FOOTSTEPS TO DEMOCRACY

...We must de-emphasize politically motivated projects of doubtful value, such as the Cambodian road, and with them, the size of our foregin aid bureaus in the capitals...

...A nation of 170 million should be able to find more than 712 "shirtsleeve" ambassadors to the underdeveloped areas—Americans, neither busy-bodies nor misfits, who have some degree of expertness and a di-sire to serve in the greatest adventure of the age...

...Currently around 80 per cent of our total foreign aid budget goes into military hardware, or into the so-called "defense support...

...But now material power is in stalemate...

...One would feel better about American arms aid if there were more asREPRESENTATIVE HENRY REUSS, Wisconsin Democrat, is one of the most articulate members of Congress arguing for a more creative course in American foreign policy...

...The Cambodian highway, for instance, which parallels an existing road between Pnom-Penh, the capital, and the sea, is justified as making Cambodia independent of its neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam...

...No doubt the highway will gratify the Cambodian government...

...Instead, we must show the essential difference between our side and the Communist side by emphasizing the development of democratic practices and social progress...

...But the peasant in his paddy a few miles away may be unaware of the highway's existence...

...I'll admit that this is far easier said than done...

...Thus, Price Sihanouk of Cambodia is at one and the same time an oriental despot and a student who drank in Rousseau's ideas of the rights of man at the French Lycee at Saigon years ago...

...Happily, in a modest and unpubli-cized way, we are already doing many things that do advance freedom and democracy...

...If we do not believe in their capacity, they tend to reflect our lack of confidence...

...A road, for example, which wise economic planning would postpone far into the future while more essential facilities are constructed, and which is not sufficiently interesting to the military to entice them to spend their own funds, may be agreed upon simply because no better subject of agreement can be found...

...Chundriggar, complained to me last fall that his military pacts with America had estranged Pakistan's relations with India...

...In Cambodia, where the French neglected to provide any schools whatever outside the capital city during their century there, at least a handful of American teachers are training Cambodians to educate the new generation...

...It's the one kind of program we can offer that the Communists can't...

...And the reason, I believe, is that we are hiding our light under a bushel, or rather under two bushels...

...Presently it subscribes to the belief that if you kill 20 people, you will be able to fly...

...We have had Americans like Marian Anderson and Benny Goodman in the area, but they tend to stick to the capitals, thus giving the Communists a free cultural field in the villages...

...Try though we may, the planes and tanks and guns we send our allies in SEATO and in the Bagdad Pact make an unattractive contrast with the Communist campaign of trade and culture and smiles and peace...

...If we do have something that the Communists don't, now is the time to bring it forth...

...Certainly the Indians were extremely upset by the maneuvers of the Iranian and Pakistani navies, both supplied by this country, that were then under way in the Persian Gulf...

...Yet today, American planes are being used against North African Arabs by the Spaniards at Ifni in Morocco at the same time that American rifles are being sent to the Arabs of Tunisia a few hundred miles away...

...In one capital I visited, a trained irrigation engineer who was eager to be out in the countryside supervising reclamation projects, learning the language, and getting to know the pepole was fretting at a desk, initialing papers...

...It requires huge American administrative staffs in the nation's capital, passing papers back and forth with the government, and arousing resentments simply because we are rich, numerous, and there...

...In the political sphere, we can at least make clear that we prefer democracy to dictatorship, and that we want to speed its arrival...

...Rightly or wrongly, Russia is recognized as our technological peer...

...While I was in Taiwan (Formosa), Chiang Kai-shek was locking up some newspaper editors for criticizing his administration...

...To oversimplify a little, therefore, why not have our diplomacy cater to the Rousseau in the Prince by really helping his school-building program, rather than to the potentate in him who sees a grandiose road network as a means of showing up his neighbors...

...Ambassador Charles Bohlen told me that he believed our barrio program was in considerable part responsible for last November's successful elections in the Philippines, perhaps the most democratic and free from corruption ever held in the East...

...But there are many stations on the road to political democracy...

...Furthermore, Communist aid comes without any military strings...

...When I told Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek that we hoped he would move as fast as possible toward greater freedom of democratic expression, he replied, "That is the right direction, and we will move as fast as we can...

...The Binh Xuyen, a group of gangsters with an army of 10,000, owned the gambling houses, opium dens, and brothels of Saigon...

...Now it is perfectly true that Western-style political democracy can be little more than a Utopian dream in most of these countries, with a literacy rate around 10 per cent...

...What we need is at least double the 712 technicians which now comprise the entire U.S...

...These countries need arms as a deterrent to open aggression and for protection against domestic subversion...

...Having had to bow down to American technological excellence for so long, people of the East are quick to find America caught off base...

...Our preoccupation with "project-ism" has another disadvantage...

...Still, it is better to have democracy accepted as a goal, however long term, than to see it spit upon, as our other ally, Generalissimo Franco, did in October when he hailed the advent of Sputnik as illustrating the decadence of democracy...

...The second bushel which hides the light of Jefferson and Lincoln is the fact that most of the countries we are aiding, whatever their political theory, are in practice many miles from being democracies...

...It may take some imagination to recruit them...

...One can forgive President Diem of Vietnam for his undemocratic intolerance of opposition when you learn that much of his opposition in the last three years has consisted of the sects...

...Such a shift in our aid program would emphasize footsteps to democracy rather than more power-conscious military and economic manifestations...

...Such entanglements are frequently defended on the basis that we must not interfere with the internal sovereignty of countries we aid...

...If the local organization does its part, the Philippine government contributes local or U.S...

...Take the magnificent series of roads we are building in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam...

...Sometimes, too, in dealing with native rulers, we underrate their capacity for enlightenment...

...What are we waiting for...

