Daniel Ellsberg

". . . Here are some things I understood when I had finished reading the Pentagon Papers.

There have been no First and Second lndochina Wars, no Third War: just one war, continuously for a quarter of a century. In practical terms, it has been an American war almost from its beginning: a war of Vietnamese--not all of them but enough to persist--against American policy and American financing, proxies, technicians, firepower, and finally, troops and pilots. Since at least the late 1940's there has probably never been a year when political violence in Vietnam would have reached or stayed at the scale of a "war," had not the U.S. President, Congress, and citizens fueled it with money, weapons, and ultimately, manpower: first through the French, then wholly owned client regimes, and at last directly.

The popular critique that we have "interfered" in what is "really a civil war"--a notion long held privately by many of my former colleagues as a pledge to themselves of their secret realism--is as much a myth as the earlier official one of "aggression from the North." To call a conflict in which one army is financed and equipped entirely by foreigners a "civil war" simply screens a more painful reality: that the war is, after all, a foreign aggression. Our aggression.

Our role has defied the U.N. Charter and every principle of self determination from the beginning, and violated our international assurances at Geneva since 1954. In the technical language of Nuremberg--American language ratified by the U.N. in 1951--it is a "crime against peace." * It persists as such: a wholly illegitimate unilateral intervention, desperately unwanted by most of those of another nation and culture, designed to determine who should govern them, how they should live, and which of them should die.

I had, of course, heard all these arguments before: and dismissed them, as my colleagues had, as overblown rhetoric. It was what "extreme" critics--and most international lawyers--had been saying about the nature of our involvement for years. I had not believed them. Now I had to. . .

For myself, to read, through our own official documents, about the origins of the conflict and of our participation in it, is to see our involvement--and the killing we do--naked of any shred of legitimacy. That applies just as strongly to our deliberately prolonging it by a single additional day, or bomb, or death. Can it ever be precipitate to end a policy of murder?. . . ."

(Ellsberg footnote.)

* "Crimes against peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing," [Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal, 1945; see Quincy Wright, The Role of lnternational Law (New York, 1961),p. 108, and see, Vietnam and lnternational Law, ed. Richard Falk, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1967, 1969).]

For example, the air attacks on North Vietnam from early 1965 to the present appear to meet every legal test of "aggression," or illegal use of armed force in international relations (Wright, pp. 59-65).

Moreover, the U.S. Government gave a unilateral "international assurance"--in binding fashion--that it would "refrain from the threat or use of force to disturb" the Geneva Accords of July 21, 1954, which called for nationwide elections--i.e., throughout Vietnam, which was regarded by all as one nation--in July, 1956 (PP, 1, 570-72).

As the Pentagon Papers reveal unequivocally, we proceeded to supply arms and pay an army and police force devoted to repressing by force every element in "South Vietnam" that favored the honoring of the Accords, from 1954 to the present; while a regime totally dependent on our arms and money refused even to discuss the implementation of the Accords.

Source: Ellsberg, Daniel. Papers On The War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. pp. 33 - 34.