No Peace, No Honor
Porter, D. Careth
No Peace, No Honor D. GARETH PORTER After a year of heavy and continuous fighting which has left the ceasefire provisions of the Paris Agreement a shambles, South Vietnam is now closer to...
...The PRG also claimed, in October, to have forced Saigon troops to retreat from a number of posts built since the ceasefire in My Tho and Kien Phong provinces...
...On top of all this, the Secretary of Defense has promised to ask Congress for authorization to intervene with air power in the event of a Communist offensive...
...While they claimed the remarkable feat of having captured the base just two minutes before the ceasefire deadline, no outside observer was there to verify the claim, and it is doubtful that they ever did gain full control of the base, since they were reported the following day to have retreated with heavy losses...
...ARVN troops moved into both the PRG zone and contested areas to build new permanent military outposts and thus try to establish control over the area, in violation of Article Two of the ceasefire protocol, which provides that there can be "no major redeployments or movements that would extend each party's area of control...
...bility of launching a new military offensive, than to the actual military actions of the two sides after the agreement went into effect...
...Instead, Saigon's offensive operations were noticeably stepped up...
...The agreement, if implemented, would have provided not only a legal framework for a political solution which deprives Thieu of his claim to be the sole and final arbiter of the nation's political future, but also the peaceful conditions under which the PRG could carry on a successful campaign of political struggle against Thieu while reconstructing its own economically shattered and demographically weakened zone in Vietnam...
...The PLAF then began to roll back some of Saigon's earlier expansion into the PRG zone...
...He has spent more than a year in South Vietnam and has written on Indochina for Commonweal, The New Republic, and other publications...
...This document, published by the U.S...
...For example, ARVN built new outposts all along Route Four between My Tho and Vinh Long, making that area one of the major battlegrounds throughout 1973...
...Despite the Kissinger-Tho communique of June 13, 1973, calling anew for the full implementation of the ceasefire and the political provisions of the Paris accord, reporters in Vietnam found that Saigon's commanders had received no ceasefire orders...
...As for the PLAF, the directive specified that when Saigon's forces attacked, it had to "fight back and eradicate the enemy," but that any military response had to contribute to the political objective of strengthening the Paris Agreement: "We are not opening a military campaign of attacks everywhere...
...This basic strategy, which was supported by more specific directives to military units to observe the ceasefire during the first sixty days, gave the Nixon Administration the opportunity to avert a military resolution of the conflict it had always claimed it wanted to gain...
...After two months during which the PLAF had deliberately maintained a low profile, foregoing the use of main force units in defending against Thieu's "nibbling operation," the Lao Dong Party issued a second directive that discussed the problems which had arisen since the agreement was signed and how to deal with them...
...Perhaps the most significant aspect of this offensive, however, was that Thieu ordered his troops to begin to move back into areas which had been lost during the 1972 offensive, when ARVN was forced to pull back from hundreds of posts around the country where it had been overextended...
...The Thieu government immediately seized on these PLAF counterattacks to move another step toward an open rupture and renunciation of the entire Agreement...
...Following President Nguyen Van Thieu's open break with the ceasefire agreement in January 1974, the only factor still limiting the fighting is that Communist forces have not yet been authorized to attack the Saigon zone or Saigon military units as such, but only to push back and punish specific offensive operations by ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam...
...For the fact is that the leaders of North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) had a positive interest in seeing it work...
...Pointing out that the situation in the South was "not yet stable" due to the "police operations and aggression and infringement" by the Saigon government, the directive nevertheless reaffirmed the strategy of "mobilization of the masses to stand up in large numbers and struggle" so as to "force the enemy to implement, step by step, the ceasefire agreement, even though he might be totally obstinate...
...Then, in a broadcast on November 8, Saigon Radio quoted a military spokesman as threatening to "launch operations deep into their sanctuaries" to punish alleged PRG violations of the ceasefire...
...On October 12, ARVN troops were forced to withdraw from Bach Ma outpost, which they had established on a previously unoccupied mountain top after the ceasefire in an effort to push beyond the ceasefire line in Thua Thien Province...
...A top secret directive, issued in January 1973 by the Lao Dong Party's Central Office for South Vietnam and captured by Saigon's forces soon after, made it clear that the Hanoi and PRG leaders wanted the ceasefire to work in order to pursue this strategy of political struggle...
