Vietnam: the Crucial Issue

...Our basic asset, which neither the Johnson nor the Nixon Administration has been willing to acknowledge, is that this war is not now and never has been essential to our interests, essential, that is, to the freedom and safety of the American people...

...And that, as the Paris peace talks have shown, is an outcome which the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong will never accept, unless it is forced upon them by military defeat...

...The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong have said that they will fight indefinitely to prevent that and they have shown their ability to do so...

...As outlined by President Nixon, Vietnamization, according to a Rand Corporation expert, "is a policy that must goad the Hanoi leadership to challenge it by increasing the pressure of United States casualties...

...Its utility as a precedent has therefore been importantly undermined...

...As defined in the President's speech of November 3, "Vietnamization" means that American forces will be withdrawn gradually while the Saigon army is built up to take over a greater share of the war...

...Whatever the outcome of the war in Vietnam," he wrote, "it is clear that it has greatly diminished American willingness to become involved in this form of warfare elsewhere...

...Once it is clear that the war in Vietnam is neither a valid global testing of the liberation-war doctrine nor a proxy war in a grand Chinese strategy for the conquest of Asia, it follows inescapably that the United States has been fighting a war without need or justification—a war based on demonstrably false premises...

...As long as American policy is committed to survival of the Thieu-Ky regime or one very much like it, "Vietnamization" will remain a euphemism for victory...

...There is good reason to believe that, in return for our agreement to an interim coalition government and to ultimate total American withdrawal from Vietnam, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese would be willing to make significant concessions...

...It was said—and is still said—to be an exemplary war—an object lesson for the makers of "wars of national liberation," and a war designed to inspire worldwide confidence in America through a demonstration of fealty to our presumed commitments...

...Again, on Vietnamese television on September 19, Thieu dismissed the idea of a standstill cease-fire as "unrealistic," pledged never to cede "so much as a hamlet" to the Vietcong, and said he would make no further concessions at Paris...

...To get these negotiations going two things are required of the United States: our willingness to require Thieu and Ky to take their chances along with the other factions in South Vietnamese politics, and our willingness to commit ourselves to a phased but total American military withdrawal from Vietnam...

...They have also indicated that a transitional government need not necessarily include members of the National Liberation Front...

...As a young South Vietnamese army officer told an American reporter: "In thousands of years of our history we have seen the Chinese and the French and the Japanese come and we have forgotten them all...

...They have already indicated that they would not expect total American withdrawal prior to substantive negotiations but only a commitment to a definite schedule for withdrawal...

...Until and unless the Administration provides clear, specific evidence "The crucial issue of the war is the character of the government which rules in Saigon...

...American soldiers in the field have little confidence in the ability of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to take over the fighting...

...The President's speech of November 3 was suffused with associations of this kind, including a reference to "those great powers who have not yet abandoned their goals of world conquest...

...In my opinion we have already done it, but I also think we can undo it—not with glory, because there is no glory in a charnel house, and not with "honor" in the sense in which soldiers use that term...

...A war is supposed to be fought for purposes external to itself, for substantive political purposes, not just for the glory of winning it...

...I solemnly declare," he said at that time, "that there will be no coalition government, no peace cabinet, no transitional government, not even a, reconciliatory government...

...It should also be possible, in such a negotiation, to make arrangements for a general amnesty on both sides and for prevention of the "blood bath" which the Administration confi". . . the United States has been fighting a war without need or justification...

...In time we will forget the Americans, too...

...After all this killing and destruction, and unless we remain in permanent occupation of Vietnam, the eventual outcome will probably be the same that it would have been if Americans had never gone to Vietnam...

...Indeed the United States has no vital interest in whether South Vietnam is governed by Communists, non-Communists, or a coalition...

...If we could bring ourselves to deprive Saigon of its veto on American policy—as we could do without impairing either our own vital interests or, I daresay, the best interests of the South Vietnamese people—there would be no need either for the "precipitate" withdrawal which the President likes to talk about or for the condemnation of the Vietnamese people to prolonged war, which is the true meaning of "Vietnamization...

