Vietnam: A Reconsideration

Last spring, the CRIMSON asked that American troops be withdrawn from Vietnam. We felt that a National Liberation Front government was the only possible outcome of the situation in Vietnam. We doubted that leaving Vietnam would seriously affect America's international position. And we believer that only America's intransigence and unwillingness to negotiate was prolonging the war.

These position no longer seem tenable. And the suggestion that the Unites States pull its troops out of Vietnam seems to us now to be irrelevant.

An American withdrawal would now be more than an international embarrassment. The U.S. has repeated its commitment too often, in words too strong, for any of its promises to be considered genuine if it reneges on this one. Prince Sihanouk said two weeks ago that if the U.S. withdraws from Vietnam "Cambodia will be a ripe fruit, which the Communists will be able to savor without having to take the trouble to pick it from the tree as the "Khmer Reds' will cause it to fall straight into their laps."

It seems certain that U.S. withdrawal or a Communist victory could lead only to a unified Communist government under Ho Chi Minh. For if the Viet Cong were once isolated peasant revolutionaries, they now seem to be a substantial army controlled by Hanoi. Their weapons and communication equipment are modern. Both government and newspaper reports claim that these supplies are now being shipped from the North. And it is difficult to believe that the North Vietnamese would commit two army divisions now fighting in the South to a command it does not control.

We would still be unwilling to support the war if we felt that a Vietnamese Communist government could maintain any semblance of independence. But we do not see how a Vietnamese Communist government could stay free of a declaredly expansionist China. Could it hope to protect the "rice bowl" of South Vietnam against a country which recently had to spend millions of dollars buying "Canadian wheat? China has marched it army to the borders of a country as well-befriended as India. Sihanouk, whose country has no border with China, fears its domination. Marshal Lin Pao's recent manifesto unabashedly admits China's designs on the underdeveloped world. Could a Communist Vietnam be anything but a Chinese satellite, under a government far more repressive than that of any Minh, or Kahn, or Ky?

Obviously any government is preferable to a state of perpetual war. But we do not believe that the Johnson administration is responsible for the continuation of the war. The President has repeatedly said that the United States will negotiate with any party at any time.

But Hanoi has not accept. When 17 nonaligned nations called on both sides to negotiate without preconditions, the U.S. agreed. When India proposed a cessation of hostilities and the policing of boundaries by an Afro-Asian force, the U.S. expressed interest and began discussions with the Indian government. Both these proposals plus those of the secretary general of the United Nations, five African heads of state, two left-wing British MP's, and the Canadian delegate to the International Control Commission, among others, have been heard and rejected in Hanoi and Peking. Marshal Tito and the other nonaligned chiefs of state who asked negotiations were denounced as "monsters and freaks" by China. India was accused of betraying the anti-imperialist struggle. When Secretary-General U Thant wanted to visit Peking, he was told "that the Vietnam situation had nothing to do with the U.N." Hanoi added that "any approach tending to insert U.N. intervention in the Vietnam situation is...inappropriate."

But although the North Vietnamese refused all these offers of Mediation, their occasional proposals of conditions for negotiations indicate that the day for talks may not be far off. We think the Johnson administration could do a good deal more to has ten that time.

To begin with, the administration should remember the nature of the war it is fighting. This is a holding action, not a search for an ephemeral "victory." Military measures appropriate to a war of conquest ought to be reconsidered when a country is fighting toward a conference table.

Specifically, eight months of bombing North Vietnam have chiefly been intended to prove to Hanoi that we are not about to be driven out of South Vietnam and that the Communists can hope for no better than a negotiates peace. Surely the point has been made by now. Senator Fulbright has suggested that the daily bomb runs temporarily be ended in order to persuade the North Vietnamese to negotiate. This offers the United States an escape from continued bombing which may be a serious strategic and psychological error.

Further, now that the U.S. is in a somewhat better position militarily, pressure is being put on the President to expand the war on the ground still further, to press our advantage, to try to reconquer more and more of Vietnam. Any expansion of the war before all efforts at negotiation have failed offers very little in return for more deaths and a greater danger of all-out war.

Finally, the President has made it clear that the National Liberation Front can have its views represented at any peace negotiations. We see no reason why he should not say specifically that the NLF will be welcome as participants in a conference.

Such negotiation can reach a conclusion acceptable to both sides. Immediate elections in a country overrun by two armies seem out of the question, but a neutral coalition government with haps policed by the U.N., does not. Such a solution restored Laos to a degree of stability, after stability seemed impossible. It could certainly bring order to South Vietnam and permit the withdrawal of foreign troops.

As important as the kind of government that emerges in Vietnam will be the war's effect on American foreign policy. We hope the government never draws form its very limited military success the lesson that military intervention must be used to halt revolutions everywhere. Again and again in the next few years, the United States will see governments threatened by revolution, and again and again the cry will go up: "Remember Vietnam -- Intervene."

Perhaps a better lesson is that a fraction of the $2 billion in aid now being offered to Vietnam, a handful of the gestures of reform now being made, would have sufficed several years ago to turn this revolution into something very different.

And when revolutions do break out, we hope the U.S. will understand that it is not always threatened and that many should be welcomed instead of opposed. The origins of the war in Vietnam are now being shrouded in double-talk, but it appears certain that it had its beginnings in a localized rebellion against the government. One long, horrible war should persuade the United States that revolution properly understood is not a threat to American interests, but that a revolution mishandled may be so.