...And in Quang Tri, ARVN Marines launched what was officially described as a "last minute" offensive against a key PLAF naval base at the mouth of the Cua Viet River...
...Article Seven permits only the provision of weaponry "of the same characteristics and properties" as those being replaced...
...The New York Times has reported $813 million in U.S...
...again raising the specter of a Communist offensive— now discounted by U.S...
...When pressed to clarify the statement, he said, "If they launch a big offensive—and small attacks around the country could also be considered a big offensive—the negotiations can break up...
...military aid being sent to Thieu in fiscal 1974, and Pentagon plans for $1 billion more thereafter to enlarge and modernize Saigon's forces...
...Disregarding Article Seven of the Agreement regulating "piece by piece" replacement of military equipment, the Pentagon has decided to supply Saigon's air force with F-5E aircraft, which are far more advanced than the F-5A's they now have...
...Directives went out at the beginning of October to local units to punish Saigon's offensive operations by attacking not only the units so engaged but their rear bases as well...
...Saigon has since claimed this to be another major Communist violation of the ceasefire...
...The Saigon government also tried to grab as many villages as it could following the ceasefire deadline...
...The People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) were not to attempt to improve their military or territorial position but to "firmly maintain our new strategic deployment by protecting our base areas and liberated areas, protecting our party, administration and people, [and remaining] ready to take the initiative in any circumstances to smash the enemy's plot to resume hostilities...
...The directives added, however, according to U.S...
...Finally, on November 4, the PLAF overran the newly built ARVN bases in Quang Due as well as two of the three pre-ceasefire bases in the province, one of which was the command post for ARVhFs military op- ^ erations there...
...Some 8,000 "civilian" advisers and technicians have been provided to assist Thieu's military and police for three to five more years...
...As translated by the U.S...
...And on January 4 of this year, Thieu...
...But it would be naive to assume that the present state of affairs can persist indefinitely...
...Thieu's open defiance of the Paris Agreement clearly reflects the fact that he has been given a virtually free hand by the Nixon Administration...
...Saigon's complete military and economic dependence on Washington gives the United States the key to peace in South Vietnam...
...Moreover, the press has consistently given more prominence in covering the issue of the ceasefire to American charges of North Vietnamese infiltration and reminders of Communist capaD. Gareth Porter is a research associate of Cornell University's Project on the International Relations of East Asia...
...Whether or not this reckless gamble results in the renewal of American military involvement, for which Thieu so fervently hopes, the main victims of the Kissinger-Nixon-Thieu policy are once again the Vietnamese people, who are being cheated of the peace they were promised a year ago and instead subjected to savage and unending war...
...Mission, it called on cadres in the South to mobilize the people for political struggle in order to "create basic conditions to guarantee the implementation of the agreement, maintain peace, and enable the revolution to continue its march forward...
...But that would have meant making it clear to Thieu that the United States would not tolerate blatant violations of the ceasefire by Saigon's forces...
...On December 28, Thieu said that he wondered "whether or not we should continue to be at the bargaining tables...
...One American official told The Washington Post that about 350 hamlets had been seized by the PRG before the deadline and that it took Saigon about three weeks to recapture all of those hamlets as well as some controlled by the PRG for much longer periods...
...And the Nixon Administration was apparently not prepared to put any such limitations on Thieu...
...In addition to replacing everything Thieu's forces have used up on the battlefield, the Administration seems bent on increasing his military strength...
...we only attack to extinguish plots of destruction and obstruction, to force the enemy to implement the ceasefire and the Agreement and not to prolong the war or to return to the war of the past...
...Other such operations in the Mekong Delta as well as on the Central Coast, in places where Saigon had lost ground in 1972, were the subject of many PRG demands for investigations by the International Control Commission...
...The task of analyzing the failure of the Paris Agreement to restore peace and assessing the responsibility for that failure has generally been avoided by the media, which prefer not to become involved in the politically sensitive issue of "blame" for the disintegration of the ceasefire...
...In nearby Kien Hoa province, ARVN troops constructed outposts in a well-established Communist base area near Giong Trom...
...intelligence analysts, that the purpose of such counterattacks was still limited to punishing Saigon's ceasefire violations and that they must not cause the breakdown of the ceasefire itself...
