Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the ... · Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War Gavin P. Bowd∗ and Daniel W. Clayton† ∗School

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Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste andthe Vietnam WarGavin P. Bowd a & Daniel W. Clayton ba School of Modern Languages, University of St. Andrewsb School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St. AndrewsPublished online: 23 Mar 2012.

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

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Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacosteand the Vietnam War

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 1972expose on the American bombing of the Red River Delta of North Vietnam on opposition to the VietnamWar and how it was implicated in wider political debate about what Hannah Arendt saw as systemic “lying inpolitics.” In various reports and newspaper articles Lacoste deployed the tools of classical geography—firsthandobservation, mapping, and the integrated analysis of physical and human factors—to disclose connections amonglaw, 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 constructionof “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 asa mode of othering and Western dominance. Third, Lacoste’s critical engagement with Gourou points to theambivalent critical impact that the Vietnam War had on Francophone and Anglophone geography during the1970s and 1980s, yet also how interest in the idea of tropicality developed in French geography twenty yearsbefore the better known Anglophone critical literature on the subject emerged. Key Words: geographical warfare,Pierre Gourou, Yves Lacoste, tropicality, Vietnam War.

Este artıculo relata una historia de tres niveles. Primero, se re-examina el impacto que tuvo la revelacion delgeografo frances Yves Lacoste en 1972, en oposicion a la Guerra de Vietnam, sobre el bombardeo americanoen el delta del Rıo Rojo, Vietnam del Norte, y como aquello se incrusta en el mas amplio debate polıtico sobrelo que Hannah Arendt identifico como un sistemico “mentir en polıtica”. En varios informes y artıculos deperiodicos, Lacoste desplego las herramientas de la geografıa clasica—observacion de primera mano, mapeo y elanalisis integrado de factores fısicos y humanos—para desentranar las conexiones entre la ley, la guerra y el medioambiente (o lo que el llamo “la guerra geografica”), que tuvieron una molesta significacion polıtica. Segundo,exploramos la manera como la revelacion de Lacoste se ligo con el tema de la “tropicalidad” (la construccion deOccidente a tıtulo de otredad ambiental de “los tropicos”), principalmente a traves de su busqueda de apoyo enel estudio de Gourou (1936) sobre el delta. Lacoste mostro como la exotica imaginerıa de los tropicos ha servidocomo instrumento de negativismo y crıtica y tambien como un modo de otredad y dominacion occidental. Tercero,el enfoque crıtico de Lacoste con el modo de pensar de Gourou apunta hacia el impacto crıtico ambivalente quetuvo la Guerra de Vietnam sobre la geografıa de los mundos francofono y anglofono durante los anos 1970 y1980, pero tambien a mostrar como se desarrollo un interes sobre la idea de tropicalidad en la geografıa francesaveinte anos antes de que apareciera la mas conocida literatura crıtica 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 GeographersInitial submission, January 2010; revised submission, March 2011; final acceptance, July 2011

Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.

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628 Bowd and Clayton

The arrival of French geographer Yves Lacoste inthe Red River Delta of the Democratic Repub-lic of Vietnam (DRV) in July 1972 represents a

pivotal scene in international protest against the Viet-nam War. The International Commission of Inquiryinto U.S. War Crimes in Indochina, which Lacostecame with, sought to investigate allegations that theU.S. Air Force (USAF) was deliberately bombing thedike system of this monsoon region, threatening catas-trophic flooding.1 Lacoste’s intervention is also a keymoment in the postwar genealogy of “tropicality,” bywhich we mean, following Arnold (1996, 2005) andnow many others, including geographers (e.g., Driver2004; Power and Sidaway 2004; Bowd and Clayton2005), the way the West has constructed “the tropics”as its environmental other, in positive and negativeterms (as edenic and debilitating); a discourse (or suiteof experiences, practices, and representations), whichin taking the temperate West as the norm against whichtropical otherness is viewed and judged, has been deeplyimplicated in Western imperialism. Lacoste helps us toglean how this discourse can work as a mode of oppo-sition as well as othering and how it has been linkedwith postwar politics, armed conflict, and environmen-tal destruction—themes that are muted in the criticalliterature on the tropics.

Lacoste’s expose concerning the American bomb-ing initially appeared on the front page of the Frenchnewspaper Le Monde on 16 August 1972. We providea detailed critical and contextual reconstruction of itsnature and influence, in two main sections. We startwith the USAF’s bombing campaign (dubbed Opera-tion Linebacker by the Pentagon), how it amounted towhat Lacoste termed “geographical warfare,” and howhe opened up a set of connections among law, war, andgeography that troubled the American establishment.The second section tracks how, as Lacoste expanded onhis Le Monde article in subsequent writing, and mediainterest gathered around his story, he brought the themeof tropicality more directly into view, chiefly throughhis recourse to Gourou’s (1936) monumental (660-page) study Les Paysans du Delta Tonkinois, which in1972 still had a strong hold on how the 15 million rice-cultivating people of the region were viewed within theWest (see Gliedman 1972; Leitenberg 1972; Melcher1972; Walli 1973). We explore how Lacoste (and otherWestern observers) reinforced Gourou’s imagery of the“beauties of the delta”—the delta represented throughan exoticizing Western gaze, or affirmative tropical-ity (Bowd and Clayton 2003)—but also how Lacoste’s

project (unlike Gourou’s) was attuned to politics, war,and world opinion and generated an activist (ratherthan contemplative) geography. We end this sectionby examining the role that Lacoste, Gourou, and thedikes played in 1970s French geography, and particu-larly in the inaugural 1976 issue of the radical journalHerodote: Strategies, Geographies, Ideologies, founded byLacoste (which he still edits, for many years now withBeatrice Giblin); and how, by 1984, a critique of whatwe now call “tropicality” had emerged more than tenyears before the Anglophone literature on this subjectgot going.

Some of the impetus for the story we tell came frominterviews with French geographers in 2008–2009in connection with a larger project on Gourou. Thisarticle was not initially planned as part of that project.Rather, it stems from an issue raised by most of ourinterviewees: We were reexamining Gourou’s work(innovatively for some, perplexingly to others) withanalytical tools that in some respects were alien toFrench geographers. Our interviewees remarked on thestrongly Anglophone and “postcolonial” hue of theliterature on tropicality, with Said’s (1978) Orientalismseen as an underlying theoretical influence. Although itwas acknowledged that this discourse (usually renderedas tropicalisme in French) was pertinent to Frenchexperience, we were told that little critical interest hadbeen shown in it, principally because Said’s work andpostcolonialism had made limited headway in Frenchgeography. In short, our interviewees prompted us tobe wary about endorsing a single or simple criticalscript about tropicality—to remain alive to its diverseexpressions in different times, places, and projects. Thisarticle can be read, in part, as a response to such recog-nition. How do we treat this discourse, as it is definedand used in one location, as more or less adequate tothe task of teasing out its meaning in another? Mightit be seen as a modality of opposition and exchange,rather than simply as an epistemology of division andothering (cf. Driver and Martins 2005, 1–11)?

Law of War—Space of Deception

The Pentagon Papers, the voluminous top-secret U.S.Department of Defense report on U.S. involvement inVietnam, which was leaked to The New York Times byDaniel Ellsberg in February 1971, heightened publicawareness of how politicians had lied to the Americanpublic about the Vietnam War. Arendt (1958, 198–99;

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Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War 629

1971, 30–34) famously argued (eighteen months be-fore the Watergate scandal broke) that The PentagonPapers were indicative of a more systemic “lying in pol-itics” that diminished the “space of appearance”—theperformance of political freedom through the “comingtogether” of citizens in public spaces where shared inter-ests, a “common world,” would be found through respectfor a plurality of perspectives. “Deception” and “self-interest” were the political watchwords of the Vietnamage, she argued, and The Pentagon Papers underscoredthe “extravagant lengths” to which the U.S. military-political establishment took its “commitment to non-truthfulness” (Arendt 1971, 30–34). Derrida (2002,39–52) suggested that, for Arendt, The Pentagon Paperspointed to an intensification of modernity’s destructionof the very reality to which lies refer, and thus of theground on which truth could be settled. Arendt and theantiwar movement, however, clung to the idea of whatshe termed “factual truth”—a form of truth, she rea-soned (Arendt 1968, 238–39), reaching back into theGreek polis, that “concerns events and circumstancesin which many are involved,” that is “political by na-ture” because “it is always related to other people . . .

