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Annals of the Association of American Geographers Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raag20 Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War Gavin P. Bowd a & Daniel W. Clayton b a School of Modern Languages, University of St. Andrews b School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St. Andrews Published online: 23 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Gavin P. Bowd & Daniel W. Clayton (2013) Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103:3, 627-646, DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2011.653729 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.653729

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Gavin P. Bowd∗ and Daniel W. Clayton† ∗School of Modern Languages, University of St. Andrews †School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St. Andrews

This article tells a three-layered story. First, it reexamines the impact of French geographer Yves Lacoste’s 1972 expose´ on the American bombing of the Red River Delta of North Vietnam on opposition to the Vietnam War and how it was implicated in wider political debate about what Hannah Arendt saw as systemic “lying in politics.” In various reports and newspaper articles Lacoste deployed the tools of classical geography—firsthand observation, mapping, and the integrated analysis of physical and human factors—to disclose connections among law, war, and environment (or what he termed “geographical warfare”) that had a troubling political significance. Second, we explore how Lacoste’s expose´ was bound up with the theme of “tropicality” (the West’s construction of “the tropics” as its environmental other), chiefly through his recourse to Gourou’s (1936) study of the delta. Lacoste showed how exotic imagery of the tropics has served as a means of opposition and critique as well as a mode of othering and Western dominance. Third, Lacoste’s critical engagement with Gourou points to the ambivalent critical impact that the Vietnam War had on Francophone and Anglophone geography during the 1970s and 1980s, yet also how interest in the idea of tropicality developed in French geography twenty years before the better known Anglophone critical literature on the subject emerged. Key Words: geographical warfare, Pierre Gourou, Yves Lacoste, tropicality, Vietnam War.

Este art´ıculo relata una historia de tres niveles. Primero, se re-examina el impacto que tuvo la revelacion´ del Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 geografo´ frances´ Yves Lacoste en 1972, en oposicion´ a la Guerra de Vietnam, sobre el bombardeo americano en el delta del R´ıo Rojo, Vietnam del Norte, y como´ aquello se incrusta en el mas´ amplio debate pol´ıtico sobre lo que Hannah Arendt identifico´ como un sistemico´ “mentir en pol´ıtica”. En varios informes y art´ıculos de periodicos,´ Lacoste desplego´ las herramientas de la geograf´ıa clasica—observaci´ on´ de primera mano, mapeo y el analisis´ integrado de factores f´ısicos y humanos—para desentranar˜ las conexiones entre la ley, la guerra y el medio ambiente (o lo que el´ llamo´ “la guerra geografica”),´ que tuvieron una molesta significacion´ pol´ıtica. Segundo, exploramos la manera como la revelacion´ de Lacoste se ligo´ con el tema de la “tropicalidad” (la construccion´ de Occidente a t´ıtulo de otredad ambiental de “los tropicos”),´ principalmente a traves´ de su busqueda´ de apoyo en el estudio de Gourou (1936) sobre el delta. Lacoste mostroc´ omo´ la exotica´ imaginer´ıa de los tropicos´ ha servido como instrumento de negativismo y cr´ıtica y tambien´ como un modo de otredad y dominacion´ occidental. Tercero, el enfoque cr´ıtico de Lacoste con el modo de pensar de Gourou apunta hacia el impacto cr´ıtico ambivalente que tuvo la Guerra de Vietnam sobre la geograf´ıa de los mundos francofono´ y anglofono´ durante los anos˜ 1970 y 1980, pero tambien´ a mostrar como´ se desarrollouninter´ es´ sobre la idea de tropicalidad en la geograf´ıa francesa veinte anos˜ antes de que apareciera la mas´ conocida literatura cr´ıtica anglofona´ sobre esta materia. Palabras clave: guerra geografica,´ Pierre Gourou, Yves Lacoste, tropicalidad, Guerra de Vietnam.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(3) 2013, pp. 627–646 C 2013 by Association of American Geographers Initial submission, January 2010; revised submission, March 2011; final acceptance, July 2011 Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC. 628 Bowd and Clayton

he arrival of French geographer Yves Lacoste in project (unlike Gourou’s) was attuned to politics, war, the Red River Delta of the Democratic Repub- and world opinion and generated an activist (rather T lic of Vietnam (DRV) in July 1972 represents a than contemplative) geography. We end this section pivotal scene in international protest against the Viet- by examining the role that Lacoste, Gourou, and the nam War. The International Commission of Inquiry dikes played in 1970s French geography, and particu- into U.S. War Crimes in Indochina, which Lacoste larly in the inaugural 1976 issue of the radical journal came with, sought to investigate allegations that the Herodote:´ Strategies, Geographies, Ideologies,´ founded by U.S. Air Force (USAF) was deliberately bombing the Lacoste (which he still edits, for many years now with dike system of this monsoon region, threatening catas- Beatrice´ Giblin); and how, by 1984, a critique of what trophic flooding.1 Lacoste’s intervention is also a key we now call “tropicality” had emerged more than ten moment in the postwar genealogy of “tropicality,” by years before the Anglophone literature on this subject which we mean, following Arnold (1996, 2005) and got going. now many others, including geographers (e.g., Driver Some of the impetus for the story we tell came from 2004; Power and Sidaway 2004; Bowd and Clayton interviews with French geographers in 2008–2009 2005), the way the West has constructed “the tropics” in connection with a larger project on Gourou. This as its environmental other, in positive and negative article was not initially planned as part of that project. terms (as edenic and debilitating); a discourse (or suite Rather, it stems from an issue raised by most of our of experiences, practices, and representations), which interviewees: We were reexamining Gourou’s work in taking the temperate West as the norm against which (innovatively for some, perplexingly to others) with tropical otherness is viewed and judged, has been deeply analytical tools that in some respects were alien to implicated in Western imperialism. Lacoste helps us to French geographers. Our interviewees remarked on the glean how this discourse can work as a mode of oppo- strongly Anglophone and “postcolonial” hue of the sition as well as othering and how it has been linked literature on tropicality, with Said’s (1978) Orientalism with postwar politics, armed conflict, and environmen- seen as an underlying theoretical influence. Although it tal destruction—themes that are muted in the critical was acknowledged that this discourse (usually rendered literature on the tropics. as tropicalisme in French) was pertinent to French Lacoste’s expose´ concerning the American bomb- experience, we were told that little critical interest had ing initially appeared on the front page of the French been shown in it, principally because Said’s work and newspaper Le Monde on 16 August 1972. We provide postcolonialism had made limited headway in French a detailed critical and contextual reconstruction of its geography. In short, our interviewees prompted us to nature and influence, in two main sections. We start be wary about endorsing a single or simple critical with the USAF’s bombing campaign (dubbed Opera- script about tropicality—to remain alive to its diverse tion Linebacker by the Pentagon), how it amounted to expressions in different times, places, and projects. This what Lacoste termed “geographical warfare,” and how article can be read, in part, as a response to such recog- he opened up a set of connections among law, war, and nition. How do we treat this discourse, as it is defined

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 geography that troubled the American establishment. and used in one location, as more or less adequate to The second section tracks how, as Lacoste expanded on the task of teasing out its meaning in another? Might his Le Monde article in subsequent writing, and media it be seen as a modality of opposition and exchange, interest gathered around his story, he brought the theme rather than simply as an epistemology of division and of tropicality more directly into view, chiefly through othering (cf. Driver and Martins 2005, 1–11)? his recourse to Gourou’s (1936) monumental (660- page) study Les Paysans du Delta Tonkinois, which in 1972 still had a strong hold on how the 15 million rice- Law of War—Space of Deception cultivating people of the region were viewed within the West (see Gliedman 1972; Leitenberg 1972; Melcher The Pentagon Papers, the voluminous top-secret U.S. 1972; Walli 1973). We explore how Lacoste (and other Department of Defense report on U.S. involvement in Western observers) reinforced Gourou’s imagery of the Vietnam, which was leaked to The New York Times by “beauties of the delta”—the delta represented through Daniel Ellsberg in February 1971, heightened public an exoticizing Western gaze, or affirmative tropical- awareness of how politicians had lied to the American ity (Bowd and Clayton 2003)—but also how Lacoste’s public about the Vietnam War. Arendt (1958, 198–99; Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War 629