...This means that we will find less competition if we will but enter the race...

...Instead, the Russian ballet and the Chinese opera make frequent "cultural" visits...

...In Cambodia, Prince Sihanouk controls all 91 seats in the national assembly...

...In Iran the government party counts the votes and determines who can be a candidate...

...Yet the Administration this year is actually reducing last year's $152 million Point Four request to $142 million...

...Our civil service training institute in Saigon, staffed by technicians from Michigan State University, is slowly creating a cadre of trained Vietnamese...

...When I visited the little town of Sien-Reap in the jungles of northern Cambodia, the 71-man Peking Opera Company was playing to standing room only crowds every night...

...And everywhere, the Russian and Chinese Communists are either talking about or actually producing large-scale economic aid programs...

...Newsstands are supplied with unlimited quantities of Communist literature...

...Our technological supremacy and our unequalled ability to help underdeveloped countries are monopolies no longer...

...The Struggle in the Far East FOOTSTEPS TO DEMOCRACY by HENRY REUSS Sputnik, beeping its way over the arc of countries that lie on the borders of the Communist world, symbolized the end of two great American monopolies...

...Point Four staff in Asia and the Middle East...

...Built on a crash basis and on an extravagant system of cost-plus contracts, they will cost us upwards of $70 million before we are through...

...As the State Department recently disclosed, for the last two years Communist aid in those underdeveloped areas where we and the Communists both operate has been more than double ours...

...The first bushel which is suffocating our candle is militarism...

...President Diem told me how eager he was to start on a land reform program but that the burden of maintaining the army was delaying the start...

...In Pakistan a national election has not yet been held, despite a consitiutional provision requiring one...

...In Thailand, the military leaders run the country, managing to get themselves good jobs on the public lottery or in import licenses...

...Sometimes "defense support" expenditures take the form of dams or highways, telecommunications or power facilities...

...Examples of this economic astigmatism are not lacking...

...Under that program, people from the villages are trained in the rudiments of democratic organization—how to get the neighbors united on building a school, digging a well, or treating a malarial swamp...

...While we have to continue working through corrupt and dictatorial governments, we must stop acting as though we had no better hope for their people...

...Moreover, many new countries that are delighted to have a Russian dam or highway demur at letting the commissars into their village...

...What our foreign aid program in Asia needs, I firmly believe, is to be turned inside out...

...The people of "free Asia" may not know much about parliamentary democracy, but they know what they want: schools, doctors, houses, food, land reform, a freer press, the right to speak out, an end to corruption, a beginning for local self-government...

...In this way, a project of low priority for individual policy planners becomes top priority through default...

...For an impact on his life, American mold-board plows, or medical trucks to bring better health to the villagers along the existing highway, would be vastly more effective...

...How about a "Career Service" for a small cadre of senior specialists, and a "Point Four Selective Service" for a much larger number of young people who are willing to serve their country for a few years in far-off places, at a soldier's pay...

...To an alarming degree, they are monuments to a new and unhealthy autarchic nationalism that is showing itself in Southeast Asia...

...The Hao Hoa is a fanatical Buddhist sect whose leader, Ba Cut, seven times rallied to Diem's cause, and seven times betrayed him...

...In fact, many of these rulers are composites of reaction and enlightenment...

...Driving his water-buffalo along the shoulder of a super-highway may or may not provide him with some gratification...

...And as long as we are associated, as we inevitably are, with Asian governments that rule by military clique, that throttle the opposition press, that rig elections—we simply do not project an image of the land of the free...

...Along with a stepped-up program of advancing freedom, we need to be a little less hopeless at the prospect of disentangling ourselves from the repressive governments of some of our allies...

...For example, in Vietnam, with a population of 12 million and an average annual income of around $116, we are supporting a huge 150,-000-man army...

...technical assistance...

...Not that the idea of military aid to the countries along the Asian perimeter is misplaced...

...In such instances, the casual observer might conclude that both objectives —the military and the economic— have been served...

...In Taiwan, the land reform program is a model for other parts of Asia...

...Pakistan's prime minister, Dr...

...A second danger may lie in the sheer size of some of these armed forces...

...But we don't hesitate to interfere in the military and strategic sphere...

...Almost any American, thus challenged, would say that of course we have something unique of our own— the idea of Jefferson and Lincoln that the life, liberty, and happiness of the individual are the things that count...

...Unfortunately, this light of America isn't coming through to the people of the East...

...It is ironic that America, home of the town meeting and of local self-government, of voluntary organizations from the PTA to the labor union to Rotary to the 4-H Club to the farm cooperative, appears in Asia mainly in the country's capital and as an arm of the country's government...

...In the Philippines, our barrio (village) program is now operating successfully in almost one-sixth of the 30,000 villages...

...In Vietnam—unlike Pakistan and India—the colonial government left no legacy of trained native civil servants when it cleared out...

...There are other examples of what might be called a footsteps-to-de-mocracy program...

...surance that it was going to be used against Communist aggressors, rather than against neighbors...

...Up until Sputnik, the superiority of American power in technology and in economic aid was largely responsible for limiting our losses in Africa and Asia to Communist China and North Vietnam...

...Reuss recently returned from a first-hand inspection tour of the Far East...

...But there are at least two dangers inherent in the most sensible arms aid program...

...We must downgrade our military aid from an end in itself to a shield behind which progress can be made...

...Because these activities depend on the consent of the village people, they are not the kind of things the Soviets do best...

...The answer is not that we should end our military aid program, but these dangers must be recognized...

...The people, having had a taste of democracy, demanded, and got, a fairly honest count at the polls, and showed commendable discrimination at getting rid of some corrupt office-holders...

...Unfortunately, projects of this sort frequently represent a compromise of the conflicting demands, satisfactory to neither...