Last Chance in Vietnam
Dissenter
Half the art of politics consists in timing. Programs cease to be relevant after a certain point; they matter only if applied at the appropriate moment. For years now both radical and...
...This disaster is the result bf political failures in U.S...
...The strategic concept of a drawnout war of attrition makes sense only if one can foresee at the end of such a war either a diplomatic solution or a significant change in the enemy camp...
...Toward a "total victory" which would destroy the Viet Cong in the South...
...today they appear as liberators of the peasant from burdensome rents and foreign intervention...
...And if in turn this program were related to a political ventilation in the cities, an opening up of free discussion and public life, there could follow a growth of participation in the effort to preserve Vietnamese integrity...
...It would be necessary to approach Ho Chi Minh for a political deal...
...Neither Vietnamese state would try to conquer the other...
...But if there is any way of staving off defeat, this is it...
...We cannot be sure that a point has not been reached where no program or leadership or strategy makes any difference...
...Neutralization" under the auspices of an international conference would thus mean that a coalition government ruling the whole of Vietnam, both North and South, would be formed...
...Whether all this is true only time, bold pol itics and skillful diplomacy could tell...
...With good reason, too...
...Half the art of politics consists in timing...
...today they are an enormously powerful social force in South Vietnam...
...Six or seven years ago the guerrillas could be branded as agents of a foreign imperialism...
...but its absence would insure defeat...
...therefore finds itself involved in an increasingly hopeless military entanglement...
...policy over the past decade...
...It does not make him feel that Saigon speaks in his behalf...
...An attack limited to North Vietnam is silly: it would not cripple the guerrillas in the South but would risk a larger war...
...It is probably too late for that...
...But if continuing the present policy means a hopeless attrition of the Vietnamese people, it must be stressed that simply for the U.S...
...Six or seven years ago they could be identified with the Ho Chi Minh regime in the North, from which nearly a million refugees had fled...
...The necessary political-social measures were not taken, in part because of an ingrained conservative obtuseness in Washington...
...Is there still a possible way out...
...military men no longer say the war in South Vietnam can be won...
...What should then follow, instead of the linked chimeras of "victory" and "neutralization," is a political arrangement for the co-existence of South and North Vietnam...
...that the government will extend credit and aid to the new independent peasant proprietors...
...Suppose, too, that the U.S...
...For years now both radical and even non-radical students of the Vietnamese situation have been saying that a precondition for defeating the Communist guerrillas was a government ready to apply seriously a democratic social program, one that would give land to the peasants and political and economic reforms to the cities...
...What little land reform has been put forward in the areas under its control remains partial, inadequate and undramatic...
...Such a scheme rests of course on a number of assumptions which, in the nature of things, cannot be proven: that Ho Chi Minh would rather not continue a war that requires him to be dependent upon China and institute strict controls at home...
...That seems most unlikely, and the price in blood enormous...
...Part of that sum might have sufficed to start a sweeping land reform—buying out the absentee landowners and placing tools and credit in the hands of the peasants...
...It is possible, of course, to invest more military hardware, to send more "advisors," to stage periodic raids into the countryside— thereby maintaining the semblance of a Western-oriented regime which would deflect Communist aggressiveness from neighboring nonCommunist countries for a while...
...To abandon these people now, after years of bitter civil war, would be an act of callousness...
...and the Americans would pull out completely from the South, while Ho Chi Minh would disengage himself from Chinese vassalage...
...The war in Vietnam could not be won on the battlefields alone...
...and the U.S...
...It may be necessary...
...it could be lost on the ricefields alone...
...In only one way could the South Vietnam government stem its increasing isolation and the mounting defeatism of its supporters...
...The immediate debacle presents itself in military terms, but its root cause is political: a failure to understand the revo lutionary currents sweeping through the "underdeveloped nations...
...It does not free the peasant from the burden of paying rents to absentee landlords...
...they would restore their old and mutually beneficial economic relations, with the South supplying much-needed rice to the North and the North selling coal to the South at a better price than it can get elsewhere...
...Still, it is a premise of serious politics that every situation be exhausted...
...It might then lessen their inclination to give secret support to the guerrillas...
...But if the alternatives are a humiliating defeat or an escalation into atomic war, the validity of this or a similar idea might yet be recognized...
...The U.S...
...that the agents of the absentee owners are deprived of their power...
...promise to underwrite developmental aid for both countries as a way of easing their relations, helping the rehabilitation of war-torn areas, and making the arrangement so tempting to the Communists that they would choose not to press their military advantage...
...We should be candid with ourselves...
...that he and the other Northern Communist leaders retain something of the traditional Vietnamese distaste of China...
...It does not give him the sense of being his own master...
