WORLD
H. Rap Brown's OUTLOOK Letter from Prison
Vol. 6, No. 9 March 8, 1968 How Many More Troops Was That?
“Wall Street Journal” Guatemalan Guerrillas Sees Defeat in Vietnam Break with CP
HOW MANY MORE TROOPS WAS THAT?
The successful National Liberation Front offensive has had a stunning impact on the American people which has been transmitted to the summits of the capitalist ruling class. There is far less restraint than before in expressing doubts about the wisdom of Johnson's course in Southeast Asia and more explicit condemations of it.
Relations between the administration and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are becoming further strained and embittered; some of the nation's most influential newspapers have assailed U.S policy in Vietnam; and even the CIA is reportedly at odds with other advisers of the White House over a true assessment of the situation there after the latest events.
Following the altercation between Secretary of State Rusk and Senator Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, over deployment of nuclear weapons to South Vietnam, the committee took the outgoing Secretary of Defense McNamara to task for deceiving the American people and manipulating Congress by presenting a distorted view of the Tonkin Gulf incidents in August 1964.
These incidents in 1964 were used as a springboard for escalating the war. They were utilized to secure a resolution from Congress that White House spokesmen later claimed to be "the functional equivalent" of a declaration of war and a warrant for air bombardments of North Vietnan.
It was previously disclosed that, some weeks prior to the alleged attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats on American destroyers, the administration had already prepared a resolution for submis-— sion to Congress. McNamara assured the Foreign Relations Committee on August 6, 1964, that the two American destroyers were “carrying out a routine patrol." The record of his current interrogation by the committee reveals that their mission was neither routine nor unprovocative.
The American warships were actually engaged in clandestine electronic surveillance, had violated the twelvemile limit set by North Vietnam, and were trying to decoy that nation's ships away from an attack on its shores by South Vietnamese vessels. From available evidence it is even highly questionable whether any such attack upon the U.S ships took place as described.
In any case, the unqualified assertion in the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that North Vietnamese patrol boats had "deliberately and repeatedly attacked United States vessels lawfully present...and have created.a serious threat to international peace" can no longer be sus-— tained. The administration's misleading version of the events, which was used to justify air assaults on North Vietnan, has fallen to pieces. And the already extensive "credibility gap" has become wider than the Grand Canyon.
"Even if the Administration's version of the Tonkin incidents is accepted," pertinently asked the New York Times editors on February 24, "does this justify the subsequent actions of the United States Government? Much more serious incidents in the Mediterranean last June and in the Sea of Japan last month produced far less traumatic results."
Senator Robert Kennedy uttered the first shrill cry of defeatism emanating from the heart of the American ruling class on February 8 (see: "Kennedy Admits U.S. Cannot Win in Vietnam" by Les Evans, World Outlook, February 16, p. 123.) Three important newspapers have since joined the chorus.
In an editorial February 23, entitled "The Logic of the Battlefield," that influential U.S. business daily, the Wall Street Journal, declared that "the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed." It warned that "everyone had better be prepared for the bitter taste of a defeat beyond America's power to prevent." [For text of this editorial see page 195.]
The senior associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Joseph E. Evans, commented that "we gradually have become more critical of the premises and conduct of the war. This editorial does not advocate military withdrawal. It doesn't advocate any course of action. It is a warning to the American people that they better be prepared to accept the possibility that the whole thing may go to pot no matter what our Government does."
Bemoaning “the precarious predicament of the American forces now in Southeast Asia," the lead editorial in the New York Times for Sunday, February 25, comes to similar conclusions and recommends a specific line of action.
"The time has come for Americans and their leaders," it says, "to recognize that the policy [of escalation] itself is illogical; that it entraps the United States in a war without visible limits, despite all official optimism; that it will continue to make insatiable demands on American manpower, resources and energy far beyond the worth of any conceivable gains. The only sound policy is to move
from the battlefield to the negotiating table with fullest speed."
In an editorial published on the same day as that of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post pointed out that the pessimistic findings of the Central Intelligence Agency controverted the administration's public insistence that all is for the best in Vietnan. "Not so long ago," it stated, "CIA director Helms is said to have informed Senators that the war could last 100 years, at least the way it is going now. More recently, relations between the agency and the White House have been reported so frigid that some CIA officials are doubtful about the future of their jobs."
Fewer and fewer personages in high places are taken in by the topsy-turvy official logic that the worse things are in the war zone, the better they actually are. Thus Senator Fulbright dismissed as "fantastic" the representation of Walt Rostow, the president's chief counselor on Vietnam, that the offensives "may have left the South Vietnamese army and government institutions stronger than before the attacks." On February 25, Fulbright called for a congressional investigation of the administration's war policy.
