Should We Negotiate in Vietnam?

...If a ceasefire were proclaimed, and then followed by prolonged negotiations of the Panmunjom variety—and that is exactly what would happen—the Vietcong would be able to achieve very nearly complete control of the countryside...

...That Ho Chi Minh might turn out to be a Tito may be true, but it is similarly immaterial...

...They cannot...

...Most of all, we must forget about the illusion of some quickie escape from Vietnam...

...Even if a village is flying the VC flag and VC troops are parading in the market place, it is likely that half or more of the population is either neutral or secretly opposed to the Vietcong—that is until the American bombers come over...

...However clumsy and needlessly destructive, the Americans already have reversed the course of the war...

...The coincidence of Communist subversion starting most easily when the government is bad does not alter the fact that we must stop the subversion that can lead to Communist conquest of more real estate and to our ultimate peril...

...A shoeshine boy with a bright-eyed smile can earn more in an hour with gi customers than his father may bring home in a day...

...Still more non-issues, for the same reasons: Our allies won't support us...

...They are no less deplorable, yet I think it is important to try to separate the question of performance from the mountains of fluff created by the debate over whether we should be in Vietnam at all...

...While this may not have been true 10 years ago, events have now made it the flash point of the struggle we have been waging against Communist expansionism since the end of World War II...

...table-hammering anger about the stupidities in Washington or in the embassy down the street has always been a way of life...

...United States authorities vigorously insist that our forces are under rigid orders not to shoot up populated areas, and there is no reason to doubt that this is the official policy...

...The important thing is that we are going to make it anyway—assuming that the American voters will permit the effort to continue...

...national security...

...The United States has accepted the challenge in Vietnam...

...Moreover, the senior American official in Vietnam is not the commander of our more than 400,000 troops, General Westmoreland, but the Ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge...

...Yet a New York Times correspondent has estimated that at least 1,000 civilians are killed every month by air strikes and artillery...

...In Vietnam, on the basis of guesswork about their location, we appear to be expending ordnance in unparalleled quantities against professional troops, whom we seldom see and almost never catch by surprise...

...This has surely been proved by the Communists' ability to increase their strength dramatically despite almost two years of air attack on the North...

...a Sunday afternoon on the terrace of the Continental Palace Hotel, once one of the fashionable spots in Asia, a loudspeaker blared a re-broadcast of a baseball game from the Armed Forces Radio Station...

...It therefore makes no sense to try to defeat the Vietcong by provoking a larger war ourselves, especially in view of the awesome danger that a larger war could quickly become a global holocaust...

...If the answer to the root question is no, Vietnam is not essential to U.S...

...So far this year, Westmoreland has been able to find out about every Communist military maneuver far enough, and accurately enough, in advance to block it...

...They tend to fall into a kind of sing-song recital of the official line that soon begins to sound like a General Motors publicity man explaining the unique safety features of the 1967 Corvair...

...The evidence, I think, is overwhelmingly conclusive that defense of South Vietnam is essential to American security...

...This group believes the time has come for the United States to abandon its antiseptic treatment of Vietnamese sovereignty...

...The Vietnamese rank among the proudest, most sensitive peoples in the world, and they simply would not put up with it...

...This is the American way, and it is not about to change just because the problem is more difficult than usual...

...It has become so fragmented that people are beginning to talk, not entirely in jest, about someday moving nato headquarters to Moscow...

...One of the biggest problems in Vietnam is a dismal absence of effective, imaginative leadership, not only among the Vietnamese but among the Americans, and this complaint applies as much in Washington as it does in Saigon...

...So if we are clearly winning, it makes no sense at all to negotiate a compromise...

...I was dismayed to find that the line is being converted into an article of faith in exactly the same way, in the same self-satisfied, often smug tone of voice that we used in my day to defend American support for Ngo Dinh Diem...

...Conversely, I think the assertion of American power in Vietnam was one reason for Sukarno's collapse, and there have been some indications that the present turmoil in China results from a rebellion against Maoist adventuring...

...A good example of this is the eloquent article by Neil Sheehan in the New York Times Magazine several months ago, in which he deplored our trying to work with a corrupt, weak and gutless aristocracy inherited from the French...