1971, 30–34) famously argued (eighteen months be- Law, Strategy, Geography fore the Watergate scandal broke) that The Pentagon Papers were indicative of a more systemic “lying in pol- It was in this space of deception that Lacoste’s ex- itics” that diminished the “space of appearance”—the pose´ achieved significance. He informed his Le Monde performance of political freedom through the “coming readers (Lacoste 1972f) that he had sought to conduct together” of citizens in public spaces where shared inter- an “on-the-spot-analysis” that would assess firsthand ests, a “common world,” would be found through respect written and verbal testimony and visual data (maps, for a plurality of perspectives. “Deception” and “self- ground and aerial photography) that had been pro- interest” were the political watchwords of the Vietnam vided, at his request, by the DRV’s Ministry of Hy- age, she argued, and The Pentagon Papers underscored draulics. This evidence, he continued, showed that the the “extravagant lengths” to which the U.S. military- USAF had resumed its onslaught on North Vietnam, political establishment took its “commitment to non- which it had bombed heavily between 1965 and 1968 truthfulness” (Arendt 1971, 30–34). Derrida (2002, (Operation Rolling Thunder), with Presidential Advi- 39–52) suggested that, for Arendt, The Pentagon Papers sor Walt W. Rostow insisting that the DRV’s guerrilla pointed to an intensification of modernity’s destruction operations in the south (the fighting force dubbed the of the very reality to which lies refer, and thus of the “Vietcong” by the Americans) was underpinned by a ground on which truth could be settled. Arendt and the more conventional industrial–military capability in the antiwar movement, however, clung to the idea of what north that was supplied by China and the Soviet Union she termed “factual truth”—a form of truth, she rea- (Milne 2007). President Richard Nixon (1978b, 602) soned (Arendt 1968, 238–39), reaching back into the announced Operation Linebacker in a television ad- Greek polis, that “concerns events and circumstances dress on 8 May 1972, urging that it was by destroying in which many are involved,” that is “political by na- these supply lines that the United States would place ture” because “it is always related to other people ... itself in a stronger negotiating position with the DRV, [and] is established by witnesses and depends upon testi- and placed fewer strike restrictions on the USAF than mony” and that should be regarded as crucial to the way President Johnson had done previously (Pape 1996, the legitimacy of wars is judged; a truth at odds with the 174–201). neo-conservative rhetoric ascendant in Nixon’s White Operation Linebacker was a response to the DRV’s House, which held that silence, secrecy, and deception Eastertide Offensive, mounted on 30 March 1972 with were acceptable when and where they served (what was 120,000 troops and culminating, by early May, in the deemed to be) some greater and otherwise unattainable capture of provincial capitals and territory deep into good (see Owens 2007). southern Vietnam—the DRV’s most significant push Commentators viewed lying over the Vietnam War south since its 1968 Tet Offensive. Nixon (Public Pa- as an issue of vision and geography. Schlesinger (1971), pers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon for instance, simply opined that the United States was 1972, 583–87) claimed the air campaign was the most “eyeless in Indochina,” unable to see, let alone tell, the effective way of keeping “weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Vietnam”

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 truth; but others regarded this blindness as more com- plex and baleful. When renowned journalist Sydney and “prevent[ing] the imposition of a Communist gov- Schanberg ([1972] 1998, 397–405) reflected on his war ernment by brutal aggression upon 17 million people” reporting and what Arendt had termed the “credibil- to the south. The intention, he confided in his diary, ... ity gap” in politics, he wrote not of the disappearance was to make “our actions speak infinitely louder than of truth, or of a complete lack of vision, but of the our words” (Nixon 1978b, 606). “different realities” that connected and divided differ- American left-wing critics (e.g., G. D. Porter 1972, ent participants in war (he highlighted the gap between 1–5) charged that Nixon’s rhetoric was the latest in a “the reporter” and “the general”). The Vietnam War, he litany of American falsehoods regarding the supposed suggested, was a way of seeing as well as a material con- “reign of terror” that the North Vietnamese Com- flict, and the rhetorical ruses of war were bound up with munist party had visited on its peasantry since the how the Vietnam War was known, experienced, and 1940s. On the other hand, Republican politicians saw orchestrated from different places—“here” and “there,” Linebacker as a way of expediting Nixon’s program of “above” or “below” ground—and with how this geog- “Vietnamization”—the withdrawal of U.S. personnel raphy fractured clear distinctions between truth and from South Vietnam, the number having dropped from lies. a high of 545,000 in 1969 to 69,000 by May 1972; 630 Bowd and Clayton

and the building up of the Army of the Republic of At a 29 June 1972 press conference, Nixon (1978a) Vietnam—in advance of the U.S. presidential election described the DRV’s allegations as woefully “inaccurate of November 1972. propaganda” to cover for the fact that North Vietnam Nixon’s announcement was prompted by allegations had not fully recovered from the extensive damage to made by DRV officials in April 1972 that the USAF the dikes caused by “natural factors” (floods) the pre- was contravening international law by bombing civil- vious year. The United States had “used great restraint ian targets, and especially the dikes (U.S. Senate 1972b, in its bombing policy,” he claimed, and “orders [are] 63). Although deemed a “lesser issue of war” by Nixon’s out not to hit the dikes because the result in terms National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, the issue of civilian casualties would be extraordinary” (Nixon of civilian casualties had struck a chord with the pub- 1978a, 260). Two months later, however, a now irri- lic and press since Operation Rolling Thunder, and on tated Nixon, still being pressed over the dikes, asked, 3 May 1972 the Chair of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee “Is it worth the risk of possible flooding or of having on Refugees and Escapees, Democratic Senator Edward world opinion turn against us to bomb military targets Kennedy, urged Congress to examine “war damage to near dikes and dams?” His belligerent answer was that the civilian population” (Kissinger, Kennedy, in U.S. “If it were the policy of the United States to bomb the Congress 1972, S. 7182). Declassified White House doc- dikes, we could take them out, the significant part of uments now reveal that in the spring of 1972 both them out, in a week” (Nixon 1978a, 270). Nixon and Kissinger “strongly favored” bombing the Lacoste and the International Commission, which dikes and did not rule out “the nuclear option” (U.S. toured the DRV between 29 July and 13 August National Security Archives 2006); and the Pentagon 1972, worked against this vitriolic backdrop. Seven Papers (1971, 4:43) show that systematic destruction of observers, including Amnesty International President the dikes, although finally rejected as a military strategy, Sean McBride, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsay had been the subject of detailed Oval Office delibera- Clark, and what Clark (U.S. Senate 1972b, 10) de- tion during the 1960s. In the spring of 1972, however, scribed as a “group of experts ...demographers, geogra- the White House simply denied that the dikes were phers, and engineers,” assessed the charges. Driven by being targeted. North Vietnamese army officers in Soviet jeeps, they Nevertheless, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency focused their attention on the eastern side of the re- (CIA) and U.S. House of Representatives Armed Ser- gion, and traveled some of the way alone and some of vices Committee both investigated the DRV’s allega- it in groups (Lacoste, personal interview 2008). Their tions and concluded by late July that although some findings were reported in Stockholm in October 1972. dikes had been hit accidentally by American tactical This International Commission was established in fighters (Phantoms) and B-52 bombers from the U.S. March 1970 as what its convenor, Hans Goran¨ Franck Seventh Air Force and U.S. Navy TaskForce77, in sor- (1972, iii), characterized as “an independent body, ties that numbered more than 2,000 per month by July which would bring together a great moral and social 1972, there was no evidence of intentional targeting force, drawn from the record of American atrocities in

