David and Goliath: Anthony Eden Warns US Against Bombing Vietnam (1966) | The Cold War

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On 16 August 1966, Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, spoke to ITN's Reggie Bosanquet about his proposals for peace in Vietnam. Presented in a book entitled Toward Peace in Indochina – published the day of his interview with Bosanquet – Eden's proposal called for America to halt its large-scale bombing of North Vietnam and begin searching for a peace plan that might be acceptable to Hanoi. The bombing of North Vietnam, the former Prime Minister argued, would not win the war. "On the contrary," he told Bosanquet, "bombing creates a sort of David and Goliath complex in any country that has to suffer bombing— we had that in '40." Going beyond a critique of the bombing strategy, Eden argued outright that the war could not be won by American military victory. "They can win a series of battles, they could even win a series of engagements in the jungle, but that a military victory can decide this conflict I don't believe, because what matters is what happens after you've won your military victory."

Toward Peace in Indochina represented yet another high-profile intervention against America's escalation of the Vietnam conflict, though its potential was limited. Eden was out of government at the time of the interview, and the Suez Crisis a decade before had discredited him as prime minister. Eden was still respected in America for his role as Britain's foreign secretary during the war years, but it was not enough to stop his plan falling on deaf ears in Washington. Determined not to "lose Vietnam", US President Lyndon B Johnson would commit ever more American troops and expand the target area of Operation Rolling Thunder – the name given to America's aerial bombing campaign – to include parts of neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. While Rolling Thunder would eventually be cancelled in 1968, it would take the catastrophic fall of South Vietnam in April 1975 to completely end America's military involvement in Vietnam.

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