...They call it "Vietnamization...

...It would have been achieved under the only authentic nationalist leader in modern Vietnamese history, Ho Chi Minh, and we would probably be today on as good terms with a unified Vietnam as we are with Yugoslavia...

...to which the President promises to respond by re-escalation against all past evidence (and consistent, reliable intelligence predictions) that this would neither deter nor end such pressure...

...Conceding in principle that the world Communist movement is divided, and that North Vietnam is not merely a pawn of China, our policy makers nonetheless invoke these very specters in their efforts to justify our involvement in Vietnam...

...In his speech of November 3, President Nixon said that "we really have only two choices open to us if we want to end this war"—either "precipitate" withdrawal or, failing acceptance of our terms in the Paris peace talks, Vietnamization...

...As long as the Nixon Administration adheres to its present position that it will "discuss" but not "negotiate" a settlement without Saigon's approval, thereby giving Saigon a veto on our policy, Mr...

...Whether they did good or ill, they will only be a footnote to our history...

...Lacking either a reliable army or the support of their own people, the Saigon generals have only one solid base of power: their veto over American war policy...

...If it could not be so inspired, then the South Vietnamese government would not survive...

...The President's words, part of his November 3 speech, are a reasonable expression of the theory behind our war in Vietnam...

...He said that his government would never accept the existence "in any way" of a Communist party in South Vietnam...

...Our leaders may then suffer a loss of prestige but our country will have recovered its self-respect...

...The obstacle to such a negotiation is our continuing attachment to the Thieu-Ky government...

...He minced no words in stating his government's position upon his return from Midway last June...

...In the spring of 1968 he asserted that the war was "not for the freedom and independence of South Vietnam alone, but to make possible the conditions of a wider and durable peace...

...The exact terms of peace do not, therefore, matter very much from the standpoint of American interests, but the early restoration of peace matters enormously because every day that this war goes on the sickness of American society worsens...

...Rusk used to warn of a "world cut in two by Asian Communism...

...The crucial issue of the war is the character of the government which rules in Saigon...

...We need only put them on notice that these terms have become our war aims, that we hope they will join us in negotiating their realization, but that, if they are not, we shall nonetheless negotiate the conditions of American withdrawal, while they, in turn, will be at liberty to continue the war on their own, to negotiate for new alliances, or to come to their own terms with the Vietcong...

...He said that "North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States...

...But we can do it with dignity and we can do it with self-respect—the self-respect of human beings who have learned something about their own humanity and its terrible fallibilities...

...As for the Vietnamese, they are a nation of tough, resilient peasants who will make their own accommodations to reality...

...When its political purposes are recognized as unworthy, as they have been in Vietnam, it is rank immorality to press on for a costly, destructive, and probably unattainable victory...

...The President's own chief foreign policy adviser, [Henry] Kissinger, effectively challenged this proposition in an article written shortly before he went to work in the White House...

...If they had anything like the same influence in Vietnam that they have had in Washington, Thieu and Ky would have beaten the Vietcong long ago...

...One Green Beret captain, part of a twelve-man team which has been trying to shape up a South Vietnamese force in an outpost near the Cambodian border, commented to a reporter: "Let our glorious allies in on anything, and the enemy knows about it within an hour...

...When President Johnson used to declare that he would not be the first American President to lose a war, and when President Nixon warns, as he did on November 3, against "this first defeat in American history," they are not talking about the national interest but about the national ego and their own standings in history...

...A war is not a football game which you try to win for its own sake, or in order to maintain an unblemished record of victories...

...Assuming still that our national interest in Asia is strategic rather than ideological, it follows that the United States has no vital security interest in the preservation of South Vietnam as an independent, non-Communist state...

...Whether, and to what extent, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong are sincere in the concessions they say they are willing to make can only be ascertained in serious, substantive negotiations...