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 or widespread destruction (Palmer 1984, 96–99; Harris Indochina and charted against the laws of the inter- 1987). A report on the history of dike bombing was also national community.” It was an offshoot of the 1967 prepared for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Com- Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, organized mittee, chaired by Southern Democrat J.W. Fulbright, by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, and concluded that prior “results of the bombing of which probed U.S. conduct in Vietnam and was con- North Vietnam have consistently fallen far short of the vened in two sessions in Sweden and Denmark. These claims made for it,” including claims about the avoid- Vietnam commissions and tribunals were all closely ance of civilian damage (U.S. Senate 1972a, 12). If affiliated with the Swedish Committee for Vietnam, the issue would not go away, then it was also partly chaired by economist Gunnar Myrdal (Scott 2009). due to USAF General John D. Lavelle’s admission to They were not formal criminal proceedings concerned Congress that Vietnam’s monsoon climate (especially with the actions of individuals, like the Nuremburg dense cloud cover) made precise targeting difficult and Trials of 1945 to 1949, but nor were they “kanga- that pilots did not always file “accurate” or “complete” roo courts” whose findings politicians could simply ig- reports of what they had hit (U.S. House of Represen- nore or trivialize (Klinghoffer 2002). As lawyers at the tatives 1972, 12). time (e.g., D’Amato 1969) argued, they had a stake in Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War 631

international law as generative of evidence respective to viets and DRV, paved the way. DRV officials in Paris differences of opinion over facts of wars. Lawyer Richard had been briefing Dresch about dike bombing since Falk (1970, 2–4) argued that such “impartial and re- 1967, and Dresch had passed this intelligence on to sponsible agencies of inquiry” were integral to “the cir- Lacoste, regarding him as well equipped to assess its ve- cle of responsibility” (analogous to Arendt’s democratic racity because of his training as a physical geographer space of appearance) that would “investigate and pun- and his research on the alluvial levees of the Gharb ish” the “war crimes” that the U.S. establishment had plain in Morocco. Indeed, Lacoste had previously pre- sought to “suppress” and expose their “refusal to differ- pared a report for the 1967 Russell Tribunal and re- entiate between combatants and non-combatants and garded the Vietnamese material he had been given as between military and non-military targets.” incomplete because it did not pay close enough atten- In 1972, U.S. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird tes- tion to the unique “geographical context” (dike system) tified before the U.S. Senate (1972b, 70) that the Hague of the delta (Lacoste 1972e)—a lacunae rectified in a Convention of 1907 and Geneva Convention of 1949 1967 DRV “briefing” for foreign diplomats and 1968 were far hazier about the rules of engagement regard- pamphlet on the air strikes, the latter containing co- ing civilians in air warfare than in ground or naval pious quotes from Lacoste’s report (U.S. CIA 1967; warfare. Parks (1983, 4–5) noted that during Opera- DRV 1968). tion Linebacker the Judge Advocate (adviser) to the On 7 June 1972, Lacoste (1972e) published an ar- U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff inferred an important dis- ticle in Le Monde claiming that “the American ag- tinction between the intentional targeting of the civil- gressors are toying with the idea of destroying the Red ian population, which was prohibited by international River dike system” and thus perpetrating “a genocidal law, and “incidental injury to civilians working in law- crime.” The piece was widely read, including by Jane ful targets.” Parks notes that “water control facilities Fonda, who relied heavily on an English translation of it such as irrigation dams and dikes” were deemed legit- in one of her well-known radio broadcasts to Amer- imate military targets, provided that their destruction ican GIs from Hanoi lambasting her government’s yielded “a specific military advantage.” Although in the- record in Vietnam, and it was widely circulated among ory, “reasonable precautions to avoid [such] incidental antiwar protesters (Fonda 1972; Miami Conventions damage” were to be observed, in practice the question Coalition 1972). Scholar David Marr (in U.S. Sen- of what constituted a “legitimate target,” and whether ate 1972b, 119) also used it to explain in The New “collateral damage” was “proportionate to anticipated York Times (1 July 1972) that the Americans were military advantage,” was indeed a thorny matter of bombing in such a way that if the dikes collapsed, interpretation (Parks 1983, 1–5). Ambiguity surround- “the Pentagon can picture it to the world as a nat- ing this issue was stressed in a 1971 report on Opera- ural disaster.” DRV (1972b) officials seized on La- tion Rolling Thunder by Cornell University scientists coste’s analysis, too, in its appeal to world opinion (Littauer and Uphoff 1972). What alarmed DRV nego- against Nixon’s “devilish design,” and the Manchester tiators in Paris in July 1972 was a quip by Nixon at a Guardian (“The truth of Nixon’s bombs” 4 August 1972,

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 press conference that “anything that contributes to the 12) relayed Lacoste’s inflammatory remark that the war effort”—hence the dikes—was a legitimate target bombing could cause more deaths than “several atomic (U.S. Senate 1972b, 95). bombs.” It was these ambiguities in the relations among law, Lacoste (1972b, 298) later informed his American war, and geography that Lacoste was to exploit. He readers that the aim of this and especially his 16 August recalled (1976a; personal interview 2008) how the re- article was to jolt them out of their “relative apathy” quest to participate in the International Commission toward the “deadly nature” of the American bombard- came “out of the blue” and how, within three days of ment. “A large sector of the American people, wit- receiving it, he had been flown from Paris to Hanoi, nessing through television and other mass media the via Moscow, with the help of the Soviet authorities, greatest deluge of fire and steel known to history,” he without the need for any travel papers and with only mused, “has reacted like a slightly bored theatre audi- Gourou’s (1936) magnum opus in his bag to inform ence to the subtlest and most terrifying methods of de- his enquiries. As Lacoste (personal interview 2008) in- struction.” Lacoste’s way of wakening this audience was formed us, his patron, Jean Dresch, the Director of the by “assembl[ing] a dossier of a new kind, arising from Institut de Geographie´ in Paris and communist figure- a geographical analysis of the points where the dike head of French geography, who had links with the So- network has been hit with bombs” (Lacoste 1972f). He 632 Bowd and Clayton

used the tools of classical geography—field observation, newspaper, Nhan Dan (“French geologist insists U.S. mapping, multiscale analysis, and an emphasis on the hitting dikes” DRV 1972a; also see, e.g., “Geographers unity of geography as the integrated study of human See Dike Bombing Peril” 1972; “L’escalade de la cru- and physical landscapes—to give his analysis authority aute”´ 1972; “Nixon Prepares Watery Grave” 1972). and draw a distant public to the scene of destruction he Lacoste’s argument became a fulcrum of discussion at beheld. Following the suggestion made to him by the Kennedy’s U.S. Senate hearings, and Lacoste himself French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maurice Schumann rehearsed some of his analysis and findings in an ex- (1972), that his field report might attract international change with Nguyen Tien Hung, a prominent South interest, Lacoste had it translated into English. Vietnamese White House adviser, in The New York Lacoste’s aim was to “go beyond symbols and sub- Times on 6 September 1972 (“Premeditated Character jective reactions in order to determine and examine of the Bombing” 1972) and then at greater length in the facts of the attack” (Lacoste 1972b, 298–99). His the 9 October 1972 issue of the American leftist weekly hypothesis was that if the bombing of the dikes fol- The Nation (Lacoste 1972b; see Figure 1). lowed a deliberate and systematic plan, then it would The USAF dropped more than 150,000 tons of ex- be expressed on the map of bombed dikes. “During the plosives over North Vietnam between May and October period April 16 to July 31,” he spelled out (Lacoste 1972, when Operation Linebacker was curtailed upon 1972f), the Red River dikes had been struck 150 times, the resumption of peace negotiations in Paris (Stock- at ninety-six different locations. Fifty-eight of these lo- holm International Peace Research Institute 1976). cations, and over 90 percent of the bombs dropped, were Fortunately, the flooding was localized and human ca- in the densely populated eastern part of the delta be- sualties were not as high as feared, partly due to the tween Hanoi and Haiphong, where the Red River flows immense effort Vietnamese peasants had made to re- above the level of the plain due to the ancient accumu- pair damaged dikes with earth that they had stockpiled lation of alluvial material from the tropical headwaters since 1965. Asselin (2002, xii, 179–80) has argued that of the river to the west—a region where, as Gourou the Paris negotiations were “doomed” to fail because of had explained in considerable detail, peasant commu- a complex set of international diplomatic factors, and nities had built an elaborate dike system to contain and that the inability of further heavy bombing in December channel the river and developed a rich rice-growing 1972 (Operation Linebacker II) to weaken Vietnamese civilization. resolve made a military solution to the war look even A regional synthesis of dike bombing (see Figure 1) more distant. “Never again,” Bacevich (2010, 121–22) was combined with detailed locality studies, principally wrote of the Linebacker campaigns, “would the United in Nam Sach district and the Province of Thai Binh. States employ violence on such a scale with such little Together, Lacoste (1976a, 90) declared, they furnished regard for exactly who was being killed and what was be- an irrefutable “unmasking of the Pentagon.” The former ing destroyed.” Yet diplomacy was not the only reason analysis of the pattern of bombing, Lacoste explained behind the curtailment of Linebacker I, and dike bomb- in Le Monde and his report for the International ing was pushed down the military agenda in Linebacker

