THE WAR IN VIETNAM WHY HANOI IS CONFIDENT OF VICTORY IN THE END

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31349, 20 April 1967, Page 14

THE WAR IN VIETNAM WHY HANOI IS CONFIDENT OF VICTORY IN THE END

(By

ARNAUD de BORCHGRAVE

in "Newsweek.")

(Reprinted t>v arraneemenu

Since 1954, when he covered the French war In Indo China, Arnaud de Borchgrave, a senior editor of "Newsweek” has returned often to South-east Asia to report the course of the war and politics in the area. Recently, Mr de Borchgrave visited South Vietnam after an absence of six months. This article is his report

“We are now witnessing the beginning of the end,” said the general. And although American generals have been known, on occasion, to talk that way about the war in Vietnam, this time it was the top man in the North Vietnamese military hierarchy—Vo Nguyen Giap who was doing the talking. The United States, the jaunty Giap told a visiting diplomat, is now going through the same stage that France experienced before Dien Bien Phu. Its home front is “eroding.” Public opinion is in doubt. General Giap, therefore, is confident that the Communists will win in the end.

It is tempting to write off Giap’s opinion as a hopeless example of wishful thinking. But the hard fact is that Giap and his comrades have what to them seems powerful evidence to support their belief in ultimate victory. Diplomats just returned from Hanoi say Giap and Co. cite the following facts as Hanoi reads the tea leaves:

The Tea Leaves Senator Robert F-. Kennedy, widely favoured to succeed President Johnson (just five years hence, by Hanoi’s reckoning) is in open conflict with the White House on Vietnam policy. President Johnson did not dare ask the nation’s governors for a statement of support on Vietnam, after having received such support three times in the past. Martin Luther King, jun., a Nobel Prize winner and a leading Negro opinionmaker, now calls the war a “blasphemy against everything the United States stands for.” The newly elected head of Americans for Democratic Action, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, has warned the President that he faces “the disintegration of the Democratic Party” over the war. Polls show that the President’s popularity has declined significantly in some sectors of the electorate, thus spurring dissidents in the Democratic Party to new efforts at forming a Vietnam policy that is "softer” than the one advocated by the Administration.

From this it is not difficult to understand Hanoi’s apparent conviction that the United States—like France before it —will not stay the course and that there is something to be gained by resisting negotiations for quite a while longer. By hitting us hard when they can, by boobytrapping us when they cannot and no doubt by mustering a major military effort that will keep United States casualties high during next year’s election campaign, Ho Chi Minh and his associates are convinced that they can force the American electorate to rally round the peacemakers. Washington’s hard line, they believe, will have to soften; the accent will be on the word “settlement,” not on

"honourable," and Hanoi will achieve at the conference table what it has not been able to win in the field. Such is Hanoi’s grand strategy. Ridiculous? It would be hard to convince Hanoi that this is so—especially since so many American politicians are in such frantic haste to

get the whole thing over with by 1968 —the “hawks” by pulverising the enemy, the “doves” by sitting down with him, each hoping their course of action will produce a viable political solution. Two-way Street The truth is, of course, that neither of these courses makes much real sense; indeed, in some ways both are downright dangerous. Escalation is a two-way street. To bomb the Mig airfields, as the “hawks” are advocating, would merely force the Migs to fly from bases inside China—a pointless escalation since the Russian supplied jets have so far proved of little more than nuisance value. To mine Haiphong harbour—with the attendant risk

of blowing up Russian ships —would hardly be calculated to encourage Moscow to use what influence it has in Hanoi to promote reasonableness. Instead, the “hawks” in Moscow would gain ground, and the next move might well be to give the North Vietnamese short-range ground-to-ground missiles with conventional warheads—weapons capable of taking out some of our bases and airfields in South Vietnam. On the other hand, some of the proposals from the dovecote are also dangerous in the extreme. Take, for example, the idea of “standstill ceasefire.” The United States’ forces on their massive search-and-destroy sweeps would not be able to stand still. They would have to return to their base areas, there to become immobilised under the watchful eye of the international press—while the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong would have the run of the country with no supervision whatsoever. Then, the Communist infrastructure could once again be developed with impunity. Grand Gesture Another "dove” suggestion —that the United States make the grand gesture and stop the bombing of North Vietnam —also strikes me as foolish. To Hanoi this would mean merely that international and domestic United States—opinion had forced Washington to give up the weapon that has been hurting North Vietnam the most It would be taken as another sign that the United States cannot stay the course.

