Washington Report: Kill Him, Save It

...None of the three coalition governments has succeeded in winning two terms of office in a row and the latest failure to do so will make it difficult for the disgruntled members of both partners to continue the arrangement...

...The Russians demonstrated this in the aftermath of World War II by carting off factories, transit systems, fountain pens and wrist watches from their conquered territories, but that's the old-fashioned way, rather simple-minded, really, in which the preservation of enemy property can be valuable to the victor...

...Just recently, Agence France Presse and Le Monde, the esteemed French daily, itemized additional repressions against the United Buddhist Church, against assertive publications, and individuals who obViously want a freer society than what the new government appears willing to give them...

...Maybe this is so...

...On the other hand, how can one dismiss as illusionary so many accounts of human fights violations...

...in fairness to the government of Vietnamese it must be conceded that the bloodbath so many predicted after the fall of Saigon never did materialize...

...There is one more aspect to the neutron bomb that apparently has occurred to no one and that may in the long run may be more important, more valuable to this country, than any other...

...Give that a double-take, it needs it...

...WASHINGTON REPORT KILL HIM, SAVE IT It's understandable why there should be a certain amount of shock and horror at presidential and congressional backing for the neutron bomb...

...Something more is in order than a unilateral declaration from Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City that all is blessed and free in the new Vietnam...

...The new government has now a 20-seat majority over all the rest...

...Is mankind going crazy...

...19 August 1977:518...

...At any rate, we win: we probably couldn't lose anyway, although, after Vietnam it is never wise to underestimate the military's capacity for Commonweal: 517 bungling the most elemental tasks, but with one of the Communist powers on our side, we really can't lose...

...If these "calls" seem imperious, they are in fact but minimal...

...They brought with them a glimpse of new frontiers and an echo of President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address about not asking what the country could do for you but what you could do for your country...

...It was only four years and four months since they had come into office as a government of all the talents, committed to a program of reform...

...For almost thirty years now, all military thinking in the two superpowers has been solidly rooted in cloud cuckooland, as is readily seen in the standard approach to appropriations: the argument invariably has been we must build this new, incredibly destructive, incredibly expensive weapons system so that we shall never have to use it...

...If we did it to the Russians to prevent their becoming Chinese, within 5 years after the war, our markets would be flooded with cheapo Russki TV sets, cars, tape recorders, cameras...

...the American military establishment at least did get into a war, but it was so ashamed of the odds on its side that for years it wouldn't even admit it was there, and, worse, got itself clobbered in spite of those oads by a bunch of amateurs who wouldn't have known a kiltron from a megaton but did know the terrain...

...It precipitated resignations as party leaders of Fine Gael's Liam Cosgrave, who had been Tooiseach or Prime Minister from 1973, and the Labor Party's Brendan Corish...

...Warriors should think about war, not about Wittgensteinian questions of epistemology...

...You don't do it by building weapons so as not to use them...

...By that logic, and in the wake of unrelieved reports of human rights violations in Vietnam, the "calls" of the American peace community of last spring are as valid as ever, and merit repeating: "We eaU for a complete public accounting of those detained or imprisoned indicating, as well, the charges for which they are held...

...asked Bahr...

...postwar reconstruction aid...

...The election result was a surprise to the pundits...

...How can one minimize such unnerving incidents as the self-immolation of 12 Buddhist monks and nuns in Can Tho Province last November in protest against administrative orders redefining and drastically restricting their religious practice...

...Baez said: "I would rather err in unintentionally offending government officials anywhere in the world, to whom I would apologize later if I have been mistaken, than to offend one political prisoner whom I might now conceivably help and whom later I may never be able to reach...

...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FROM IRELAND UPSET A T THE The recent general election shattered the political scene in Ireland...

...Challenged on her signing of last spring's appeal, Ms...

...Under the proportional representation system used for Irish elections, the government would have been safe with a maximum swing against them up to three percent...

...other things these sources also speak of as many as 300,000 persons being held in "re-education" camps, and of the arrest and detention of a wide range of people, including religious, cultural and political figures who had opposed the Thieu regime despite considerable personal risk...

...The Coalition government changed the constituencies again in a way calculated to do them most good...

...Conor Cruise O'Brien, Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, would get back, even if only narrowly...

...They did it by turning four-seat constituencies, in which they could have expected two seats out of the four, into three-seaters in which they hoped to pick up two seats to the Opposition's one...