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 Commission (Lacoste 1972c, 55, 66), “betrays the II because it had become such a politically sensitive deliberate character of the attacks,” their “premeditated issue. On both counts, Lacoste’s expose´ had played character”; and the “detailed analysis” proved that the a pivotal role. Rostow (1973, 31) intimated that La- bombing was not random but “total and systematic,” coste and the International Commission had influenced targeting points in the dike system (often with delayed world opinion by pointing to deception rather than just action torpedoes) that were subjected to particularly American operational confusion and sloppiness. strong water pressure at high water—the concave How did Lacoste’s expose´ in particular achieve this parts of dike bends, water channel confluences, and influence? Three strategies, we suggest, were particularly sluices. Overall, the bombing was concentrated in a significant, and the third of them brings Lacoste into 100-square-mile area where the majority of the villages alignment with tropicality. and rice fields were located below the level of the river and were thus most vulnerable to flooding. Lacoste’s “Factual Truth” What the Baltimore Sun (in U.S. Senate 1972b, 83) described as the “left-wing” professor’s “highly tech- The seriousness with which the findings of the Inter- nical argument” solicited commentary in newspapers national Commission were taken hinged on the strate- right around the world, including in the DRV’s state gies that Lacoste and his colleagues deployed to turn Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War 633 Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013

Figure 1. Yves Lacoste, “Bombing the Dikes.” Reprinted with permission from the October 9, 1972 issue of The Nation. For subscription information, call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week’s Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com 634 Bowd and Clayton

their observations into evidence, to collocate truth sphere, and with the issue of intentionality (targeting) from a process of individual and collective witnessing, key to assessing the legitimacy of a particular course of and to articulate the fruits of this witnessing in terms military action. Such truth was also geared to restoring that could be transposed from Vietnam to America and the connection between language and violence (the transported around the world. ability of the former to represent the latter)—a con- Lacoste noted that his prime strategy, or mode of nection that Gregory (2011) showed was blown apart transposition, was mapping, and the accumulation of by the Allies’ aerial bombardment of German cities the ground and aerial observations and data that went during World War II. What gained media attention into it. The maps of the pattern of bombing that accom- in the U.S. press was Lacoste’s demonstration of the panied his press articles were key to his ability to work “premeditated character” of the bombing with a map “beyond the mere transcription of spatial and environ- and written explanation of its geographical ratio- mental facts,” as Cosgrove (2008, 4, 155–82) described nale. The performativity of his intervention was not how maps gain an authoritative stake in geopolitical at issue. understanding by serving as “immutable mobiles” (texts Third, and as Lacoste (1972g) started to emphasize and images that can move across space without a sig- at a Paris press conference, his “demonstration” was also nificant loss of meaning). Lacoste repeatedly enjoined made possible by his “close reading” of Gourou’s clas- the Pentagon to refute his findings by providing maps sic text. Lacoste (personal interview 2008) has since and aerial reconnaissance photographs of its own, and confirmed that he looked no further than at Gourou’s Kennedy’s Senate subcommittee kept returning to the study for what he needed to know about how to as- evidentiary burden that cartographic and photographic sess the DRV’s allegations and Nixon’s bravado sur- evidence played in the adjudication of dike damage and rounding the bombing. Although the dike network had civilian casualties, especially in the second of its ses- been enlarged during the 1950s, it was Gourou, in the sions, when State Department and Pentagon officials 1930s, who had explained its nature and purpose more were hounded for, yet failed to provide, such evidence exhaustively than anyone else, and this fact, Lacoste (U.S. Senate 1972c, 32, 35, 42, 47–49; 1972b, 17–22). informed the press, the Americans knew well and had But maps were not the only routes to factual truth. known for a while. An unauthorized English translation In his testimony before Kennedy’s subcommittee, of Gourou’s study had been completed under the aus- Clark (U.S. Senate 1972b, 23) urged that civic respon- pices of the Yale Human Relations Area Files project sibility stemmed from “fact” and “truth” as they were in 1955, and Lacoste already sensed from the work he “found from experience” and that diary keeping had had done for the 1967 Russell Tribunal that Pentagon been important to the team. Yet experience based on strategists had gained from Gourou’s maps and text an firsthand observation did not necessarily nurture what invaluable knowledge of why and where to target the O´ Tuathail (1996a, 173) has called an “anti-geopolitical dikes—a fact that Gourou (1965) himself had lamented eye” that “disturbs and disrupts the hegemonic foreign in private to Jean Gottmann. policy gaze” through “a style of reporting that is direct, Gourou’s key insight was that the dikes were an es-

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 personal, moral and angry.” A comparison of Clark’s sential precondition for the existence of this densely in- and Lacoste’s private diary entries from their time in habited peasant region, and one of Lacoste’s main aims Vietnam and later public statements reveals that their was to invest this insight with political and moral signif- “public anti-geopolitical eye” was still a disembodied icance. He expanded on his Le Monde expose—first´ in eye. Most of the effusive emotion and outrage in their two longer (and nearly identical) pieces that were pre- diaries about the “inhuman bombing” (Clark 1972), pared (in French and translated into English) for the In- the witnessing of which Lacoste (1972c) found “a very ternational Commission meeting in Stockholm and the painful experience,” is absent from the “facts” they ac- 22nd Pugwash Conference on Science and World Af- centuate in public, where they present themselves as fairs held at Oxford in September 1972 (Lacoste 1972a, impartial masters of all they survey. 1972d, although Lacoste did not attend either event), The factual truth that was coveted by the media, excerpts of which later appeared in a special issue of politicians, and antiwar protestors alike because of the the journal Security Dialogue (Lacoste 1973a); then in means it provided of unmasking political lies and decep- a more politically charged piece for The Nation (La- tion was, in this instance, state centered—instrumental coste 1972b); then, in a longer article based on his to how the “international” work of the commission Stockholm report, with an “epistemological preamble” could be mapped into the “domestic” (U.S.) political (translated by Anne Buttimer) aimed at geographers, Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War 635

which was published in the radical geography jour- erature ignores Lacoste’s use of Gourou, and Lacoste’s nal Antipode (Lacoste 1973b) and reprinted in Richard 1972 intervention points to two wider lacunae: first, the Peet’s 1977 collection Radical Geography; and finally in absence of a critical interest in war in geography during his book La Geographie,´ c¸a sert, d’abord, a` faire la guerre this period (see Cowen and Gilbert 2008, 2–17) and, (1976b) and a commentary piece in Herodote´ (1976a). second, a lack of dialogue between the literatures on Throughout, Lacoste’s debt to Gourou becomes more tropicality and critical geopolitics. Lacoste was not the explicit and important. It was with the USAF’s use of iconoclast with regard to aerial warfare and bombard- Gourou’s maps in mind, Lacoste (personal interview ment (see, e.g., Hewitt 1983), but his concern with how 2008) told us, that he famously declared that “geog- the earth environment was conceived and served as a raphy serves firstly to wage war” (Lacoste 1976b), and weapon of war was muted in 1980s work on nuclear war- we now want to examine in more detail what Lacoste fare and its environmental scenarios (see Cutter 1988 and others concerned with the dikes did with Gourou for a review). in 1972. We can find in Lacoste’s geographical warfare an am- bivalent or strategic tropicality and should see it as part of his “reasoning of the strategic type,” which he re- Reconnecting Tropicality garded as different from geographical reasoning in “the academic world” (Lacoste 1984, 216). On the one hand, Lacoste (1976a, 91; personal interview 2008) re- his reasoning sprang from what O´ Tuathail (1996b, 131) called how the term geographical warfare was inspired saw as an “unproblematized Cartesian perspectivalism,” by an article in Newsweek, “When the landscape is or “dream of the geographer as a removed and privileged the enemy” (1972, 14) where it was argued: “In Viet- seer.” On the other hand, Lacoste turned tropicality into nam, on a scale unprecedented in the history of war- a critical instrument. fare the landscape itself has become an enemy sub- jected to systematic destruction.” By 1972 the Amer- An Ambivalent Tropicality icans had dropped considerably more bombs (possibly three times as many tons) over Vietnam than the Al- Lacoste extends and reinforces Gourou’s affirmative lies had dropped over Europe during World War II and tropicality, a representation of the delta as a cultur- had thus inaugurated a new era of what Weisberg and ally and environmentally rich and unique, yet delicate others (in Weisberg 1970) termed (with reference to and vulnerable landscape and civilization based on a the Vietnam War) “ecocide”—the intentional destruc- centuries-old struggle to master what he viewed as a tion of life-supporting ecosystems by armed conflict and “fearful” monsoon environment (Bruneau, personal in- conventional and chemical weapons. In his Antipode ar- terview 2009). Gourou’s (1936) profound admiration ticle, Lacoste (1973b) mulled over whether geographers of the peasants, who, he argued, had crafted an “ut- had actively participated in this ecocide and surmised terly humanised landscape” (14) and “stable civilisa- that “those who did design the strategy and tactics of tion in material and aesthetic harmony with material

