JOHNSON'S PROJECTED TROOP INCREASE MEETS WIDESPREAD RESISTANCE
General Westmoreland's request for 206,000 more U.S. troops for Vietnam, now being considered by Johnson, has touched off a furious debate in Washington. It became the focus of two days of impassioned confrontation between the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Secretary of State Rusk March 12-13.
Speaking for the administration, Rusk refused to agree to consultation with Congress before the crucial decision sending forty percent more men to Vietnam is made. He also did not rule out extension of military action to Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam or the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
Rusk paid no heed to warnings voiced by the senators that the White House should draw back from its catastrophic plans for all-out, full-scale escalation. In answer to Senator Pell of Rhode Island, he stated there was no "top price" to the U.S. commitment in Southeast Asia because "vital national interests were involved." Twelve of the fifteen members of the Foreign Relations Committee have become critical of the President's course which was defended by only three reactionary senators.
Meanwhile, signs of rising resis-— tance to the administration's Vietnam policy are multiplying. On March 12 a bipartisan group of twenty-two representatives submitted a resolution asking Congress to oppose the dispatch of any more troops to Vietnan.
Senator Eugene McCarthy, who is challenging Johnson for the Democratic nomination in criticism of his war policy, made an unexpectedly strong showing in the first presidential primary poll in New Hampshire March 12. He received about forty percent of the vote in this conservative state.
According to a Gallup poll released March 10, forty-nine percent of the respondents now believe it was a mistake for Johnson to have sent combat troops to Vietnam in 1965. Sixty-one percent believe the U.S. is either losing the war or making no progress toward winning it.
The National Broadcasting Company news department asserted without qualification March 11 that the war in Vietnam was being lost, that the initiative of the war had passed to the National Liberation Front, and that the time had come to decide whether it was a futile policy to destroy Vietnam in an effort to save it. The TV medium is the main source of news for a majority of Americans.
In an unusual editorial stand in its current issue, Newsweek magazine joined the Wall Street Journal and other influential periodicals in condemning Johnson's leadership. It stated that his "strategy for Vietnam has run into a dead end."
Under the heading of "Suicidal Escalation," the New York Times editors wrote March 11: "The time has come to abandon this bankrupt policy...The fate of the nation depends upon it."
SPECIAL NUMBER
Our current issue is mostly devoted to a document of considerable significance, an up-to-date "sophisticated" attack on Trotskyism, prepared during 1967 by no less an institution than the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and put out under the signature of one M. Basmanov.
There has recently been a spate of intensified attacks of this kind, from both pro-Moscow and pro-Peking elements. Both the Kremlin and the Maoists, for example, have dragged in "Trotskyism" in polemicizing against the Cuban line. The material in Basmanov's work has found echoes already in such widely scattered places as Britain, Brazil, Italy, and Japan.
We have felt it important, even though it meant postponing other material for a week, to make the text of this "model" article available in translation, together with some notes and comments. This is a first step in combating its false but now widely promoted arguments.