...On the other hand, air attack on the North could certainly be escalated to the point where it would threaten the survival of the Hanoi government, and thus perhaps prevail upon it to call off the war in the South rather than commit suicide...

...security, then we should abandon it as quickly as we can gracefully do so...

...I think we could, however, strengthen our influence, at least in military matters, if we could persuade Nguyen Cao Ky to accept a joint command under an American commander who would follow policy directives from some kind of joint council...

...This is the first time we have ever been involved with large numbers of our forces in a war against guerrillas...

...Everywhere, too, there were barricades and barbwire to frustrate Vietcong terrorists, but having the additional effect of separating the Americans from the people...

...A ceasefire would permit the Vietcong to regroup and strengthen their hold on the peasants, which of course could be done without shooting anyone, while our side would be helpless...

...We lack even a joint command arrangement with the Vietnamese...

...It is an urgent imperative for the United States to back away from the idea of negotiation, and quickly...

...One of the aspects of the U.S...

...This kind of thinking lies behind the two great propositions now before the nation: to negotiate a settlement with the Communists, or to escalate our operations and go after Curtis LeMay's manure pile...

...Sure enough, an hour or two later the Americans came back and bombed the village into rubble—thereby proving the VC to be right...

...The U.S...

...This is a war...

...But let us not forget the vital truth in President Kennedy's remark that what the Communists are arguing about is how to bury us...

...and sad to say, newspaper accounts of the new elite of Saigon prostitutes are all too true...

...On the contrary, it has stirred Hanoi to a much greater effort in the South than it might have made otherwise...

...He said there are hundreds of Americans in the field right now who would know what to do...

...Nevertheless, the hard reality is that the men in Hanoi who direct the Vietcong are proclaimed enemies of the United States, and the struggle in Vietnam is a crucial test of the Chinese proposition that the Western world can be destroyed by force, as against the Soviet inclination toward a detente...

...But it has caused some undesirable effects upon American public opinion...

...We would be forced into a settlement so advantageous to the Communists that their eventual total control of South Vietnam would be a certainty...

...We are doing them a favor, of course, but that is only incidental to the central defense of our own interest...

...In fact, a good argument can be made for the proposition that one reason for the discrediting of Stalinist theory and Communist fragmentation has been the success of American policy during the past 20 years in preventing them from expanding by use of force...

...Mission that most disturbed me during my service as a Public Affairs officer there was the willingness of our top people to accept, and base critical policy decisions, on information from often notoriously unreliable sources...

...And particularly troublesome is the point that the Vietcong are ignorant peasants, motivated by patriotism, who never heard of Communism...

...The Johnson Administration has failed persistently to make the point to the American people, loud and clear, that their sons have been sent to Vietnam to defend our own security...

...policy to attack villages at all, especially when the attack is not in support of ground action...

...Relatively few Americans in Saigon think we should give up the fight entirely, go home and let the Viet-cong take over...

...Paradoxically, the American behavior in the countryside has been impeccable in almost every other respect...

...Mission called the situation "a case of advanced cancer...

...In Qui Nhon, I even saw an American soldier directing civilian traffic, which surely is a job that could be trusted to the local police...

...We are committing a multitude of secondary errors, however, and taken as a whole they suggest an absence of the kind of American leadership in Saigon that a situation as urgent as this demands...

...It probably is not reasonable to ask our troops to do without air and artillery retaliation when they draw sniper fire from a village...

...The breakup of the Communist monolith, in short, may be a valuable by-product of the atomic stalemate achieved by American power and determination...

...The hitch is that we cannot achieve that kind of objective without attacking population centers, factories, and the seat of Ho Chi Minh's government itself, or without invading the country with ground forces...

...no more than, say, the French could have thrown out the Nazis by themselves...

...It was no accident that the Vietcong failed to infiltrate the Buddhist rebels, for instance...

...The bombing of the North is downright frightening...

...I also found a subtle but distinct change in the mood among civilian Americans in Saigon...

...Nor are there any magic new moves we could make in Vietnam itself if only somebody had the brilliance to point them out...

...This, too, is true, but does not alter the reality that these same pathetic, barefooted peasants are fastening a police state on their country just as surely as if they wore Nazi jackboots...