...And it has ended, temporarily at least and possibly for good, the coalition arrangement between their two ,parties, which had previously ruled from 1945-48 and 1954-57...

...Preeminently, we are the warmaking species and that is how you make war...

...It is, no doubt, asking too much to expect any glimmer of delicacy or tact on the part of a German politician, b u t still, at least for the lifetime of people who can remember Hitler, it would be nice if prominent Germans would just shut up about other countries' weapons...

...So we win...

...The government of Vietnam responds that it is being victimized by propagandists, that those who opposed the Thieu regime now occupy "well-deserved positions in the new society," that human fights are not being violated, and that "being detained are only those who had done so much harm to the people and the country and now continue to sabotage activities against the laws and the peaceful life of the people...

...And we did this not merely to our loyal allies, but especially to our hated enemies, the people formerly called Japs and Krauts suddenly transmogrified into defenders of the free world...

...Naturally enough, the Minister tries to make sure his surgery benefits the ruling ,party or parties...

...While the best minds of the Pentagon were occupied with how to stop the Russians from doing a bank shot off the moon and taking out Colorado Springs, out in 'Nam the M-16--that old rifled bore--was falling apart and aeroplanes were arriving with melted electrical insulation, no one having remembered it's quite hot there...

...This would seem trouble worth taking, assurance worth conveying--if it can---on the eve on Vietnam's' formal sitting in the United Nations on Sept...

...The pundits' predictions were bolstered by a revision of constituency boundaries which seemed to copperfasten the coalition's position...

...20, and in view of its continuing and rightful demand for U.S...

...The warriors, in short, have suddenly gotten back to war as their subject rather than the ~psycho-military-politics of cloud cuckooland which has preoccupied them ever since the hydrogen bomb...

...Wittgenstein got into military thought in this country with the change of name from War Department to Defense Department...

...Since most people prefer people to buildings, at least if absolutely pressed to make the choice, the neuiron bomb strikes many as the wrong choice, an immoral choice, an Unnatural preference...

...We can kill all the Russians we want but save the Russian means of production in all its comforting obsolescence, inefficiency and blessed non-competitive state...

...It seemed a new dawn in Irish political life and no one expected so early a sunset...

...If this comment is accusatory of the government of Vietnam, and if it implies guilt where in fact there may be none, then some remarks of singer Joan Baez might be borne in mind...

...They had, one and all, predicted that the Coalition, with Ministers as well-known internationally as Dr...

...The neutron bomb delivers us from all that...

...There were a lot of reasons for our disaster in Vietnam, prominent among them General Westmoreland, but certainly among them too is the mindset of a Pentagon convinced that the really important weapons are the ones made not to be used...

...The revision was carried out by the Coalition's Minister for Local Government, Mr...

...Fianna Ffiil had changed the constituency boundaries substantially before the 1973 election, but they had miscalculated the size of the swing against them and their strategy failed...

...The great virtue of the bomb is that it kills ~eople, leaves buildings mostly undamaged in its kill zone...

...Is this supposed to be the last progress...

...but one, been turned into 3-seaters...

...We call for government recognition of the fight to open and free communication...

...Projecting that pattern into the future, it is easy to see what could happen...

...Certainly while Ludwig Wittgenstein broods over the Pentagon, there is no such thing as a complete defense, since the mind of man can always dream up some way out of the trap the mind of man has dreamed up in the first place--especially if it's the same mind, and most especially if that mind sees another star on the shoulder, another stock option from the corporation if the epistemology can be successfully diddled once again...

...The first good thing to be said about the neutron bomb is just the thing that a number of observers have condemned in it, namely that it seems to be a practical, battlefield weapon...

...What we did, if you remember, was to pour in factories, transit systems, fountain pens and wrist watches to take the places of those we had destroyed or the Russians had carted off...

...Instead it averaged five percent and up to seven percent in some of the key Dublin constituencies which returned 43 of the 148 Dfiil seats and which had all...

...On the other hand, when we remember the German destruction of Coventry Cathedral, of Warsaw and Lidice, it is easy, too, to understand the sheer bafflement of a German at the idea of not blowing up all the buildings available, Unless you have Sam Peckinpah directing the camera and the editing, pictures of buildings blowing up are much 19 August 1977:516 more NordicaUy satisfying than those of just plain old, modestly proportioned human bodies being smithereened...

