Holding Southeast Asia-Three Articles:
BOHN, S. L. A. MARSHALL \ TAKASHI OKA \ REINHOLD NIEBUHR \ WILLIAM E.
Holding Southeast Asia—Three Articles The Big River By S. L. A. Marshall At the outset, let's move quickly over the optimistic tidings from South Vietnam and the concurrent crepe-hung...
...In South Korea the United States once supported the corrupt regime of Syngman Rhee...
...Long before Cambodia is reached, the Pathet Lao can extend hands across the border to the Viet Cong and fellow-travelers around the Kontum plateau of Vietnam...
...And with the expensive examples of Laos and South Vietnam before them, Thai officials hope that this time the Communists will be turned back conclusively before, rather than after, they have worked up the momentum so chillingly displayed east of the Mekong River...
...But while they remain, they constitute a potential fifth column directly serving Hanoi's purpose...
...The town has prospered because of the fairs and pilgrims the temple attracts...
...Not that the United States might have said, at any time, to Laos...
...Consider the hazards of democratic life in the "client" nations the United States supports, as revealed in the current news...
...McNamara thus suggested that we already have enough power on the scene to hold our own and a little more...
...Laos and Cambodia are neutralist in terms of the agreement...
...And where the U.S...
...it deliberately crippled the fingers...
...But at the same time, Marshal Sarit's Government has drafted and will put into operation this year a $300 million development program for the northeast...
...The good news from Saigon, as everyone knows, was timed to the homecoming of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who, accompanied by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, recently visited the Southeast Asian battleground...
...The instances of non-Communist nations not conforming to minimal standards of justice are too numerous to mention...
...Schools and public health facilities are fewer and farther between than in the central plains...
...Yet Iran's poor peasants are neither encouraged nor helped by a law which requires them to pay for their land in 25 annual installments...
...Rising in Red China, the Mekong skirts the Thailand border briefly before coursing east past Luang Prabang...
...S. L. A. Marshall, military analyst of the Detroit News and the author of Night Drop, has recently returned from Southeast Asia...
...He said cheerfully that we had about reached our force goals in Vietnam...
...That may not be policy...
...While Lao and Thai are languages as closely related as are Spanish and Portuguese, Bangkok Thais think of their Lao-speaking compatriots in the northeast in stereotypes similar to Yankee images of the depression-era South...
...During the last roundup, on December 14, the suspects opened fire on the police with a French machine gun...
...Compared with the alluvial ricelands of the central provinces, and the rubber and tin of the south, northeast Thailand is a poor, parched tableland, cut off by hills from the rest of the country...
...Thailand has resources of population, food, equipment, administrative skills and military knowhow far beyond what the anti-Communist faction in Laos can command...
...I didn't know the answers myself...
...The present Pahlevi dynasty, however, is very young: It was instituted by the Shah's father, an army sergeant until the British gave him a leg up on the royal ladder...
...politically, it is under the sovereignty of a feeble Monarchy which boasts 2,000 years of dynastic rule...
...But more than all else, the feeling that we had turned against them gutted the Royal Army...
...If by then the Chinese are not stirred to take a more direct hand in the game, they are beyond temptation...
...Since Bangkok has traditionally derived little revenue from the northeast, it has expended correspondingly little...
...military power to South Vietnam to eradicate the Viet Cong guerrillas and stabilize the present Government...
...It was overthrown by a military coup, but the succeeding regime did not eliminate corruption either...
...The presence of a Vietnamese refugee colony numbering perhaps 125,000 (there has never been an accurate census of these refugees) in the provinces bordering the Mekong complicates the problem...
...nor can it be the highlands of that state, which afford access to nowhere...
...Diem's brother and sister are infamous for their relation to corrupt Government contractors...
...There is no reason why, in such dealings, Harriman should be expected to think like a soldier...
...then a steady buildup of Special Force detachments, helicopter companies and so forth in the area covering the Mekong as it runs from west to east...
...The fact that we are not formally at war with the Viet Cong cannot change the forfeits...
...Forests still abound but are gradually being eroded by wasteful slash-and-burn methods of cultivation and by indiscriminate felling of such valuable hard woods as teak...
...In addition, the northeast is predominantly a Lao-speaking area...
...policy did throughout the same months that it trumpeted a greater bellicosity in Vietnam...
