Widening Down the War

...Pleasant provincial villages such as Snoul and Kompong Cham,- scenes of some of the worst fighting, have been seared and flattened...

...He had, at the same time, renewed his ties with the United States and the western bloc...

...There is, in my opinion, one overriding truth which has not been effectively communicated to the three American Presidents who have involved us in the Indochinese struggle...

...It might put less emphasis on Tchepone and Phnompenh and more on Paris, as the appropriate theater for ending the conflict and withdrawing our troops...

...This is the frame of reference in which basic American strategy is formulated in Vietnam...

...It may well be that the policy of widening down the war will ultimately demonstrate to this Administration that the Saigon government's requirements for time-buying may indeed be limitless...

...In looking back at the events in Indochina last year there appears an alternate course of action that the United States might have followed had the Administration wished to avoid an expanded war...

...He said his views were uniformly shared by all ranking officials in the American military and diplomatic missions...

...If Washington were also to regard the NLF and Hanoi as something other than outside hoodlums seeking to muscle their way into a peace and freedom-loving slice of American dominion, there might be a road to peace with honor in Paris...

...Nixon told the nation, was a bullet that would not be fired at an American boy...

...Most population centers in South Vietnam are generously endowed with sandbags and barbed wire as well as contingents of troops...

...There was one conspicuous blind spot in the paper blizzard—the proportion of the "enemy's" total supplies actually seized during the incursions...

...Every bullet captured during the sweeps of the Cambodian sanctuaries, Mr...

...It is all too easy for an American military planner to think of the entire Indochinese land mass as one geo-military configuration of jungle, paddy, and seacoast...

...The "widening down" strategy is based, in my opinion, on the same misleading premises that have determined the course of the American military occupation of South Vietnam...

...LAURENCE STERN, now editor of the "Style" news feature section of The Washington Post, was a correspondent in Indochina for the Post last year...

...We have established . . . a disinformation system which tends to mislead Presidents and Cabinet officers as well as newspaper readers...

...Late last summer one of the top American military officials in Saigon told me in unequivocal terms that he opposed any military expeditions into the Laotian panhandle by South Vietnamese troops...

...If the Cambodian operation was as successful in "buying time" as officials claimed, then a reasonable demurrer might be entered to the need for a second incursion—the one into Laos—to buy more time...

...The claims were made and duly reported...

...It was countryside in which B-52s and helicopter gunships and tanks seemed to violate grossly the scale of things...

...generals and civilian advisers who are still yoked to the goal of forcibly subduing the Vietnamese nationalist-Communist movement south of the Seventeenth Parallel, the niceties of political boundaries seem of little consequence...

...It is the policy that we have recently pursued in Laos to support the fragile coalition government of Prince Souvanna Phouma from the recurrent threat of rightist coups...

...If the objective of American policy last year had been to stabilize and de-escalate the Indochina conflict, then Sihanouk was as crucial a figure as Souvanna in the overall balance...

...Along with many other correspondents, I had grown familiar with the lovely Cambodian countryside during April, 1970, in the initial hostilities between Vietnamese Communist guerrilla fighters and a rag-tag, untrained Cambodian militia...

...Widening Down the War by LAURENCE STERN Tt is now a full year since the Nixon Administration inaugurated the policy that one highly-placed Washington official adroitly describes as the "widening down" of the war in Indochina...

...At the time he was deposed, Sihanouk was engaged in the daring diplomatic feat of trying to win Russian and Chinese support for a reduction of the North Vietnamese military presence in his country...

...Snoul is Cambodia's offering of a city that had to be destroyed to be saved...

...Cambodia's economy, a marginal mix based on rubber, rice, and tourism, has been devastated, and the country is a highly dependent client of U.S...

...it is surprising that President Nixon did not avoid this unhappy formulation...

...To the U.S...

...The military had wanted to go into the Cambodian sanctuary for years, and it is neither far-fetched nor tortuous to assume that when Sihanouk was overthrown the green light went on throughout the Administration for the cross-border strikes...

...We have established, in effect, a disinformation system which tends to mislead Presidents and Cabinet officers as well as newspaper readers...

...But their meaning—their impact on the conduct of the war—was not discernible at the time and is still not...

...Before the Cambodian operations there had been a general lull in the fighting in South Vietnam...

...The widening-down strategy was launched...

...There were towns where I had stopped for a lukewarm beer, or soft drink, or bowl of Chinese soup on the way to the front, where I would be passed by smiling Cambodian soldiers on their way to the front in Pepsi-cola trucks and school buses...

...In the mental map carried around by many American officials the "pacified" areas are colored white and the enemy-held land is black...

...The prevailing assumption that explains the Administration's present behavior in Vietnam is that a stable regime can be established in Saigon which can prevent Vietnamese Communism from spreading south of the Seventeenth Parallel...

...If the Administration were to accept the fact that there is little hope for long-term survival of an unpopular garrison state run by former colonial French officers, it might act quite differently from the way it is now behaving...

...troops were imperiled by any new major invasion plans of the Communists, there was no intimation of it from the innumerable military briefers and embassy officials responsible for war-monitoring...

...Experience has taught us that when the military needs a rationale for a new major operation, military spokesmen have no difficulty in supplying it...

...The light - at - the - end - of - the - tunnel image was first prominently applied to Vietnam by former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara nearly eight years ago...

...Govenment careers, appropriations, programs, bureaucratic fiefdoms, and even the outcome of elections hinge on the overall results of this multi-billion dollar enterprise...

