CAN WE PLAY GOD IN ASIA?

...fore, our own creation, and our now canonized "word" to defend it was given to the tyrant Diem, who was finally deposed and murdered and who has been succeeded by a kaleidoscopic array of unpopular and ineffective rulers...

...It sets a dangerous precedent for the United States to become both the judge of the "democratic" nature of any internal revolt, and the wielder of repressive force against any uprising of which we disapprove...

...Doubtless this terrible progression would proceed "with restraint and with all the wisdom we can command," but before the United States slides, by carefully planned stages, into this bottomless pit we should pause to reflect on the cataclysmic consequences of a war with China—not to mention the Soviet Union...

...Elections designed to reunite the country were directed by the Conference, to be held by July, 1956, under international supervision...

...But we will use it...

...Professor Staughton Lynd, Yale historian, commented aptly, in a letter in The New York Times on April 14, that while we use "gas, torture, and napalm to crush an indigenous social revolution, a Mekong Delta Authority will be a fig leaf to hide barbarism...

...We are also committed by the U.N...

...Our leaders are naive if they expect mature men and women to credit their offer of "unconditional discussions" while they bomb at will throughout Southeast Asia...

...Rather than the political dominoes falling away from us in all directions, presuming that we "lost" Southeast Asia, we are instead causing them to fall rapidly away from us now through our very effort to hold South Vietnam by every conceivable means, the prospect of world war included...

...There is no blinking the fact, either, that our only hope of avoiding ultimate defeat in Asia, if current U.S...

...It is far too late for us to attempt to play the role of God in Asia, let alone on all the continents...

...leaders, of all world evil...

...This year he is a visiting professor...

...It is sad indeed that Lippmann should have to remind us that "revolution is a homegrown product" and that it could not be stamped out, once and for all, "by stamping out Red China...

...Our man Diem's rule in South Vietnam provoked a great rebellion...

...It is far more likely that the large North Vietnamese army will finally leave its devastated country and move south to fight against us...

...The President himself said ominously on April 7, "Over this war—and all Asia —is another reality: the deepening shadow of Communist China...

...f The elections were frustrated by President Ngo Dinh Diem, whom Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had selected to rule South Vietnam, because both knew that the vote would almost certainly be for union under a Communist-oriented leadership...

...1 The 1954 Geneva Conference of nine governments which ended the war split the country into two zones in its efforts to stop the shooting, but never intended to divide Vietnam permanently...

...The rulers in Hanoi are urged on by Peking...

...The President is advised by men who have been consistently wrong about Vietnam...

...Faced with frustration in their efforts to impose their own solutions to the problems of the Vietnamese people, the chief decision-makers in the United States have resolved, as the President asserted on April 7, that "We will not be defeated...

...Charles de Gaulle, the man who was installed in power to "save" Algeria for France, wisely eased France out of Algeria...

...Beyond North Vietnam lies China...

...But is must be undone, since our whole future depends on it...

...51 Entirely aside from the moral issue, there is not even prestige to be gained by bombing other peoples into submission...

...Such a policy repudiates the principles of our Declaration of Independence, and denies the innate right of every people to revolt against intolerable conditions...

...He is the author of four books on the aftermath of World War I and of a two volume history, "The Cold War and its Origins, 1917-1960," which is being published in London, Milan, Athens, and Tokyo and is in its fourth printing in this country...

...f By attempting since 1950 to blockade, by every means, the new China, we have won the bitter hatred of the Chinese people, and this can be undone only slowly...

...This aid, whether from Hanoi or Peking, has never been more than a trickle compared to the billions of dollars in military aid which the United States, a land across the world, has poured into Saigon's hands in an ever-rising flood...

...Currently, unable to suppress the rebellion in the South, we are relentlessly bombing the "aggressor" state of North Vietnam, the half of the divided Vietnamese nation which is hungry and dependent on foreign aid because it is cut off from the rice of South Vietnam...

...But it is questionable that Hanoi could do so, even if it wished...

...Vastly detailed" studies are ready to "return China to the dark ages," if necessary, according to a report from Washington in the Wall Street Journal March 5. The survey emphasizes we would probably begin by bombing "along the enemy's supply lines all the way back to the home-front factories," and we "could plaster almost at will such targets as petroleum and ammunition dumps, air fields, rail hubs, and bridges . . . nuclear bombs would also be available if the President decided to use them...

...Exactly two months earlier, on February 7, when the shelling of our barracks and planes at Pleiku signalized vividly how badly we were losing the guerrilla war in Vietnam, Mr...

...But it is dubious that the United States, half a world away, shares an interest of comparable depth...

...Southeast Asia may be a core interest of China...

...This may soon seem to Washington, according to the President's thinking, to be the only way to prevent the Administration's ultimate defeat in Southeast Asia and of its avowed policy that "we will not be defeated...