...There is no legal basis for our presence there...

...It is an open invitation for them to come at their leisure and be given at least part of what they want, if they decide they cannot obtain it by force...

...This is certainly true, but if South Vietnam had a good government it would not have needed our help in the first place...

...that if they promise to cease trying to subvert the people, they will in fact redouble the effort to exploit their new prestige...

...Unlike past crises, there is an immense psychological element in this struggle which is often overlooked in our thinking...

...The government in Saigon is sovereign, indeed formidably sovereign, and the Americans are powerless to do anything about the country's multitudinous problems except where they can persuade the Vietnamese authorities to act...

...It is not too long a reach, I think, to suggest that we have seen what happens when the United States looks weak in events like Cambodia's drift toward Peking, the breakup of Malaysia, and Sukarno's alliance with the Communists...

...Another American official told me about a case on the Cambodian frontier where a gang of Vietnamese soldiers had been caught using their Army trucks to smuggle stolen goods across the border...

...The sole question about escalation is whether it will achieve our purpose...

...By escalation, I mean expanding the political limits of the struggle and thus adding to the pressures on the Communists to retaliate...

...There is none...

...Our purpose is exclusively to defend South Vietnam, and thereby to prevent a Communist gain that almost certainly would lead eventually to a much larger war...

...Surely anyone who has read the newspapers for the past 20 years must realize that if the Vietcong win a foothold of legitimacy in the South Vietnamese body politic, they will stop at nothing to extend it...

...An official whom I regard as one of the ablest men ill the U.S...

...For one thing, there is the possibility that the Ky government would not cooperate, just as Diem refused to accept the 1954 settlement, and that one of the first results of a meeting with Communists would be political chaos in Saigon...

...In the last 12 years the West has tried twice to negotiate settlements with the Communists in Southeast Asia—the Indochina agreement of 1954, and the Laos agreement of 1962—and in both cases they violated their solemn commitments before the ink was dry...

...You cannot make policy involving the security of the United States on the basis of a hunch—and besides, what would we do if he turned out to be a de Gaulle...

...This article was adapted from an address to the Institute of Current World Affairs...

...many of them are receiving surprisingly little attention...

...Worse even than the error is the fact that it is U.S...

...Indeed this kind of quick visitation to a community long under Vietcong control tends to make the Americans look like the bandits, and the VC like the legitimate government...

...There can be no settlement in Vietnam until our side is strong enough to enforce it...

...In the broad area of American administrative relations with the Vietnamese government, the suggestion I mentioned earlier about covertly taking over the countryside is tempting but impractical...

...Officially, of course, members of the civilian U.S...

...The critics say, too, that Americans show a basic lack of understanding of this kind of war by using their forces so often on hunter-killer operations wherein troops sweep through the countryside, spend a few hours in the villages, and then go home...

...In a letter published recently by Aviation Week, a Navy pilot just back from Vietnam wrote that he and his comrades were "humiliated and weary of bombing foot bridges, hay stacks and mythological Vietcong concentrations...

...We are receiving better intelligence from the people, which is also a critical measure of the psychological climate...

...No Americans, not even our most seasoned foreign service officers, are good at that kind of absolutism...

...A good many of them go along with General Curtis LeMay's memorable observation that "we are swatting flies when we should be going after the manure pile...

...Then, he said, the Americans entered the village, immediately began caring for the wounded—there were no Vietcong—and took such pains to avoid making trouble that their vehicles carefully followed existing ruts through the village fields to avoid unnecessary damage to the crops...

...This is because Vietnam is not officially a war, despite the fact that Westmoreland's headquarters, which includes 58 generals and admirals by one count, already is bigger than General Eisenhower's Supreme Command at the end of World War II...

...Rather it is that a limit exists to human tolerance of ineptitude and endless years at dead center...

...It has never been a happy community...

...Still greater danger lies in the fact—which even the New York Times has recognized—that the American offer to negotiate is a priceless last resort to the Communists...

...A high-ranking American official put it this way: "People all over the world, including our allies and a hell of a lot of Americans, think we're running things here anyway, so why don't we do so, and get the job done right before it's too late?'" His idea is to preserve the trappings of our present relationship with the Saigon government, take no overt actions, but begin exerting direct American muscle at the rice-roots level to bring honest, effective government to the peasants...