...One Special Force senior officer, who returned home in February, after we were off to the fresh start in Vietnam, had this to say: "Lao commanders and soldiers would come to me and ask, 'Why are you still here...
...The machine gun, the District Officer presumed, had come across the river from Laos...
...Pressure from Washington prevented Bigart's expulsion...
...Like the Chinese, they are hardworking and have gone into commerce and skilled trades...
...We cannot quit the peninsula without announcing to the world that we are defeated...
...Iran protects the northern border of the non-Communist world...
...The U.S...
...The story that the United States was giving up on the Laos appeared in the very editions carrying the word that things are looking up in Vietnam...
...A more fell blow to a demoralized, unhelped army with its back to the wall could not be imagined...
...It will improve roads and communications, teach villagers how to increase their income by growing crops specially suited to the region, and expand and deepen community development programs now being tried only on an experimental basis in selected villages...
...Repatriation proceeds at a slow pace, with Hanoi seeking propaganda advantages by building pagodas and open air stages in northeastern Thailand as goodwill gestures...
...It was like sending a cable: "You're no good...
...Asians know the score...
...But one other instructive case is worth citing here —Iran, whose Shah recently visited this country...
...strategy was right in the spring of 1961, when the decision was taken not to send main forces into Laos...
...Events have proved it...
...Some are still on the ground...
...The yawning gap and the opening which affords the opportunity of striking a decisive blow are a greater lure to their leaders than is the Southeast Asia Rice Bowl to hungry stomachs...
...until mid-May, when Washington took its belated second reading on the situation, they must have been wondering why...
...To them, Bangkok seems to be geographically and mentally more remote than the Lao cities of Savannakhet, Thakhek or Vientiane...
...It has to be the southwestern bulge of Laos where the Mekong roughly parallels the border north and west of Vientiane...
...Over the past several years there have been about 58-60 U.S...
...On the contrary, the scuttling of the faint hope in Laos was speeded by Washington attitudinizing and our diplomacy afield...
...The river valley does not greatly facilitate operations by modern forces staging out of Thailand into Laos, and if they tried for that target out of Vietnam, they would have to go airborne...
...In effect, that was what U.S...
...That Phanom, situated not far from the Mekong River, was named after a much revered Buddhist That, or pagoda...
...They do not have enough money to pay one installment...
...Buddhism is not attacked, nor is the venerated institution of the Monarchy...
...Past Pakse, it becomes a mighty river bisecting Cambodia, then turns again southeast to build the vast delta which is Vietnam south of Saigon...
...carelessness...
...Takashi Oka, a new contributor, is the Southeast Asian correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor...
...He has encouraged land reform, both on his own Royal estates and among the nobility...
...military power a secure purchase ashore until these objects are achieved...
...His jails are full not only of Communists but also of anti-Communists who criticize his rule...
...President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam had some early success in consolidating the economic life of his half of the nation and in settling refugees from the North...
...It is also becoming more and more the way our high servants determine strategy...
...It is not the aim of our national policy to liberate Indochina or even to regain territory forcibly taken by Communist irregulars in recent months...
...Anti-Communist South Vietnam is unhappy about North Vietnam's repatriation program, but its own screening procedures for Vietnamese applying for resettlement in the South are so complicated that few of their countrymen residing in Thailand have managed to qualify...
...In Washington the press was informed, via the grapevine, that the Administration was writing off the Right-wing Laotian Army as useless against pro-Communist forces...
...Second, while it is perfectly correct that high policy must be governed by political considerations, any diplomatic maneuvering or policy decision which proceeds out of blindness to military values is criminal ignorance...
...For the same reason that civilization builds up around river courses, rivers provide the valley floors which become the broad highways of advance for invading armies...
...So Harriman went ahead—and for that matter, he is still going ahead— convinced that he is right...
...In fact, the neutral control commission under British and Russian auspices has been unable to bring stable internal peace to Laos...
...No wonder Thailand shudders, and is willing to grant entry to American forces...
...It wishes our defeat.' There was nothing I could tell them...
...Where we went wrong, and fog dimmed our strategic lights, was in the hour that the decision was made to commit enough U.S...
...This is a relatively small land area, not too inaccessible and with friendly borders for the most part, which is politically and geographically related to the problem of holding South Vietnam...
