Vietnam War Collection: books plus

[stanleywinthrop]

The tic-tac-toe passage is from pg. 160 and relates to the truly remarkable effects of the Social Purification Law, propounded by Madam Nhu. According to Moyar, Diem's RVN was not only defeating Communism but also prostitution.

Yet your claim that this 'tic-tac-toe' phenomena is the reason Moyar believes western press decided to dislike Diem is fallicious. My reading of Moyar leads me to the conclusion that Moyar believed the western press disliked Diem because most of the prominant journalists spent entirely too much time with and placed entirly too much weight on the opinions thereof with one small portion of the Vietnam poplulation--the social and acedemic elites of Saigon, not because "the troops had to play tic tac toe". I do not have my copy of the book available but when I do I will post pages for your reference.

No, I simply find many of his conclusions incredible and unhelpful. I am also slightly bitter at having spent much time reading transcripts of Diem declaiming on various subjects, presented as examples of Diem's clear-eyed leadership, as well as Moyar's justifications for the butchery in Indonesia ---

I am not familiar with this event and Moyar's analysis of it, but I shall study.

Moyar is far too credulous in taking the assessments of certain officials as genuine reality rather than as points of view, while discrediting others as inherently compromised. For instance, Pham Xuan An, the Communist military intel agent and Reuters stringer, is automatically presented as providing a distorting view and propaganda stories to the Western press.

I'm confused here (that happens often ) are you saying that Pham was reliable source or not?

The view of Merle Pribbenow, former CIA officer and Moyar's translator of Vietnamese documents, is that Pham's main value was as conduit of intelligence to VCI given his many links to South Vietnam's CIO and the CIA, as well as analyst of South Vietnamese and American intentions and motivations. Pribbenow's view that Pham would not have been wasted by presenting VCI propaganda to Western newspaper reporters, and indeed that Pham acted "more Catholic than the Pope" to avoid suspicion, is much more plausible than Moyar's take. Yet Moyar does not even pause to consider this in his rush to assault the Western press in Saigon.

Again your line of reasoning is confusing to me. Are you saying that while Pham was a communist agent he acted "more Catholic than the Pope" to avoid suspicion, and this necessarily included not spreading communist propaganda and disinformation to the press? What was his purpose as a communist agent, to back up Diem's claims that he was winning the war?

Perhaps most misleading is his picture of the Vietnamese peasantry as an unpoliticized, undifferentiated lumpen mass which responded only to strength - David Elliott's Social Change in the Mekong Delta 1930-1975 illustrates just how wrong this theory is.

It's interesting that you choose to use an anthropolgy of the Mekong delta as evidence of the social leanings of the Vietnamese people--preciscly the place where Diem's COIN effort was least successful--even in Moyar's account.