...The idea that there is a cheap, easy way out of the war by escalation is equally illusory, and even more dangerous...

...Once the military tide has clearly turned, and it is obvious that the Vietcong cannot win, there is certain to be an upsurge of new life in South Vietnam, of new vigor, and new interest in tidying up the country's affairs...

...The men who feel this way —and I heard the opinion from several officials whom I respect—are dedicated to their work in Vietnam...

...By this I mean arguments against our role in Vietnam that are irrelevant if we agree our presence there is essential to U.S...

...We are faced with an extraordinarily difficult conflict which will probably last for years, if we stick with it, demanding a degree of fortitude and patience that Americans find hard to come by...

...Unlike the British in Malaya, or the French in Indochina, the United States has no authority in Vietnam...

...But there is no question that other uses of our firepower are wasteful, terribly costly in innocent fives, and doing more to harm our cause politically than to help it militarily...

...And once negotiations began, the political pressures both at home and among our allies to make sweeping concessions, anything to get out of Vietnam, would be irresistible...

...An American defeat would demoralize hundreds of millions of people the world over whose respect for American power is no less vital an asset than our divisions and our atomic missiles...

...Unofficially, the most vocal dissenters are the military people in Saigon, who resent the political limitations on their operations...

...it is not escalation when Washington deploys tens of thousands of additional American troops in the Mekong Delta...

...Hopefully, there are signs that General Westmoreland is diverting a much larger proportion of his troops to clear-and-hold operations...

...Yet the military and political situation today in Vietnam is still so tenuous that even a ceasefire could be disastrous...

...At American installations, which are everywhere, young, nervous sentries stood with rifles at the ready, butt on hip, muzzle in the air, finger on the trigger...

...In my opinion, all of these proposals—to negotiate, to escalate, to quit, or to take over-—are wrong, and in most cases dangerous...

...Some of them think we should escalate to the point of air attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong, or even Peking...

...There are distinct parallels between Vietnam and other divided countries, such as Germany...

...And it seems important to try to identify the really urgent issues of the moment...

...Because this requires gaining the support of the people, we cannot achieve that kind of strength until the war is virtually won...

...Reports are multiplying, for example, of Communist troops surrendering instead of fighting to the death as they did before...

...This has not been ignored entirely, especially by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, but a good many Americans believe our mission is mainly a kind of humanitarian crusade on behalf of the Vietnamese people...

...Whatever may be done about this sort of problem, if anything, the fact we must all accept is that the effort in Vietnam is always going to be a monumental American boondoggle, done in the most expensive, most inefficient, most heavy-handed and most good-intentioned manner possible...

...It would be enough, he said, simply to rescind the present standing orders prohibiting Americans from interfering in Vietnamese affairs...

...It is surely the first time a major power has gone to war in such makeshift political circumstances...

...Mission could certainly do much better than it has to combat inflation and the unsavory social effects created by the presence of so many thousands of Americans in the towns and cities...

...There is close to unanimous opinion in Saigon that the military situation is improving, perhaps even faster than it appears...

...A Vietnamese journalist told me about an action he witnessed when an American unit mercilessly bombarded into rubble a hamlet suspected of harboring Vietcong...

...This will not happen overnight, but I am convinced that sooner or later the Vietnamese themselves will evolve a healthy, viable government which can survive without foreign help...

...We can't fight a land war in Asia...

...But another group is worth particular mention...

...So what should we do about Vietnam...

...It probably is not feasible politically to call off the bombing now, but it certainly should be reduced in intensity, and it would be madness to escalate it...

...You could search the whole world over and not find a more doubtful source than a paid informer in Southeast Asia—yet we wiped out a village on this basis...

...However the negotiations turned out, the Americans and South Vietnamese government would find themselves isolated in the towns and cities, cut off, perhaps permanently, from two-thirds of the population...

...security, then compromise is unacceptable...

...Saigon had visibly decayed, much of its charm having been replaced by shabbiness...

...It thinks we should move in and, in effect, start running the country ourselves, at least in the rural areas...