...f Because we are not a signatory to the Geneva Treaty of 1954, and have violated its terms by injecting our arms and troops into South Vietnam, we have no legal standing in Vietnam, South or North...

...Japan is increasingly restive...

...They clearly violate our United Nations obligations to "first of all seek solution by negotiation" and to report any alleged measures of self-defense "immediately" to the Security Council...

...forces had already stirred world opinion to an unprecedented unanimity of opposition to our government's policy in Asia...

...Air Force Major General John P. Lavelle, in testimony presented in February before a House Appropriations subcommittee, stated that the United States has selected its targets in China and in the event of general war could "inflict an unacceptable level of destruction" on that nation with missiles...

...The principal motive for our assertions of global mastery seems to be the belief that if revolution succeeds in Vietnam it will succeed in many other places...

...Pakistan is friendly with China, and we must expect the mounting indignation of the Soviets to force Soviet intervention at some stage...

...Before we turn all humanity against the United States we should weigh, with humility, these considerations: 5| There is a manifest vanity in our assertion of control over the entire Pacific Ocean and the islands and fringes of China on the far side of it...

...These outrages generated a countrywide guerrilla revolt, which began and still centers in the southern part of South Vietnam...

...It seems increasingly clear that the main target is China, the new source, for U.S...

...policy in Asia...

...She was defeated in Algeria a few years later and made the best of it...

...5[ We must reexamine our obsession that all Communism is intrinsically vile and that Communist societies never evolve into something better...

...leadership thinking is to be carried to its logical conclusion, is to attempt to destroy China now—even if hundreds of millions die—before that nation has developed effective nuclear capability...

...Will this be the route to a war on China...

...We will not withdraw, either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement...

...Doing what is right generates prestige...

...Hanson Baldwin, military expert of The New York Times, suggests that a million troops may be required to effectuate our will in that area and he did not allow for a long occupation of Southeast Asia and China against never-ending guerrilla attack...

...We have used helicopters carrying sharp-shooters, napalm in large amounts, bombers, needle shrapnel, defoliants that kill vegetation and crops, and noxious gas, and we have made attempts to burn whole forests, but the rebellion still gathers strength...

...Johnson abruptly determined that the trouble lay in North Vietnam, that the North Vietnamese were "aggressors" who must be bombed from the air...

...As our bombers range farther and farther north in Southeast Asia, attempting to impose our leadership's will, the words of the 2,500 clergymen whose statement was published widely in the press on April 4 should ring ever-louder in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department—"In the Name of God, Stop It...

...It stated, rather: "The conference recognizes that the essential purpose of the agreement on Vietnam . . . is to end hostilities...

...Every target in China that seems to matter is already pinpointed from our plentiful launching points all along China's coasts...

...Only a powerfully-expressed public opinion can rescue our leaders—and all of us—from their desperate gamble in Asia...

...It is a new kind of confrontation, one which could not even have been imagined fifty years ago...

...Chou En-lai has already said, in Algiers on March 30, that China expects to be bombed by the United States but that she believes her many millions of trained people will win the war, however long it might take...

...Walter Lippmann spoke precisely of this when he wrote on April 21 about our "drifting into icy isolation...

...doing what is wrong destroys it...

...The scope of our actions in Vietnam discloses the enormity of this-obsession which has seized our leaders...

...It is a contest between the will of a half-dozen men at the summit of our government—with a greatly-divided country watching fearfully—against the will of a billion or more Asians caught up in a "revolution of rising expectations" and in a mighty determination to be rid of all forms of Western control...

...This is a formula for avoiding negotiation...

...On April 11, Undersecretary of State George W. Ball was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the United States would carry out its "commitment" in Vietnam even if this meant war with China and the Soviet Union...

...Charter to refrain "from the threat or use of force" against any state...

...We should be prepared for the fierce anger of the Chinese that would increase with such bombings, jf they should ever take place, and for the growing wrath of virtually all of Asia and most of the rest of the world...

...bayonets and bombs, and because of the continuing lavish expenditure of billions of dollars by the United States...

...5| The people of Vietnam have a right to self-determination and we have denied it to them ever since 1956, whether they choose to determine their future by "free elections" or by revolution...

...We cannot achieve peace by agreeing, as the President has done, to negotiate unconditionally with everybody except our real antagonist...

...The South Vietnamese government is, thereD. F. FLEMING, a well-known authority on world affairs, is emeritus professor of international relations at Vanderbilt University...

...We will not grow tired...

...Johnson has "no desire to devastate that which the people of North Vietnam have built with pain and sacrifice," but he is fully and obviously prepared to do so, for he continued: "We will use our power with restraint and with all the wisdom that we can command...

...methods of suppressing the rebellion have served instead only to greatly exacerbate it...