[and] is established by witnesses and depends upon testi-mony” and that should be regarded as crucial to the waythe legitimacy of wars is judged; a truth at odds with theneo-conservative rhetoric ascendant in Nixon’s WhiteHouse, which held that silence, secrecy, and deceptionwere acceptable when and where they served (what wasdeemed to be) some greater and otherwise unattainablegood (see Owens 2007).

Commentators viewed lying over the Vietnam Waras an issue of vision and geography. Schlesinger (1971),for instance, simply opined that the United States was“eyeless in Indochina,” unable to see, let alone tell, thetruth; but others regarded this blindness as more com-plex and baleful. When renowned journalist SydneySchanberg ([1972] 1998, 397–405) reflected on his warreporting and what Arendt had termed the “credibil-ity gap” in politics, he wrote not of the disappearanceof truth, or of a complete lack of vision, but of the“different realities” that connected and divided differ-ent participants in war (he highlighted the gap between“the reporter” and “the general”). The Vietnam War, hesuggested, was a way of seeing as well as a material con-flict, and the rhetorical ruses of war were bound up withhow the Vietnam War was known, experienced, andorchestrated from different places—“here” and “there,”“above” or “below” ground—and with how this geog-raphy fractured clear distinctions between truth andlies.

Law, Strategy, Geography

It was in this space of deception that Lacoste’s ex-pose achieved significance. He informed his Le Mondereaders (Lacoste 1972f) that he had sought to conductan “on-the-spot-analysis” that would assess firsthandwritten and verbal testimony and visual data (maps,ground and aerial photography) that had been pro-vided, at his request, by the DRV’s Ministry of Hy-draulics. This evidence, he continued, showed that theUSAF had resumed its onslaught on North Vietnam,which it had bombed heavily between 1965 and 1968(Operation Rolling Thunder), with Presidential Advi-sor Walt W. Rostow insisting that the DRV’s guerrillaoperations in the south (the fighting force dubbed the“Vietcong” by the Americans) was underpinned by amore conventional industrial–military capability in thenorth that was supplied by China and the Soviet Union(Milne 2007). President Richard Nixon (1978b, 602)announced Operation Linebacker in a television ad-dress on 8 May 1972, urging that it was by destroyingthese supply lines that the United States would placeitself in a stronger negotiating position with the DRV,and placed fewer strike restrictions on the USAF thanPresident Johnson had done previously (Pape 1996,174–201).

Operation Linebacker was a response to the DRV’sEastertide Offensive, mounted on 30 March 1972 with120,000 troops and culminating, by early May, in thecapture of provincial capitals and territory deep intosouthern Vietnam—the DRV’s most significant pushsouth since its 1968 Tet Offensive. Nixon (Public Pa-pers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon1972, 583–87) claimed the air campaign was the mosteffective way of keeping “weapons of war out of thehands of the international outlaws of North Vietnam”and “prevent[ing] the imposition of a Communist gov-ernment by brutal aggression upon 17 million people”to the south. The intention, he confided in his diary,was to make “our actions . . . speak infinitely louder thanour words” (Nixon 1978b, 606).

American left-wing critics (e.g., G. D. Porter 1972,1–5) charged that Nixon’s rhetoric was the latest in alitany of American falsehoods regarding the supposed“reign of terror” that the North Vietnamese Com-munist party had visited on its peasantry since the1940s. On the other hand, Republican politicians sawLinebacker as a way of expediting Nixon’s program of“Vietnamization”—the withdrawal of U.S. personnelfrom South Vietnam, the number having dropped froma high of 545,000 in 1969 to 69,000 by May 1972;

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and the building up of the Army of the Republic ofVietnam—in advance of the U.S. presidential electionof November 1972.

Nixon’s announcement was prompted by allegationsmade by DRV officials in April 1972 that the USAFwas contravening international law by bombing civil-ian targets, and especially the dikes (U.S. Senate 1972b,63). Although deemed a “lesser issue of war” by Nixon’sNational Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, the issueof civilian casualties had struck a chord with the pub-lic and press since Operation Rolling Thunder, and on3 May 1972 the Chair of the U.S. Senate Subcommitteeon Refugees and Escapees, Democratic Senator EdwardKennedy, urged Congress to examine “war damage tothe civilian population” (Kissinger, Kennedy, in U.S.Congress 1972, S. 7182). Declassified White House doc-uments now reveal that in the spring of 1972 bothNixon and Kissinger “strongly favored” bombing thedikes and did not rule out “the nuclear option” (U.S.National Security Archives 2006); and the PentagonPapers (1971, 4:43) show that systematic destruction ofthe dikes, although finally rejected as a military strategy,had been the subject of detailed Oval Office delibera-tion during the 1960s. In the spring of 1972, however,the White House simply denied that the dikes werebeing targeted.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) and U.S. House of Representatives Armed Ser-vices Committee both investigated the DRV’s allega-tions and concluded by late July that although somedikes had been hit accidentally by American tacticalfighters (Phantoms) and B-52 bombers from the U.S.Seventh Air Force and U.S. Navy TaskForce77, in sor-ties that numbered more than 2,000 per month by July1972, there was no evidence of intentional targetingor widespread destruction (Palmer 1984, 96–99; Harris1987). A report on the history of dike bombing was alsoprepared for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Com-mittee, chaired by Southern Democrat J.W. Fulbright,and concluded that prior “results of the bombing ofNorth Vietnam have consistently fallen far short of theclaims made for it,” including claims about the avoid-ance of civilian damage (U.S. Senate 1972a, 12). Ifthe issue would not go away, then it was also partlydue to USAF General John D. Lavelle’s admission toCongress that Vietnam’s monsoon climate (especiallydense cloud cover) made precise targeting difficult andthat pilots did not always file “accurate” or “complete”reports of what they had hit (U.S. House of Represen-tatives 1972, 12).

At a 29 June 1972 press conference, Nixon (1978a)described the DRV’s allegations as woefully “inaccuratepropaganda” to cover for the fact that North Vietnamhad not fully recovered from the extensive damage tothe dikes caused by “natural factors” (floods) the pre-vious year. The United States had “used great restraintin its bombing policy,” he claimed, and “orders [are]out not to hit the dikes because the result in termsof civilian casualties would be extraordinary” (Nixon1978a, 260). Two months later, however, a now irri-tated Nixon, still being pressed over the dikes, asked,“Is it worth the risk of possible flooding or of havingworld opinion turn against us to bomb military targetsnear dikes and dams?” His belligerent answer was that“If it were the policy of the United States to bomb thedikes, we could take them out, the significant part ofthem out, in a week” (Nixon 1978a, 270).

Lacoste and the International Commission, whichtoured the DRV between 29 July and 13 August1972, worked against this vitriolic backdrop. Sevenobservers, including Amnesty International PresidentSean McBride, former U.S. Attorney General RamsayClark, and what Clark (U.S. Senate 1972b, 10) de-scribed as a “group of experts . . . demographers, geogra-phers, and engineers,” assessed the charges. Driven byNorth Vietnamese army officers in Soviet jeeps, theyfocused their attention on the eastern side of the re-gion, and traveled some of the way alone and some ofit in groups (Lacoste, personal interview 2008). Theirfindings were reported in Stockholm in October 1972.

This International Commission was established inMarch 1970 as what its convenor, Hans Goran Franck(1972, iii), characterized as “an independent body,which would bring together a great moral and socialforce, drawn from the record of American atrocities inIndochina and charted against the laws of the inter-national community.” It was an offshoot of the 1967Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, organizedby philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre,which probed U.S. conduct in Vietnam and was con-vened in two sessions in Sweden and Denmark. TheseVietnam commissions and tribunals were all closelyaffiliated with the Swedish Committee for Vietnam,chaired by economist Gunnar Myrdal (Scott 2009).They were not formal criminal proceedings concernedwith the actions of individuals, like the NuremburgTrials of 1945 to 1949, but nor were they “kanga-roo courts” whose findings politicians could simply ig-nore or trivialize (Klinghoffer 2002). As lawyers at thetime (e.g., D’Amato 1969) argued, they had a stake in

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international law as generative of evidence respective todifferences of opinion over facts of wars. Lawyer RichardFalk (1970, 2–4) argued that such “impartial and re-sponsible agencies of inquiry” were integral to “the cir-cle of responsibility” (analogous to Arendt’s democraticspace of appearance) that would “investigate and pun-ish” the “war crimes” that the U.S. establishment hadsought to “suppress” and expose their “refusal to differ-entiate between combatants and non-combatants andbetween military and non-military targets.”