...There are, to be sure, a hundred special circumstances in Vietnam, such as the legacy of generations of French oppression...

...Increasing evidence suggests that the Communists are hurting in Vietnam, and that the Russians are working quietly on the North Vietnamese to negotiate...

...Public Affairs Officer in Vietnam from 1962-64...

...Inflation has become an incalculably dangerous problem...

...The only hopeful thing I can say about the Saigon atmosphere is that I was told it was worse a year ago...

...The standing American offer to negotiate is extraordinarily dangerous...

...It is useless to speculate about dominos and what country would come next, or even to try to guess what form the next upheaval might take, but one thing is certain: If Vietnam goes under, there will be a next country, and a next, and so on until we are forced to fight again anyway...

...There are at least a half dozen separate American intelligence offices in Saigon, but they only trade minor secrets with each other and otherwise compete much more than they cooperate...

...If the answer is yes, it is essential, then the only remaining area for debate is how to achieve it...

...The significance of this bleak picture, however, is not that the Americans on the scene, or even the Vietnamese, are quitters...

...Another first-rate man, a Special Forces officer, remarked bitterly that "all we're doing here is a bunch of bloody push-ups...

...There are understandable political reasons for talking this way—to try to stir the Vietnamese to get out and fight the Vietcong, too, for instance...

...This means that once troops move into an area, they will stay there indefinitely to provide security and economic help while the civil authorities clean out Vietcong stay-behind agents...

...We are clearly still doing that...

...The arguments on what to do are no less intense, and often no more informed...

...The unpalatable reality now, as it was with Diem, is that we can do very, very little about the shortcomings of the Vietnamese authorities, except try to live with them...

...There has been at least one verified case where the Vietcong entered a village they had not been able to penetrate before and warned the people that if they would not cooperate, the American imperialists would come and destroy them...

...For one thing, we can usefully clear away the clutter of what I call non-issues that are confusing our thinking...

...Saigon has become a rapacious city...

...if the defense of Vietnam is essential, but we lack the power for it, we face a massive reassessment of our policies everywhere...

...There can be no moral objection to escalation...

...The challenge in the past has been Russian tanks at the gates of Berlin and Chinese armies in Korea...

...The South Vietnamese have considerable first-hand knowledge—mostly from relatives with whom they can still communicate by mail through Bangkok—of conditions in the North, where there is food rationing, shortages of all kinds of consumer goods, and of course rigid Communist discipline, and this is not what they want...

...Dramatic proof of this was provided recently when it turned out that American planes had bombed a village, killing a score of peasants, on the basis of a tip from a paid Vietnamese informer that the village was full of Vietcong—which it was not...

...On policy matters, Americans in Saigon are divided roughly along the lines that divide us at home...

...On two recent trips to Vietnam, after an absence of two-and-one-half years, my first impressions were uniformly dismaying...

...The stakes in Vietnam amount precisely to the preservation of this stalemate, and thus are the greatest single hope of world peace in the foreseeable future...

...It has no parallel among Americans at home...

...agencies are pushing the line that we are fighting to force the Communists to sit down and reason with us...

...Yet there can be no negotiated settlement without compromise on our part, and any kind of compromise can only weaken the defense of Vietnam as well as grant the Communists a reward for the use of force...

...It is no less an honorable role for our country than any other undertaking in our history...

...The fundamental role of the United States in Vietnam is to preserve this option for the Vietnamese people, and thereby to close this avenue for Communist expansion permanently...

...and it has cost over 500 American planes so far...

...Considered in this framework, some of our mistakes in Vietnam become understandable...

...An intelligence officer told me of a report that the Vietcong in the nearby countryside have actually been paying the bus fare to send peasants into Saigon to see for themselves how the Americans are corrupting the city...

...This means, of course, that the Vietcong can freely come back to the villages in time for supper, and it fails almost totally to root out the VC from the population...

...It results from years of cold war propaganda, the explosion of modern communications into the most remote corners of the earth, and the emergence of super states whose pleasure is the only security of their smaller neighbors...

...First, though, let me turn to the central question that must be answered before we can discuss any American policy in Vietnam: Is it, or is it not essential to the national security of the United States to prevent Communist capture of this little country...

