No Light in This Tunnel

SEVEN YEARS ago Gen. William C. Westmoreland, then U.S. commander in Vietnam, told President Johnson that he could not "see any end in sight" to American involvement in Southeast Asia. He proceeded to ask Johnson for as many as 100,000 more troops to prevent South Vietnam from falling to the communists.

Today Westmoreland is seeking the Republican nomination for the governorship of South Carolina and the U.S. has ended its official combat role in Southeast Asia. But despite all the shuffling of actors and the valuable lessons the United States is supposed to have learned during its 14 years of involvement in Vietnam, not much has changed. American Southeast Asia policy continues to be dictated by the same basic assumptions and anti communist fervor which have guided it from the start.

In 1959, President Eisenhower said that "the communist capture of South Vietnam would set in motion a crumbling process" throughout Southeast Asian Last week the new American ambassador to Vietnam sadly demonstrated that the official U.S. attitude has not undergone significant changes since that Eisenhower statement. After eight months as ambassador, Graham A. Martin made clear in his first newspaper interview that, despite all the current rhetoric about an "honorable peace," the Nixon administration is still bound by a fierce anti-communism which requires continued support at almost any cost of a corrupt and illegitimate dictatorship. Martin and the White House persist in maintaining that the way to resolve Vietnam's problems and prevent an ultimate communist takeover is a large infusion of military and economic aid.

Martin believes that "You can debate the past, but where is our interest now? My concern with Vietnam is what happens to us [Americans] as a people, the whole intricate power balance in the world, as the world perceives us and perceives our will to do what we said we do."

Reiterating the old communist-in-the-woodwork line, Martin says that he fears that Congress will not continue to give enough money to South Vietnam. He is afraid that an "economic takeoff" by the Saigon government towards independence from U.S. aid will be impeded by a "Hanoi-inspired propaganda campaign" which aims at turning Congress against the Nguyen Van Thieu government.

The major focus of Hanoi's alleged campaign to "force the American congress to limit economic aid" is the widely held charge that Thieu is holding 200,000 civilian political prisoners and is engaging in systematic mental and physical torture. The thrust of the strategy is to create the impression that "if you're against evil, torture and repression, as most Americans are, then we don't want to give aid to a regime like this," Martin said. He claims that the Hanoi campaign has engaged already the enthusiasm of American peace groups, some journalists, and some aides on Captial Hill.

DESCRIBING HIMSELF as "an old-fashioned, liberal humanitarian," who has battled for world-wide prison reform both as a public servant in the New Deal and in the Foreign Service, Martin insists that the allegations against the Saigon government are not true. He said he ordered his embassy staff to conduct a through study of all accusations against Thieu shortly after he took over last year. According to Martin the investigation showed that South Vietnam's civilian prison population is about 35,000--roughly the same per capita population as found in U.S. prisons.

If there are abuses in the prisons, he said, they are not widespread and not systematic. No more than a handful of the prisoners are being held solely for their opposition to the Thieu government, Martin concluded after his staff conducted an investigation "using all the means at their disposal to get at the truth."

Since the cease-fire agreement last year, however, many reliable American journalists and researchers have disputed Martin's conclusion that Thieu's government does not hold and torture political prisoners. Documentary films, articles, and reports of instruments of torture being manufactured by American companies and shipped to Vietnam all cast doubts on the validity of Martin's investigation. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that "all the means" at the disposal of Martin's staff were substantially limited by a self-imposed need for unequivocal support of and reliance upon the statements of Thieu's corrupt government.

MARTIN believes that the United States should take a harder line in its Vietnamese policy and continue to build up military and economic spending since there is no longer a serious threat of Soviet or Chinese intervention.

Two years of heavy economic aid is all that South Vietnam needs because the South Vietnamese are "ingenious, hard-working people and I'm convinced that the situation for an economic takeoff on the Korean-Taiwan economic model in a very shortened time is here," Martin claims. Thieu's government has taken "all the right measures, simply tightening their belts and going on" with the relatively small amount of aid supplied this year.

Substitute a few words here and there and Martin sounds dangerously like the mongers who stampeded us into the war in the early sixties. Coloring his statements with anti-communist rhetoric, he states emphatically that "it's not my business to support Thieu or anything else. It's my business to support the interests of the United States."

American troops are no longer officially engaged in Vietnam, and for the time being at least, American bombers are not providing support for South Vietnamese troops. Nonetheless, America's commitment to Thieu and South Vietnam is unflagging. Thousands of civilians employed by the U.S. government and American corporations have moved in to unofficially perform the same military duties which our men in uniform did two years ago. The U.S. does everything for the South Vietnamese army except shoot their rifles and fire their artillery. The level of spending on military aid is still well above $1 billion annually and economic aid is rapidly approaching that level.

American involvement in Vietnam has gone underground but the light at the end of the tunnel, which Westmoreland, Eisenhower and so many others finally admitted they could not see, is still a long way off. And the light will continue to be until Martin and the Nixon administration abandon their efforts to adhere to the rigid dicta of the fifties' anti-communism and the pocket-book interests of American corporations and military factions.