in President Bush's Vietnam reverie, one that attracted
considerable headscratching and eyerolling from the cognoscenti, was
his invocation of Alden Pyle, the blindly confident and profoundly
destructive do-gooder in Graham Greene's The Quiet American:

    "In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham
Greene wrote a novel called 'The Quiet American.' It was set in Saigon
and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle.
He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism and dangerous
naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: 'I never knew a
man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.'

    "After America entered the Vietnam War, Graham Greene -- the Graham
Greene argument gathered some steam. Matter of fact, many argued that
if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese
people. In 1972, one anti-war senator put it this way: 'What earthly
difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence
farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos whether they have a military
dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant
capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?'"

Hmmm.

Contrary to the president's assertion, the central lesson of Greene's
book is not that Pyle's (read Bush's) courage, energy, and idealism
were betrayed by the lazy, ignoble disdain of lesser men (read
Democrats) for a multi-decade crusade on behalf of Vietnamese (read
Iraqi) freedom.

Greene's powerfully-argued theme is that Pyle sacrificed the moral high
ground, doomed his venture at its inception, and sowed the seeds of his
own destruction by orchestrating a terrorist bombing in a profoundly
misguided and indecent attempt to advance a foolish, unrealistic, and
catastrophic political agenda.

Greene got it right in Vietnam and, I would say, in Iraq.

President Bush gets it wrong.

The thought that President Bush is perhaps relying on this fictional
portrayal of a deluded naif to stoke personal fantasies of omniscience,
moral clarity, and perhaps even (political) martyrdom in the face of
widespread repudiation of his policies is, to say the least, disturbing.

Who was Alden Pyle supposed to be?

Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the brilliant, driven general who was High
Commissioner to Indo-China and the last, best hope of France's
desperate counterinsurgency effort against Ho Chi Minh, had this to say
about Robert Blum, head of the US Economic Aid Mission to Indochina
(Blum is sometimes cited as Greene's model for Pyle):

    You are the most dangerous man in Indochina.

And was the United States-represented in Greene's fiction by Alden
Pyle-dangerous enough to connive with a Vietnamese warlord in a
terrorist attack in Saigon in 1951?

That was the explosive allegation at the heart of The Quiet American.

The Quiet American culminates with a bloody bombing in a square off the
rue Catinat in central Saigon, precipitated by the naïve, bookish
Pyle's disastrous attempt to end-around the French and package a
thuggish warlord, General The, as the leader of a nationalistic and
democratic "Third Force".

In real life, as in the book, the blast was set off by a "General" The,
a renegade officer who had left the private army of the Caodai sect to
set up business for himself near Saigon. He had apparently attracted
the interest of American, keen for a nationalist third force that would
supplant both Communism and the French-backed Bao Dai regime.

To make a splashy arrival on the political scene, The executed two
bloody bombings in Saigon. Not only that, he took credit for them in a
radio broadcast, despite initial attempts by the US to blame the
Vietminh for the atrocities.

The later on became a fixture in the US-backed Diem government.

The Quiet American infuriated Americans when it came out. New Yorker
writer A.J. Leibling, fresh from liberating the wine cellars of Paris
and flush with the self-regard born of the good war, excoriated Greene
in a famous review.

Not surprisingly, the current Vietnamese government loves the book for
its depiction of a US intervention morally and strategically doomed
from its inception.

The Quiet American is apparently available all over the Vietnam and the
government gave full support to the filming of Philip Noyce's excellent
adaptation, which was finally released in 2002 after much 9/11-related
anguish.

But the interesting and unanswered question is, what exactly did The
get from the United States in 1950 and 1951?

Most American histories of the Vietnam mess give relatively short
shrift to the period before 1954. That was the year of Dienbienphu,
Geneva, Diem, and all that, and Vietnam officially became America's
exclusive tar baby.

That's why Graham Greene's The Quiet American and volume two of Norman
Sherry's authorized biography of Greene The Life of Graham Greene
(Penguin, 2004) are such fascinating and important additions to the
history of the period.

Greene worked as a correspondent in Vietnam in the early 50s, and many
of the characters and incidents are direct distillations of his
experiences. He wrote "Perhaps there is more direct rapportage in The
Quiet American than in any other novel I have written". Sherry's
diligence in retracing Greene's steps and providing context for his
work and life have become legendary.

It appears highly likely that in 1950-51 the US aid mission, actually a
hive of CIA spooks, was chafing at the limited role and information the
French were willing to grant them in the effort against the Vietminh.

