REPORT FROM SAIGON

The Larger Hope

From ARNOLD BE1CHMAN

AA POLITICAL journalist suddenly evidencing op- ..timisrn while his confreres are keening the GOttercliimmetung blues—as here in South Viet- nam—takes a calculated risk. He may find that his dispatches are being spiked in favour of those from colleagues whose pessimism is a more dramatic synonym for the editor's sense of realism.

My hope is that this dispatch. with its aura of optimism amid savage battles, will avoid so dismal a fate as non-publication just because it argues that the war in South Vietnam is surely reaching an important turning-point in contem- porary history, one from which we may draw some cheer for the future.

was here last summer when the American military etlort consisted of 15,000 men, and it is now nearing 90,000 combat and logistical troops, and no doubt the figure will double by the year's end; and when the daily cost of the American resistance was perhaps $1.5 million a day, and it is now running at the rate of $3.6 million a day and will soon be $4 million. I was then, as were others, disturbed that the Johnson- Goldwater campaign clearly was of greater im- portance to US military strategy than the Mao-Ho strategy of steady infiltration by North Vietnamese regulars south of the 17th Parallel.

And I was also here when General Kguyen Khanh, then the South Vietnamese Premier, was demanding bombing of the north, to the intense irritation of Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor and the White House. Today, bombings of the north are as routine as a milk-run.

What I most remember, however, is the curious incident of the hound which didn't bark last August. There was the sudden bulletin on the news-tickers that the US Fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin had ordered its fighter-planes to strike North Vietnam's navy after torpedo-boats had twice attacked an American destroyer. In Hong Kong that week we had waited for Peking's reac- tion. A day went by, a night went by, another day. Newsmen tuned their transistors to Chinese radio stations and waited. Nothing. No reaction. It was an ominous silence and then it became just a silence, because there was, perhaps, nothing that could be said. Perhaps nothing could be done by China and North Vietnam.

It is now a year later and the war has entered a decisive phase which I believe will test the Mao-Ho doctrine of 'wars of liberation,' or 'peoples' wars.' A few weeks before the US air strikes in the Gulf of Tonkin, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the hero of Dien Bien Phu, had written in the North Vietnamese paper, Quan Dio Nhan Dan:

South Vietnam is the model for the national

liberation movements in our time. . . . If the

special warfare that the US imperialists are test- ing in South Vietnam is overcome, this means that it can be defeated everywhere in the world.

President Johnson's evident determination about America's police r6le in South-East Asia may be giving Giap and his mentors in Peking second thoughts about the ease with which the 'national liberation' wars can subvert existing countries in Asia or elsewhere. It was Nikita Khrushchev who, in January 1961, described the three possible categories of international conflict —'world wars, local wars and wars of liberation or popular insurrections.' The first two were dangerous and should be prevented. As for 'wars of liberation,' he said, 'we accept such wars. We are supporting and we will support the peoples in their struggle for independence.'

There have been full-fledged Communist up- risings in seven Asian countries since the Second World War ended. Two succeeded—the seizure of China by Mao in 1949 and Tibet in 1953. Three failed—Korea, Malaya and the Philippines. One is enjoying a truce tnomentane—Laos. The future of the seventh—South Vietnam—is now in the balance. Only five of the seven can be said to fit the 'wars of liberation' rubric—China, Malaya, Philippines, Laos and South Vietnam. Korea was a conventional war which ended in stalemate. For the US it was a costly police action —59,000 killed, 103,000 wounded and almost $18 billion in costs. The seizure of Tibet was a simple piece of imperialism.

Communist defeat in Malaya after twelve years of battle and similar defeat in the Philippines will now be followed, in my opinion, by a stalemate in the Indochinese peninsula. For one thing is clear from the history of 'wars of liberation' since the Second World War—the victim must be weak, like Tibet, or else withdut allies, or both, as Kuomintang China was. Given a modern industrial power capable of and willing to fight as an ally, 'wars of liberation' become dangerous for aggressor Communist countries, whose economies cannot support, except at enormous -cost to their planning programmes, protracted conflict.

The third requirement for Communist success is speed. That is why Fidel Castro won so easily in Cuba. The Batista government was corroded, unsupported and friendless. Fidel Castro looked good, the Herbert L. Matthews propaganda camouflaged the Communist character of the revolution and they made it. But the 'war of liberation' in Venezuela will not succeed, despite the FALN terror, so long as Havana knows that US troops are poised to fly in at the first sign that the Caracas government is unable to cope. What President Johnson is doing in South Viet-

nam—and what he did in the Dominican Republic—is not lost on Fidel Castro, I am sure. In other words, despite a feeling on a previous visit that the way to lose to the Communists. is by using conventional war tactics, I am begin-

ning to be persuaded that conventional war with ordnance, manpower, air power, either fluid or fixed battlefronts, accompanied by some counter- insurgency manceuvres, is the only way to out- flank the enemy insurgents.