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 bombing, demonstrated a powerful mastery of geograph- conditions” (573) came with the foreigner’s “commis- ical information and geographical thinking” (3). Ten eration” over their “inability” (108–10) to see how years later he met geographers with the USAF who had and why they lived in “great poverty” (575) and “mis- been involved in Linebacker, and they told him that his ery albeit not despair” (206). We have argued else- hypothesis and proof was “well spotted”—they had in- where that Gourou constructed the region as an exotic deed been involved (Lacoste, personal interview 2008). space of otherness: as a “special” and “peculiar” land- Lacoste’s exposition of geographical warfare de- scape (these were Gourou’s terms) with a beauty that pended heavily on Gourou and aspired to be a mode had not hitherto been revealed in the rational light of analysis that could make geography a means of stop- afforded by scientific Western observation (Bowd and ping rather than waging war—“la geographie,´ cela ne Clayton 2003). sert pas seulement a` faire la guerre,” as Lacoste (2003, In his Antipode article, Lacoste (1973b) registered the A14) later explained. His expose´ has been linked with caution that “ideological problems ... [are] bound up the development of “critical geopolitics”—geographical with geographical representation” (2); however, his ex- analysis that questions and deconstructs dominant and pose´ can be placed in Gourou’s discursive mold, which taken-for-granted geopolitical ideas and practices (O´ does not problematize ideology. Lacoste continues to Tuathail 1994, 1996b; Hepple 2000); however, this lit- represent the Tonkin Delta as a beautiful yet vulnerable 636 Bowd and Clayton

region, as an area at his investigative behest, as a space of actly to the area where their effects can be most serious” representation that conforms to what Mitchell (2002, (Lacoste 1972b, 300). see 135–37 on Gourou) termed “a rule of experts,” a Lacoste (1972b, 298–99) developed this line of in- space that grants to the Westerner the right to decide quiry by emphasizing how a vulnerable and resource- on what counts as right, normal, and true (and what ful Vietnamese peasant-civilian appears in the midst does not). The help that the expert receives from in- of the carnage: “Public anxiety and embarrassment of digenous assistants and authorities is effaced. The facts the [U.S.] authorities would no doubt be just as great of the matter, arrived at by detached means, are Western if, as a means of strategic action, it were a matter of facts. In a 1972 article, Gourou (1972, 135) reflected unleashing typhoons, earthquakes or volcanic erup- (perhaps with Lacoste in mind), “I have always tried tions against the civil population.” Both war and na- to reason out my geography from maps.” He regarded ture are eruptive and violent, Lacoste reasoned, with cartography as key to his ability to find order and com- Gourou’s image (1936, 205) of the Red River as a plexity, and uniformity and diversity, in the tropical “fearful stranger” on his shoulder and war and nature world and later declared, “The term judge of the world together compound the peasant’s vulnerability and de- expresses my attitude to what I see” (Gourou 1984, 53). fenselessness. A violent American presence bears down In an essay entitled “What is a beautiful landscape,” on a beautiful (majestic, yet fragile) landscape. He Lacoste (1990) remarked: thus extends a skein of discourse—the West’s cultural production of Vietnamese landscapes as exquisite and When Pierre Gourou describes ... the “beauties of the phantasmagoric—that reaches back into French colo- delta,” it is not only the uniform plain ... with the pad- nial times and resurfaces in American cinematic rep- dyfield in the foreground to the observer who observes it resentations of the Vietnan War (see Norindr 1996; from his height alone. ... [It is also] the plain which ap- Kleinen 2003). However, Lacoste’s beautiful landscape pears, very vast and differentiated, with the green spots is neither supine (a common trope in Western imagin- indicating big villages hidden in the trees, with the net- ings of landscapes of war) nor separated from human- work of dikes and canals: it is the landscape that can be ity. Rather, Lacoste (1972b, 298) continues, turbulent seen from the top of a tall dike; it is from these tall dikes “forces of nature,” combined with the forces of war, are that we discover the beauty of the landscape. (60–61) pivotal to “solidarity among men” in this part of the world and are germane to Lacoste’s political affiliation In other words, for Gourou and Lacoste, “beauty” is a with the peasants through their identification of a com- technical achievement as well as an aesthetic response. mon enemy—American imperialism. Tropicality also emerges in Lacoste’s work, and pace Finally, echoing Gourou as directly as anywhere in Gourou, through the connections and separations they his analysis, Lacoste (1972b, 298) argued that the logic draw between the destructive nature of “the West” (of of the bombing is “essentially of a geographical nature,” French colonists and American imperialists) and the because the Red River Delta has Vietnamese battle with the delta’s unruly tropical na- for centuries been an area in which the geographical in-

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 ture. “It appears that people know intuitively that this form of [Western] destruction symbolizes a new form teractions between “natural factors” and “human factors” of warfare,” Lacoste observed in The Nation (1972b, were especially complex, and presented a sort of dramatic tension. In fact, there are few regions of the world where, 298), as though, he expounds elsewhere (1972d, 595), in such a limited area, there exist so many human be- “they considered, for very profound reasons, that the ings who have evolved such an efficient, subtle culture fiercest of conflicts between men should remain quite under such difficult conditions: that is with their stability distinct from the centuries-old struggle between the hu- constantly threatened by the forces of nature. (Lacoste man species and the most formidable forces of nature.” 1973a, 4) The dikes would not have been such a pivotal target or scene of destruction eliciting public outcry if it were Such imagery and analytical procedures connect La- not for this eternal struggle between people and nature coste to Gourou and connect the two of them to the in the delta and the way the dikes were an essential discourse of tropicality. The American bombing of the precondition of life and culture. At the same time, the dikes is conceived as a modern-technological onslaught dikes would not have taken on such importance if it on a “beautiful” landscape. were not for American deception surrounding the alle- This depiction was not just Lacoste’s tropicality. gation that American bombs were being “directed ex- Other members of the International Commission Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War 637

