"He does make gestures towards peace -- some-more convincing than others. The Christmas truce is one such; presumably the generals could do their job better without it. But these gestures usually look pretty feeble in the lurid light of what is going on at the same time in Vietnam. It doesn't cost much to gratify Mr. Goldberg with an appeal to U Thant, if you are meanwhile allowing your air force to drop bombs so close to Hanoi that at last you have to admit that an ‘accident' may have happened. A Christmas truce loses its seasonal glitter when your bombers have the day before been dropping leaflets on Hanoi saying ‘These aircraft will return.' Even the most spectacular. of the President's peace efforts -- the bombing pause a year ago -- was accompanied by. the bringing in of thousands of new American troops, and later by the launching of an ambitious land offensive. (This should be remembered when holiday truces are objected to as opportunities for the Communists to regroup.)
"All the military activity that goes with the peace talk makes it look fairly unconvincing even to many Americans. How does it look in Hanoi? Either President Johnson is hypocritical or, if sincere (as is more likely), he is powerless to prevent his approaches from being condemned to failure by what his soldiers are doing. Most likely of.all, his motives are mixed; but in any case it seems increasingly likely that, even if "he wants a negotiated settlement, he will not be allowed to have it."
In this equivocal way The Guardian rejected Johnson's bombing and the lies to cover it up.
Harrison Salisbury's dispatches from on the spot in Hanoi exposed completely the hypocrisy both of Johnson and Brown, and has produced very strong reactions within the Parliamentary Labour party and the rest of the Labour movement.
John Mendelson, Labour MP said: "It is now-the Foreign Secretary's duty, first of all as a member of a Government closely linked to the United States, and secondly as co-chairman of, the Geneva Conference to raise his voice on our behalf against this bombing.'
Eric Heffer, Labour MP, came out even more strongly: "This is proof of. what many of us have been saying in the House of Commons for some time. It is. no good for the Americans to imagine for one moment that they can bomb military targets without bombing civilians. This must mean that the campaign to end this war in Vietnam will inevitably be. stepped up." |
Frank Allaun was quoted in the Morning Star of December 29 as saying: "T and two other M.P.'s, Mr. Peter Jackson and Mrs. Ann Kerr, have written to six leading newspapers in America pleading that this genocide should be stopped."
Further protests were made from the trade-union movement. William McLean President of the Scottish Trades Union Congress commented: "What has happened to the Government's decision to dissociate with the bombing on Hanoi earlier this year? ...Those of us who are opposed to the American aggressionin Vietnam, and warned of the horrors and dangers, are now fully entitled to call on all British trade unionists to demand that the British Government ends its support for U.S. activities there."
Similar statements were made by a number of other MP's and trade-union leaders. Tribune, the labour left-wing weekly, said in its front page editorial on December 30: "It is Britain's peculiar disgrace that our Government has constantly associated itself with the American Administration and has evenallowed itself to be entangled in Washing-
ton's duplicities."