Put another way. American strategy now in Vietnam is to force and entice the Vietcong 65,000 hard-core 'Chu Luc,' plus about 100,000 irregulars, plus about 40,000 North Vietnamese infiltrees—to come out of their foxholes and

thus transform their ambush tactics, their hit-and- run tactics, their terror and effective propaganda and their brainwashing—in short, the entire arsenal of 'liberation' weapons—into face-to-face, bayonet-to-bayonet battle. Admittedly, the West can't overcome 'war of liberation' tactics with trick tactics or weapons or the counter-insur- gency special forces. Since 1961, the US has tried them all—advisers, amphibious vehicles like the M-113, defoliation, flareplanes, offensive helicopters, enclaves—all these wonder drugs, and none of them worked. The US is now doing what it can do best—war, direct combat and to hell with psychological war, political war and all the special training programmes at Fort Bragg, Oberammergau, Eglin Field, Okinawa, for counter-insurgency. With a skilful political enemy like Mao or Ho, there is nothing else to be done but to provide muscle, in every shape or form, except nuclear.

Such a response would not work if America were determined on 'rollback.' I am sure that had President Eisenhower insisted on going beyond the 38th Parallel, the US might still be lighting in Korea or else have used the atomic bomb once more. And since the Johnson administration had stated again and again that they 'seek no wider war,' that they do not intend the overthrow of the Hanoi regime, they offer the Communists difficult choices. To beat the American forces, now that they are arriving daily with'every con- ceivable kind of weapon—plus, of course, the ineffable Seventh Fleet—Communist guerrilla tactics are insufficient. American power must be met by Communist power and that means grave risk for Hanoi. It hasn't that kind of power against an industrial giant immune from attack at home and it is questionable whether Hanoi would want a million Chinese troops marching through North Vietnam.

What impels me to this analysis is that the Communists twice in the last twenty-one months looked as if they would take power in South • Vietnam at any moment. The first occasion was the immediate aftermath of the Diem regime overthrow in November 1963, and the second time wa's October-November, 1964, when the Communists were —American officials admit this now—on the verge of victory. Somehow they didn't make it, because when it came to phase three—fighting in divisional strength and being able to muster the essential logistics for fixed warfare—it could not be done against the US.

• It could have been done easily had the South Vietnamese been alone, but they were not.

This is what 1 meant when I suggested earlier we were at a turning-point in history, because it appears that `wars of liberation' are doomed as a tactic if the victim has an ally or allies with patience, power and prowess. The victim may be a corrupt government-- Khrushchev in his

January 1963 speech called them 'rotten, reac- tionary regimes'---or a piece of real estate with

no sense of nationhood or without an economy.

But if the victim has a friend willing to make the victim's interest his own, 'wars of liberation' will not work. (Stalin tried a 'war of liberation' in Greece and Turkey, which failed because of President Truman. However shaken and riven both countries may be today, they exist.) Having said all this, I must add that when America has to bring up so much of its weaponry and manpower it is dangerously late. There can be no victory in South Vietnam—meaning a stable government without the intrusion of Com- munist coalitionism—without an American occu- pation army for years to come to ensure the country's continued existence. Now would be the time for American policy planners to determine who are potential victims—lran?—of 'wars of liberation' and see if they can avoid the inevitable heavy losses of American lives in these wars, let alone among the people who live in these Communist target areas.

The success of a 'liberation' invasion depends upon four factors—a resistant operational base like this country, where the Vietcong control two- thirds of the countryside, on which live more than half of South Vietnam's sixteen million people; intelligence and communication; time; and, lastly, as Mao wrote, 'the political goal [which] must be clearly and precisely indicated to the inhabitants of guerrilla zones . . . with- out a political goal, guerrilla warfare must fail.'

A fifth factor must now be added in the light of the, Vietnam experience—for a Com- munist insurgency to triumph, it must be pro- tected by a conventional military power (in this case, China) against counter-thrusts by another power. The theory of 'wars of liberation' de- pended from the outset upon Western unwilling- ness to risk war with either or both of the Commtthist powers. Since the Sino-Soviet alliance is ruptured for some years to come and since the Soviet Union itself 'seeks no wider war' over South Vietnam, the burden of' protector has fallen upon China. America has exercised its

option—counter-invasion along convent ton;' lines. China today has only one option--counfri.

counter-invasion—if they mean to safeguard the ten-year-old investment of South Vietnam. Thi.; option they will not or they cannot exercise. because it means a confrontation with America" military power for which China is obvioush unprepared. 1 omit what appears to be :1 Chinese option--..a willingness to sit around titi: negotiation . table-hut which China quite properly must reject, because an agreed cease-fire with the Vietcong in possession oi two-thirds of the count ry would be insupportabh: from the US standpoint. Could China demand of Hanoi that the Vietcong troops be shiltod north of the 17th Parallel so as to make negev tiations possible?

Peking may have one other option--to allo%t or to 'press Hanoi .to send down part of it' 500,000-man armed force, an unlikely event, since. no matter what happened thereafter, North Viet- nam would then be even more dependent tha" it is on Chinese military support.

If luck holds out, we may see the cremation '- the 'wars of liberation' doctrine in South Viet- nam, just as we saw the end of the Soviet militarY threat to Western Europe after the Berlin and the creation of NATO.