used similar imagery. Clark (1972, 20–27), who had orientalism: U.S. stereotypes about “war against Asian witnessed the destruction of Europe in World II, beheld hordes” being “by definition a disastrous plunge into in North Vietnam “a people so vastly different,” a “poor quicksand for any Western army” because of “the Orien- ...but proud country” and “a beautiful way of life” being tal indifference to death,” as a USAF official, Townsend devastated by “the horror of bombing” (cf. Mandelbaum Hoopes, proclaimed (cited in Chomsky 1971, 5; cf. in U.S. Senate 1972b, 85). Nor was Gourou the only Gliedman 1972, 2). influence. Multiple layers of representation, involving Gourou (1961) had been scathing about the phys- writers, artists, travelers, scholars, colonists, administra- ical determinism that pervaded Wittfogel’s analysis of tors, journalists, and photographers, had gone into the Asian hydraulic systems in Oriental Despotism (1957), construction of this image of the Red River Delta as a and Chomsky identified some important radical ex- human environment in delicate harmony (Gourou) or tensions to Gourou’s “tropicalist” critique of Oriental- dramatic tension (Lacoste) with a troublesome tropical ism, with North Vietnamese resistance to American nature (see Chaliand 1969; Bradley 1999; Bowd 2008). imperialism now paired with peasants’ ingenious, yet The literature, film, and photography of the Vietnam fraught, mastery over the Red River. The DRV invoked War (especially perhaps Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Gourou for similar radical purposes, arguing in a 1968 film Apocalypse Now) have, of course, been pivotal in pamphlet that the “determination and solidarity” that drawing landscape into the meaning of war, with “beau- North Vietnam’s peasantry was displaying against the tiful” (usually exoticized and feminized) landscapes USAF mirrored their “persistent struggle to tame their contrasted with the masculinist violence of military rivers” and “shape the face of their country.” Gourou’s intervention (Gelfant 2005; Robson and Yee account of how “the delta is at present man’s work,” the 2005). product of this struggle, is central to this Vietnamese To be sure, however, much of the imagery deployed critique of the bombing (Gourou 1936, cited in DRV in 1972 to criticize the American bombing can be 1968, 7, 21). traced directly to (and in some cases, with quotes from) We have the rudiments here of a militant tropicality. Gourou (e.g., “Geographers See Dike Bombing Peril” Lacoste had not simply rediscovered the beauty of the 1972; “Premeditated Character of the Bombing” 1972), landscape by looking at it in Gourou’s way. “It is not and if not to Gourou then to Buttinger’s (1958) The for nothing,” Lacoste (1990, 61–62) reflected, “that to Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam, which hold these tall dikes is to hold a very important tactical relies on Gourou (see Buttinger 1958, 48–55; U.S. position.” The French army discovered this during the Senate 1972b, 121–32). Two images, in particular, first Indochina War, and Lacoste was now beholding the recur in the way Gourou is refracted through media dikes for his own tactical—discursive—advantage. Nor and political commentary: First, people and nature are did Lacoste necessarily view himself, as Gourou did, as viewed as inextricably connected; and second, peasant a “judge of the world,” objectifying this landscape and life is represented as being characterized by poverty but filtering out Vietnamese voices. Lacoste brought the not despair. DRV’s Hydraulics Department into view, commenting

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 All of this imagery shows how tropicality, like Ori- on how the dike system had been expanded during the entalism, operates as what Said (1978, 55, 327) de- 1950s and 1960s through DRV investment and mod- scribed as a system of citation, with a select number of ernization. To borrow Said’s (1978, 240) insight about tropes and motifs (“typical encapsulations” Said called Orientalism after World War I, the Red River Delta them) about the Orient, or tropics, taking on the man- had been pushed from passivity into “militant modern tle of truth through repeated use; however, as Chomsky life” by a communist state apparatus. In short, Lacoste’s (1970, 1971) began to show, the tropicality that in- tropicality should be seen as an ambivalent or strategic fused the issue of the dikes was not simply derogatory or tropicality, which (again to borrow Said’s terms) was a matter of equating beauty with the exotic and the de- “filiated” to the discourse of tropicality but “affiliated” fenseless. He found (Chomsky 1970, 1971), in the work (as Chomsky noticed) to a global antiwar movement of Chaliand (e.g., 1969) and the British war reporter (Said 1983, 157). Richard Gott, an emphasis on how North Vietnamese Lacoste’s factual truth helped to combat the para- resistance to the Americans sprang from a civilization dox of protest that Berger, in a 1972 essay, saw in that had long lived in “misery” but with “resilience” gory close-up photography of the death and destruction against invasion. This, Chomsky noted, was at odds wrought by the Vietnam War: The way photographs with what P. Porter (2009) has since termed military that were meant to stir public indignation and protest 638 Bowd and Clayton

over the barbarity and senselessness of the conflict civilian, as a figure of international law, as a vulnera- ended up compounding feelings of helplessness and de- ble target and hapless victim. Alexander (2007, 371) spair over how to stop the war (Berger 1980, 41–44). traced the genesis of the idea of the civilian back to the To use Massey’s (2005, 354) apt terms, Lacoste’s view of early twentieth century and noted how the “civilian the dikes did not quite amount to a political “romance population” became portrayed “as weak, feminized and of being in amongst things” (which war photography infantilised.” However, as Falk and Marr recognized, the feigned to deliver); nor was it simply “a romance of North Vietnamese peasant was not simply positioned objectivity” that sought to capture a distant war in in this genealogy as weak or even feminized. Rather, “the distanced view.” Rather, his expose´ was strategic: what Lacoste (1972b, 299) described in The Nation as geared to the aspirations of an International Commis- a twofold “wilful unleashing” of nature and American sion and using an optic of environmental otherness firepower on the delta had generated an earthbound sol- to place evidence of bombing on a plane of factual idarity among the Vietnamese and antiwar and socialist truth. activists around the world. In his August Le Monde article, Lacoste did not ven- In short, the DRV peasant was a revolutionary civil- ture far beyond those facts that made the bombing ap- ian engaged in a national liberation struggle, rather than pear premeditated and systematic. It was left to others to an exposed and muted civilian who was simply an ob- take his evidence, and his tropicality, into a legal–moral ject of international law and its vexed protections. As a terrain. As Marr (in U.S. Senate 1972b, 99) started to DRV publication, Vietnam: A Sketch (1971, 35) put it, make this move, “If there is a cardinal principle among the war against the Americans was the latest phase what we loosely call the laws of war, it is that one an- of a 4,000-year “double struggle against nature and tagonist does not have the right to wreak Carthaginian invasions” that had united the peoples of the mountains peace upon the other. ... [T]o try to force the enemy and plains and of the north and south (cf. Chaliand to give in by methodically devastating his lands, his 1977, 143; Duanˆ 1994, 328). crops, his people is now regarded as barbaric and deserv- Lacoste’s intervention was unique within geography. ing of punishment.” If Lacoste’s geographical warfare As Smith (1971) intimated, whereas the Vietnam War amounted to what Franck (1973, 33) called “environ- formed a vital backdrop to innovation and critique mental murder,” then as Lacoste showed, this was the in Anglophone geography, a new creed of “radical most human of murders, a war on an utterly humanized geography” paid scant attention to the conflict itself. landscape. This, we think, was Lacoste’s key insight, Radical geographers Joe Doherty and James Anderson and Gourou had helped him to arrive at it. To bomb the (personal correspondence 2010), for instance, recalled dikes was to bomb a whole way of life, a densely settled that activist and theoretical (broadly Marxist) energies peasant land and civilization. It was to undermine the were largely trained on issues of poverty, social justice, land–life nexus, or what not just Gourou but also Mus ghetto formation, social exclusion, race, and civil (whose influential Viet-Nam:ˆ Sociologie d’une guerre also rights in Western urban settings and on imperialism eschewed Orientalism) called the “essential milieu” of and underdevelopment at a global scale and in more

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 Vietnamese existence and identity (see Gourou 1936, abstract terms. Whereas environmental questions of 205–207; Mus 1952; Bayly 2009, 196). famine, drought, and population pressure were in the “It is inherent in the concept of war, as an open- air and examined in “Third World” contexts, war and ended contest,” Fried (1973, 44) argued, “that the fi- its environmental impacts were largely ignored. Indeed, nal outcome is uncertain, while the contest continues: in his survey of the development of radical geography hence, until a war is formally ended, the eventual fate of in the United States, Peet (1977, 23) cited Lacoste’s the contested area must not be pre-empted by measures (1973b) Antipode article as an example of “the radical of the occupation that cannot afterwards be changed.” theory of spatial relations,” but does not connect it to Ecocide in Vietnam amounted to genocide because it the subfield’s quest for “advocacy” and “relevance” (it caused irreversible environmental damage, and as Falk is William Bunge’s Detroit Geographical Expedition (cited in Caplan 1974, 28) intimated before a 1972 that is spotlighted). This begs important questions U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on about radicalism in Anglophone geography at this the subject, “to destroy the environment per se,ordis- time, to which we return briefly at the end. For now, rupt normal relationships between man and nature on we want to outline how the Vietnam War and theme a sustained basis” also fed into the construction of the of tropicalisme was taken up in French geography. Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War 639