...There were torrents of daily statistics that tended to portray the war in terms of individual and crew-served weapons, bicycles, gallons of gas, and tons of rice captured in Communist hideouts...

...It is that the mandarins and generals we have chosen to lead South Vietnam do not enjoy mass support among the Vietnamese people—and that if anyone holds the franchise for the powerful nationalist movement in that country it is the leadership in Hanoi and the National Liberation Front in the south...

...Widening down means extending the national frontiers of American and South Vietnamese military engagement in an effort to speed the withdrawal of American forces from South Vietnam...

...The name of the game is to hit the enemy with everything we've got...

...Correspondents and photographers in droves were ferried by helicopter to captured cache sites in jungle redoubts...

...It is perhaps a more plausible theory that they are misinformed, just as the rest of us mortals are misinformed by the huge disinformation machine that has been created...

...Depending on which military briefer or Administration official was speaking at the time, the two incursions, first in Cambodia and then in Laos, set back Communist offensive plans six months, eight months, or twelve months...

...air, sea, and ground forces cannot subdue a guerrilla army of 240,000, then it does not take a fancy computer to tell you that something is amiss in that government...

...Unlike the recent Cambodian expedition into Laos, the Cambodian incursion was accompanied by maximum feasible public relations at the daily briefings and in the field...

...He was, in short, trying to maintain Cambodia's immunity from the war by political and diplomatic maneuver rather than by sliding over the brink of full-scale military involvement, the course his successors chose...

...These are the accoutrements of what—in the Or-wellian language of the war—is called "pacification" but is really—in the classic sense—military occupation...

...Whenever the Laotian rightist generals begin to look covetously at the Souvanna government, the United States lets it be known in Vientiane that Souvanna has the total support and confidence of Washington and the U.S...

...It now appears that the Laotian operation has turned into a funeral ceremony—at least in the first military region where the North Vietnamese demonstrated great strength...

...Had the United States let the word pass quietly to Lon Nol and Sirik Matak that it looked with disfavor upon the removal of Sihanouk, the past year's history in Indochina might have taken a different turn...

...ARVN forces, he insisted, had enough to do in South Vietnam without venturing into the certain dangers of the Laotian panhandle where the enemy was concentrated in large unit strength in a terrain that defied aerial or ground attack...

...So it would seem that we are also engaged in "buying time" for the Cambodian Government of Salvation...

...An American brigadier general exultantly described the Cambodian expedition to me as a "graduation ceremony for Vietnamization...

...We have established programs and institutions for the government in Saigon that were designed to help it maintain control over the population of the country...

...Since February 8 this same military source has been reported to have endorsed the ARVN operations in Laos even though the very debacle that he foresaw last year has befallen the South Vietnamese soldiers who were routed by waiting North Vietnamese units...

...He was in communion with all parties to the conflict...

...This is why we have bequeathed to the Thieu administration the largest Asian army outside of China...

...It is no surprise that the accent is on the positive and that bad news gets filtered out of the communication pipeline...

...Embassy...

...North Vietnamese forces have spread across the northern half of Cambodia from Vietnam to beyond the ancient Khmer capital of Siem Reap, where the Communists are billeting their forces among the great funerary temples of Angkor...

...If the withdrawing U.S...

...There were dispatches about the "New Optimism" which was taking hold in the Delta and other regions where the level of conflict had dwindled to quiet somnolence...

...And since our perceptions of Vietnamese reality have so often been wrong it might be reasonable to assume that there is something awry in the conventional way of viewing the war...

...I decline to believe that our Presidents are inveterate liars...

...President Nixon spoke recently on national television about the light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam even as the remnants of the much-touted ARVN First Division were scrambling for helicopter skids to get away from the punishing North Vietnamese gunfire along Route 9 in Laos...

...He was earnestly trying to pressure the North Vietnamese to remove the 40,000 or more troops that were camped along Cambodia's eastern borders...

...Throughout the war there has been a great and recurrent disparity between what was happening on the battlefields and in the hamlets, on the one hand, and the official Washington version of those events, on the other...

...A year after the Cambodian expedition the balance sheet on that operation is not overwhelmingly impressive...

...In Cambodia, last year, despite President Nixon's initial insistence that he acted solely in the interests of Viet-namization, an ancillary American purpose quickly developed: the salvation of the Lon Nol-Sirik Matak administration in Cambodia's capital, Phnompenh...

...In Cambodia in May, 1970, and then in Southern Laos February 8 of this year the President pursued the strategy of widening down the war...

...High level politicians in Saigon were speaking as though the war were already over...

...When a government with 1.5 million men under arms supported by U.S...

...We have also set up information systems with which to report the successes of this effort to Washington, to the Congress, and to the American public...

...military and economic assistance programs...

...There is the additional truth that Americans are no better loved in South Vietnam than preceding legions of foreign occupiers, starting with the Chinese and the Mongols...

...The essential goals of both expeditionary campaigns, as announced in Washington, were roughly the same: to interdict the flow of North Vietnamese Communist troops, supplies, and weapons into South Vietnam, thereby "buying time" for the Thieu government and for the withdrawing Americans...

...In justifying the "incursions" into Cambodia and Laos, the President based his case on the political imperative of protecting American lives...

...This has also been a principal objective of our B-52 bombing program and defoliation activities along the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos and South Vietnam...

...Laos is at least one country where we had learned a lesson from the bad old days of coups and countercoups cooked up by Central Intelligence Agency operatives...

...The irony of this is that under the rule of that acrobatic neutralist, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia did not seem to require these bequests of American-supplied time or weapons or manpower...