EDITORIALS
Editorials THE MAYAGUEZ INCIDENT One way to test the reasonableness of the actions taken by the United States in the Mayaguez incident is to ponder whether the same set of decisions would have...
...Most such exercises are...
...Not less dismaying than the display of the White House and the Pentagon was that of the Congress: Senator Clifford Case, co-author of the 1973 legal ban on military action in Indochina, telling President Ford he could ignore the law...
...But it was a cowardly performance...
...Where were all the lessons allegedly learned over the past decade about presidential authoritarianism...
...and judicious reaction would have meant something other than the turning loose of trigger-happy military forces...
...It is a scary thing when a Congress can get swept up in a patriotic emotionalism born of a lunatic military aggression...
...The brute triumphed...
...He has made the Nobel Peace Prize a mockery of everything for which it is supposed to stand...
...Many people are having second thoughts about Henry Kissinger, and well they might...
...Where were all those new sensitivities about the co-responsibility of the Congress...
...But even as the official Washington "story" became porous, as the casualty list grew, and as new details became known of the extent of the militarism, the chorus of approval continued at crescendo level...
...Then there was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger talking of American lives and American property, and sounding for all the world like Richard Nixon-who he seems to have been more than most of us realized at the time...
...response, he certainly helped modulate it...
...The Mayaguez was thirty miles from the Cambodian mainland, and only two-to-seven miles (depending upon what U.S...
...or any other nation the right to traffic indiscriminately (innocently or otherwise) in the land, sea or air areas affected by that claim...
...Senator Hubert Humphrey rushing to rally 'round the flag...
...Analogies are seldom exact, but under the circumstances Cambodia's action seems not too much different from what U.S...
...If one counters by observing that Nantucket is an acknowledged territorial part of the U.S., who then is the U.S...
...seems stuck with him for the duration of the Ford term, and so much the worse for us all so far as principle is concerned...
...One expected considerable reassessment by many senators and representatives in the cooler aftermath of the incident...
...It is to suggest, however, that the incident was welcomed by the Ford administration and the Pentagon in order to dramatize American "resoluteness...
...The Mayaguez incident could have been another Gulf-of-Tonkin time bomb, but the voices that so warned were lonesome indeed...
...This is not to say that the Mayaguez incident was deliberately provoked by the U.S...
...The U.S...
...to decide that Tang Island is not integral to Cambodia...
...Kissinger was at Ford's side or near his telephone-ear throughout the Mayaguez incident, and if he did not dictate the U.S...
...The conclusion can only be that an entirely different course would have been followed, one much more sane (if only because of the intimidating nature of these peer powers) and one presumably more balanced in cause/effect response...
...We do not know if there is any machinery in the Nobel operation for the rescinding of awards, but if there is it ought to be activated and applied to Kissinger...
...House minority leader John Rhodes declaring through a spokesman that he had no complaint because he was notified about the acts of war rather than consulted...
...to stand...
...Nantucket waters are not international waters...
...If Henry Kissinger is not a liar, then he is an equivocator...
...Negotiations, for instance, would likely have meant precisely that-not 24-hour ultimatums...
...The elephant-gun was got out to zap the gnat...
...So the bully flexed his muscles and tingled to the exertion...
...There is strong suspicion that he would have had the bombers back over Hanoi in the last days of Vietnam...
...In either case, he is not the man of peace that much of the world thought he was...
...Besides, the hypersensitive political and military situation in Southeast Asia, and incidents a few days before involving South Korean and Panamanian vessels in the same area, should have dictated a caution on the part of the Mayaguez that was obviously not present, nor, it seems, strongly recommended by U.S...
...Editorials THE MAYAGUEZ INCIDENT One way to test the reasonableness of the actions taken by the United States in the Mayaguez incident is to ponder whether the same set of decisions would have been made if the nation involved were not weak, tiny Cambodia but instead China or Russia...
...So much the worse, too, for the Nobel Prize Committee, whose medal for peace Kissinger owns...
...Senator Hugh Scott bristling when pressed as to whether congressional leaders had merely been advised about the leap to militarism, or consulted as the law stipulates they should have been...
...In this context, the sinking of the Cambodian patrol boats, the bombings of the Cambodian mainland, and the Marine invasion of Tang Island, for however brief a battle, amount to colossal overreaction to an incident whose circumstances were anything but clear, then as now, with respect to culpability and responsibility...
...official was speaking at what particular moment) from an island claimed by Cambodia...
...action might have been, if in a militarily tense situation an unfriendly boat wandered into Nantucket waters...
...authorities...
...And there is still the unexplained business about the secret agreements between then-President Nixon and South Vietnamese President Thieu at the time of the Paris Peace Accords-agreements whose existence Kissinger denied to all the world...
...In any instance, a disputed claim with Vietnam over Tang Island does not give the U.S...
Vol. 102 • June 1975 • No. 6