In 1972, U.S. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird tes-tified before the U.S. Senate (1972b, 70) that the HagueConvention of 1907 and Geneva Convention of 1949were far hazier about the rules of engagement regard-ing civilians in air warfare than in ground or navalwarfare. Parks (1983, 4–5) noted that during Opera-tion Linebacker the Judge Advocate (adviser) to theU.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff inferred an important dis-tinction between the intentional targeting of the civil-ian population, which was prohibited by internationallaw, and “incidental injury to civilians working in law-ful targets.” Parks notes that “water control facilitiessuch as irrigation dams and dikes” were deemed legit-imate military targets, provided that their destructionyielded “a specific military advantage.” Although in the-ory, “reasonable precautions to avoid [such] incidentaldamage” were to be observed, in practice the questionof what constituted a “legitimate target,” and whether“collateral damage” was “proportionate to anticipatedmilitary advantage,” was indeed a thorny matter ofinterpretation (Parks 1983, 1–5). Ambiguity surround-ing this issue was stressed in a 1971 report on Opera-tion Rolling Thunder by Cornell University scientists(Littauer and Uphoff 1972). What alarmed DRV nego-tiators in Paris in July 1972 was a quip by Nixon at apress conference that “anything that contributes to thewar effort”—hence the dikes—was a legitimate target(U.S. Senate 1972b, 95).

It was these ambiguities in the relations among law,war, and geography that Lacoste was to exploit. Herecalled (1976a; personal interview 2008) how the re-quest to participate in the International Commissioncame “out of the blue” and how, within three days ofreceiving it, he had been flown from Paris to Hanoi,via Moscow, with the help of the Soviet authorities,without the need for any travel papers and with onlyGourou’s (1936) magnum opus in his bag to informhis enquiries. As Lacoste (personal interview 2008) in-formed us, his patron, Jean Dresch, the Director of theInstitut de Geographie in Paris and communist figure-head of French geography, who had links with the So-

viets and DRV, paved the way. DRV officials in Parishad been briefing Dresch about dike bombing since1967, and Dresch had passed this intelligence on toLacoste, regarding him as well equipped to assess its ve-racity because of his training as a physical geographerand his research on the alluvial levees of the Gharbplain in Morocco. Indeed, Lacoste had previously pre-pared a report for the 1967 Russell Tribunal and re-garded the Vietnamese material he had been given asincomplete because it did not pay close enough atten-tion to the unique “geographical context” (dike system)of the delta (Lacoste 1972e)—a lacunae rectified in a1967 DRV “briefing” for foreign diplomats and 1968pamphlet on the air strikes, the latter containing co-pious quotes from Lacoste’s report (U.S. CIA 1967;DRV 1968).

On 7 June 1972, Lacoste (1972e) published an ar-ticle in Le Monde claiming that “the American ag-gressors are toying with the idea of destroying the RedRiver dike system” and thus perpetrating “a genocidalcrime.” The piece was widely read, including by JaneFonda, who relied heavily on an English translation of itin one of her well-known radio broadcasts to Amer-ican GIs from Hanoi lambasting her government’srecord in Vietnam, and it was widely circulated amongantiwar protesters (Fonda 1972; Miami ConventionsCoalition 1972). Scholar David Marr (in U.S. Sen-ate 1972b, 119) also used it to explain in The NewYork Times (1 July 1972) that the Americans werebombing in such a way that if the dikes collapsed,“the Pentagon can picture it to the world as a nat-ural disaster.” DRV (1972b) officials seized on La-coste’s analysis, too, in its appeal to world opinionagainst Nixon’s “devilish design,” and the ManchesterGuardian (“The truth of Nixon’s bombs” 4 August 1972,12) relayed Lacoste’s inflammatory remark that thebombing could cause more deaths than “several atomicbombs.”

Lacoste (1972b, 298) later informed his Americanreaders that the aim of this and especially his 16 Augustarticle was to jolt them out of their “relative apathy”toward the “deadly nature” of the American bombard-ment. “A large sector of the American people, wit-nessing through television and other mass media thegreatest deluge of fire and steel known to history,” hemused, “has reacted like a slightly bored theatre audi-ence to the subtlest and most terrifying methods of de-struction.” Lacoste’s way of wakening this audience wasby “assembl[ing] a dossier of a new kind, arising froma geographical analysis of the points where the dikenetwork has been hit with bombs” (Lacoste 1972f). He

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used the tools of classical geography—field observation,mapping, multiscale analysis, and an emphasis on theunity of geography as the integrated study of humanand physical landscapes—to give his analysis authorityand draw a distant public to the scene of destruction hebeheld. Following the suggestion made to him by theFrench Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maurice Schumann(1972), that his field report might attract internationalinterest, Lacoste had it translated into English.

Lacoste’s aim was to “go beyond symbols and sub-jective reactions in order to determine and examinethe facts of the attack” (Lacoste 1972b, 298–99). Hishypothesis was that if the bombing of the dikes fol-lowed a deliberate and systematic plan, then it wouldbe expressed on the map of bombed dikes. “During theperiod April 16 to July 31,” he spelled out (Lacoste1972f), the Red River dikes had been struck 150 times,at ninety-six different locations. Fifty-eight of these lo-cations, and over 90 percent of the bombs dropped, werein the densely populated eastern part of the delta be-tween Hanoi and Haiphong, where the Red River flowsabove the level of the plain due to the ancient accumu-lation of alluvial material from the tropical headwatersof the river to the west—a region where, as Gourouhad explained in considerable detail, peasant commu-nities had built an elaborate dike system to contain andchannel the river and developed a rich rice-growingcivilization.

A regional synthesis of dike bombing (see Figure 1)was combined with detailed locality studies, principallyin Nam Sach district and the Province of Thai Binh.Together, Lacoste (1976a, 90) declared, they furnishedan irrefutable “unmasking of the Pentagon.” The formeranalysis of the pattern of bombing, Lacoste explainedin Le Monde and his report for the InternationalCommission (Lacoste 1972c, 55, 66), “betrays thedeliberate character of the attacks,” their “premeditatedcharacter”; and the “detailed analysis” proved that thebombing was not random but “total and systematic,”targeting points in the dike system (often with delayedaction torpedoes) that were subjected to particularlystrong water pressure at high water—the concaveparts of dike bends, water channel confluences, andsluices. Overall, the bombing was concentrated in a100-square-mile area where the majority of the villagesand rice fields were located below the level of the riverand were thus most vulnerable to flooding.

What the Baltimore Sun (in U.S. Senate 1972b, 83)described as the “left-wing” professor’s “highly tech-nical argument” solicited commentary in newspapersright around the world, including in the DRV’s state

newspaper, Nhan Dan (“French geologist insists U.S.hitting dikes” DRV 1972a; also see, e.g., “GeographersSee Dike Bombing Peril” 1972; “L’escalade de la cru-aute” 1972; “Nixon Prepares Watery Grave” 1972).Lacoste’s argument became a fulcrum of discussion atKennedy’s U.S. Senate hearings, and Lacoste himselfrehearsed some of his analysis and findings in an ex-change with Nguyen Tien Hung, a prominent SouthVietnamese White House adviser, in The New YorkTimes on 6 September 1972 (“Premeditated Characterof the Bombing” 1972) and then at greater length inthe 9 October 1972 issue of the American leftist weeklyThe Nation (Lacoste 1972b; see Figure 1).

The USAF dropped more than 150,000 tons of ex-plosives over North Vietnam between May and October1972, when Operation Linebacker was curtailed uponthe resumption of peace negotiations in Paris (Stock-holm International Peace Research Institute 1976).Fortunately, the flooding was localized and human ca-sualties were not as high as feared, partly due to theimmense effort Vietnamese peasants had made to re-pair damaged dikes with earth that they had stockpiledsince 1965. Asselin (2002, xii, 179–80) has argued thatthe Paris negotiations were “doomed” to fail because ofa complex set of international diplomatic factors, andthat the inability of further heavy bombing in December1972 (Operation Linebacker II) to weaken Vietnameseresolve made a military solution to the war look evenmore distant. “Never again,” Bacevich (2010, 121–22)wrote of the Linebacker campaigns, “would the UnitedStates employ violence on such a scale with such littleregard for exactly who was being killed and what was be-ing destroyed.” Yet diplomacy was not the only reasonbehind the curtailment of Linebacker I, and dike bomb-ing was pushed down the military agenda in LinebackerII because it had become such a politically sensitiveissue. On both counts, Lacoste’s expose had playeda pivotal role. Rostow (1973, 31) intimated that La-coste and the International Commission had influencedworld opinion by pointing to deception rather than justAmerican operational confusion and sloppiness.