...and Nikita Khrushchev's promise to President Kennedy last June at Vienna, pledging help in establishing an independent coalition government in Laos, does not appear to amount to much in substance...
...Three royal princes control the three factions, pro-Western Prince Boun Oum, neutralist Prince Souvanna Phouma and Communist Prince Souphanouvong...
...Yet U.S...
...The grim news from Laos was of another kind of landing—a hard landing by Pathet Lao irregulars on the backside of the Royal Army...
...Recently, too, the distinguished journalist Homer Bigart of the New York Times was nearly expelled by the Saigon Government for ventilating some of the unsavory facts about the regime...
...For many years, the U.S...
...Your Government is against us...
...These cultures may or may not possess two prerequisites for democracy: One is a degree of ethnic and linguistic uniformity sufficient to serve as a community base for a free society...
...Energetic counter-measures taken now could stop them before they gain even a toehold...
...A great part of our forces would have been consumed in covering lines of supply, leaving too few to energize fighting operations...
...What was needed five months ago could have been done gradually, with no cock-crowing, no turning on the publicity spigot, no outcry of alarm, no atmosphere of crisis, and consequently far less risk: The abandonment of a weak policy which was at best a procrastination and a wishful hope...
...High policy may still have been right when, under the leadership of Ambassador Averell Harriman, the decision was taken to gamble that a neutralist coalition might gradually tranquilize Laos and persuade the Pathet Lao to lay off, at least for a time...
...The political situation is as grave as the military, if not more so...
...It is so serious, indeed, that the question must be raised whether it has not been a mistake to commit our prestige unqualifiedly to the defense of this nation...
...SEATO was behaving like a reluctant paper dragon...
...Now we are in difficulty once more for moving at cross-purposes with ourselves...
...And the Communists will be coming from the right direction to pour through...
...It is a time-honored custom for VIPs to talk sunnyside up when they descend the ramp...
...After escaping to Cambodia, the pilot declared the bombing was the Army's gesture of protest against the Presidential clique...
...In all this the United States, which is allied with Thailand through the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, is expected to lend a helping hand...
...There are times when we find it inescapable to support questionable leaders who, in the words of FDR, "may be bastards but are at least our bastards.' The loss of South Vietnam to the Communists would mean a considerable strategic loss in Southeast Asia...
...Again, it should be emphasized that the real estate under discussion is southern Laos, not the entire country...
...but it is pretty much the way we, the American people, think...
...In South Vietnam the situation is even more serious...
...One could hardly tell, from their treatment, that these reports had any relation to each other...
...We have been training the Southern forces in guerrilla warfare, and perhaps participating in it, though such warfare requires a friendly peasantry to be successful...
...Once the Communists take Vientiane, not only will all Laos be in dissolution, but the gate will be thrown wide to the whole peninsula...
...has engaged in a creative agricultural assistance program...
...It is too soon to gauge the effectiveness of governmental efforts to eradicate the Communist threat in the northeast...
...We have also vainly tried to persuade the Parliament of landlords to institute tax reform...
...In addition, Iran's bureaucracy and intellectuals are disaffected, and the nation is ripe for rebellion...
...Village by village, we have been teaching the peasants to farm with more modern implements than those used at the time of Cyrus...
...This would make perfect sense if Vietnam were an island, or a coastal paradise covered on the land side by the Sahara and the Great Wall of China...
...Not only did the left hand act as if it knew not what the right was doing...
...It is neither a significant barrier nor a conveyor belt, but a sprawling delta-spread stream at its mouth, navigable for only a few miles, and serviceable to small boats only intermittently in its upper parts because of treacherous waters...
...We took it over from the French and have since poured billions of dollars in military assistance and foreign aid into it...
...The reasoning is elementary...
...So the enemy mistakenly supposed that it could strike and we would not intervene...
...At least Bangkok has been forewarned...
...It is neither...
...We will do what we can to help preserve your independence in a truncated country, but we can't help you in the north.' What was called for was a change in the American attitude, a jettisoning of the Harriman policy, and then such additional military help as could be given to stem the tide in the existing military situation...
...These continue...
...THE PROBLEM IS, of Course, wider than Indochina...
...The soil is sandy and frequently so salty that only scrub will grow on it...
...In 1960 his regime survived an Army revolt...
...Can Democracy Work...
...the cessation of the cheap practice of using economic aid as a political bludgeon (which we are too honorable to do in most quarters...