One glimpse into the gloomy mood prevailing in Washington was provided by the private reasons given for the abrupt refusal of Senator Morton of Kentucky, the moderate Republican leader, to run again for office. He has been a strong critic of Johnson's Vietnam policy. Close associates describe Morton "as profoundly depressed by the combination of Vietnam, urban insurrection and what he regards as insufficient national leadership and the failure of the Republican party to rise to the resulting challenges."
What about Johnson himself? He cannot be oblivious to the adverse turn of events and the rising revulsion against his policies. But he gives no sign of bending to criticism or changing his course. Instead he is listening apprevingly to Westmoreland, the sinister general who is insatiable in his demands for the war machine and its needs in beating down a colonial people. Already the White House has begun to prepare public opinion for another big leap in the "escalation." This is what the speculation in Washington over numbers is about. If half a million more troops is mentioned, then Westmoreland sounds modest asking for 200,000; and how can loyal citizens oppose sending a mere additional 100,000 for right now?
"WALL STREET JOURNAL" SEES DEFEAT IN VIETNAM
[The following is the complete text of an editorial which appeared in the February 243 issue of the Wall Street Journal, the most authoritative national business and financial daily newspaper in the United States. The editorial appeared under the title, "The Logic of the Battlefield."]
* * *
We think the American people should be getting ready to accept, if they haven't already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed; it may be falling apart beneath our feet. The actual military situation may be making academic the philosophical arguments for the intervention in the first place.
Granted, there is an opposite theory, the "last gasp" notion that the weeks'-long wave of assaults on cities and hamlets is the enemy's final outburst before greatly decreasing the war's intensity and coming to the bargaining table. Perhaps it will turn out that way, but right now the evidence does not lend the theory much support. .
Hanoi is believed to have relatively large numbers of troops still uncommitted in North Vietnam. The Communists appear to be getting ample supplies of weapons from the Soviet Union and Red China. As long as the arms keep coming and there are Vietnamese Communists to use then, you would suppose they could keep up the struggle more or less indefinitely. Thus far, at least, they are showing with a vengeance their ability to sow destruction and demoralization everywhere.
Meantime the present South Vietnamese government, never very impressive, looks worse and worse. Most important, the government can't protect the people even in the heart of the cities. The Saigon- U.S. effort to secure villages and woo villagers to the government side has been brought to a halt. This is a government and a nation in chaos; how long can it go on? The failing, it should be stressed, is not in U.S. will or valor, but basically in something lacking in Vietnam itself.
As for the U.S. military undertaking, the current tactic is sad to see: The wholesale destruction of towns and cities in order to "save" them, killing or making homeless refugees out of thousands more civilians. While it is certainly true that an American commander has to destroy a building or a town if he considers it necessary for his soldiers' safety, the scale on which it is going on is hardly endearing the U.S. or Saigon to the populace.
Hence the question: Are developments on the ground making hash of our original commendable objectives?
The U.S. went in to keep South Vietnam out of Communist hands. But no matter what our forces do, they can't seem to do that. If practically nothing is to be left of government or nation, what is there to be saved for what?
The U.S. also went in to demonstrate to Communist China that it couldn't get away with this kind of indirect aggression and that it hadn't better try direct aggression either. But the Communists are getting away with it; they are putting the mighty U.S. through a wringer, and they may be encouraged to try more of it.
Should such be the upshot, that the U.S. abandons the effort not because it "should" do so but because its purposes have become irrelevant in the light of events on the battlefield and of Vietnamese politics, let no one blink the fact that it will be a disaster. It will be a stunning blow to the U.S. and the West in the larger struggle with international communism. At home it will be a traumatic experience to have lost a war in which thousands of Americans died in vain.
The only thing is that continuing in circumstances so unprepossessing could be a worse disaster. If it had in fact been possible for the U.S. to intervene three years ago and accomplish, at reasonable cost, the objective of saving South Vietnam, it probably would have been well worth doing. But since it seems increasingly doubtful that the original purposes can any longer be achieved, the logic of the battlefield suggests that the U.S. could get forced out of an untenable position.
We don't know that the possibility is being squarely faced in Washington; it seems rather unlikely. The Administration insists that the Communist drives are failing of their aims, which Senator Fulbright describes as "wholly irrational, a fantastic analysis." President Johnson seems more firmly committed to Vietnam than ever.
Now stubbornness up to a point is a virtue, but stubbornness can also go beyond the realm of reasonableness. We believe the Administration is duty-bound to recognize that no battle and no war is worth any price, no matter how ruinous, and that in the case of Vietnam it may be failing for the simple reason that the whole place and cause is collapsing from within.
Conceivably all this is wrong; conceivably the Communists are on the brink of defeat and genuine peace talks are about to begin. It doesn't look that way, and as long as it doesn't everyone had better be prepared for the bitter taste of a defeat beyond America's power to prevent.