SWEDISH FOREIGN MINISTER SPEAKS UP FOR PENTAGON
The Pentagon received a rather unusual vote of confidence February 14 from Torsten Nilsson, Sweden's minister of foreign affairs. The Scandinavian statesman said he refused to believe that the American generals would go so far in Vietnam as to doom a million people by blowing up the Red River dikes.
"For the Americans to bomb the Red River dikes would be genuine genocide," he said in an interview. "The Red River dikes constitute a strictly civilian target. If they were destroyed this would probably mean the death of a million people while another million would be left shelterless and faced with famine. I refuse to believe that the American military command would consider such a frightful idea."
Questioned about the offensive mounted by the National Liberation Front, Nilsson said: "The NLF offensive appears to have had a very obvious aim -- to paralyze the Saigon administration and arouse doubt among the civilian population on the capacity of the generals to govern their own country. Under these conditions, I cannot understand how one can maintain that the guerrillas failed. Quite the contrary, according to all the reports reaching us, the chaos seems to be complete in Saigon."