Indo-China Is Too Late
HEPTISAX
INDOCHINA IS TOO LATE By Heptisax For several months now, Secretary Dulles and other Administration spokesmen have been giving our people a tragically belated, yet over-agitated briefing on the...
...As such, he is representative of a school of thought with considerable influence in the present Administration...
...and we're doing nothing about it...
...We are still at war with Red China, because Red China made war on us and a truce isn't peace...
...So were those who, only recently, opposed negotiation of the armistice in Korea on the ground that the only thing to do with that war was to win it, at any risk and at any cost, because the collapse of the Chinese Red Army in Korea would probably pull down the Mao Tse-tung edifice in Peking, and would, at any rate, postpone indefinitely the concentration of the Mao gang's attention on Indo-China and the south...
...I'd spend a few months building up the ROK army and equipping the Nationalist force on Formosa with every weapon needed for offensive action...
...and, by the time the worldwide Red propaganda machine had made its view of it known throughout the world, we Americans would feel that we had been let in for something as smelly as it was futile...
...Then what...
...We should, first of all, have a declaration of purpose...
...That isn't a good cause from any point of view...
...INDOCHINA IS TOO LATE By Heptisax For several months now, Secretary Dulles and other Administration spokesmen have been giving our people a tragically belated, yet over-agitated briefing on the importance of Southeast Asia's defense against Communist encroachment...
...But how to go about it...
...to the people of Korea, whom we have not relieved of the ever-present threat from the North...
...Then, at three widely separated points, I'd give that gang in Peking three simultaneous jolts...
...Of course, the British policy-makers would faint en masse...
...Those of us who were in China in August 1945, when the terms of the Yalta Agreement, as incorporated in the Sino-Soviet treaty of that month, were first published, were aware of the weight that the USSR would immediately put behind a Chinese Communist effort to make China the base for the conquest of Southeast Asia, and of the measures that the United States would have to take to prevent the development of the situation we now face...
...It is by doing that job, and in no other way, that we can insure the permanent security of Indo-China, Burma, India and Asia at large against the extension of Moscow's hegemony over the area...
...I'd give the people of China the most intensive education in our purposes, by leaflet and radio, and by word of mouth, that the Far East has ever known...
...Heptisax was for years a famous pseudonym in the New York Herald Tribune...
...We should proclaim it our purpose to win the war and to liquidate the Mao Tse-tung regime...
...I wouldn't put a single American GI on the mainland of China...
...But, without victory and with no prospect of a peace in Korea that would satisfy anyone but the Reds, we quit the job there and let Peking make leisurely plans for its southward advance...
...It is too soon to designate the points I have in mind, but my feeling is that the chances are at least 50-50 that there would be no heavy fighting...
...I am entirely out of sympathy with this game...
...The second is that we cannot, under existing circumstances, go into Indo-China with so much as a single jet fighter without seeming, in the sight of all Asia, to be going to the rescue of French colonialism...
...This effort is evidently designed to get the popular mind adjusted to the idea of some degree of American military intervention in Indo-China...
...Now there are two good reasons why this country should not seriously consider military action in Indo-China in support of the wavering French, or in their stead...
...The first is that Southeast Asia is not defensible against the USSR, operating through China, on any line south of the Yangtse River...
...to the thousands of our own officers and men who were killed or maimed to no evident purpose, and to ourselves...
...Its bearer was long a Tribune editorial writer and an old China hand...
...But, to return to what I said at the outset, the worst feature of involvement in Indo-China is that it would divert attention from the fact that we still have a heavy obligation to discharge to the people of China, whom we let down five years ago...
...But they wouldn't be long coming out of it...
...Before Lenin died, the importance of such a campaign ("through Peking to Paris") was not only clearly understood by all Communists the world over, but was clearly enough advertised to all those nations that had reason to be on the defensive against it...
...But, from 1945 down to 1950, anyone who said in print that the Communist occupation of all China would some day saddle us with the responsibility for defending Southeast Asia against Chinese-backed aggression was a voice crying in the wilderness...
...To direct dramatic attention to Southeast Asia at this late date, and to punch-drunk Indo-China, serves no useful purpose but to divert attention from our own bungled and unfinished job in the Far East...
...That job is the liquidation of the Peking dictatorship, for the establishment of which the postwar Acheson-Truman-Marshall policies were chiefly responsible, and for the firmer establishment of which the Eisenhower armistice in Korea was lately responsible...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 25
