I am continuing my reading of US Department of Defense. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department’s Secret History of the Vietnam War. Red and Black Publishers. Kindle Edition.

I have come to the section on the waning days of French control in Vietnam. I excerpt a section of a French Parliamentary mission to Vietnam to assess the situation.

“It is grave that after eight years of laisser-aller and of anarchy, the presence in Indochina of a resident Minister has not been able to put an end to these daily scandals in the life in regard to the granting of licenses, the transfer of piastres, war damages, or commercial transactions. Even if our administration is not entirely responsible for these abuses, it is deplorable that one can affirm that it either ignores them or tolerates them.”

Commenting on this report, an influential French editor blamed the “natural tendency of the military proconsulate to perpetuate itself” and “certain French political groups who have found in the war a principal source of their revenues…through exchange operations, supplies to the expeditionary corps and war damages . . . He concluded that:

“The generally accepted theory is that the prolongation of the war in Indochina is a fatality imposed by events, one of those dramas in history which has no solution. The theory of the skeptics is that the impotence or the errors of the men responsible for our policy in Indochina have prevented us from finding a way out of this catastrophic enterprise. The truth is that the facts now known seem to add up to a lucid plan worked out step by step to eliminate any possibility of negotiation in Indochina in order to assure the prolongation without limit of the hostilities and of the military occupation.”

This situation sounds remarkably like what the USA continued as it took over the effort to defeat the will of the people of Vietnam. It also sounds remarkably like the continued corruption of our present day military/industrial complex.