...It is old stuff to military scholars, and not exactly a fresh idea likely to startle schoolboys, that throughout history river courses have shaped strategic concepts no less, and probably more, than the placement of mountain ranges and deserts...
...A provincial public health officer told me that villagers complain "about the Government's nonactivity in their areas...
...And at this late date, it would take a wiser strategist than Alexander or MacArthur in his prime to tell them where to go...
...Moreover, these Vietnamese do not mix easily with the Thai...
...Why did they strike when they did in North Korea...
...military assistance group there has more and more become involved in the actual fighting between North and South, which continues unabated...
...Instead, by dallying and pursuing the oblique course, we again yielded the initiative to the Communists, then reacted in dismay and desperation when they did what comes naturally...
...Thailand will already be outflanked...
...Is that cricket...
...Vietnam is divided, in the fashion of Korea, and South Vietnam has become the U.S.' responsibility...
...In That Phanom, the Ambassador visited the abbot and helped to open the temple's annual fair...
...But his Government has become increasingly corrupt and repressive...
...Fortunately, Marshal Sarit now appears to recognize this...
...We were not committing any additional force to Southeast Asia...
...As in Laos, the Communists have begun with propaganda which plays on existing village discontent but which never mentions ideology except for share-the-wealth slogans such as "a car for every village...
...its separate parts are pasted together in the apparent belief that each will hold on its own...
...Special Force soldiers in Laos, committed to a forlorn and virtually impossible mission—training and stiffening the Royal Army...
...Strategy is no longer moulded or shaped...
...Villagers at Umao, nine miles from That Phanom, told members of a research team touring the northeast a few weeks ago that the Pathet Lao had used a helicopter to bring them money and medicine...
...These Vietnamese fled to Thailand during the Indochina war of 194654...
...And the research team mentioned earlier discovered that several villages it visited by jeep and Land Rover had never before seen Government officials in their midst...
...By Reinhold Niebuhr PERHAPS THE MOMENT has come for an "agonizing reappraisal" of the position of our battlelines in Asia and Africa...
...But such measures must include a great deal more than the mere military build-up now taking place, and time is of the essence.- If the Communists see inviting possibilities for themselves in northeast Thailand, it is because previous governments in Bangkok have treated northeasterners as country cousins and have not given them the social and economic attention they deserve...
...does decide to support such nations, it has to determine how much it can interfere in their internal life in order to create economic and social conditions which will make democracy viable...
...Turning the Tide in Thailand By Takashi Oka That...
...It will also build more schools, supply more teachers, and improve medical and health facilities...
...None of it is our fault...
...However, if it is not the clearly stated object of our Govern" ment, as well as of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), to contain Communist aggression in the region in order to prolong free Asia's chance for independent existence, then everyone out in the hinterland has been under a grave misconception...
...But that is high policy, and it has been policy for months now...
...The other is a degree of literacy and of technical development sufficient to provide the intellectual maturity and social flexibility necessary for a system of selfrule...
...So Marines have landed in Thailand, many difficult leagues from the ground of main decision...
...There will be as little chance of stopping them as there is of halting the flow of the Mekong...
...So we wash our hands of you...
...It also has an authoritarian but capable and restlessly energetic leader in Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who is himself from Mukdaharn, not far from That Phanom and just across the river from the important Lao city of Savannakhet...
...Phanom Under the shadow of northeast Thailand's most prestigious Buddhist temple, Communist propagandists from across the Lao border are cultivating Thai villagers with promises of material benefits and with occasional judicious distributions of medicine, blankets and other household supplies...
...Even the severest critics of the present policy know that strategic considerations enter into any political equation...
...Moreover, the Laos are rabbit-eared to everything we say about them, and they get it within a few hours...
...But as this is being written, long negotiations aimed at establishing peace in Laos on the basis of a genuinely neutralist government have not yet produced results...
...Uniquely, the Mekong is the key to the region for none of the reasons that have made Rhine, Nile and Vardar familiar names through the ages to warriors and chroniclers...
...To say that they are never decisive, though, is to overlook that a two-mile wide stream made the Hitler Armies pause to regroup west of Stalingrad, which proved their fatal blunder...
...The program, which will run from 1962-67, will bring water through new wells and irrigation canals to the parched, salt-encrusted northeast...
...There is no longer any reason...