...James Tully, in pursuance of a constitutional provision requiring that there should be one Deputy in Dfiil l~ireann (the lower House of Parliament) for each 20,000-30,000 of the population...

...This may be regarded as regrettable, but in that case human nature, at least on the record, has to be so regarded, too...

...Again the strategy failed...

...As part of the process we would ship into Russia, say, all-new factories, transit systems, fountain pens and wrist watches to keep the Russians from becoming Chinese...

...That sales pitch would have knocked Willy Loman out of the New England territory before the curtain got up, yet over the last three decades that pitch has made the Pentagonians in the White House and on Capitol Hill the most successful snake-oil men in history...

...In the old-time pattern, we would immediately make friends with the defeated enemy in order to forge a new alliance against the former ally and now potential enemy...

...They got the factories, transit systems, fountain pens and wrist watches precisely so they would not become Communists...

...Tully miscalculated the size of the swing against the government...

...But the factories, transit systems, fountain pens and wrist watches so shil~ped would, in the nature of things, be far advanced over those we ourselves had unharmed at home...

...Periodic censuses provide the statistical basis on which the number of seats in Dfiil gireann is determined and it has hitherto fallen to the Minister for Local Government to reorganize constituency boundaries accordingly...

...This sign of returning sanitymto be taken cautiously, to be suremcould be the most important military development since the invention of the rifled bore, which is not,, as you may think, a fixture in the lounge of the Army-Navy Club here, but probably the most efficient weapon ever devised...

...Well, the neutron bomb is not in the class with' German death camps when it comes to killing ,people, we may as well freely admit, and it is the descendant of the German V-1 and V-2 which were used to kill masses of English civilians, but still the neutron bomb is basically designed to kill soldiers...

...That formula, basically, is what has made Germany and Japan the fierce market cornpetitors they are, with severely damaging effects on our own economy...

...There is a much more sophisticated, much more valuable way suggested by American conduct after that famed world catastrophe...

...War is war, after all, an art, a science, a trade, a business, whatever, its principles comprehensible, its practice perfectible...

...This may indeed be the aspect of it that Bahr, as a German, finds shocking...

...We go to war with the Russians and automatically pick up the Chinese as our principal ally--it could work the other way round, it hardly matters...

...Inflation would soar, as would unemployment and there wouldn't be a darn thing we could do about it for fear the Russians might start taping their eyes into slants...

...Instead of keeping the Coalition in office, the balance of advantage worked in Fianna Ffiil's favor, returned them with 84 seats instead of the 66 they had before the poll...

...It is this, the preservation of property can be enormously valuable to the victor in a war...

...It swept Fianna Ffiil back into power with the greatest number of seats won by any Irish party since 1922...

...But there is really no such thing as defense, not in the solid, matter-of-fact way that there is war...

...We call on the government of Vietnam to facilitate onthe-spot inspection by the United Nations, Amnesty International or other independent international agencies in order to assure that those in the government's charge are treated in accord with international covenants regarding human fights...

...Rather than embarrass the government of Vietnam they should challenge it to demonstrate to the world outside that this government is what it says it is...

...The neutron bomb moves military discussion from Wittgenstein back to Clausewitz, not as interesting a mind, perhaps, but a hell of a lot better soldier...

...If you try, you, too, can learn to love that bomb...

...Well, with that background, you can see why the neutron bomb is really encouraging...

...It threw out of office the Fine GaelLabor Party coalition which had been returned in 1973, ending 16 unbroken years of rule by Fianna F~iil, the party founded by Eamonn de Valera in 1927...

...We call on you to release any individuals who are held purely because of their religious or political convictions...

...The basic virtue of the neutron bomb comes from the consideration that wars are won by killing soldiers u o r wounding them, capturing them or putting them to flight--not by blowing up buildings but by killing soldiers and taking the ground the soldiers occupied before they were dead...

...Garret FitzGerald, Foreign Minister and Dr...

...The results of this cloud cuckooland thinking are shameful to the military establishments of both powers: the mighty Red Army in that period has been reduced to operating as riot control units in the capitals of Eastern Eurape, moving tanks against school children throwing rocks...

...With bone~deep irony, such was the reaction of the German politician Egon Bahr of the Socialist Democratic party...