...My own premise, of course, is that our legitimate interest in Southeast Asia is not ideological but strategic, having to do not with the elimination of the Vietcong or of any other indigenous Communist movement but with the discouragement of overt Chinese military expansion...

...The critical question therefore remains: Are we going to allow Saigon to continue to exercise this veto or are we going to give them the simple choice of joining us in making a compromise peace or continuing the war on their own...

...For whatever their reasons—conviction, pride, or dogmatic anti-Communism—our policy makers have never been willing to recognize the Vietnamese conflict for that which virtually every expert and seasoned observer has long recognized it to be: a civil conflict in which Communism is and always has been secondary to the drive for national independence...

...Expanding on the exemplary war thesis, President Nixon expressed the opinion on November 3 that calling off our war in Vietnam "would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership not only in Asia but throughout the world...

...But we have done enough, having fought their war for more than four years at the cost of more than forty thousand American lives thus far...

...Looking back on the history of Vietnam since World War II, if we had not intervened in any way either to support the French or to create the Diem government, the nationalists would probably have achieved the independence of a unified Vietnam...

...dently predicts should the Vietcong ever gain power in South Vietnam...

...President Nixon said one thing in his recent speech with which I agree...

...If we did withdraw and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, with its one million well-equipped soldiers, could then be inspired to defend the Saigon government, it would survive...

...Early in his campaign for the Presidency he made reference to Vietnam as "the cork in the bottle of Chinese expansion in Asia...

...Like many theories, however, it does not tell us much about the practice...

...There is a third and better option than either of these: the negotiation of arrangements for a new interim government in South Vietnam, for elections conducted by the interim coalition regime with or without international supervision, and for complete American withdrawal...

...Let historians not record," declared the President, "that, when America was the most powerful nation in the world, we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism...

...The prevalent view among Southeast Asian specialists outside of government is that the Chinese challenge in South Asia is more political and cultural than military, that a strong independent Communist regime is a more effective barrier to Chinese power than a weak non-Communist regime, that the Hanoi government is nationalist and independent, and that, accordingly, once peace is restored—if ever it is—North Vietnam will serve as a barrier rather than as an avenue to Chinese expansion...

...Nixon has long subscribed to this theory of an exemplary war...

...The question, of course, is how...

...nor is it a matter of vital interest to the United States whether North and South Vietnam are united or divided...

...American intervention in Vietnam never has been rationalized primarily in terms of indigenous Vietnamese considerations...

...to the contrary, Vietnamization can only be taken as "heads I win, tails you lose," a strategy aimed at victory for the Thieu-Ky government...

...A group of GI's gathered around their radio at an outpost in Vietnam greeted President Nixon's glowing account of the progress of Vietnamization on November 3 with what one account describes as "loud, ironic laughter...

...We do not have to force such a settlement on the South Vietnamese government...

...Vietnam: the Crucial Issue by SENATOR J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT In his last major address on the war, President Nixon spoke of the "right of the people of South Vietnam to determine their own future" as the single American war aim which is not negotiable...

...They won't tell us exactly what it is, or exactly how it will work, or when it will be accomplished, but they insist that they have a plan...

...Wedded as they have been to the idea of Chinese Communism as a conspiracy for the conquest of Asia, if not of the world, our policy makers have been more than resourceful in disposing of facts that do not fit the cherished preconception...

...The Administration has a plan—so they tell us—for getting out of Vietnam...

...The President, I think, is mistaken...

...In addition, the North Vietnamese government is on record as being willing to accept a neutralist, independent South Vietnam which they would not seek forcibly to reunite with North Vietnam...

...Only Americans can do that...

...And in his speech of November 3 the President predicted that American withdrawal from Vietnam—our "defeat and humiliation," as he chose to put it—"would spark violence wherever our commitments help maintain the peace—in the Middle East, in Berlin, eventually even in the Western Hemisphere...

...Thieu will have every incentive for continued adherence to his present uncompromising stance...