How did Lacoste’s expose in particular achieve thisinfluence? Three strategies, we suggest, were particularlysignificant, and the third of them brings Lacoste intoalignment with tropicality.

Lacoste’s “Factual Truth”

The seriousness with which the findings of the Inter-national Commission were taken hinged on the strate-gies that Lacoste and his colleagues deployed to turn

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

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their observations into evidence, to collocate truthfrom a process of individual and collective witnessing,and to articulate the fruits of this witnessing in termsthat could be transposed from Vietnam to America andtransported around the world.

Lacoste noted that his prime strategy, or mode oftransposition, was mapping, and the accumulation ofthe ground and aerial observations and data that wentinto it. The maps of the pattern of bombing that accom-panied his press articles were key to his ability to work“beyond the mere transcription of spatial and environ-mental facts,” as Cosgrove (2008, 4, 155–82) describedhow maps gain an authoritative stake in geopoliticalunderstanding by serving as “immutable mobiles” (textsand images that can move across space without a sig-nificant loss of meaning). Lacoste repeatedly enjoinedthe Pentagon to refute his findings by providing mapsand aerial reconnaissance photographs of its own, andKennedy’s Senate subcommittee kept returning to theevidentiary burden that cartographic and photographicevidence played in the adjudication of dike damage andcivilian casualties, especially in the second of its ses-sions, when State Department and Pentagon officialswere hounded for, yet failed to provide, such evidence(U.S. Senate 1972c, 32, 35, 42, 47–49; 1972b, 17–22).But maps were not the only routes to factual truth.

In his testimony before Kennedy’s subcommittee,Clark (U.S. Senate 1972b, 23) urged that civic respon-sibility stemmed from “fact” and “truth” as they were“found from experience” and that diary keeping hadbeen important to the team. Yet experience based onfirsthand observation did not necessarily nurture whatO Tuathail (1996a, 173) has called an “anti-geopoliticaleye” that “disturbs and disrupts the hegemonic foreignpolicy gaze” through “a style of reporting that is direct,personal, moral and angry.” A comparison of Clark’sand Lacoste’s private diary entries from their time inVietnam and later public statements reveals that their“public anti-geopolitical eye” was still a disembodiedeye. Most of the effusive emotion and outrage in theirdiaries about the “inhuman bombing” (Clark 1972),the witnessing of which Lacoste (1972c) found “a verypainful experience,” is absent from the “facts” they ac-centuate in public, where they present themselves asimpartial masters of all they survey.

The factual truth that was coveted by the media,politicians, and antiwar protestors alike because of themeans it provided of unmasking political lies and decep-tion was, in this instance, state centered—instrumentalto how the “international” work of the commissioncould be mapped into the “domestic” (U.S.) political

sphere, and with the issue of intentionality (targeting)key to assessing the legitimacy of a particular course ofmilitary action. Such truth was also geared to restoringthe connection between language and violence (theability of the former to represent the latter)—a con-nection that Gregory (2011) showed was blown apartby the Allies’ aerial bombardment of German citiesduring World War II. What gained media attentionin the U.S. press was Lacoste’s demonstration of the“premeditated character” of the bombing with a mapand written explanation of its geographical ratio-nale. The performativity of his intervention was notat issue.

Third, and as Lacoste (1972g) started to emphasizeat a Paris press conference, his “demonstration” was alsomade possible by his “close reading” of Gourou’s clas-sic text. Lacoste (personal interview 2008) has sinceconfirmed that he looked no further than at Gourou’sstudy for what he needed to know about how to as-sess the DRV’s allegations and Nixon’s bravado sur-rounding the bombing. Although the dike network hadbeen enlarged during the 1950s, it was Gourou, in the1930s, who had explained its nature and purpose moreexhaustively than anyone else, and this fact, Lacosteinformed the press, the Americans knew well and hadknown for a while. An unauthorized English translationof Gourou’s study had been completed under the aus-pices of the Yale Human Relations Area Files projectin 1955, and Lacoste already sensed from the work hehad done for the 1967 Russell Tribunal that Pentagonstrategists had gained from Gourou’s maps and text aninvaluable knowledge of why and where to target thedikes—a fact that Gourou (1965) himself had lamentedin private to Jean Gottmann.

Gourou’s key insight was that the dikes were an es-sential precondition for the existence of this densely in-habited peasant region, and one of Lacoste’s main aimswas to invest this insight with political and moral signif-icance. He expanded on his Le Monde expose—first intwo longer (and nearly identical) pieces that were pre-pared (in French and translated into English) for the In-ternational Commission meeting in Stockholm and the22nd Pugwash Conference on Science and World Af-fairs held at Oxford in September 1972 (Lacoste 1972a,1972d, although Lacoste did not attend either event),excerpts of which later appeared in a special issue ofthe journal Security Dialogue (Lacoste 1973a); then ina more politically charged piece for The Nation (La-coste 1972b); then, in a longer article based on hisStockholm report, with an “epistemological preamble”(translated by Anne Buttimer) aimed at geographers,

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which was published in the radical geography jour-nal Antipode (Lacoste 1973b) and reprinted in RichardPeet’s 1977 collection Radical Geography; and finally inhis book La Geographie, ca sert, d’abord, a faire la guerre(1976b) and a commentary piece in Herodote (1976a).Throughout, Lacoste’s debt to Gourou becomes moreexplicit and important. It was with the USAF’s use ofGourou’s maps in mind, Lacoste (personal interview2008) told us, that he famously declared that “geog-raphy serves firstly to wage war” (Lacoste 1976b), andwe now want to examine in more detail what Lacosteand others concerned with the dikes did with Gourouin 1972.

Reconnecting Tropicality

Lacoste (1976a, 91; personal interview 2008) re-called how the term geographical warfare was inspiredby an article in Newsweek, “When the landscape isthe enemy” (1972, 14) where it was argued: “In Viet-nam, on a scale unprecedented in the history of war-fare the landscape itself has become an enemy sub-jected to systematic destruction.” By 1972 the Amer-icans had dropped considerably more bombs (possiblythree times as many tons) over Vietnam than the Al-lies had dropped over Europe during World War II andhad thus inaugurated a new era of what Weisberg andothers (in Weisberg 1970) termed (with reference tothe Vietnam War) “ecocide”—the intentional destruc-tion of life-supporting ecosystems by armed conflict andconventional and chemical weapons. In his Antipode ar-ticle, Lacoste (1973b) mulled over whether geographershad actively participated in this ecocide and surmisedthat “those who did design the strategy and tactics ofbombing, demonstrated a powerful mastery of geograph-ical information and geographical thinking” (3). Tenyears later he met geographers with the USAF who hadbeen involved in Linebacker, and they told him that hishypothesis and proof was “well spotted”—they had in-deed been involved (Lacoste, personal interview 2008).

Lacoste’s exposition of geographical warfare de-pended heavily on Gourou and aspired to be a modeof analysis that could make geography a means of stop-ping rather than waging war—“la geographie, cela nesert pas seulement a faire la guerre,” as Lacoste (2003,A14) later explained. His expose has been linked withthe development of “critical geopolitics”—geographicalanalysis that questions and deconstructs dominant andtaken-for-granted geopolitical ideas and practices (OTuathail 1994, 1996b; Hepple 2000); however, this lit-

erature ignores Lacoste’s use of Gourou, and Lacoste’s1972 intervention points to two wider lacunae: first, theabsence of a critical interest in war in geography duringthis period (see Cowen and Gilbert 2008, 2–17) and,second, a lack of dialogue between the literatures ontropicality and critical geopolitics. Lacoste was not theiconoclast with regard to aerial warfare and bombard-ment (see, e.g., Hewitt 1983), but his concern with howthe earth environment was conceived and served as aweapon of war was muted in 1980s work on nuclear war-fare and its environmental scenarios (see Cutter 1988for a review).