The survival of the French presence in Vietnam and its Bao Dai regime
was clearly a matter of no more than a year or two. The US had no
qualms about pursuing Third Force options independently and displayed
little sympathy for French objections or the destabilizing and
demoralizing effects that their actions had on the desperate French
effort to stabilize Vietnam.

Greene, himself a MI6 officer in the Second World War and sympathetic
to the French view, undoubtedly learned of America's playing footsie
with people like The from indignant sources in the French Surete.

Did The, as Greene alleges in his book, get explosives, know-how, and
direction from the CIA? And did the US have prior knowledge of the
attacks and, instead of stopping them, encouraged them and planned
around them and exploited them for propaganda purposes?

Norman Sherry is extremely cautious and circumspect in weighing the
evidence for the more sensational allegations.

Greene was clearly hearing Gallic tittle-tattle as suspicious French
intelligence, military, and diplomatic personnel monitored the growing
and increasingly assertive U.S. presence in Saigon.

The most damning was information from the French No. 1 in Vietnam,
General Salan, that he had arrested an American consular officer on the
Dakow Bridge (where Alden Pyle meets his end in the book) with plastic
explosives in the trunk of his car.

However, Mr. Sherry did not uncover any whistleblowers within the ranks
of Americans stationed in Saigon in '50/'51 who supported Greene's
story that the Catinat bombing was carried out by The with guilty
American foreknowledge, assistance, and approval-or even that the US
had any serious contacts with The prior to 1954.

Case not proven to legal standards is the conclusion I extracted from
Chapter 29, which discusses the era and the events of the bombings in
great detail.

However, on artistic grounds the situation in Vietnam provided a
suitable basis for Greene to depict the deaths in rue Catinat as the
direct consequence of callous and overconfident American adventurism.

Examining the historical context of The Quiet American provides an
illuminating picture of the creeping American intervention and
sidelining of the French, which came into the open only in 1955, when
the US sided with Ngo Van Diem-and General The-and closed the books on
the French experience in Vietnam.

The French struggle to regain control of Vietnam after World War II was
a political, human, and financial catastrophe for the French homeland.

No question that the French needed American help, which Truman and
Eisenhower provided. By the time the French packed it in after Dien
Bien Phu, America had underwritten 80% the cost of the failed French
effort.

Nevertheless, the United States was an unenthusiastic and suspicious
partner. Truman's anti-communism had replaced Roosevelt's support for
self-determination in the liberated countries of Southeast Asia as
America's guiding ideology, but the US was never able to look upon
French aims, methods, or capabilities in Vietnam with any enthusiasm.

The corrosive distrust and dislike between the French and the Americans
is fully documented in Greene's book.

The takeaway from Greene's book is not that he was wrong about the
nature of US engagement in the brief period when Vietnam was slipping
from French control. It was that he was profoundly right about the
twenty-year nightmare that the US and Vietnam were embarking on
together.

Greene's life and art were nourished by a stew of self-loathing and
self-knowledge. France's doomed, disgusted struggle for Vietnam
resonated with Greene's sense of sin and cynical despondency.

On the other hand, he took the blithe, assertive ignorance of the
Americans-symbolized by Alden Pyle-as a personal affront.

In 1951, to indicate the disastrous consequences of virtue blindly
asserted without awareness of personal sin and weakness, Greene makes
the naïve Pyle knowingly complicit in a horrific crime: the terror
bombing of a square filled with innocent civilians in the center of
Saigon.

Later on, American errors in Vietnam would be characterized more by
sins of omission by the intentionally blind and willfully ignorant, and
all-too-knowing sins of commission by people who harbored no illusions
about the decency of their own methods.

People like Edward Lansdale.

Thankfully, Sherry's book lays to rest the canard, repeated in Stanley
Karnow's Vietnam and countless other works-and promoted by Landsdale
himself--that Edward Lansdale was the model for Alden Pyle.

Lansdale was the antithesis of Pyle: an egomaniacal blowhard,
grandstander, and loose cannon whose eccentricity bordered on the
pathological.

He famously put one over on Graham Greene, conspiring with director
Joseph Manckiewicz to shoot the first version of The Quiet American, in
1959, in direct contradiction to the book and Greene's intentions. When
the movie appeared, Alden Pyle-played by Audie Murphy-was the hero; and
Greene's alter-ego-the jaded English journalist Fowler-is the dangerous
naïf who precipitates the carnage in the square.

In explaining why his version would prevail, Lansdale wrote to
Manckiewicz:

    " [no] more than one or two Vietnamese now alive know the real
truth of the matter, and they certainly aren't going to tell it to
anyone."