...The Nile, the Danube, the Jordan, the Meuse and the Shenandoah are all friendly paths for conquerors, smoothing the way even where they do not carry the freight...
...It is pointless to go into the details of the movements and cheap victories which shook Washington into an awareness that guerrillas are not downed by trading princes, as one trades horses, and started the tide of Lao refugees rolling toward Cambodia as if Vientiane were already lost...
...Most of the country's oil wealth is used to pay the Army...
...They rotate every six months or so and, by their own account, it takes them all of that time merely to win the confidence of their trainees...
...It was, in turn, ended by another military revolt led by the tough, U.S.-trained General Chung Hee Park, who learned honesty but not democracy from his American tutors...
...Holding Southeast Asia—Three Articles The Big River By S. L. A. Marshall At the outset, let's move quickly over the optimistic tidings from South Vietnam and the concurrent crepe-hung reports from neighboring Laos...
...We face the question, in short, of whether South Vietnam has sufficient political and moral health to invest its struggle against Communism with the necessary moral capital...
...Clearly, one of the most pressing issues in United States foreign affairs is to determine when we must and can support the less than ideal democracies scattered throughout the world...
...Two factors, perhaps, are operative here: The Chinese Communists are not the most cooperative partners in the "Socialist camp...
...In modern times, in wars between technologically advanced armies, rivers are less important than when Roman legions tramped through Gaul...
...The Thais understand the geographical realities of the peninsula's political existence, some of which appear to have escaped American planners...
...Economically, it is still feudalistic...
...With Communist territory at the top and flanking it on the east, Laos might have become a deadfall...
...The death-blow in the West also came when American forces made the surprise seizure of an almost collapsing bridge and crossed the Rhine at Remagen...
...But it would be impossible to cite a case in which a river course more directly dictates and dominates the strategy of a military problem than does the Mekong, particularly in relation to the military and political objectives of the United States in Southeast Asia...
...Here, then, are the elements that make northeast Thailand a peculiarly vulnerable target for Communist exploitation...
...It was not necessary to proffer the southern provinces on a silver platter...
...Many streams flood down from the hills in the monsoon season, only to dry up in the rainless half of the year...
...The question is whether we have not too simply regarded Western-style democracy as the alternative to Communism in non-European cultures...
...Seventy miles west of the Lao political capital of Vientiane, it becomes the boundary between the two countries for about 350 miles of its southeastward journey, rounding that eastern bulge of Thailand which is the very heart of the peninsula...
...If what we proposed was a form of appeasement, the fact remains that beggars are not choosers...
...Those words are to be remembered in the light of Washington's self-righteous declaration that it is renouncing the Royal Army because it is a sorry lot...
...It is certainly not South Vietnam's littoral, which has neither the terrain nor the breadth hospitable to conventional maneuver...
...Pathet Lao domination of the northern provinces was already a fait accompli...
...For their part, the Communists appear to be only in the preliminary sounding-out stage of a plan to build up a base in the northeast...
...But no amount of pressure, including a visit from Vice President Lyndon Johnson, has been able to prompt the Diem government to carry through the reforms which are the litmus test of minimal justice in moribund feudal economies...
...The genial, saffron-robed abbot of That Phanom is the direct representative of the Supreme Patriarch in Bangkok, and is thus the highest ranking prelate in the entire northeast—which includes one-third of Thailand's 25 million people...
...Two propositions should be inviolate in policy-making for Southeast Asia...
...without them, policy must undermine strategy...
...Thai police have carried out three large-scale roundups of suspected Communists in the district and have arrested a total of 170 persons since last July, the Nai Amphur (District Officer) told me in a recent interview...
...In 1960, our forces stood neither in nor out...
...In Laos, after the Eisenhower effort to support a pro-Western government failed, Washington decided to back a neutralist regime...
...But not one thing was said, and nothing was done, to correct our policy in Laos and bring it into realistic military and political consistency with this decision...
...He has suppressed all political life and freedom in Korea...
...Anti-French and pro-Ho Chi Minh from the start, they are easy targets for propaganda emanating from Hanoi...
...It is in a class by itself, a freak...
...policy— and it is more accurately called that than a strategy—has been formed piecemeal, in total disregard of how the Mekong flows and of the decisive importance of that river trench to all our undertakings in Southeast Asia...
...But the question remains whether democracy is not also a luxury which only advanced nations can afford...
