NO EXIT
Stern, Laurence
NO EXIT by LAURENCE STERN Tt is a measure of President Nixon's new-found suasion with the press and public that there was such a mild response to his recent announcement concerning British...
...In the early days it was as a member of the British advisory mission to our Government in Vietnam...
...When this contact is broken or at least greatly reduced the guerrilla units are out on a limb without supplies, recruits, or intelligence...
...This too may be Thompson's mistake in Vietnam, a more populous and militarily more challenging theater for anti-guerrilla warfare...
...Yet Mr...
...If Sir Robert has had any substantive difference with American military tactics in Vietnam it centers on the scale of military force applied to the rooting out of the Vietcong revolutionary forces...
...The President's assertion that he had sent Sir Robert to Vietnam for a "first-hand, candid, and completely independent report on the situation there" could hardly be greeted with a straight face by either boosters or detractors of the redoubtable general...
...Yet Thompson is credited with having been the architect of the strategic hamlet policy during the Diem period which proved such a terrible fiasco...
...Malaya is not Vietnam, as the most casual initiates to history know...
...NO EXIT by LAURENCE STERN Tt is a measure of President Nixon's new-found suasion with the press and public that there was such a mild response to his recent announcement concerning British anti-guerrilla warrior Sir Robert Thompson...
...From 1961 through today Thompson has been a consultant in one form or another to the U.S...
...no troops or supplies were being introduced from outside...
...Nixon might just as plausibly have said that he had sent coach Vince Lombardi to Kennedy Stadium here in the nation's capital for a candid and completely independent assessment of the Washington Redskins...
...He continued advising us through such Government-financed instrumentalities as the Rand Corporation, the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Brookings Institution, and Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute...
...His plan was to take cadres of very tough guys and expand their control further and further into the villages until you could take the villages...
...He promises in his book that it will produce a "complete if not altogether a happy victory...
...The French mistake in Algeria was to differentiate between the guerrilla underground and the population...
...In Malaya the enemy was identifiable (the vast majority of the Malaysian Communists were Chinese...
...Yet it took twelve years to do the job...
...The emphasis in Algeria was the development of a ruthlessly effective intelligence system that flourished on fear and torture...
...His consulting fees, too, have apparently been un-stemmed by the misfortunes of war...
...The key point in his philosophy," said one American official who has maintained close contact with Thompson, "is to use highly sophisticated police techniques—not a massive, half-baked bureaucracy in Saigon...
...Nixon characterized as "cautiously optimistic...
...Nixon has, with his own words, given rise to speculation that the "long haul, low cost" strategy espoused by Sir Robert may also reflect his own long-range intentions in Vietnam...
...In an extraordinary way the old general's reputation has weathered the vicissitudes of the Vietnam War, the ill winds and bloody reverses that broke the fortunes of politicians and battlefield commanders...
...It is against this setting that the President pronounced Thompson's latest report from Vietnam to be "in line with my own attitude and the reports I have received from other observers and . . . our own civilian and military leaders in Vietnam...
...policy in Vietnam...
...A citation from Thompson's book, No Exit From Vietnam (which President Nixon said he read) would be appropriate: "It is the task of the intelligence organization," he writes, "to identify the individuals in the underground organization working within the population so as to break the contact between that organization and the guerrilla units...
...Government...
...If that is the case, the President's reluctance to be pinned down to a timetable of disengagement is understandable...
...The reputation derives from the role widely ascribed to Sir Robert of LAURENCE STERN is a staff writer for The Washington Post...
...That promise has been made by others—many times...
...From the very beginning of American military participation in the war —as far back as 1961—Sir Robert has wielded an influential role in the formulation of U.S...
...This influence stems in part from the high esteem in which he has been held by a long line of American officials who determined the course of the war...
...having master-minded the liquidation of the Chinese Communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950's...
...the number of insurgents was fixed and far smaller...
...The Thompson technique is strongly reminiscent of the tactics used by the tough French paratrooper generals in Algeria to crack the backbone of the resistance by wiping out the leadership cells and cadres...
...And now he continues to advocate a "long haul low cost strategy" that would require an American presence (albeit reduced) in Vietnam for fifteen to twenty more years...
...Counterinsurgency was the siren song in the early days of the Kennedy Administration's involvement in Vietnam...
...The notion had a romantic allure to the Washington activists of that period, freshly emancipated from sheltered academic lives...
...The question, obviously, is whether such a protracted strategy in Vietnam is in the American national interest...
...Thompson lays out a prescription in No Exit, and presumably in his report to President Nixon, for a lower cost American involvement in Vietnam —lower cost and longer haul...
...It might be a dubious proposition that American public opinion would be cautiously optimistic about any plan that called for stationing American troops in Southeast Asia another five or fifteen or twenty years...
...But counterinsurgency has been a flop in Vietnam...
...The list includes President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, President Johnson, General Maxwell Taylor, Ambassador Averell Harriman, White House Adviser McGeorge Bundy—and now President Nixon...
...It is an attitude that Mr...
Vol. 34 • February 1970 • No. 2