Landsdale did not officially enter the Vietnam arena until 1954, when
he appeared as Diem's minder. Greene wrote his book in 1952.

But that doesn't mean that Lansdale's shadow isn't over the events in
rue Catinat.

Before Lansdale gained notoriety as John Kennedy's go-to guy for
spectacular failures, first in Vietnam and then Operation Mongoose-the
increasingly harebrained strategies for destabilizing Cuba and
assassinating Castro that attracted the attention of the Church
Committee--he presided over one of the greatest successes in post-world
war II US foreign policy-the crushing of the Philippine insurrection.

He did it in alliance with an energetic, talented, and compliant
military office, Ramon Magsaysay.

Tactics included enlarging and upgrading the army, limiting abuses
against the population by state military forces, aggressive irregular
counterinsurgency operations, lots of psyops, and some land reform.
Also highly trained hunter-killer squads and unreliable paramilitaries.

Amazingly, everything worked , at least against the isolated Huk
movement, which at its height claimed 15,000 troops and only drew on
the population of Luzon-1.5 million-for support.

The Philippines is still the acme of American counterinsurgency, and
one thinks it would be cited in the same breath with British
suppression of the Malay Uprising, which seems to get all the positive
ink as the only truly successful counterinsurgency operation in the
modern period.

According to Lansdale, in 1954 he was ordered to Vietnam "to do there
what you did in the Philippines."

An academic at the University of the Philippines, Roland Simbulan,
stated:

    So successful was the CIA in pulling the strings thru Lansdale that
in 1954, a high-level US committee reported that, "American policy in
Southeast Asia was most effectively represented in the Philippines,
where any expanded program of Western influence may best be launched."

    The CIA's success in crushing the peasant-based Huk rebellion in
the 1950s made this operation the model for future counterinsurgency
operations in Vietnam and Latin America. Colonel Lansdale and his
Filipino sidekick, Col. Napoleon Valeriano were later to use their
counterguerrilla experience in the Philippines for training covert
operatives in Vietnam and in the US-administered School of the
Americas, which trained counterguerrilla assassins for Latin America.
Thus, the Philippines had become the CIA's prototype in successful
covert operations and psychological warfare. 

After his stint in the Philippines using propaganda, psywar and
deception against the Huk movement, Lansdale was then assigned in
Vietnam to wage military, political and psychological warfare.

When the Americans looked at Vietnam, they believed the French had a
formula for failure, and America had the recipe for success.

During World War II, Roosevelt had already touted America's policy
supporting Philippine independence as a template for Vietnam.

The Pentagon Papers record that President Roosevelt offered the De
Gaulle Filipino advisors to help them out in Vietnam.

De Gaulle's response to the astounding suggestion that the banner of
European civilization and French honor could best be shouldered with
the help of brown folks from the Philippines was "pensive silence".

The Americans-like Alden Pyle-were too impatient of success and
confident in their methods to work with the French.

Once the French [had] left, the American magic would work in Vietnam
as it had in the Philippines. All it required was U.S. prestige and aid,
an innovative and ruthless cadre of advisors, and a seamless
coordination between the American patron and the Vietnamese client, all
constellated around a charismatic, competent leader.

But the differences turned out to be more important than the
similarities.

Instead of Magsaysay, a dynamic man on horseback, we put our money on
Diem, a (literally) cloistered Catholic and out of touch egoist.

Instead of the hapless, isolated Huks, we got iron-hard NVA soldiers
with an impregnable base in North Vietnam, safe-haven borders, and
Russian and Chinese assistance.

We got a counterinsurgency operation fatally compromised from its
outset by excessive American reliance on political and military
violence.

And of course, we got defeat instead of victory.

That's the tragedy Graham Greene foresaw in the rue Catinat.

I think I'll let Philip Noyce, director of the 2002 film adaptation of
The Quiet American, have the last word. From a Salon interview in early
2003, as America teetered on the brink of the Iraq invasion:

    "Alden Pyle is alive and well today. And that's either a mark of
Greene's brilliance, or the fact that some things just never
change. ..In theory, you've got a White House full of Alden Pyles.
[Laughter] And that's scary...

   " ... Well, George Bush is the ultimate Alden Pyle! He's hardly been
out of the country, he's steeped in good intentions, believes he has
the answer, is very naive, ultimately not that bright, and extremely
dangerous."

[China Hand edits the very interesting website China Matters
at http://chinamatters.blogspot.com/ ]