The Emergence of a French Critique of Tropicality ment of Gourou, and ideology critique in the disci- pline only started to gain ground, and then hesitantly, Lacoste saw Herodote´ as a vehicle for bringing French in the wake of the student uprising of May 1968 (see geographical research, which had long been cocooned Claval 1984, 30–36; Bruneau 2008; Courade personal in a hierarchical disciplinary field, to a wider audi- interview 2009). ence. The journal’s inaugural issue is best known for Georges Condominas (personal interview 2008) its interview with Foucault on geography (see Foucault recalled how Dresch and Pierre George admonished 1980), but the Vietnam War also looms large. Its front him at Lacoste’s defense of his doctorat d’etat for praising cover gives an aerial view of an American B-52 bomber Gourou. The historic rivalry between the College` de traversing a pockmarked Vietnamese landscape, and La- France (where Gourou held a Chair from 1947 to coste used his experience in Vietnam to reflect on “the 1970) and the Sorbonne on the opposite side of Rue links between certain geographical representations and Saint-Jacques (where Lacoste was examined) partly certain forms of ideological behaviour.” The contribu- lies behind this aggression. Sorbonne students were tion of filmmakers Chapuis and Ronai (1976, 117) took chastised if they cited Gourou (Bruneau personal this link further, examining the “ideological behaviour” interview 2009). But more specifically, it was Gourou’s at work in Gourou’s representation of the “beauties of aesthetic gaze that was being questioned. When the delta.” Akin to the dramaturgical image that Said Gourou “looks at the landscape,” Condominas (per- (1978, 63) used just two years later to describe the Ori- sonal interview 2008) remembered George asking ent as “a theatrical stage affixed to Europe,” Chapuis and him and Lacoste, “Where are the people?” “Gourou Ronai launched an acerbic attack on Gourou and how speaks of beauty, but where are the Vietnamese people he had constructed an “inaugural landscape” that “liter- who feel the beauty?” It was two disillusioned tropical ally functioned in his [1936] study like the opening of an geographers based at the Centre d’Etude´ de Geographie´ opera.” At the heart of this landscape, they argued, was Tropicale in Bordeaux, however, Michel Bruneau and Gourou’s image of the peasant living in “misery albeit Georges Courade, who became Gourou’s most forceful not despair” (Gourou 1936, cited in Chapuis and Ronai and insightful critics. In two pivotal 1984 papers 1976, 118). We find here and in Lacoste’s reflections (Bruneau and Courade 1984a, 1984b), they argued a concern with issues of discourse and representation that the field of tropical geography had to change that an Anglophone literature on tropicality has, in because the Westerner’s relationship with the tropics a sense, since made its own. But we also begin to see had been transformed by decolonization and postwar how, as Raison (2005, 327) related, in French geography U.S. imperialism. the idea of tropicality came to assume “a more precise This discussion bleeds into a second line of criticism, meaning”—one “shaped above all by researchers who which Rodolphe De Koninck (1978) captured in disagreed with Gourou.” This disagreement had vari- a paper on how “classical French geography” was ous roots and trajectories, but for our purposes three deeply imbued with “philosophical idealism”—an stand out. unproblematized concern with, inter alia, beauty, Broc (1976, 505) identified one line of criticism,

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 harmony, equilibrium, and landscape that eschewed noting in a review of this first issue of Herodote´ that analysis of material social relations and state power. “we take mainly from Lacoste’s musings the fact that “Ideology underpins Gourou’s supposedly objective Pierre Gourou’s text has been used in turn by French and neutral tropical geography,” Bruneau and Courade colonists, Japanese fascists, American imperialists, and (1984b, 308–10) declared, and similar points were put Vietnamese progressives.” Is this not “a great tribute to to Gourou, principally by Lacoste himself, in a 1984 the objectivity and science of the bourgeois geographer” interview for Herodote´ , albeit in a milder fashion Gourou, he asked wryly. This concern with the imbrica- and with an apology from Lacoste for the Chapuis tions of geography and power was not new, however. In and Ronai piece, which Lacoste now described as a his influential Discours sue le colonialisme,Cesaire´ (1955, “blunder and an injustice” (Gourou 1984, 72). 36) singled out Gourou’s (1947) Les pays tropicaux for Finally, tropical geography came to be questioned criticism, arguing that it amounted to an “impure and from an increasing number of “fringe” (or anti- worldly geography” that granted to the Western scholar establishment) locations (Bruneau 2008, personal in- the unequivocal right (or neocolonial authority) to cast terviews 2008, 2009; Courade personal interview 2009): the tropical world in a derogatory light, as exotic and by “tropicalists” such as Bruneau and Courade, whose backward. Yet French geographers ignored this indict- radical commitments (Bruneau’s to Marxism, Courade’s 640 Bowd and Clayton

with the review Politique Africaine) were out of line war is waged (see, e.g., Gregory 2004; Gregory and with Gourou’s paradigm and the figureheads of the Pred 2006; Cowen and Gilbert 2008). Among other state-funded tropical geography research institutes in things, he showed us that when comparing Vietnam France (mostly Gourou’s former students) who po- with other wars and armed conflicts, it is important to liced it; and from journals such as Herodote´ and specify which kind of knowledge is used, how, and why. L’Espace Geographique´ (established by Roger Brunet in Lacoste unearthed how USAF strategists had grasped 1972), which encouraged experimentation and debate and exploited the complex interplay of cultural, topo- in French geography. In 1981, Brunet, who was then in graphical, hydraulic, and ballistic factors that made the the office of J. P. Chevenement’s` Ministry of Research, Red River Delta of North Vietnam a military target. His was sent a damning report on the state of geography location in Paris, which was a hub of U.S.–Vietnamese in France. Although tropical geography was not tar- diplomatic activity, connection to Dresch, and partic- geted explicitly, Brunet decided to throw open debate ipation in an International Commission made his in- about the subfield in L’Espace Geographique´ , inviting tervention possible and helped him to disseminate his essays from Bruneau and Courade (1984b) and others. findings widely. It was his methodology, though, and Lacoste, who was skeptical about the spatial modeling how it was bound up with the problem of “factual truth” and systems thinking advocated by Brunet, was not in- that made his expose´ significant. Arendt’s (1968, 241) vited (Durand-Lasserve et al. 1984; De Koninck 1985). observation that although “unwelcome opinion can be By 1984, a polemic had gathered around Gourou’s work, argued with, rejected, or compromised upon ... un- and one less respectful of the classical unity of geogra- welcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that phy than Lacoste’s engagement with Gourou had been. nothing can move except plain lies” fits Lacoste’s crit- Bruneau (personal interview 2008, 2009) and Courade ical vision. He mobilized the tools of “classical geog- (personal interview 2009) reflected that although the raphy” to create an international and environmental Vietnam War and Herodote´ were important in sen- knowledge—or space of knowledge and field of vision, sitizing them and other younger geographers to the to use more contemporary geographical terms—that ideological and political dimensions of geography and could challenge organized lying. geographical knowledge, the debate about tropicalisme This critical vision, Lacoste (2006; personal inter- in France that was presaged (in different ways) by La- view 2008) affirmed to us, owed a lot to Gourou’s ge- coste and Brunet was quickly drawn back to Gourou and ographie humaine, which, paradoxically, was starting to what they (Bruneau and Courade 1984a, 67) described be questioned by French geographers during this pe- as the “naturalist and colonial perfume” of his oeuvre. riod for its apolitical outlook. Fieldwork, mapping, and They acknowledge that Lacoste’s purposive reworking a concern with spatial pattern and distribution (drawn of Gourou was bypassed. from Gourou) as well as a geopolitical concern with the action of power and arms on people and territory, was key to Lacoste’s ability to raise significant doubts in U.S. Conclusion: Lacoste’s “Unwelcome Fact” media and political circles that the bombing was not ac-

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 cidental and was probably deliberate. This was Lacoste’s Lacoste used the 1972 American bombing of the Red “unwelcome fact,” and his interest in the connections River dikes to deploy a vision of geography as a critical among military strategy, society–environment interac- and strategic form of knowledge. In his “dossier of a tions, and the ecological dimensions of war helped to new kind” he sought to show that landscape, environ- make what Giblin (1985) termed his “geopolitical ge- ment, and territory are not inert or fixed backdrops of ography” both distinctive within French geography and war—“geographic conditions ... invoked in very gen- different from Anglophone political geography. A full eral and abstract terms to explain permanent features accounting of the distinctiveness of Lacoste’s position is of a state’s foreign policy” (Lacoste 1984, 217–18; cf. beyond the purview of this article. Two sets of remarks Lacoste 2008). Rather, Lacoste envisioned geography need to suffice. as an active, operational constituent of war and ar- First, Chomsky (1986) observed that although gued that a “multivariate” geographical analysis was projects like Lacoste’s helped to bring a “normally qui- needed to oppose war. Lacoste’s intervention should escent [American] population” to doubt its politicians be regarded as a seminal precursor to geographers’ con- and fueled a “crisis of democracy,” the “intelligentsia” temporary insistence that geography (as “a knowing” struggled to maintain its “adversarial stance vis-a-vis` and “a doing”) makes a significant difference to how established power” simply through the proclamation of Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War 641

