Back to Credibility Gap

...At the same time, the President must be confronting the increasingly obvious fact that "Vietnamization" will not do the trick...

...Americans desperately want to believe that the President is "winding down" the war, but there are limits to credulity...

...Words that once had some semblance of meaning lie torn and bleeding on the battlefield, like so many hapless Vietnamese caught up in the devastation of a "free-fire zone...

...Ambassador David K. E. Bruce, the chief U.S...

...Trying to define the reality behind the rhetoric is no small task...

...The high hopes for a Paris agreement that Mr...

...military command as saying that "protective reaction is the inherent right of self-defense," and that American planes would henceforth be free antiaircraft positions that were merely tracking the planes on their radar screens...

...At the same time, the Administration has significantly broadened its definition of "protective reaction...

...Thus the Administration, in the arrogance of its power, has unilaterally established a basis for resuming wholesale air warfare against North Vietnam, on the flimsiest of pretexts...

...Yet that same policy, cosmeticized by limited troop withdrawals, a reduced rate of American casualties, and the catchword "Vietnamization," remains in effect and is widely regarded as a program for "winding down" the war...

...Nixon that his effort to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese is less than an unqualified success...

...No evidence to support the existence of such an "understanding" has been produced, and Senators Fulbright and Mike Mansfield, as well as former officials of the Johnson Administration, have expressed doubts that it exists...

...While setting the stage for an expanded air war, the Administration has all but written off the prospects for negotiating a peace settlement in Paris...

...But the Administration's claim gives it an open-ended pretext to mount "protective reaction" strikes at any time—and to turn these attacks, as it did in November, into full-scale assaults on North Vietnamese installations...

...Nixon's predecessors learned, the level of lying must be escalated with each new escalation of the war...

...He can even unleash South Vietnamese units to invade parts of the North...

...The President contrived still another "understanding" at his news conference December 10 when he warned that if the North Vietnamese "threaten our remaining forces, if they thereby develop a capacity and proceed possibly to use that capacity to increase the level of fighting in South Vietnam, then I will order the bombing of military sites in North Vietnam, the passes that lead from North Vietnam into South Vietnam, the military complexes, the military supply lines" (emphasis added...

...Back to Credibility Gap When the complete unexpurgatecf history of America's miserable military adventure in Indochina is finally compiled, it may turn out that the events of last November 20 and 21 marked the beginning of a new, sordid chapter...

...Nixon voiced in his October 7 speech, and that Administration spokesmen continued to leak to the press until the November elections, are now completely discounted...

...That "certain problem of credibility" which Secretary Laird observed in November is bound to persist, and to grow, until the last vestige of American military intervention is withdrawn from Asia...

...Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who pro-t fessed October 9 to be "very hopefuP' about the possibility of negotiating a cease-fire, declared less than two months later that "the fact of the matter is that no progress has been made in Paris—it is as simple as that...

...Laird's explanation that he did not tell the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations about the rocket attacks in the vicinity of Hanoi because "I only answer questions that are asked...

...According to press reports, his own prized consultant on Vietnam, British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, recently advised Mr...

...One count might deal with the Orwellian crime of newspeak and specify, as an example, Defense Secretary Laird's reference to an attack by 250 U.S...

...As Senator J. W. Fulbright recently observed, "They're following the same tactics, the same procedure, that the Johnson Administration did...

...Quoting "high Administration officials," The New York Times reported on December 1 that there is "a new policy of striking North Vietnamese missile sites along the Laotian border when they threaten American planes operating over Laos...

...One of these signs was the Administration's insistence that the North Vietnamese entered into an "understanding" in October, 1968, that American reconnaissance flights would continue after the bombing of the Nprth was halted...

...From the time of President Kennedy's first decision to send American "advisers" into South Vietnam, the war has been packaged and purveyed to the American people in layer upon layer of deceptive wrapping...

...President Johnson's 1964 campaign pledge not to send American boys to do what Asian boys ought to do for themselves, the fraudulent circumstances of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the incessant flow of "success statistics" from the Johnson White House were all of a piece with the latest Nixon flim-flammery...