We can find in Lacoste’s geographical warfare an am-bivalent or strategic tropicality and should see it as partof his “reasoning of the strategic type,” which he re-garded as different from geographical reasoning in “theacademic world” (Lacoste 1984, 216). On the one hand,his reasoning sprang from what O Tuathail (1996b, 131)saw as an “unproblematized Cartesian perspectivalism,”or “dream of the geographer as a removed and privilegedseer.” On the other hand, Lacoste turned tropicality intoa critical instrument.

An Ambivalent Tropicality

Lacoste extends and reinforces Gourou’s affirmativetropicality, a representation of the delta as a cultur-ally and environmentally rich and unique, yet delicateand vulnerable landscape and civilization based on acenturies-old struggle to master what he viewed as a“fearful” monsoon environment (Bruneau, personal in-terview 2009). Gourou’s (1936) profound admirationof the peasants, who, he argued, had crafted an “ut-terly humanised landscape” (14) and “stable civilisa-tion in material and aesthetic harmony with materialconditions” (573) came with the foreigner’s “commis-eration” over their “inability” (108–10) to see howand why they lived in “great poverty” (575) and “mis-ery albeit not despair” (206). We have argued else-where that Gourou constructed the region as an exoticspace of otherness: as a “special” and “peculiar” land-scape (these were Gourou’s terms) with a beauty thathad not hitherto been revealed in the rational lightafforded by scientific Western observation (Bowd andClayton 2003).

In his Antipode article, Lacoste (1973b) registered thecaution that “ideological problems . . . [are] bound upwith geographical representation” (2); however, his ex-pose can be placed in Gourou’s discursive mold, whichdoes not problematize ideology. Lacoste continues torepresent the Tonkin Delta as a beautiful yet vulnerable

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region, as an area at his investigative behest, as a space ofrepresentation that conforms to what Mitchell (2002,see 135–37 on Gourou) termed “a rule of experts,” aspace that grants to the Westerner the right to decideon what counts as right, normal, and true (and whatdoes not). The help that the expert receives from in-digenous assistants and authorities is effaced. The factsof the matter, arrived at by detached means, are Westernfacts. In a 1972 article, Gourou (1972, 135) reflected(perhaps with Lacoste in mind), “I have always triedto reason out my geography from maps.” He regardedcartography as key to his ability to find order and com-plexity, and uniformity and diversity, in the tropicalworld and later declared, “The term judge of the worldexpresses my attitude to what I see” (Gourou 1984, 53).

In an essay entitled “What is a beautiful landscape,”Lacoste (1990) remarked:

When Pierre Gourou describes . . . the “beauties of thedelta,” it is not only the uniform plain . . . with the pad-dyfield in the foreground to the observer who observes itfrom his height alone. . . . [It is also] the plain which ap-pears, very vast and differentiated, with the green spotsindicating big villages hidden in the trees, with the net-work of dikes and canals: it is the landscape that can beseen from the top of a tall dike; it is from these tall dikesthat we discover the beauty of the landscape. (60–61)

In other words, for Gourou and Lacoste, “beauty” is atechnical achievement as well as an aesthetic response.

Tropicality also emerges in Lacoste’s work, and paceGourou, through the connections and separations theydraw between the destructive nature of “the West” (ofFrench colonists and American imperialists) and theVietnamese battle with the delta’s unruly tropical na-ture. “It appears that people know intuitively that thisform of [Western] destruction symbolizes a new formof warfare,” Lacoste observed in The Nation (1972b,298), as though, he expounds elsewhere (1972d, 595),“they considered, for very profound reasons, that thefiercest of conflicts between men should remain quitedistinct from the centuries-old struggle between the hu-man species and the most formidable forces of nature.”The dikes would not have been such a pivotal targetor scene of destruction eliciting public outcry if it werenot for this eternal struggle between people and naturein the delta and the way the dikes were an essentialprecondition of life and culture. At the same time, thedikes would not have taken on such importance if itwere not for American deception surrounding the alle-gation that American bombs were being “directed ex-

actly to the area where their effects can be most serious”(Lacoste 1972b, 300).

Lacoste (1972b, 298–99) developed this line of in-quiry by emphasizing how a vulnerable and resource-ful Vietnamese peasant-civilian appears in the midstof the carnage: “Public anxiety and embarrassment ofthe [U.S.] authorities would no doubt be just as greatif, as a means of strategic action, it were a matter ofunleashing typhoons, earthquakes or volcanic erup-tions against the civil population.” Both war and na-ture are eruptive and violent, Lacoste reasoned, withGourou’s image (1936, 205) of the Red River as a“fearful stranger” on his shoulder and war and naturetogether compound the peasant’s vulnerability and de-fenselessness. A violent American presence bears downon a beautiful (majestic, yet fragile) landscape. Hethus extends a skein of discourse—the West’s culturalproduction of Vietnamese landscapes as exquisite andphantasmagoric—that reaches back into French colo-nial times and resurfaces in American cinematic rep-resentations of the Vietnan War (see Norindr 1996;Kleinen 2003). However, Lacoste’s beautiful landscapeis neither supine (a common trope in Western imagin-ings of landscapes of war) nor separated from human-ity. Rather, Lacoste (1972b, 298) continues, turbulent“forces of nature,” combined with the forces of war, arepivotal to “solidarity among men” in this part of theworld and are germane to Lacoste’s political affiliationwith the peasants through their identification of a com-mon enemy—American imperialism.

Finally, echoing Gourou as directly as anywhere inhis analysis, Lacoste (1972b, 298) argued that the logicof the bombing is “essentially of a geographical nature,”because the Red River Delta has

for centuries been an area in which the geographical in-teractions between “natural factors” and “human factors”were especially complex, and presented a sort of dramatictension. In fact, there are few regions of the world where,in such a limited area, there exist so many human be-ings who have evolved such an efficient, subtle cultureunder such difficult conditions: that is with their stabilityconstantly threatened by the forces of nature. (Lacoste1973a, 4)

Such imagery and analytical procedures connect La-coste to Gourou and connect the two of them to thediscourse of tropicality. The American bombing of thedikes is conceived as a modern-technological onslaughton a “beautiful” landscape.

This depiction was not just Lacoste’s tropicality.Other members of the International Commission

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used similar imagery. Clark (1972, 20–27), who hadwitnessed the destruction of Europe in World II, beheldin North Vietnam “a people so vastly different,” a “poor. . . but proud country” and “a beautiful way of life” beingdevastated by “the horror of bombing” (cf. Mandelbaumin U.S. Senate 1972b, 85). Nor was Gourou the onlyinfluence. Multiple layers of representation, involvingwriters, artists, travelers, scholars, colonists, administra-tors, journalists, and photographers, had gone into theconstruction of this image of the Red River Delta as ahuman environment in delicate harmony (Gourou) ordramatic tension (Lacoste) with a troublesome tropicalnature (see Chaliand 1969; Bradley 1999; Bowd 2008).The literature, film, and photography of the VietnamWar (especially perhaps Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979film Apocalypse Now) have, of course, been pivotal indrawing landscape into the meaning of war, with “beau-tiful” (usually exoticized and feminized) landscapescontrasted with the masculinist violence of militaryintervention (Gelfant 2005; Robson and Yee2005).

To be sure, however, much of the imagery deployedin 1972 to criticize the American bombing can betraced directly to (and in some cases, with quotes from)Gourou (e.g., “Geographers See Dike Bombing Peril”1972; “Premeditated Character of the Bombing” 1972),and if not to Gourou then to Buttinger’s (1958) TheSmaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam, whichrelies on Gourou (see Buttinger 1958, 48–55; U.S.Senate 1972b, 121–32). Two images, in particular,recur in the way Gourou is refracted through mediaand political commentary: First, people and nature areviewed as inextricably connected; and second, peasantlife is represented as being characterized by poverty butnot despair.