If, then, neither the “doves” nor the “hawks” are on the right track, what should the United States do? In my opinion, the only realistic course is the present one—the carefully controlled application of power and steady, unrelenting pressure at al) possible points. That has been the Administration’s course so far, and to me—returning to Vietnam after an absence of six months—it seems clear that this middle course is leading to unspectacular but impressive gains. The enemy’s mainforce units are being chewed up at a staggering rate. They are coming off second best in each and every engagement (thanks mostly to prompt allied air and artillery strikes), and Communist morale is suffering badly. Then why are there not more defections among the North Vietnamese regulars? “Most of them have wives and children,” explained one North Vietnamese who did come over recently. “And if they defect, they feel sure they

will never see their families again. If it weren’t for that.

you would see a lot more.” Here it should be. noted that these considerations notwithstanding, enemy defections last month rose to more than 5000, the highest monthly total to date. Team Triumphs On the question of the pacification programme—the “other war,” as it is sometimes called—l will take issue with some of the Saigon ‘Tve-seen-it-alls” and insist that the programme <•—"•-

off the ground. Some 500 Revolutionary Development teams are now in the field, and more than half of them are operating far more effectively than anyone had dared to hope. I saw “R.D.'s" (rural development teams) building school houses and improving irrigation systems, all within

a mile or two of Viet Cong infested areas. And in a village in the Mekong Delta recently, fourteen families came in to seek protection the first day the RD. team moved into the village. Within a few days, a thousand had flocked in. And soon the villagers were telling the RD. men ■ about the Viet Cong hiding places. This was not just an iso: lated triumph. Recently captured enemy documents show mounting food and recruit-.-ment problems for the Viet Cong as they lose control over ever-larger sections of the population. And the percentage of the population controlled by the Communists is shrinking steadily. Viet Cong Target “The R.D. programme is the best thing that ever happened to Vietnam,” says one Vietnamese, and I am inclined to agree that the R.D. teams are doing a first-rate job of rooting out the Viet Cong infrastructure from the villages. If they were not, the Viet Cong would not be making them a priority target for assassination. In one recent week, 26 of the 106 civilians murdered by the Viet Cong were members of the R.D. teams.

Politically, too, enormous progress has been made over the last six months. Last year, the cynics were laughing heartily about the idea of instituting democratic processes in Saigon. But since then, the military government has shown itself either unwilling or unable to intimidate the popularly-elected constituent assembly. A democratic constitution has been drafted and accepted by the generals. Village elections are being held. And in the fall, national elections for a President and Congress will take place. Painfully but surely, a workable nonCommunist society seems to be emerging. These highly significant developments seem not to have been noted by United States “doves:” and in Europe the tendency is to write them off as trivial. But after this latest visit to Asia, I know that many informed Asians are watching the United States effort closely—and sympathetically. Anti-Vietnam demonstrations may follow Hubert Humphrey across Western Europe, but prominent Indian officials are forthrightly apprehensive that the United States, as 1968 draws closer, might agree to a Vietnam settlement that would momentarily disguise—but not ultimately conceal —an American defeat

A Contingent Stability

This feeling is widely shared in Laos—where the Communist Pathet Lao, directly aided by North Vietnamese regulars, have kept the country divided and chaotic, and in most other neighbouring Asian countries —the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, even in neutralist Burma. As Singapore’s outspoken Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, certainly no great admirer of the United States, put it recently: “The nations of the area would rather live with a permanent American military presence than face the process that has emasculated South Vietnam."

Like Lee Kuan Yew, most intelligent Asians these days are the first to concede that stability is directly contingent on the commitments and guarantees of the Great Powers—and, even more important, on the performance of the Great Powers in carrying out these same commitments and guarantees. Europeans had little trouble understanding this after World War 11, when the United States stood between them and political chaos. Now the Asians seem to understand it well. Their stability depends on United States steadfastness, and they are watching the United States performance in South Vietnam intently hoping devoutly that the United States will stay the course, as it has pledged it will.