“independence and integrity.” The intelligentsia was with targeting and civilian casualties, currently in the not immune from doubt, and in any event, Chomsky context of the long-distance air (“drone” and “reaper”) conceded, the political establishment would do all it war being waged over the “borderlands” of the Mid- could to “restore order ... for the powerful and privi- dle East. Although Lacoste himself did not draw out leged.” Arendt (1968, 231) grasped this point too, por- the fact, the Linebacker operations underscored what tending that “the chances of factual truth surviving the the U.S. military is still trying to come to terms with, onslaught of power are very slim indeed.” namely, as Gregory (2010) put it, that aerial warfare White (1973, xii, 6) saw this struggle as part of a wider not only makes the landscape of war “blurry” and ren- series of twentieth-century “rebellions against historical ders clear distinctions between combatant and civilian consciousness” that had fractured distinctions between obsolete, but also makes questions of geography and ge- truth and lies—between “finding” and “inventing” a ographical analysis paramount to the moral as well as story, as he put it. In part “finding” and in part “in- technical evaluation of war. venting” a story (constructing a “technical argument,” Second, our concern with Lacoste stemmed from an as the Baltimore Sun described his endeavors), Lacoste interest in Gourou’s tropicality, and part of our purpose mounted both a defense and critique of geographical has been to explore how this discourse can serve mul- consciousness. How, he asked, could a geography that tiple and conflicting political agendas and should not had long served to wage war be turned on its head by ge- simply be written off as an oppressive or domineering ographical analysis itself? If this question was not heeded mode of othering. We have described Lacoste’s tropical- by Anglophone geographers until years after Lacoste ity as strategic and ambivalent; by strategic we mean, in had blazed his particular trail, it was partly, Dalby (2001, part, specific to a time, place, and project. Fleetingly in 423–24) intimated, because they were more taken in by 1972 it helped him to generate his own hermeneutic cir- the belief that the long-range ballistics of the nuclear cuit connecting America and Vietnam, geography and age promised the end of “constraints of geography” and politics, and war and environment and revealing that by an encompassing discourse of the “American cen- scholarship and politics always intersect but not along tury” that turned questions of space (of distribution, predictable channels. Lacoste roused exoticist habits of difference, and unevenness) into ones of time (of devel- mind—a Western tropicalist gaze drawn to the fragile opment, diffusion, and connectivity). Only later, Hep- environmental otherness enshrined in the spectacle of ple (1986) observed, did a “critical geopolitics” start the bombed dikes—for subversive ends. To bomb the to pay attention to what Lacoste’s geographical warfare Red River Delta was to bomb a way of life. implied: that military strategy and geopolitical concepts We should be careful about treating Lacoste’s “geo- both lived by (rested on), and could be taken down on, graphical warfare” as a critical exemplar or method that the sword of geographical calculation and critique. can simply be repeated elsewhere or transposed to other At a time when the neo-conservative rhetoric iden- conflicts. At the same time, however, Lacoste’s explicit tified by Arendt is resurgent in U.S. politics, it is impor- concern with ecocide still remains somewhat muted in tant to recognize that the 11 September 2001 attacks current geographical writing on war, terror, and what

Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013 on the World Trade Center and Pentagon (hereinafter Gregory and Pred (2006) called “violent geographies.” “9/11”) did not “ramp up” lying in politics, as has been Much of the critical literature on aerial warfare alights claimed (see Presbey 2008). Far from it: Arendt’s and on the production of space as target (and often as ab- Lacoste’s interventions remind us that political lying stract space), and much more could be done with the and censorship, especially in times of war, has a complex ecological and aesthetic dimensions of Lacoste’s land- historical geography. Lacoste’s “factual truth” served to scapes of war and paysages politiques. politicize the crisis of fact and fiction that was part and As for the different trajectories that Anglophone parcel of the Vietnam War by drawing attention to the and Francophone geography have been on regarding different kinds of spaces—physical, cultural, political, war since the 1970s, one possible (albeit admittedly rhetorical, ballistic—in and through which war is rep- speculative) contrast might repay further investigation: resented, enacted, and experienced. Indeed, U.S. reac- Although Lacoste wrote out of what Ross (1996) de- tion (by politicians, lawyers, and the media) to Lacoste’s scribed as a modernist French critical tradition that 1972 expose´ points to what Gregory (2010) described as was sensitized by the French wars in Indochina and the “legalisation of the battlespace” and saw as one mark Algeria, and that made the public intellectual’s ability of the colonial present: the involvement of lawyers and to speak truth to power over matters of war, violence, a public-opinion-conscious American political system and earthly destruction integral to French culture and 642 Bowd and Clayton

identity, the “lying in politics” exposed by Lacoste Barnes, Hugh Clout, Cole Harris, Alan Lester; the preyed on unresolved public and political attitudes London Group of Historical Geographers, participants within the United States concerning mass death and at the IAG 2009 Conference, James Cook Univer- its twentieth-century technological acceleration, which sity, Australia; and Audrey Kobayashi and the journal’s Torgovnick (2005) has termed a repressed “war com- anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier plex” that stems from World War II. We have seen versions of this article. The usual disclaimers apply. Our that this French critical tradition had a complex and research has been supported by grants from the British uneven bearing on French geography, with Gourou’s Academy and Carnegie Trust. apolitical outlook questioned but Lacoste’s critical use of his classical geography overlooked by French geog- raphers at the time. But why was Lacoste’s idea of ge- Note ographical warfare not taken up in 1970s radical geog- 1. All translations from French are our own. Born in 1929, raphy, and why did it remain muted until the 1990s, in Fez, Morocco, Lacoste gained his aggregation´ in ge- when, following the collapse of communism, a “criti- ography in 1952, and from 1952 to 1955 taught at the Lycee´ Bugeaud in Algiers. He left Algeria and quit the cal geopolitics” began to turn its attention to “other” French Communist Party in 1956 (although he retained forms of geopolitical conflict (e.g., environmental secu- links with the Algerian anti-colonial movement) and en- rity)? The reasons—and whether Torgovnick’s diagno- tered the Parisian academic system as a research assis- sis helps—are unclear and need to be debated. tant to Pierre George and Jean Dresch at the Institut de Geographie.´ In the autumn of 1968 Dresch asked Lacoste Wisner (1986, 212–15) identified the problem in the to head a “geopolitics” laboratory at the newly established mid-1980s, commenting on geography’s age-old mili- University of Paris 8–Vincennes. Lacoste became profes- tary penchant “for targeting places and people” and on sor there in 1979, on completing his These` d’Etat. On how geographers had showed “remarkably little aware- Lacoste, see Bataillon 2006. On Gourou (1900–1999), ness of how central their knowledge and methods are to see Bowd and Clayton (2005). military adventures.” After World War II, and with the onset of decolonization, Anglophone geography, mind- References ful of the discipline’s close links to war, shied away from its analysis, and as Farish (2009, 119) noted, the “deep Alexander, A. 2007. The genesis of the civilian. Leiden Jour- nal of International Law 20:359–76. connections” between the two that endured (especially Arendt, H. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University in U.S. geography) “were rarely acknowledged.” Palka of Chicago Press. (2003, 505) added that the subfield of U.S. military ge- ———. 1968. Between past and future: Eight exercises in polit- ography went through “a period of drought” during the ical thought. London: Penguin. Vietnam War. Anderson and Doherty (personal cor- ———. 1971. Lying in politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers. New York Review of Books 18 November:30–39. respondence 2010) started to probe what lies behind Arnold, D. 1996. The problem of nature: Environment, culture this, suggesting to us that 1970s radical geography did and European expansion. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. little with the war–environment nexus because in ge- ———. 2005. The tropics and the traveling gaze: India, land- scape and science, 1800–1856. Seattle: Washington Uni-

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Correspondence: School of Modern Languages, University of St. Andrews, Fife, UK, KY16 9PH, e-mail: [email protected] (Bowd); School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St. Andrews, Fife, UK, KY16 9AL, e-mail: [email protected] (Clayton). Downloaded by [University Of Maryland] at 12:30 23 July 2013