...The warning from the French Army experience both in the peninsula and Algeria is clear enough...
...Where, then, is the gravity center of any strategy aimed at containing Communism within the peninsula, forestalling a chainreaction collapse of its independent states, and affording U.S...
...This was unbelievable obscurantism, for the security of southern Laos is essential to the prospect of successful operations in South Vietnam...
...Democracy may be the ideal instrument of justice in any culture...
...The risks were too great, the prospects of decisive success too little...
...Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlevi, the current ruler, is well-meaning but ineffectual...
...we had made no national declaration of intent to stand firm anywhere on the peninsula...
...Much fanfare and declaration of purpose by high Washington officialdom dramatized this resolve...
...Taking the country as a whole, it is too vast (larger than Korea), too roadless, too isolated to favor such an enterprise...
...But the landlords are of course reluctant to tax themselves, at least as long as strategic considerations prompt Washington to assist Iran with about a billion dollars a year...
...The Secretary did not let anyone down...
...not long ago, two Air Force officers bombed the Presidential palace...
...That was messy enough, but worse followed...
...But as it is now, the loss of moral prestige through the support of an unpopular and unviable regime is also a great hazard...
...more military aid to the Royal Army...
...We may not have killed cock robin, but we have done our best...
...Nevertheless, visitors to northeast Thailand who hear such stories have by no means jumped to the conclusion that the fate of Laos is about to be repeated in this neighboring country across the coppery, halfmile wide Mekong River...
...Because the tactical opening was there, created by U.S...
...Ambassador Kenneth Todd Young recently toured northeastern towns and villages to talk with officials as well as ordinary farmers, promising American aid for irrigation projects and trying to get across his country's concern for the everyday citizens of the region...
...Meanwhile, northeasterners along the Mekong frequently visit their Lao relatives across the river, and vice versa...
...irresponsible power is always dangerous...
...Or, to put the question another way, have we been mistaken in investing our moral prestige in Asia in this kind of struggle...
...It is the linchpin of freedom in Indochina for the simple reason that Pathet Lao control of the valley where it defines the southern boundary of Laos, as the stream flows on from Vientiane, would put all else in Southeast Asia within Communist reach, including South Vietnam...
...To repeat the blunder, when we know their nature, is inexcusable...
...Whatever the reasons, the Communist-led Pathet Lao forces recently violated the cease-fire and routed the Royal Army in the north...
...Should the lower shank of that inland state come under Communist control, the alternatives facing the United States will be either to ruin its credit in Asia by staging an agonizingly painful withdrawal, or to mount a massive buildup and fight a difficult war where no decisive purpose can be served...
...To counter this propaganda, Bangkok has come to realize that roundups and arrests are hardly sufficient...
...Yet the 104 villages comprising the district of That Phanom are among the most Communist-propagandized areas along Thailand's sensitive, penetrable border with guerrilla-torn Laos...
...But someone should be doing so...
...Now let's turn to the heart of the region, the Big River—the Mekong...
...Recently, several American soldiers were wounded and two sergeants were captured...
...We were just beginning to get somewhere with them when the rug was pulled from under them and under us...
...Thailand is trying to get rid of the unwanted Vietnamese by repatriating them to North Vietnam under an agreement signed with Hanoi two years ago...
...On being freed, they declined under orders to reveal the nature of their experience...
...The Mekong is decisive because its meandering course describes the political boundaries of those independent states which must either soon find a common basis for resisting the Communist encroachment or be taken one by one...
...It is improbable that they would furnish cadres for a separatist movement in the northeast...
...The Korean War was brought on by that very folly...
...The Vardar and the Maritza are the traditional portals to the Balkans and Central Europe for forces staging out of the Middle East...
...The triangle which is defined by the river line and the twin capitals of Vientiane and Luang Prabang, along with the narrow waist of the country northeast of Vientiane, are the very nexus of operational possibilities...
...Following the river, the guerrillas will move gravitationally on to Cambodia...
...Lose these and ultimately all else will be lost...
...Their aggressions feed on tactical opportunity...
...In accordance with the Geneva peace treaty of a decade ago, which in effect emancipated it from French dominion, the old territory of Indochina is now three not very competent new nations...
...First, when the situation is to their advantage, Communist guerrillas will no more be deterred by parades of force than by political deals...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 11
