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domestic pressures and so on. He points out that although the view
that "Vietnam had intrinsic strategic military and economic im–
portance" was argued, it never prevailed; properly, of course, since
Vietnam has no such
intrinsic
importance. Rather its importance de–
rives from the assumptions of the domino theory, in his formulation,
the theory "by which the fall of Indochina would lead to the de–
terioration of American security around the globe." "It was ritualistic
anti-communism and exaggerated power politics that got us into
Vietnam," he maintains, noting that these "articles of faith" were
never seriously debated (
New York Review of Books,
Dec. 2, 1971).
Hannah Arendt has discussed a variety of rather different irra–
tional factors that impelled policy-makers in Vietnam. "The ultimate
aim," she concludes, "was neither power nor profit ... [nor] ... par–
ticular tangible interests," but rather "image making," "something
new in the huge arsenal of human follies." "American policy pur–
sued no real aims, good or bad, that could limit and control sheer
fantasy, " in particular, no imperial strategy. Ignorance, blind anti–
communism, arrogance, self-deception lie behind American policy.
She is certainly correct in noting these elements in the ' Pentagon his–
tory. Thus in the face of all historical evidence, the U.S. authorities
persisted in the assumption, a point of rigid doctrine, that China was
an agent of Moscow, the Viet Cong an agency of North Vietnam,
which was in turn the puppet of Moscow or "Peiping" or both, all
depending on the mood of the planners and propagandists, who,
surely, had more than enough information at hand to refute, or at
the very least to shake their confidence in these assumptions. A kind
of institutionalized stupidity seems a possible explanation.
There is ample material in the Pentagon Papers to support such
interpretations, from the time when Dean Acheson, in a cable to
Saigon, spoke of the need to aid the French and the Associated States
of Indochina "to defend the territorial integrity of IC and prevent
the incorporation of the ASSOC[iated] States within the COMMIE–
dominated bloc of slave states" ( I, 70; October 1950), and on to
the present. One of the most remarkable revelations ' of the Pentagon
Study is that the analysts were able to discover only one staff paper,
in a record of more than two decades, "which treats communist
reactions primarily in terms of the separate national interests of
Hanoi, Moscow, and Peiping, rather than primarily in terms of an
overall communist strategy for which Hanoi is acting as an agent"
(11,107; an intelligence estimate of November 1961). Even in the
