Fighting an Intractable Dwarf

...Communism, on the other hand, appeared to us and to Western European nations in the guise of an "international conspiracy...

...It may well have more influence on the political conventions and Presidential elections in the United States than on the course of the war and the establishment of peace in Vietnam...

...The American public provisionally supported our dubious involvement in Vietnam's double civil war because some citizens were impressed by our democratic idealism, by the effort to plant a democracy on the periphery of a Communist continent...

...The honorable peace we desire so fervently—and by which we hope to prove that a little sliver of a country with its capital in Saigon is really a viable democratic institution, even though it lacks almost every prerequisite of either integral community or democracy—is denied us because the Communists see our actions as merely an American substitute for the old French imperialism...

...Indeed, it is quite probable that a dwarf nation like Vietnam is so intractable in accommodating a giant nation like the United States with an honorable peace because it shrewdly suspects the November elections will reveal that the giant nation is sick of this costly war, which the dwarf nation, fighting for Communist inspired "national liberation," is quite prepared to continue...

...The Paris peace conference, deadlocked for months, will probably not reach a formula for an honorable peace until after the political conventions, at the earliest...

...The Chinese did not intervene...

...We were drawn into the Vietnam quagmire by imperceptible stages...

...We must not forget the dwarf nation of North Vietnam in its encounter with the American giant...

...Could he not have foreseen that the public would be disenchanted about this bloody and futile war, especially when its costs in blood and money were revealed...

...Senators from hailing the Charter and the elections as the dawn of a new era in which United States aid would not be required...

...Our venture in Vietnam did give the Russians a chance to supply Hanoi with the weapons currently threatening Saigon...

...It seems incredible that the United States, with its vast resources for technological warfare, cannot win the Vietnam war, or at least negotiate an "honorable peace"—one, that is, that would enhance our political prestige in the world and particularly in Asia...

...and even now Rural Pacification, another name for land reform, has not been successful...

...Perhaps the confusion caused by Mao's fantastic "Cultural Revolution" was responsible for their unwillingness or inability to save the Indonesian Communists...

...Our ideology seemed irrelevant to the conditions of these former French colonies of Indochina...

...The presumption was that the new "nation," dressed in the panoply of democratic virtue, would be self-sufficient even against the Vietcong terror...

...and the tension between President Thieu and Vice President Ky continually threatens the little country with a new civil war...

...President Eisenhower was loath to offer military assistance, but did offer financial aid to the southern portion of the partitioned nation...

...The dwarf nation is thereby proving that, while it is unable to vanquish the giant, it does have the capacity to embarrass him and add to his store of wisdom in the first quarter century of his empire...

...we were the instrument, chosen by Providence, to defend the "free world" against Communism totalitarianism...

...Walter Lippmann rightly observes that these suggestions were a libel against our Navy, which is certainly superior to the Chinese Navy, if any...

...Actually, the Chinese are not as interested in exporting Communism as is generally supposed...

...Even now that the peace talks in Paris have begun, the Vietcong threatens Saigon with mortar destruction...

...We were told it was better to fight Communism in Vietnam than in Seattle or even in Cape Cod...

...Nor can any peace conference paper over this contrasting ideological confrontation...

...Others were impressed by our duty to contain Communism...

...We attempted to give the military juntas ruling South Vietnam the dignity of constitutional integrity, of a "Charter" drawn up by a Constitutional Assembly...

...Their own culture and history had furnished Western European nations with the social and technical presuppositions of a democratic order...

...Our continued presence there may be interpreted as proof that nations, particularly imperial ones, can never acknowledge their mistakes...

...and the USSR emerged as imperial powers, we have stumbled into a futile civil war in a small nation...

...Promised land reforms were ignored by Diem...

...On the basis of this Charter elections were held, and President Johnson sent American observers to testify to their honesty...

...As the casualties began to rise to a total of 25,000 American dead and as the war made a 10 per cent tax surcharge necessary, it became clear that an otherwise successful Administration risked defeat in the November elections...

...To the Vietnamese peasants Diem's government was merely a facade for the Catholic Mandarin landlords...

...The uncertain future of this shaky democracy did not prevent many U.S...

...Yet while it costs the USSR only two billion dollars a year to furnish arms to North Vietnam, the United States spends precious lives and two billion dollars a month to thwart the Communist strategy...

...Lo and behold, two members of the junta were elected: Nguyen Van Thieu as President and former Premier Nguyen Cao Ky as Vice President...

...But when the Communists murdered a number of military leaders, the surviving military men under General Suharto, supported by an anti-Communist student revolt, staged a blood bath in which millions of Communists perished...

...This disparity and this futility is certainly a "tit for tat" answer to our original victory in Europe, when the Marshall Plan prevented the whole of that continent from falling under Communist domination...

...President Sukarno was forced to choose between dismissal from his life Presidency or a trial that would reveal his connivance with Communism...

...The runner-up in this election, Truong Dinh Dzu, was promptly jailed...

...It is certainly a mystery why the shrewd politician in the White House, his native cunning sharpened by experience in Texas politics and years of Senatorial maneuvering, should have permitted this astronomical expansion of military effort, involving half a million soldiers and the fantastic financial cost of two billion dollars a month...

...They sought to mount a Communist coup in Indonesia under President Sukarno's benevolent eye...

...We are, in fact, in the position of trying to frustrate the Communist formula for harnessing patriotism to the purposes of its ideology...

...Obviously the military command suggested this military alternative to a defeat resulting from inadequate ideological, economic and political development in the South...

...After three months of formal and informal talks, the Paris peace conference is clearly deadlocked...

...Our Marshall Plan was so successful because it merely restored the industrial plant and communications destroyed by the War...

...Russia has since experienced difficulties in bringing nations such as Yugoslavia, Rumania and Czechoslovakia under the authority of its international system...

...In Southeast Asia, however, we were confronted by colonial liberation and the fervor of Communist-inspired nationalism...

...and a common written language furnished the ethnic and linguistic bases for integral nationhood...

...Loss of foreign prestige provides a foreign motive for this weakness...

...The monstrous military expansion started under President Johnson, probably because of the sheer necessity of preventing our clients from suffering defeat at the hands of Hanoi...

...We are at a hopeless ideological disadvantage vis-a-vis Communism, and our superior military and economic power cannot overcome it...

...This last assurance came from former Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge...

...Was it Chinese Communism that was being contained...

...We sought to plant democracy in a peasant culture and succeeded only in creating the repressive Diem regime, which perished in a bloody military revolution...

...It is rather ironic that this is ultimately a conflict between the USSR and the United States...

...Meanwhile, the bitter conflict between the Chinese and Russian versions of the Communist conspiracy made many of these justifications absurd...

...The supposed integral nation was challenged for control of its own territory by the Communist Vietcong, which held many of the villages...

...Thus we enabled Moscow to maintain its prestige in Asia against the jeering Chinese, who argue that the Russians have become infected with bourgeois complacency and are no longer interested in exporting revolution...

...the embarrassment at home in admitting error is a second reason for it...

...Certainly the Chinese defeat in Indonesia removed the last justification for our military presence in Southeast Asia...

...After Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were murdered, various Army juntas ruled South Vietnam with indifferent success...

...By the time President Kennedy came to power Ngo Dinh Diem had established a kind of autocratic "Republic" by defeating the various Buddhist sects, and President Kennedy offered to provide him with military "consultants...