Honor

An anniversary passed almost unnoticed last week.

One year ago January 23, the United states initialed the peace agreement which marked the end of over a decade of American war in Vietnam. In a televised speech, President Nixon said the agreement represented a victory for "peace with honor."

"Peace" obviously referred to the end of fighting, "honor" for an agreement which did not "abandon our allies," the South Vietnamese regime of Nguyen Van Thieu. But in the year since Nixon's announcement, it has become clear that the two words are wholly incompatible with reference to Vietnam.

There may be Nixon's kind of honor in Vietnam--Thieu's regime shows few sings of disappearing--but there is no peace in Vietnam. Ngo Vinh Long '64, who works at Harvard's Vietnamese Studies Project, has carefully monitored the progress of peace, and he reports that war continues steadily.

Long estimates that Saigon's air force has flown 15,000 bombing and reconnaisance missions, its army has carried out some 35,000 military operations, and its police have executed about 200,000 "pacification" operations--all in the year since the peace agreements were signed.

The steady rumblings of war have grown louder in recent weeks, Long reports. On January 4, Thieu explicitly directed his troops to attack territory assigned by the agreements to the National Liberation Front--an explicit violation of those agreements. Bombing raids against NLF held areas have also increased.

Thieu's objectives are simple: by keeping the war simmering and at times flaring up, he prevents the return of peasants to the countryside, where they would join the NLF, and insures that the flow of American aid which keeps him in power will continue unabated.

So his troops and warplanes continue their forays into liberated areas, claiming that the strikes are prompted by NLF aggression.

Is there any basis to Theiu's charge that the NLF is keeping the war going? It is true that within the past few months the Front's leadership has directed its troops to fight back when attacked, but this is natural and to be expected.

But in terms of overall strategy, the NLF welcomed the return of peace and continues to call for its implementation. The reasoning is simple: aside from a simple humanitarian desire to end the killing, the NLF recognizes that peace is a critical step toward fulfilling its objectives.

Peace will turn off the faucet of American aid and permit peasants to return to the countryside, where the NLF will be able to mobilize them into its democratically carried out land reform program. Thieu realizes that peace will aid the NLF, so he continues the war.

And as long as Nixon clings to his concept of honor, and the U.S. Congress continues to aid him by financing Thieu, there will be no peace.