...The villagers still resisted, so the VC planted a sniper who fired at the next American plane to fly by...

...As Professor Henry Kissinger put it, Vietnam is a "test of American maturity...

...Among the Vietnamese there is a mood of "I'll get mine," and it intensifies each time a political crisis sets officeholders to worrying about losing their jobs...

...Thus our dilemma: Bombing North Vietnam does make its support of the Communist forces in the South more difficult, but these forces are foot soldiers, most of them guerrillas who live off the countryside, and they cannot be hurt decisively by wrecking their supply lines or even the industry in the North...

...There is less support for the war than it deserves because some people feel the Vietnamese are not worth fighting for...

...Air strikes and artillery have been valuable in direct support of troops engaged with the enemy...

...In truth, there is no such thing...

...Hanoi started it and now commands the Communist forces in the South, and there is no reason why it should be spared the consequences...

...On John Mecklin, an associate editor of Fortune and author of Mission in Torment, covered Indochina for Time from 1953-57 and was a U.S...

...The South Vietnamese won't fight...

...More importantly, the notion that we have a choice about being in Vietnam, that it is not really an authentic war, tends to make people think there must be some easy way, some cheap way out of this mess...

...It is escalation when we bomb power stations and railroad junctions in North Vietnam for the first time, because these are targets that were previously spared for political reasons...

...A Communist triumph in Vietnam would be the first significant slippage of the atomic standoff in more than a decade—and therefore incalculably dangerous...

...it has dangerously alienated our allies...

...Our troops are fully aware of the need to win the cooperation of the peasants and go to remarkable extremes to achieve this...

...But it is equally obvious, in my opinion, that if we went that far, it would become mandatory for the Chinese to intervene, and perhaps also the Russians, to save a sister Socialist state threatened with extinction...

...Anyone with combat experience knows how little damage can be done to professional infantry by air and artillery, except on the rare occasion when they are surprised and caught in the open without shelter...

...The grimly ironic probability is that the first certain sign of our side winning in Vietnam, of our sacrifice of blood and treasure starting to pay off, will be a Communist offer to negotiate...

...To try to use bombs to solve our problems in Vietnam, as Professor Arthur Schlesinger recently wrote, is like trying to weed a garden with a bulldozer...

...President Kennedy's much-quoted remark that only the Vietnamese can win the war in Vietnam is also a non-issue...

...If the defense of Vietnam is essential to U.S...

...It has failed in its purpose dismally...

...But now I was struck by a new feeling of discouragement...

...And it is not merely visiting reporters who feel this way...

...that if they promise to withdraw the North Vietnamese forces and stop infiltrating supplies, they will simply make a token withdrawal and continue doing exactly what they are doing now—and our side will be helpless to do anything about it...

...This does not necessarily mean expanding the size of our effort...

...Basically we are on the right track in recognizing that this is a foot soldier's war, that we have no choice but to slug it out with the Vietcong at close range, and usually on their terms...

...It is a hard man indeed who can feel that way after he has become acquainted with Vietnam and its tragic people...

...Critics of our military practices also regard it as a serious error that so many American troops are being used in static defensive positions, thus allowing themselves to be tied down uselessly—just as the French were...

...They are profoundly troubled by our continued inability to get the South Vietnamese government to do the things that so urgently need to be done—for example, to wipe out petty government corruption in the hamlets, one of the Vietcong's greatest assets...

...The challenge this time is a brilliantly conceived and executed maneuver to outflank American industrial and technological power with the guerrilla techniques developed by Mao Tse-tung and Vo Nguyen Giap...

...If that happened, our present problems in the South would become incidentals...

...One of the little understood facts about Vietnam is that the educated minority, the urban dwellers for the most part, the people who run the country, are strongly anti-Communist even after two decades of endless strife and despair...

...The Air Force has reportedly reached the point where it wants to escalate the war by bombing power plants because the power is used for Communist anti-aircraft radar, which would not have been there in the first place if we had not started the bombing...

...Of course the Communist world is changing, and rapidly...

...American military men talk frequently about "Vietcong villages...

...I am excluding the question of whether the United States has the resources to prevail in Vietnam without dangerously weakening its positions elsewhere...