...This, at least, is a likelihood that emerges when one attempts to pierce the pea soup fog of obfuscating official rhetoric about the massive bombing strikes against North Vietnam and the abortive raid on the abandoned war prisoner camp at Sontay...

...If there is any disposition on the President's part to come to terms with the realities of Vietnam and accept a compromise political settlement, he has carefully hidden it from view...

...The danger—and, we fear, the likelihood— is that the President will, in sheer desperation, escalate the war again, as he did in Cambodia last May and in the aerial attacks in November...

...President Johnson left office two years ago because his Vietnam policy was discredited to the point of utter bankruptcy...

...This count could also encompass Mr...

...Finally, the lesser charge of absurd understatement—a misdemeanor, perhaps— might be lodged against the Defense Secretary for acknowledging that the Administration was confronted with "a certain problem of credibility" in connection with the Sontay rescue mission...

...If such a court existed, the President, his Secretary of Defense, and their official spokesmen would surely be in the dock to account for their public statements about the November forays...

...Nixon gives no sign of having abandoned that elusive goal, or of having rid himself of the obsessive fear that the United States will be "humiliated" in Vietnam— as if this nation's total involvement in the war had not been a humiliation from the very beginning...

...It's like football, you run a play and if it fails you try again," the President told one of the wounded soldiers who were his guests at the White House on Thanksgiving Day (as hastily recruited stand-ins for the prisoners of war who were to have been freed at Sontay...

...Laird's complaint that the North Vietnamese had attacked an "unarmed reconnaissance plane" which, as it turned out, was escorted by fully armed American aircraft...

...On the same day, reports from Saigon quoted the U.S...

...like a Prizefighter9 "It was like a prizefighter who brings his girl home, blacks both her eyes and breaks both her arms and says, 'That's for nothing, now be careful.' That was the purpose of the raid...

...A second count might address itself to the simple inversion of truth, citing such instances as Mr...

...What makes the Nixon effort noteworthy is its apparent success in pulling the wool over the public's eyes...

...Also in this category, of course, would be the Secretary's initial denial that American planes had attacked targets above the nineteenth parallel in North Vietnam...

...Unfortunately, neither national nor international law provides for a tribunal where officials may be brought to book for unspeakable offenses against the mother tongue...

...Not the least of the war crimes committed by the United States in the pursuit of its "objectives" in Southeast Asia are the barbarous atrocities inflicted on the English language, and, thereby, on the truth itself...

...As Mr...

...Laird's description of the Sontay raid as a "success" and President Nixon's comment that it was "one of the best raids that was ever made...

...What all this amounts to, we suspect, is a belated realization by the Administration that the United States will not obtain in Paris what it has failed to win by force of arms in Indochina— a "victory...

...The problem of credibility obviously did not arise for the first time with the November raids or, for that matter, with the Nixon Administration...

...Navy and Air Force fighterbombers as "limited duration, reinforced protective reaction air strikes against missiles and anti-aircraft gun sites and related facilities...

...Earlier the CIA had given the White House a report that literally thousands of Vietcong had infiltrated the Saigon government's police, military, and intelligence services, a revelation which taken together with the Thompson findings demonstrates that the Nixon "Vietnamization" policy is built on quicksand...

...Stanley Karnow, the Asian expert on the staff of The Washington Post, wrote recently that "among other methods of reprisal" available to President Nixon, "he can bomb Hanoi, mine the Haiphong harbor, and destroy the Red River dikes, which would devastate North Vietnam's most populated areas...

...All but lost in the confused and contradictory official statements about the November aerial attacks, in the Hollywood- style propaganda campaign for the Sontay mission, and in the Administration's drive to "go public"—as Secretary Laird put it—on the prisonerof- war issue, were ominous signs that the groundwork is being laid for stepping up the war rather than winding it down...

...A third offense charged might be devious evasion, specifying Mr...

...negotiator in Paris, now insists that "there have never been any true negotiations" with the other side, and that the talks merely provide the Communists with "a propaganda field day...

...SENATOR GEORGE D . AIKEN, Republican of Vermont, describing the Administration's rationale for the unsuccessful raid on the prisoner-ofwar camp at Sontay...