Vietnam: Good and Bad News

THERE WAS SOME good news from Vietnam last week--and some bad news from Washington. The good news was that the National Liberation Front had captured--or "overrun," as most American newspapers preferred to put it--their first provincial capital since they took An Loc, later destroyed by American bombers, during the spring offensive of 1972. The peace agreement initialed two years ago this Thursday by the four parties to the war--the United States, the Provisional Revolutionary Government, the Saigon government, and North Vietnam--was supposed to put an end to battles for provincial capitals. It was supposed to move the violent military struggle that killed Vietnamese and devastated their country to a new plane, in which political and intellectual struggle could decide the country's future.

Such a shift to political struggle was in the interest of the PRG partly because it would have meant that refugees driven into Vietnam's cities when American planes bombed their villages--the effect that Samuel P. Huntington, Thomson Professor of Government, described as "forced-draft urbanization"--could return to the countryside. In the countryside, they were beyond the reach of the Saigon government's police, and besides, Vietnam's peasants had always been the NLF's main social base--that was why forced-draft urbanization was such an effective strategy. Though military tactics were the only ones by which a Saigon government primarily representing South Vietnam's landlords and small business class could hope to dominate the country, it seemed as though the American antiwar dissent evoked by Vietnamese resistance might have forced the main pillar of any Saigon attack out from under it.

Such optimism underestimated the American and Saigon governments' resourcefulness and determination. New "aid" programs--for example, a Food for Peace program, in which Washington bought food and then sold it to South Vietnamese importers, donating 80 per cent of the proceeds to Saigon's army, navy and air force--took the place of more immediately visible forms of American intervention. And Saigon troops continued to mount attacks on the majority of South Vietnam controlled by the PRG--so that the first year of "peace," by the Saigon government's figures, resulted in about 50,000 deaths and thousands more refugees.

As resistance to Saigon's president, Nguyen Van Thieu, mounted not only in the countryside but in the cities, not only among sympathizers with the PRG but among life-long anti-communists, and as Thieu stepped up his attacks on these opponents as well, it became clearer than ever that Thieu's government bore with it no hope for peace and democracy. And for all the courage of Thieu's liberal opponents, two decades of civil war have made it plain that the PRG speaks for most of those Vietnamese farmers who are not simply weary of the war, that the PRG is the only force capable of mounting a successful resistance to Thieu and therefore the only real alternative to him, that only the PRG is likely to lead the Vietnamese people in rebuilding their shattered country into a land where it is at least conceivable that freedom and democracy will be more than just words. That is why the capture of Phuoc Binh last week--the first hint in three years that the continuing battle may have reached a turning point or be drawing toward an end--is such a welcome development.

The United States government did not find the fall of Phuoc Binh welcome. On the contrary, it provoked a flurry of threats of and preparations for stepped-up military involvement in Indochina such as have not been seen since Congress finally forced Richard Nixon to stop bombing Cambodia, two and a half years ago. North Vietnam charged last weekend that U.S. planes have directed Saigon bombers operating in South Vietnam and that U.S. reconnaissance planes have been flying over Hanoi. The long record of lies and cover-ups by the U.S. embassy in Saigon and the Defense Department made their responses--"nonsense" and "no comment," respectively--less than reassuring, particularly in view of other official U.S. response last week. Sure enough, later in the week, Pentagon officials acknowledged that U.S. planes were flying over North Vietnam, in violation of the peace agreement.

President Ford went into hasty consultation with his top advisers last week, emerging with a plea for Congress to vote more military aid to Saigon. For Congress to accede to his request would be a terrible thing. It would result in killing more Vietnamese in defense of an indefensible government. Congress should enormously increase aid to Vietnam--but not Ford's kind of aid, and not to the Saigon government.

The nation's top general and its top civilian almost fell to blows last weekend--in a dispute over which of them should have given the order for a Navy carrier task force sailing toward the Indian Ocean to feint toward Vietnam, as a "warning to Hanoi." Gen. George S. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Henry A. Kissinger '50, secretary of state, evidently had no disagreement on the desirability of such a "signal of American determination"--though Brown, who after all lacks Kissinger's training as a historian, did not specifically suggest that the Gulf of Tonkin should have been the task force's destination. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported--the State Department has denied it--that Kissinger's proposal had to be overruled by Ford himself, on the grounds that it would "needlessly" arouse concern in the United States. When the man who led the fight against Congress's ending the bombing of Cambodia is reported to wield the moderating veto in the government's war-making plans, there is something even more wrong than was obvious all along.

The Gallup poll's most-admired man also denounced Congress last week for unwarranted interference in his old stomping-grounds, foreign relations. There are so many grounds--Constitutional, historical and political--for opposing Kissinger's attack on Congress that it is difficult to choose among them. The Constitution--which gives it the power to vote foreign-affairs appropriations and to declare the wars Kissinger's foreign policy is designed to provoke--is Congress's warrant for "interfering" with foreign policy. And Congress is closer to being right than the president or the secretary of state on the foreign-policy that gave rise to Kissinger's denunciation.

But America's best-known Nobel laureate likes to think of himself as a pragmatist, less interested in lofty principles than in immediate results and specific issues. So as the Saigon government and its American supporters mass for a renewed assault on the people of Vietnam, maybe we should stick to the most specific of the issues involved in his call for more flexibility.

If Congress is interfering with Kissinger's flexibility, that is a good thing. It should interfere some more. His flexibility unleashed the Christmas bombing--apparently almost exclusively to reassure Thieu that the American government's attitude remained as inflexible as ever-just as it attempted to unleash a new Tonkin Gulf incident last week. Kissinger calls "flexibility" what other people call "war crimes." There have been too many of those in Indochina already.