...last year he was on the fadilty of tho University of Arizona...

...India, in spite of her border wars with China and Pakistan, is angry with us...

...The South Vietnam government survives, however tenuously, only because of U.S...

...The justification for this new "wider war" rests entirely upon the disastrous fiction that the government of South Vietnam is an independent sovereign state with which the North Vietnamese have no legitimate concern, but with which we have every right to deal on our own terms...

...Emphasis added...

...U.S...

...It should be our goal to help them attain unity, perhaps by stages, with as many guarantees of their independence and neutrality as we can obtain...

...We should remember also that we ourselves once waged a revolution, and with infinitely less reason...

...After all, France lost an eight-year war of conquest in Vietnam in 1954...

...This is what Walter Lipp-mann, the celebrated columnist, called, on March 31, "the half-baked notion that the war in Southeast Asia will be decisive for the future of revolutionary upheavals in the world...

...Edgar Snow has described unforgettably how Diem's agents "mopped up" hundreds of villages, arresting, plundering, torturing people, and often burning villages—on the theory that they must contain some enemies of Diem's regime...

...Yet our actions in Vietnam portend for other nations that the United States is prepared to force its will by bombs and bullets whenever the Administration thinks its foreign policy aims are being frustrated...

...The President's Baltimore speech on April 7 was forced by "public and private demands for negotiation from leading Democrats in Congress, from intellectuals, from an energetic letter-writing public at home, from his closest allies, from neutral nations, from the United Nations and from the Soviet Union," according to Max Frankel, writing in The New York Times the following day...

...We are there only by unilateral action, by our own will, for our own purposes, ostensibly at the "invitation" of our client regime in Saigon, which would have ceased to exist years ago if dependent on its own mandate to rule...

...Might Washington not decide that Peking has committed the crime of aggression by persuading the North Vietnamese not to surrender...

...This is clearly an untenable position...

...f We cannot achieve peace while refusing to negotiate with the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam, which claims the loyalty of far more people there than does the nominal government of South Vietnam which we support...

...The military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary...

...In 1954, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese people won their struggle for independence against the outdated and immoral attempt of France to reassert her rule over Vietnam, after having surrendered the country to Japan during World War II...

...Enormous as is the obliterative power in the hands of our President, it is not sufficient to establish a Pax Americana over the entire earth...

...This is a perfect method for preventing negotiations, for making them impossible...

...He "lost" it and the loss was extremely painful and humiliating, but his prestige today is higher than ever...

...Mr...

...If our nation's leaders insist on control of Southeast Asia they will have to send great numbers of U.S...

...forces to conquer it on the ground, and to police East Asia over a long period against the hatred of a billion Asians...

...at the California State College at Los Angelas...

...it is, after all, in her door-yard...

...This is the abyss before which we stand...

...This position ignores a number of highly relevant factors...

...f Our attacks upon North Vietnam contravene the most basic principles of international law...

...Today we are confronted by a deadly dangerous decision...

...Our efforts have generated hatred among the Vietnamese people and inspired bloody Vietcong reprisals against Americans in Saigon...

...It received little aid from North Vietnam until recent months...

...There is nothing in this defiance of world opinion that will win friends, or keep those few on this issue that we have left...

...Yet a high Japanese diplomat sent by his government to investigate the situation in South Vietnam returned to report, according to a New York Times account, that "even the people of Saigon" estimate the proportion of Communists in the Vietcong to be "at most thirty per cent...

...That would be necessary to prevent the Chinese from ever becoming an atomic power again...

...51 Our dominoes-of-disaster theory is a dangerous illusion which in reality works in reverse...

...It is also, in effect, a demand for unconditional surrender...

...Those who wield our will in Washington seem assured that, as devastation spreads inexorably in North Vietnam, Hanoi will "get the message" and call off the Vietcong in South Vietnam...

...The Chinese leaders and their deeply-indoctrinated people believe firmly that hundreds of millions of tough human beings can defeat any aggressor in China...

...For the first time in our entire national history we stand on the brink of moral self-annihilation, with the physical destruction of a large part of the world a constantly increasing possibility...

...We refuse to deal with an organization of Vietnamese that represents a major portion of the populace, on the grounds that the NLF is Communist...

...What this means is that the relentless bombing of North Vietnam by U.S...

...51 Cruelly divided peoples such as the Vietnamese and the Koreans have a right to unity and they will achieve it, if the holocaust of a world war is avoided...

...The President is a humane man, but he seems to have said that he will use whatever amounts of the vast powers at his finger tips that he believes to be necessary to enforce his will in Asia...

...Even our closest allies reveal growing apprehension of our bomb-into-sub-mission policy...

...Indonesia is militantly opposed to U.S...

...So are the Philippines, where feeling is rising against us not only on this but on other grounds...