...Declaring that the "Third Indochina War" had begun, Saigon ordered fifty air force planes to bomb civilian targets in Loc Ninh, the only PRG town which has direct communications with Saigon via the twice-weekly flights under the auspices of the Joint Military Commission...
...When it signed the Paris Agreement, therefore, Hanoi embarked on a new phase of its revolutionary strategy in the South: slowly to rebuild its own revolutionary forces while bringing about a weakening of Thieu's hold on the population through political means...
...Instead, when the ceasefire deadline arrived, the Administration continued to arm Thieu as he ordered his forces to go on the offensive all across the country...
...Moreover, those PRG villages which could not be entered on the ground were subjected to air and artillery attacks wherever they were in range of ARVN bases or the South Vietnamese air force...
...No Peace, No Honor D. GARETH PORTER After a year of heavy and continuous fighting which has left the ceasefire provisions of the Paris Agreement a shambles, South Vietnam is now closer to all-out warfare than at any time since the agreement was signed a year ago...
...In one of the most significant offensives, two reg sive operations into PLAF base areas, not simply to expand Saigon's areas of control but to attack PLAF main force units, presumably in order to provoke Communist attacks in response...
...For their part, the Hanoi and PRG leaders had decided by the beginning of October that they had to push back harder in response to Saigon's military pressures against PRG territory, which had been reduced by then by as much as five to ten per cent of its original area at the time of the Agreement...
...In order to regain control of the highways, Thieu mobilized a number of infantry regiments to smash through the PRG roadblocks and clear opposing forces from strategic hills along the roads—operations which in some cases went on for more than two weeks...
...The fighting must be brought to a halt or it will inevitably reach the 1972 level of hostilities and lead to demands by the Thieu government, and its sponsors in Washington, for the use of American airpower to save Saigon from defeat...
...The Paris Agreement could have provided a peaceful political process for resolving the conflict if Washington had seen it as in its interest to help make it effective...
...As the U.S...
...Mission in September and, like the earlier directive, ignored by the American press, revealed even more clearly how the PRG's military policy was related to its long-term revolutionary strategy...
...At the end of September, three battalions of Regional Forces and two of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division were ordered to assault a long-standing PLAF base area in Tay Ninh Province, where they were ambushed and had to retreat with heavy losses, as ARVN soldiers told reporters in Tay Ninh after the battle...
...they were also the cause of much of the fighting...
...How long this limitation will remain in effect, given the absence of any prospect for a stand-still ceasefire, depends on a number of factors difficult for outsiders to assess...
...The Loc Ninh bombing, and the two statements which came on its heels, were clear signals that the Saigon government wanted to find a pretext for breaking off the negotiations artd that they were ready to renounce any limitation on their military activities...
...Two days later, the PLAF overran the last ARVN military outposts in Quang Due and launched a rocket attack against Bien Hoa air base, the source of the heavy bombing attacks on PRG villages and military units in the Third Military Zone...
...Defense Attache's Office admitted to Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigators in April 1973, Saigon had "initiated several operations designed to expand areas of control," to which the PRG had "reacted strongly...
...They anticipated later statements by Thieu to the same effect...
...The Saigon spokesman charged, however, that a Communist regiment had attacked two ARVN battalions at their base, and the Thieu government continues to cite this battle as a major Communist violation of the ceasefire...
...But while Secretary of State Kissinger insists that Hanoi's suppliers restrain the Communist forces, the United States is giving Thieu the green light to wage unlimited war against the PRG...
...intelligence—ordered his troops to carry out operations "in the areas where their army is now stationed" and declared, "As far as the armed forces are concerned, I can tell you the war has restarted...
...What most of the American public has not been told is that the primary responsibility for the absence of a ceasefire, as well as for the present level of fighting, must rest squarely on the Saigon government and the Nixon Administration, which, by its silence on Saigon's actions and by its threats of reintervention, has encouraged Thieu to stay on the offensive...
...On the Central Coast, at Sa Huynh, Quang Ngai Province, where the PRG had captured a potential seaport the night before the ceasefire deadline, Saigon launched a three-week offensive on January 28, 1973, to retake the area...
...And on the same day, the Saigon press spokesman said his government's policy was to respect the Agreement "as long as its good will allows...
Vol. 38 • March 1974 • No. 3
