VIETNAM PROBLEM NOW A 'MONSTER’

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30936, 17 December 1965, Page 17

VIETNAM PROBLEM NOW A 'MONSTER’

(From FRANX OUVSR. N.X.FA. Special CorrespoadentJ WASHINGTON, Dec. 16. President Johnson has returned to Washington to face a problem which .began small and has grown into a monster about which this city seems now most concerned—Vietnam. People know the President must be on the verge of big decisions and this evoked a tremendous amount of debate over the week-end.

The theme of this is: “Let’s get off the escalator.” The press has been reminding its readers that some two years ago Mr McNamara predicted that American troops would be out of Vietnam and on their way home by Christmas, 1965. Instead they have his assurance that the United States has stopped losing the war. which will be a long one. What is noticeable is that a number of voices of solid citizens as compared with protesting beatniks carrying Viet Cong flags have lately come out for stepping off the escalator.

This does not mean they are advocating, as the Viet Cong flag-carrying beatniks do, that the United States just cut their losses and run. They suggest stepping off the escalator in order to reduce tensions and let things simmer down a bit if only because escalation has failed, in their view, to achieve its objectives and because they believe continued escalation will do no better. FACTS AND LOGIC

The current debate has been stimulated by both facts and political philosophy and logic. The facts element has come principally from three extensive articles which have appeared in the "New York Times" from the pen of a British journalist, James Cameron. who has been touring North Vietnam.

He makes it clear that the stepped-up bombing of North has not stopped the flow of men and material into South Vietnam—indeed these have steadily increased. He also

declares that the bombings have "welded the nation together unshakably” as it did in Britain during World War 11. He also challenges the theory that the bombing of the Hanoi-Haiphong industrial complex or even the capital itself would do any better because the country is a peasant, agrarian society "immensely resilient”

In commenting on the series, the “New York Times" remarks that the French, in their war there, held those industrial areas and also the Red River valley, and the Communists won the war without ever entering those strongholds.

It advocates a pause in the bombing to try and bring about negotiations. No-one. it adds, can be sure that it will, “but one can be sure that further escalation witl only prolong the war.”. KENNAN ARTICLE The smallness of Vietnam, both physically and as a problem, is a keynote in the most powerful statement about the war I have yet seen. It is an article by George f. Kennan, a former Ambassador to Russia and to Jugoslavia and an authority on the Communist half of the world. Kennan thinks the most disturbing thing about American involvement in Vietnam is its relationship to American interests and responsibilities In other world areas; “its present dimensions can only be said to represent a grievous disbalance of American policy."

For nearly a year now, says Kennan, the United States has sacrificed to the Vietnam

effort all serious possibility for improvement in relations with Russia with all that that implies from the standpoint of the ultimate danger of nuclear war and this was done at a time when prospects for such improvement “were otherwise not unfavourable." “REGRETTABLE STRAIN” The United States, Kennan goes on, has placed a regrettable strain on the friendship and confidence of the Japanese, a pall of discouragement has been cast over those responsible for the conduct of the United Nations while constructive treatment of the great problems of Germany, of nuclMr disarmament, of the future of the United Nations, and of China in the wider sense have everywhere been placed largely in abeyance “in deference to this one remote involvement.” If the United States can find nothing better to do than increase this open-ended involvement “simply because the alternatives seem humiliating and frustrating, one will have to ask whether we have not become enslaved to the dynamics of a single unmanageable situation—to the point where we have lost much of the power of Initiative and control over our own policy not just locally but or a world scale.” Nor is it clear, says Ml* Kennan, that any such Vi< namese we might find V install In power in the event of a sweeping military success would be inclined or even able to rule with any marked liberality. He discusses the relationship of Hanoi to Peking and says he believes that even In the event of a complete Viet Cong victory the result would probably be something less than the automatic extension of Chinese power that many of us fear.

He challenges the llvlng-up-to-commitments theory by asking commitments to whqnr. and if some South Vietnam Government, which one? "When and where did we assume the obligation to sacrifice to Its defence the world balance of our policy and the wider interests of world peace?"

Price of Sugar.—A group of sugar exportera, including Cuba and Australia, met in private in London yesterday to diacuM measures to raise the free market price of sugar.—London, December 16.