All of this imagery shows how tropicality, like Ori-entalism, operates as what Said (1978, 55, 327) de-scribed as a system of citation, with a select number oftropes and motifs (“typical encapsulations” Said calledthem) about the Orient, or tropics, taking on the man-tle of truth through repeated use; however, as Chomsky(1970, 1971) began to show, the tropicality that in-fused the issue of the dikes was not simply derogatory ora matter of equating beauty with the exotic and the de-fenseless. He found (Chomsky 1970, 1971), in the workof Chaliand (e.g., 1969) and the British war reporterRichard Gott, an emphasis on how North Vietnameseresistance to the Americans sprang from a civilizationthat had long lived in “misery” but with “resilience”against invasion. This, Chomsky noted, was at oddswith what P. Porter (2009) has since termed military

orientalism: U.S. stereotypes about “war against Asianhordes” being “by definition a disastrous plunge intoquicksand for any Western army” because of “the Orien-tal indifference to death,” as a USAF official, TownsendHoopes, proclaimed (cited in Chomsky 1971, 5; cf.Gliedman 1972, 2).

Gourou (1961) had been scathing about the phys-ical determinism that pervaded Wittfogel’s analysis ofAsian hydraulic systems in Oriental Despotism (1957),and Chomsky identified some important radical ex-tensions to Gourou’s “tropicalist” critique of Oriental-ism, with North Vietnamese resistance to Americanimperialism now paired with peasants’ ingenious, yetfraught, mastery over the Red River. The DRV invokedGourou for similar radical purposes, arguing in a 1968pamphlet that the “determination and solidarity” thatNorth Vietnam’s peasantry was displaying against theUSAF mirrored their “persistent struggle to tame theirrivers” and “shape the face of their country.” Gourou’saccount of how “the delta is at present man’s work,” theproduct of this struggle, is central to this Vietnamesecritique of the bombing (Gourou 1936, cited in DRV1968, 7, 21).

We have the rudiments here of a militant tropicality.Lacoste had not simply rediscovered the beauty of thelandscape by looking at it in Gourou’s way. “It is notfor nothing,” Lacoste (1990, 61–62) reflected, “that tohold these tall dikes is to hold a very important tacticalposition.” The French army discovered this during thefirst Indochina War, and Lacoste was now beholding thedikes for his own tactical—discursive—advantage. Nordid Lacoste necessarily view himself, as Gourou did, asa “judge of the world,” objectifying this landscape andfiltering out Vietnamese voices. Lacoste brought theDRV’s Hydraulics Department into view, commentingon how the dike system had been expanded during the1950s and 1960s through DRV investment and mod-ernization. To borrow Said’s (1978, 240) insight aboutOrientalism after World War I, the Red River Deltahad been pushed from passivity into “militant modernlife” by a communist state apparatus. In short, Lacoste’stropicality should be seen as an ambivalent or strategictropicality, which (again to borrow Said’s terms) was“filiated” to the discourse of tropicality but “affiliated”(as Chomsky noticed) to a global antiwar movement(Said 1983, 157).

Lacoste’s factual truth helped to combat the para-dox of protest that Berger, in a 1972 essay, saw ingory close-up photography of the death and destructionwrought by the Vietnam War: The way photographsthat were meant to stir public indignation and protest

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over the barbarity and senselessness of the conflictended up compounding feelings of helplessness and de-spair over how to stop the war (Berger 1980, 41–44).To use Massey’s (2005, 354) apt terms, Lacoste’s view ofthe dikes did not quite amount to a political “romanceof being in amongst things” (which war photographyfeigned to deliver); nor was it simply “a romance ofobjectivity” that sought to capture a distant war in“the distanced view.” Rather, his expose was strategic:geared to the aspirations of an International Commis-sion and using an optic of environmental othernessto place evidence of bombing on a plane of factualtruth.

In his August Le Monde article, Lacoste did not ven-ture far beyond those facts that made the bombing ap-pear premeditated and systematic. It was left to others totake his evidence, and his tropicality, into a legal–moralterrain. As Marr (in U.S. Senate 1972b, 99) started tomake this move, “If there is a cardinal principle amongwhat we loosely call the laws of war, it is that one an-tagonist does not have the right to wreak Carthaginianpeace upon the other. . . . [T]o try to force the enemyto give in by methodically devastating his lands, hiscrops, his people is now regarded as barbaric and deserv-ing of punishment.” If Lacoste’s geographical warfareamounted to what Franck (1973, 33) called “environ-mental murder,” then as Lacoste showed, this was themost human of murders, a war on an utterly humanizedlandscape. This, we think, was Lacoste’s key insight,and Gourou had helped him to arrive at it. To bomb thedikes was to bomb a whole way of life, a densely settledpeasant land and civilization. It was to undermine theland–life nexus, or what not just Gourou but also Mus(whose influential Viet-Nam: Sociologie d’une guerre alsoeschewed Orientalism) called the “essential milieu” ofVietnamese existence and identity (see Gourou 1936,205–207; Mus 1952; Bayly 2009, 196).

“It is inherent in the concept of war, as an open-ended contest,” Fried (1973, 44) argued, “that the fi-nal outcome is uncertain, while the contest continues:hence, until a war is formally ended, the eventual fate ofthe contested area must not be pre-empted by measuresof the occupation that cannot afterwards be changed.”Ecocide in Vietnam amounted to genocide because itcaused irreversible environmental damage, and as Falk(cited in Caplan 1974, 28) intimated before a 1972U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing onthe subject, “to destroy the environment per se, or dis-rupt normal relationships between man and nature ona sustained basis” also fed into the construction of the

civilian, as a figure of international law, as a vulnera-ble target and hapless victim. Alexander (2007, 371)traced the genesis of the idea of the civilian back to theearly twentieth century and noted how the “civilianpopulation” became portrayed “as weak, feminized andinfantilised.” However, as Falk and Marr recognized, theNorth Vietnamese peasant was not simply positionedin this genealogy as weak or even feminized. Rather,what Lacoste (1972b, 299) described in The Nation asa twofold “wilful unleashing” of nature and Americanfirepower on the delta had generated an earthbound sol-idarity among the Vietnamese and antiwar and socialistactivists around the world.

In short, the DRV peasant was a revolutionary civil-ian engaged in a national liberation struggle, rather thanan exposed and muted civilian who was simply an ob-ject of international law and its vexed protections. As aDRV publication, Vietnam: A Sketch (1971, 35) put it,the war against the Americans was the latest phaseof a 4,000-year “double struggle against nature andinvasions” that had united the peoples of the mountainsand plains and of the north and south (cf. Chaliand1977, 143; Duan 1994, 328).

Lacoste’s intervention was unique within geography.As Smith (1971) intimated, whereas the Vietnam Warformed a vital backdrop to innovation and critiquein Anglophone geography, a new creed of “radicalgeography” paid scant attention to the conflict itself.Radical geographers Joe Doherty and James Anderson(personal correspondence 2010), for instance, recalledthat activist and theoretical (broadly Marxist) energieswere largely trained on issues of poverty, social justice,ghetto formation, social exclusion, race, and civilrights in Western urban settings and on imperialismand underdevelopment at a global scale and in moreabstract terms. Whereas environmental questions offamine, drought, and population pressure were in theair and examined in “Third World” contexts, war andits environmental impacts were largely ignored. Indeed,in his survey of the development of radical geographyin the United States, Peet (1977, 23) cited Lacoste’s(1973b) Antipode article as an example of “the radicaltheory of spatial relations,” but does not connect it tothe subfield’s quest for “advocacy” and “relevance” (itis William Bunge’s Detroit Geographical Expeditionthat is spotlighted). This begs important questionsabout radicalism in Anglophone geography at thistime, to which we return briefly at the end. For now,we want to outline how the Vietnam War and themeof tropicalisme was taken up in French geography.

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The Emergence of a French Critique of Tropicality

Lacoste saw Herodote as a vehicle for bringing Frenchgeographical research, which had long been cocoonedin a hierarchical disciplinary field, to a wider audi-ence. The journal’s inaugural issue is best known forits interview with Foucault on geography (see Foucault1980), but the Vietnam War also looms large. Its frontcover gives an aerial view of an American B-52 bombertraversing a pockmarked Vietnamese landscape, and La-coste used his experience in Vietnam to reflect on “thelinks between certain geographical representations andcertain forms of ideological behaviour.” The contribu-tion of filmmakers Chapuis and Ronai (1976, 117) tookthis link further, examining the “ideological behaviour”at work in Gourou’s representation of the “beauties ofthe delta.” Akin to the dramaturgical image that Said(1978, 63) used just two years later to describe the Ori-ent as “a theatrical stage affixed to Europe,” Chapuis andRonai launched an acerbic attack on Gourou and howhe had constructed an “inaugural landscape” that “liter-ally functioned in his [1936] study like the opening of anopera.” At the heart of this landscape, they argued, wasGourou’s image of the peasant living in “misery albeitnot despair” (Gourou 1936, cited in Chapuis and Ronai1976, 118). We find here and in Lacoste’s reflectionsa concern with issues of discourse and representationthat an Anglophone literature on tropicality has, ina sense, since made its own. But we also begin to seehow, as Raison (2005, 327) related, in French geographythe idea of tropicality came to assume “a more precisemeaning”—one “shaped above all by researchers whodisagreed with Gourou.” This disagreement had vari-ous roots and trajectories, but for our purposes threestand out.

