VIETNAM Can America Pull Out?
By MALCOLM RUTHERFORD
ONE way and another the present outlook for American policy in Vietnam seems gloomier than ever. It hardly needed the latest demon- stration of authority from Air Vice-Marshal Ky in setting off to 'liberate Da Nang' to remind us that there are areas of policy over which the Americans exercise no control whatsoever. In the first week of this month the official figure for American casualties was sixty killed and 450 wounded; the figure for the South Vietnamese forces was sixty-one killed and 243 wounded. A sustained repetition of figures like this and the conduct of the war will be even more difficult to justify to the American people than it is already, for the main point in the present justification is that the US is merely helping the South Viet- namese to fight a war of their own. If figures like this continue, it will appear that the Americans are doing most of the fighting while the South Vietnamese are increasingly opting out to pur- sue their own internal feuds.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the critics of US policy are once again in full cry, or that they have been joined by people usually more sympathetic to American aims. And the critics are, of course, important, even if the logic of- their arguments is not always inescapable. Undoubtedly they encourage Hanoi and the Viet- cong to believe that sooner or later the American administration will bow to popular pressure and give up the struggle, and clearly to a certain extent Hanoi and the Vietcong have a point. It is inconceivable that the administration has not considered how it could effect a with- drawal from Vietnam if necessary. But it is also plain that the Americans do not think that .the moment for a retreat is anywhere near yet, how- ever great the popular pressure. There are too many things that might still just happen to bring about the turning of the tide that the Americans have hoped for for so long.
In the first place, there is the complicated question of the forthcoming South Vietnamese elections. It can hardly be pretended that these elections were promised as any deliberate part of US policy, or even as part of the policy of the government of South Vietnam. The promise was wrung from Marshal Ky by pressure from the Buddhists in Da Nang. No less than Mr Henry Cabot Lodge, the US Ambassador in Saigon, was quick to imply that he thought the elections were an extremely bad idea, and Marshal -Ky himself has been backpedalling on his promise ever since. He says now that elections will be held in the autumn merely to produce an assembly that will draw up a new constitution on the basis of which further elections will be held for the executive in 1967. In the meantime Ky will retain executive power.
So far the Buddhists have taken these later qualifications of Marshal Ky rather quietly, per- haps on the grounds that they are prepared to work by stages and that to have achieved the promise of any kind of elections is for the present victory enough. But American reactions, how- ever, have been far more interesting and inevit- ably they have not all been as straightforward as those of the Ambassador in Saigon.
Air Vice-Marshal Ky, for instance, is no longer in American eyes the man he was. When he made his first rash threat some weeks ago of having the Mayor of Da Nang publicly executed, the Americans began to ease their embrace of him pretty quickly. It was recalled that it was a mistake to have their Vietnam policy too closely tied to -one perhaps passing Vietnamese leader. But, as for the elections, they might after all not be too bad an idea. If there was a struggle for power, it might do no great harm to have part-of it fought out at the ballot box and at any rate the preparations for the elections should keep the Buddhists relatively quiet. Perhaps if the elec- tions are held the Buddhists will come out on top, but then there need be no great harm in this either,.for official US policy at least remains one of readiness to assist any South Vietnamese government that is in power for as long as that assistance is required. The thing to do, it seems to have been reasoned, was to edge away from too close an identification with Ky while.refrain- ing as much as possible from taking sides in an internal dispute.
This policy has two particular advantages, at least in the short run. It enables the administra-' tion to delay any final decision on long-term strategy on the grounds that it is necessary first to see what is going to happen in the power struggle. And it allows the military to go on with their increasingly successful task of engaging. the Vietcong. It is believed, as it, has been believed for some time, that the Vietcong are now paying such a price in casualties, defections and loss of supplies that sooner or later the strain is bound to tell. Moreover, if a policy of phased escalation is being pursued in bombing the North, there are still plenty of targets left—airfields, oil storage tanks and dams.
A spanner was put in all this in the early hours of Sunday morning, when Marshal Ky set off on a fresh and more determined effort to liberate Da Nang. As US diplomats icily re- ported : 'there was no prior consultation.' Mr McNamara himself was distinctly frosty about it, suggesting that there could be no question of the United States fighting the Vietnam war on its own. If, the implication went, the government of South Vietnam thought it more important to wage war on its own people than on the Vietcong, then the Americans would go home and leave them to it.
And it is here that US thinking about a possible withdrawal comes in. So-called helpful sug- gestions that the US should encourage the Buddhists to negotiate some face-saving settle- ment with Hanoi Which would allow the Ameri- cans to leave are, of course, nonsense, for in the face of Hanoi's persistent belief in ultimate vic- tory neither the Buddhists, nor anyone else in South Vietnam. have anything at all to bargain with. Negotiations in this case would be no more than a polite word for unconditional surrender. It is difficult to see why the Americans should go through a long and complicated process of diplo- macy in order to achieve just this, or how, if they did so, the result could possibly be called face-saving. For the fact is that if the Americans do decide they want to quit, and perhaps even if they don't, the thing that is going to bring this about is internal unrest in South Vietnam. This is why the casualty figures are so important. The war has to appear principally to belong to the South Vietnamese, but in recent weeks this is just how it has not appeared.
The. threat of withdrawal is itself a bargaining card to be used on the South Vietnamese govern- ment and on the Buddhists as well, and in his reaction to Marshal Ky's exploits in Da Nang Mr McNamara has already shown it. Prob- ably for a while this should do the trick, but it can be shown again if necessary and if it finally fails to work the United States can walk out of South Vietnam like a spurned lover whose pre- sence is no longer required and who would not deign to outstay her welcome. It has already occurred to the Americans that, if it comes to withdrawal, this would be a far simpler and more dignified -way to go than a negotiated sur- render.
`. . . well, I drove a bus during the General Strike . . .
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