...We are under no illusion that this would immediately dissolve the support of the Viet Cong guerrillas...
...As we said earlier: this is a desperate, last-ditch proposal, each part of which—first a radical land reform in the South and then a deal for co-existence between North and South— might well encounter severe difficulties...
...here we would be paying for a way to get off it...
...Such a reform, in turn, might have overturned the power structure in the villages, thereby making democracy meaningful in a country that was supposed to be its Southeast Asian showpiece...
...but to claim that it could be anything else is almost certainly a form of self-deception...
...Congress would take kindly to such a proposition, is difficult to suppose...
...While the essence of such a proposal would be an agreement for coexistence between South and North Vietnam, it would be crucially enabled by a U.S...
...perhaps there is no alternative...
...This might not guarantee victory...
...The way to achieve this end, it is said, is to call an international conference and to make the future guarantors of Vietnamese independence precisely the powers that "neutralization" is supposed to eliminate from the area...
...Five years ago, even two or three years ago, there would probably have been one...
...that henceforth the land belonged to the peasants who till it...
...But to do this and no more, is to continue making the people of South Vietnam into a sacrificial victim...
...What would then happen...
...That the U.S...
...And only now, a decade too late, have the American "advisors" begun to realize that the war cannot be won by military means alone and probably not won militarily at all...
...Today the odds are heavily against their success...
...they matter only if applied at the appropriate moment...
...Programs cease to be relevant after a certain point...
...Such a program was not applied, and the result is disaster...
...In some quarters it has been suggested that Vietnam, or the whole of former French Indochina, be "neutralized...
...to pull out of the country would mean something quite as inhumane...
...Tomorrow, unless the lesson is learned, there will be new Vietnams and further disasters...
...The Diem government had the opportunity to make South Vietnam viable— and squandered it...
...No, the value of such drastic measures could reside in strengthening the capacity of South Vietnam to maintain itself as an independent national entity, and to persuade North Vietnam and the Viet Cong that a military struggle for "total victory" on their part is as unrealistic as the parallel expectation in the South...
...For this country, such a policy would constitute a radical departure...
...The "neutralization" here envisaged is a formula for covering up a defeat...
...It might give their sons in the army a greater sense of morale, for they would then have something—their own plot of land—to fight for...
...By now we cannot be sure...
...There was a time when a democratic regime in Saigon might have defeated the Viet Cong guerrillas politically...
...would help provide the funds necessary for such a radical program, both to finance the peasants and pay moderate indemnities to the landowners, thereby minimizing the disruptive effects of such a revolutionary change...
...but now, after years of wearisome civil war, the people may no longer respond to any political or social appeal...
...But if, when the time came for quarterly rent payments, the peasants saw that this burden had indeed been removed from their backs, that might indeed convince them that the government was an ally...
...For it would then be a matter of months, at most, before the country was completely under Communist control and there would almost certainly follow a slaughter in the South of all those—at least some of them, let it be stressed, genuine dem ocrats—who have fought against the Communists...
...And we know that even in the areas still controlled by Saigon there would be plenty of skepticism among the peasants...
...and that the Viet Cong would agree to follow his political cues...
...We believe there is still one small possibility, and we propose it not in the mechanical spirit of liberalradical ideology which tends much too simply to confuse the politics of reform with the realities of power...
...The question now is how to minimize losses...
...has spent $500 million on subsidies which failed to make our man in Saigon popular and on arms which the guerrillas who captured them put to skillful use...
...Whether the present Khanh regime still has that opportunity is very much in doubt...
...Even U.S...
...Some authorities, hoping to make it so, have toyed with the idea of attacking North Vietnam, or even China...
...See the quote on page 274 from the Wall Street Journal...
...Toward what end...
...And they have been that long enough...
...Is that the case, however, with Vietnam...
...Based on an alliance between feeble Western-oriented and strong Chinese-oriented parties, it would surely lead in a short time either to internal crack-up and renewal of the civil war or, what is more likely, a full seizure of power by the Communists, who would then liquidate their opponents through methods by now all too familiar...
...Suppose, however, that in the immediate future the South Vietnam regime were to declare that all rents are totally and unconditionally ended...
...Five years ago such measures would have been enormously effective...
...An attack on China would be criminally irresponsible: it would make virtually certain a general war...
...An essential part of such a scheme would be to end the dodge used in those areas that have some land reform, the dodge whereby a landlord is allowed to retain 100 acres for himself and in practice keeps large estates through assigning land to the nominal ownership of close relatives...
...But at least it offers some perspective, and that is more than seems currently available in the offices directing American policy...
...So far we have paid smalltime dictators for permission to remain on their real estate...
Vol. 11 • July 1964 • No. 3