Broc (1976, 505) identified one line of criticism,noting in a review of this first issue of Herodote that“we take mainly from Lacoste’s musings the fact thatPierre Gourou’s text has been used in turn by Frenchcolonists, Japanese fascists, American imperialists, andVietnamese progressives.” Is this not “a great tribute tothe objectivity and science of the bourgeois geographer”Gourou, he asked wryly. This concern with the imbrica-tions of geography and power was not new, however. Inhis influential Discours sue le colonialisme, Cesaire (1955,36) singled out Gourou’s (1947) Les pays tropicaux forcriticism, arguing that it amounted to an “impure andworldly geography” that granted to the Western scholarthe unequivocal right (or neocolonial authority) to castthe tropical world in a derogatory light, as exotic andbackward. Yet French geographers ignored this indict-

ment of Gourou, and ideology critique in the disci-pline only started to gain ground, and then hesitantly,in the wake of the student uprising of May 1968 (seeClaval 1984, 30–36; Bruneau 2008; Courade personalinterview 2009).

Georges Condominas (personal interview 2008)recalled how Dresch and Pierre George admonishedhim at Lacoste’s defense of his doctorat d’etat for praisingGourou. The historic rivalry between the College deFrance (where Gourou held a Chair from 1947 to1970) and the Sorbonne on the opposite side of RueSaint-Jacques (where Lacoste was examined) partlylies behind this aggression. Sorbonne students werechastised if they cited Gourou (Bruneau personalinterview 2009). But more specifically, it was Gourou’saesthetic gaze that was being questioned. WhenGourou “looks at the landscape,” Condominas (per-sonal interview 2008) remembered George askinghim and Lacoste, “Where are the people?” “Gourouspeaks of beauty, but where are the Vietnamese peoplewho feel the beauty?” It was two disillusioned tropicalgeographers based at the Centre d’Etude de GeographieTropicale in Bordeaux, however, Michel Bruneau andGeorges Courade, who became Gourou’s most forcefuland insightful critics. In two pivotal 1984 papers(Bruneau and Courade 1984a, 1984b), they arguedthat the field of tropical geography had to changebecause the Westerner’s relationship with the tropicshad been transformed by decolonization and postwarU.S. imperialism.

This discussion bleeds into a second line of criticism,which Rodolphe De Koninck (1978) captured ina paper on how “classical French geography” wasdeeply imbued with “philosophical idealism”—anunproblematized concern with, inter alia, beauty,harmony, equilibrium, and landscape that eschewedanalysis of material social relations and state power.“Ideology underpins Gourou’s supposedly objectiveand neutral tropical geography,” Bruneau and Courade(1984b, 308–10) declared, and similar points were putto Gourou, principally by Lacoste himself, in a 1984interview for Herodote, albeit in a milder fashionand with an apology from Lacoste for the Chapuisand Ronai piece, which Lacoste now described as a“blunder and an injustice” (Gourou 1984, 72).

Finally, tropical geography came to be questionedfrom an increasing number of “fringe” (or anti-establishment) locations (Bruneau 2008, personal in-terviews 2008, 2009; Courade personal interview 2009):by “tropicalists” such as Bruneau and Courade, whoseradical commitments (Bruneau’s to Marxism, Courade’s

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with the review Politique Africaine) were out of linewith Gourou’s paradigm and the figureheads of thestate-funded tropical geography research institutes inFrance (mostly Gourou’s former students) who po-liced it; and from journals such as Herodote andL’Espace Geographique (established by Roger Brunet in1972), which encouraged experimentation and debatein French geography. In 1981, Brunet, who was then inthe office of J. P. Chevenement’s Ministry of Research,was sent a damning report on the state of geographyin France. Although tropical geography was not tar-geted explicitly, Brunet decided to throw open debateabout the subfield in L’Espace Geographique, invitingessays from Bruneau and Courade (1984b) and others.Lacoste, who was skeptical about the spatial modelingand systems thinking advocated by Brunet, was not in-vited (Durand-Lasserve et al. 1984; De Koninck 1985).By 1984, a polemic had gathered around Gourou’s work,and one less respectful of the classical unity of geogra-phy than Lacoste’s engagement with Gourou had been.Bruneau (personal interview 2008, 2009) and Courade(personal interview 2009) reflected that although theVietnam War and Herodote were important in sen-sitizing them and other younger geographers to theideological and political dimensions of geography andgeographical knowledge, the debate about tropicalismein France that was presaged (in different ways) by La-coste and Brunet was quickly drawn back to Gourou andwhat they (Bruneau and Courade 1984a, 67) describedas the “naturalist and colonial perfume” of his oeuvre.They acknowledge that Lacoste’s purposive reworkingof Gourou was bypassed.

Conclusion: Lacoste’s “Unwelcome Fact”

Lacoste used the 1972 American bombing of the RedRiver dikes to deploy a vision of geography as a criticaland strategic form of knowledge. In his “dossier of anew kind” he sought to show that landscape, environ-ment, and territory are not inert or fixed backdrops ofwar—“geographic conditions . . . invoked in very gen-eral and abstract terms to explain permanent featuresof a state’s foreign policy” (Lacoste 1984, 217–18; cf.Lacoste 2008). Rather, Lacoste envisioned geographyas an active, operational constituent of war and ar-gued that a “multivariate” geographical analysis wasneeded to oppose war. Lacoste’s intervention shouldbe regarded as a seminal precursor to geographers’ con-temporary insistence that geography (as “a knowing”and “a doing”) makes a significant difference to how

war is waged (see, e.g., Gregory 2004; Gregory andPred 2006; Cowen and Gilbert 2008). Among otherthings, he showed us that when comparing Vietnamwith other wars and armed conflicts, it is important tospecify which kind of knowledge is used, how, and why.

Lacoste unearthed how USAF strategists had graspedand exploited the complex interplay of cultural, topo-graphical, hydraulic, and ballistic factors that made theRed River Delta of North Vietnam a military target. Hislocation in Paris, which was a hub of U.S.–Vietnamesediplomatic activity, connection to Dresch, and partic-ipation in an International Commission made his in-tervention possible and helped him to disseminate hisfindings widely. It was his methodology, though, andhow it was bound up with the problem of “factual truth”that made his expose significant. Arendt’s (1968, 241)observation that although “unwelcome opinion can beargued with, rejected, or compromised upon . . . un-welcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness thatnothing can move except plain lies” fits Lacoste’s crit-ical vision. He mobilized the tools of “classical geog-raphy” to create an international and environmentalknowledge—or space of knowledge and field of vision,to use more contemporary geographical terms—thatcould challenge organized lying.

This critical vision, Lacoste (2006; personal inter-view 2008) affirmed to us, owed a lot to Gourou’s ge-ographie humaine, which, paradoxically, was starting tobe questioned by French geographers during this pe-riod for its apolitical outlook. Fieldwork, mapping, anda concern with spatial pattern and distribution (drawnfrom Gourou) as well as a geopolitical concern with theaction of power and arms on people and territory, waskey to Lacoste’s ability to raise significant doubts in U.S.media and political circles that the bombing was not ac-cidental and was probably deliberate. This was Lacoste’s“unwelcome fact,” and his interest in the connectionsamong military strategy, society–environment interac-tions, and the ecological dimensions of war helped tomake what Giblin (1985) termed his “geopolitical ge-ography” both distinctive within French geography anddifferent from Anglophone political geography. A fullaccounting of the distinctiveness of Lacoste’s position isbeyond the purview of this article. Two sets of remarksneed to suffice.

