Tell Saigon Where To Go

It is nearly three weeks since the North Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Nguyen Duy Trinh, announced that his nation "will" enter peace discussions when the United States ends its air raids and naval bombardment north of the 17th parallel. Trinh's assurance--the first Hanoi has ever given publicly--stirred the sudden and exhilarating hope that a major obstacle on the road to peace had been swept away. Only three months previously, President Johnson appeared to mute his earlier--and ill-advised--demand that the North Vietnamese de-escalate their military activities in exchange for the bombing halt required to initiate talks. In a September 30 speech at San Antonio, Johnson said he only "assumed" the North Vietnamese would not "take advantage" of a respite from the bombing. This statement was more concilitory than anything since his promise to Ho Chi Minh nearly a year ago that the U.S. would talk peace anywhere on the face of the earth.

But if, to use General Westmoreland's phrase, there was "light at the end of the tunnel" a few weeks ago, recent events have made the path to peace as tortuous as ever. The State Department's leading exponent of a "hard line" in Asia. Assistant Secretary William P. Bundy, said Hanoi's firm offer was little more than a dangerous propaganda device full of bad intentions. Bundy seemed to feel that Trinh's statement was like an LSD sugar cube--if we grabbed at it, we might blow our cool for good. Bundy's less outspoken boss, Dean Rusk, was not as upset by Hanoi's offer. He said he thought Trinh's speech represented a "new formulation," but dumped his usual dose of verbal sewage water on hopes for peace.

It is pretty clear--from Rusk's puzzlement in front of the press--that Trinh's speech came as a shock to official Washington. American officials had come in the last month or so of 1967 to believe that the best chances of peace lay in the opening of talks between the Saigon government and the Vietcong. As President Johnson hinted on TV just before Christmas, the war was being fought over South Vietnam and the opposing internal forces were in the best position to end it.

Actually, Johnson's statement struck at the source of the current impasse over negotiations. The President implied--probably unconsciously--that whether talks include Washington and Hanoi, or just the N.L.F. and Saigon officials, some sort of accommodation will have to be made for that large part of the South Vietnamese population that loathes America and its right-wing puppets in Saigon.

No American official has ever said this explicitly, but the mere hint of compromise with the V.C. or Hanoi has provoked several outbursts of indignation from President Thieu. During the past few weeks, he has assured his subjects--and us--that he will never permit the Vietcong to join a coalition government in Saigon. Nor will he ever talk to the Vietcong. A halt of the bombing is out of the question. In other words, the Saigon government thinks that all the feasible means to end the war are nonsensical. Sadly, each of Thieu's brash remarks inevitably draws the American response that the little leader has nothing to worry about.

Obviously, the United States will have to change its attitude toward the Saigon regime before peace talks can even begin, much less mean anything. This will be a difficult political task for Lyndon Johnson. In the past year, U.S. officials showered such praise on the Saigon government's elections and so fervently coddled the hawkish victors that any turnabout now would look like a jarring change.

But this is precisely what is required. Washington should tell Saigon what virtually every sane person knows--namely that the task of destroying the Vietcong insurgency is a Sisyphean one. The U.S. should then, of course, inform Thieu that she intends to pursue all peace feelers in the hope of ending her prohibitively costly involvement in Vietnam.

In short, America must quickly change her war aims. Her leaders must decide that an inefficient, corrupt, fanatically anti-Communist government in Saigon for all eternity is not a valid aim of national policy. Once this is done--and Thieu's regime is appraised at something less than $25 billion annually--the problems of peace-making, phasing-out, and neutralization will get the attention they deserve in Washington. The U.S. government should find that the achievement of these goals requires no more ingenuity than the deployment of troops outside the Pentagon, the development of antipersonnel weapons, and the termination of trips to Europe.