Vietnam: Prolonging the Agony
H., I.
APRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE may not need a policy, but a President does. Nixon's election seems, in part, to have been due to his skill at gathering the support of those discontented voters who,...
...The Administration would be making a great mistake if it took the relative absence of Vietnam protest as evidence that it has a free hand...
...Why so...
...In other words: the U.S...
...Surely the Administration must know that more than a militant "extremist" peace movement is at stake...
...Hanoi and the NLF refuse to discuss military questions out side the context of a political discussion [italics added...
...But a decision to reescalate the war or to drag it out on the present level would almost certainly mean to tear this country apart...
...press for "a standstill cease-fire by all sides, to be followed by early elections so the people of South Vietnam can decide freely their own future...
...If, however, it is to persist in negotiations, these can lead to significant results only insofar, as Joseph Buttinger wrote in our last issue, as "Washington is ready to accept and, if necessary, hasten the disappearance of the Thieu-Ky government...
...And partly because the other side doesn't propose to ease the pains of decision for Washington...
...The idea of a cease-fire has its overwhelming attraction: nothing seems more dreadful in this dreadful war than thousands of boys being killed simply to gain "advantages" in Paris...
...True...
...And COMMENTS AND OPINIONS as the sentence I have put into italic indicates, the other side refuses to discuss a cease-fire unless and until political questions are considered...
...It also regards a cease-fire as a boon to Saigon, since that would leave ARVN and the Thieu police as the only legitimate source of "order" in the country...
...For now, he must decide...
...One problem the Administration faces is that its decisive move must be made surreptitiously, through diplomatic avenues...
...or b) a government somehow determined by "the South Vietnamese themselves," which means a struggle for power by the local forces after a withdrawal of troops by Washington and Hanoi...
...14, 1969) : • we, and South Vietnam's non-Communist majority . may still have some luck...
...Apolitical settlement could emarge which represents a reasonable compromise of the still verycomplicated array of forces at work within the South...
...The conflict between Russia and China must give the Hanoi regime some bad moments and tempt it to hasten toward a settlement with the U.S...
...Partly because the ThieuKy regime can be expected to fight bitterly for its life...
...Unless Nixon makes the choice Buttinger has indicated, he will sooner or later face a repetition of the disasters that brought down his predecessor...
...A political price can, if we wish, beextorted for their complete removal...
...The first alternative is of course the more likely one...
...Precisely the apparent stalemate on the battlefield, which each side can upon need interpret as being slightly more advantageous to itself than it was six months ago, and which can then tempt each side to keep fighting a little longer so as to gain "an improved bargaining position"—precisely this creates the ominous possibility that the war may drag on and on...
...but precisely because he avoided committing himself to any policy, he is now in trouble...
...in order to avoid getting caught in a squeeze between its glow ering "fraternal" patrons...
...APRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE may not need a policy, but a President does...
...Re-escalation of the war may be an unreal alternativeto the U.S.—but can the Communists be quitesure...
...22, 1969) also suggests that the North Vietnamese and the NLF are having their troubles: large-scale losses of men, break-up of political cadres, failure to overcome the hold of U.S.–Saigon troops in the large cities, and "not the faintest semblance of the popular uprising [during last year's Tet offensive or this year's fainter reproduction] the Communists had hoped for...
...The one thought Nixon and his friends ought to keep steadily in mind is that of the last days of Lyndon Johnson...
...And the Communists must buy our wayout...
...Partly because U.S...
...It recognizes that a cease-fire would be a political boon to Nixon and is not willing to grant him that without some major concession being made in turn...
...A Iocalized partition . . . or agenuine coalition with a reasonable life-expectancy could still come out of this...
...The general position seems clear...
...A sober article in the London Economist (Feb...
...but what Buttinger provides here is the necessary formula, not yet the way of working it out...
...Yet there is the serious question as to what a cease-fire could mean in the kind of war being fought in Vietnam (or, for that matter, what free elections could mean...
...is asking acts of military deescalation and seeking mutual withdrawal of troops...
...If the new Administration eliminates as realistic alternatives either a major reescalation or total withdrawal—and both the military situation in Vietnam and the political situation at home seem to require that right now the Administration foreclose these possibilities—then it has no choice but to persist in negotiations...
...The second, in principle, is one that democrats and socialists ought to favor, though it would be blinking the reality to deny that it could lead to a largescale slaughter of Vietnamese by Vietnamese...
...The majority of people in South Vietnam must still be reconciled to the NLF...
...Once he has made that choice, the U.S...
...More than 500,000 Americans are in Vietnam...
...might then gain, through a major concession, some new resources in the negotiations...
...might have arisen in South Vietnam to serve as an interim provisional government and/or as the balancing third in a three-sided coalition government to be established later...
...It continues: In the present deadlock the U.S...
...ONE OF THE more "moderate" peace groups, Negotiations Now, has proposed that meanwhile the U.S...
...policy has led to a grave weakening of whatever "third force" (Buddhists, etc...
...would have bargaining power after accepting the idea that South Vietnam is to be governed either by a) a regime imposed through agreement between Washington and Hanoi, perhaps also Moscow...
...And even if the Administration accepts this formula, it still faces enormous problems...
...William Pfaff, a strong critic of the war, writes in Commonweal (Feb...
...and even a clear signal to Hanoi about its readiness seriously to negotiate over a new government in South Vietnam will not remove all its problems, though it might bring momentary easing of the war itself...
...Are the difficulties, however, entirely on one side...
...Nixon's election seems, in part, to have been due to his skill at gathering the support of those discontented voters who, for a variety of reasons, wanted to bring the Vietnam War to an end...
...surely it must know that the war has lost credibility with a large segment, perhaps a majority, of the American people...
...Indeed, at the moment this is being written (late March), each side is launching "offensives," in which the casualties are heavy, the results inconclusive, and the main purposes political...
...For all their fratricidal struggles of the last 20 years, andtheir devastating inability to compromise withone another, the majority of South Vietnamese give no evidence of unalloyed enthusiasm for NLF rule...
Vol. 16 • May 1969 • No. 3