First, Chomsky (1986) observed that althoughprojects like Lacoste’s helped to bring a “normally qui-escent [American] population” to doubt its politiciansand fueled a “crisis of democracy,” the “intelligentsia”struggled to maintain its “adversarial stance vis-a-visestablished power” simply through the proclamation of

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“independence and integrity.” The intelligentsia wasnot immune from doubt, and in any event, Chomskyconceded, the political establishment would do all itcould to “restore order . . . for the powerful and privi-leged.” Arendt (1968, 231) grasped this point too, por-tending that “the chances of factual truth surviving theonslaught of power are very slim indeed.”

White (1973, xii, 6) saw this struggle as part of a widerseries of twentieth-century “rebellions against historicalconsciousness” that had fractured distinctions betweentruth and lies—between “finding” and “inventing” astory, as he put it. In part “finding” and in part “in-venting” a story (constructing a “technical argument,”as the Baltimore Sun described his endeavors), Lacostemounted both a defense and critique of geographicalconsciousness. How, he asked, could a geography thathad long served to wage war be turned on its head by ge-ographical analysis itself? If this question was not heededby Anglophone geographers until years after Lacostehad blazed his particular trail, it was partly, Dalby (2001,423–24) intimated, because they were more taken in bythe belief that the long-range ballistics of the nuclearage promised the end of “constraints of geography” andby an encompassing discourse of the “American cen-tury” that turned questions of space (of distribution,difference, and unevenness) into ones of time (of devel-opment, diffusion, and connectivity). Only later, Hep-ple (1986) observed, did a “critical geopolitics” startto pay attention to what Lacoste’s geographical warfareimplied: that military strategy and geopolitical conceptsboth lived by (rested on), and could be taken down on,the sword of geographical calculation and critique.

At a time when the neo-conservative rhetoric iden-tified by Arendt is resurgent in U.S. politics, it is impor-tant to recognize that the 11 September 2001 attackson the World Trade Center and Pentagon (hereinafter“9/11”) did not “ramp up” lying in politics, as has beenclaimed (see Presbey 2008). Far from it: Arendt’s andLacoste’s interventions remind us that political lyingand censorship, especially in times of war, has a complexhistorical geography. Lacoste’s “factual truth” served topoliticize the crisis of fact and fiction that was part andparcel of the Vietnam War by drawing attention to thedifferent kinds of spaces—physical, cultural, political,rhetorical, ballistic—in and through which war is rep-resented, enacted, and experienced. Indeed, U.S. reac-tion (by politicians, lawyers, and the media) to Lacoste’s1972 expose points to what Gregory (2010) described asthe “legalisation of the battlespace” and saw as one markof the colonial present: the involvement of lawyers anda public-opinion-conscious American political system

with targeting and civilian casualties, currently in thecontext of the long-distance air (“drone” and “reaper”)war being waged over the “borderlands” of the Mid-dle East. Although Lacoste himself did not draw outthe fact, the Linebacker operations underscored whatthe U.S. military is still trying to come to terms with,namely, as Gregory (2010) put it, that aerial warfarenot only makes the landscape of war “blurry” and ren-ders clear distinctions between combatant and civilianobsolete, but also makes questions of geography and ge-ographical analysis paramount to the moral as well astechnical evaluation of war.

Second, our concern with Lacoste stemmed from aninterest in Gourou’s tropicality, and part of our purposehas been to explore how this discourse can serve mul-tiple and conflicting political agendas and should notsimply be written off as an oppressive or domineeringmode of othering. We have described Lacoste’s tropical-ity as strategic and ambivalent; by strategic we mean, inpart, specific to a time, place, and project. Fleetingly in1972 it helped him to generate his own hermeneutic cir-cuit connecting America and Vietnam, geography andpolitics, and war and environment and revealing thatscholarship and politics always intersect but not alongpredictable channels. Lacoste roused exoticist habits ofmind—a Western tropicalist gaze drawn to the fragileenvironmental otherness enshrined in the spectacle ofthe bombed dikes—for subversive ends. To bomb theRed River Delta was to bomb a way of life.

We should be careful about treating Lacoste’s “geo-graphical warfare” as a critical exemplar or method thatcan simply be repeated elsewhere or transposed to otherconflicts. At the same time, however, Lacoste’s explicitconcern with ecocide still remains somewhat muted incurrent geographical writing on war, terror, and whatGregory and Pred (2006) called “violent geographies.”Much of the critical literature on aerial warfare alightson the production of space as target (and often as ab-stract space), and much more could be done with theecological and aesthetic dimensions of Lacoste’s land-scapes of war and paysages politiques.

As for the different trajectories that Anglophoneand Francophone geography have been on regardingwar since the 1970s, one possible (albeit admittedlyspeculative) contrast might repay further investigation:Although Lacoste wrote out of what Ross (1996) de-scribed as a modernist French critical tradition thatwas sensitized by the French wars in Indochina andAlgeria, and that made the public intellectual’s abilityto speak truth to power over matters of war, violence,and earthly destruction integral to French culture and

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identity, the “lying in politics” exposed by Lacostepreyed on unresolved public and political attitudeswithin the United States concerning mass death andits twentieth-century technological acceleration, whichTorgovnick (2005) has termed a repressed “war com-plex” that stems from World War II. We have seenthat this French critical tradition had a complex anduneven bearing on French geography, with Gourou’sapolitical outlook questioned but Lacoste’s critical useof his classical geography overlooked by French geog-raphers at the time. But why was Lacoste’s idea of ge-ographical warfare not taken up in 1970s radical geog-raphy, and why did it remain muted until the 1990s,when, following the collapse of communism, a “criti-cal geopolitics” began to turn its attention to “other”forms of geopolitical conflict (e.g., environmental secu-rity)? The reasons—and whether Torgovnick’s diagno-sis helps—are unclear and need to be debated.

Wisner (1986, 212–15) identified the problem in themid-1980s, commenting on geography’s age-old mili-tary penchant “for targeting places and people” and onhow geographers had showed “remarkably little aware-ness of how central their knowledge and methods are tomilitary adventures.” After World War II, and with theonset of decolonization, Anglophone geography, mind-ful of the discipline’s close links to war, shied away fromits analysis, and as Farish (2009, 119) noted, the “deepconnections” between the two that endured (especiallyin U.S. geography) “were rarely acknowledged.” Palka(2003, 505) added that the subfield of U.S. military ge-ography went through “a period of drought” during theVietnam War. Anderson and Doherty (personal cor-respondence 2010) started to probe what lies behindthis, suggesting to us that 1970s radical geography didlittle with the war–environment nexus because in ge-ography’s Western heartlands, peaceful conditions wereassumed. War and conflict (and related issues of uncer-tainty and insecurity) were marginal to theory produc-tion and political debate in the emerging subfield. It ispartly through historical analysis and the specter of fig-ures like Lacoste that we might now start to gauge therelative significance of the collapse of communism, andespecially 9/11, in making the connections among vio-lence, war, and geography central to human geographyonce more.

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Yves Lacoste and Michel Bruneaufor their time and interest in this project and to Trevor

Barnes, Hugh Clout, Cole Harris, Alan Lester; theLondon Group of Historical Geographers, participantsat the IAG 2009 Conference, James Cook Univer-sity, Australia; and Audrey Kobayashi and the journal’sanonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlierversions of this article. The usual disclaimers apply. Ourresearch has been supported by grants from the BritishAcademy and Carnegie Trust.

Note1. All translations from French are our own. Born in 1929,

in Fez, Morocco, Lacoste gained his aggregation in ge-ography in 1952, and from 1952 to 1955 taught at theLycee Bugeaud in Algiers. He left Algeria and quit theFrench Communist Party in 1956 (although he retainedlinks with the Algerian anti-colonial movement) and en-tered the Parisian academic system as a research assis-tant to Pierre George and Jean Dresch at the Institut deGeographie. In the autumn of 1968 Dresch asked Lacosteto head a “geopolitics” laboratory at the newly establishedUniversity of Paris 8–Vincennes. Lacoste became profes-sor there in 1979, on completing his These d’Etat. OnLacoste, see Bataillon 2006. On Gourou (1900–1999),see Bowd and Clayton (2005).

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Correspondence: School of Modern Languages, University of St. Andrews, Fife, UK, KY16 9PH, e-mail: [email protected] (Bowd); Schoolof Geography and Geosciences, University of St. Andrews, Fife, UK, KY16 9AL, e-mail: [email protected] (Clayton).

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Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the ... · Geographical Warfare in the Tropics: Yves Lacoste and the Vietnam War Gavin P. Bowd∗ and Daniel W. Clayton† ∗School

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