March 22, 1967
Page 7597
EUROPEAN SUPPORT FOR PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S VIETNAM POLICIES
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in a timely article, Mr. Eric Mettler, a foreign editor for the Neue Zuricher Zeitung, has brought a fresh perspective to two of the more controversial aspects of the Vietnam conflict.
Discussing civilian casualties in Vietnam, Mr. Mettler points out that: Neither the Vietcong nor the Communist aggressor from the north have spared the population that was hostile to them in South Vietnam.
But, he points out, the allied forces have "limited themselves to the attempt of impeding or paralyzing the transportation of war supplies from the north to the south by bombing roads, fuel depots, and defense plants." He adds that heavy air losses sustained by the U.S. Air Force is due principally to the fact that we "have always tried to came as close as possible to our targets, to spare the civilian population and to make a direct hit."
On the other matter of controversy – whether or not the bombing has proved to be successful – Mr. Mettler reports: The bombing has seriously checked production, distribution and supplies. Hundreds of thousands of men are required to make only the most urgent repairs on all that is destroyed daily.
I ask unanimous consent that the text of the article from the Swiss Review of World Affairs be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From Swiss Review of World Affairs, February 1967]
NORTH VIETNAM IN PERSPECTIVE
(By Eric Mettler)
For a long time there were but few western reports on conditions in North Vietnam. One had to content oneself with the distorted versions given by various Communist sources or articles by fellow-travelers who had come to Hanoi with preconceived notions. This has changed of late. A few accredited correspondents of internationally known papers have suddenly received North Vietnamese visas – for a limited period – as for example Jacques Decornoy of Le Monde and Harrison E. Salisbury of The New York Times. To be sure they represent papers that have so far been known to consider American policy on North Vietnam a mistake. It is just another of the many bizarre features of the Vietnam conflict that American reporters and American women pacifists are being shown around the same region on which American bombs are being dropped.
The western correspondents’ reports from North Vietnam roughly present the following picture: A small people of 16 to 20 million is "successfully defending itself" against the war arsenal of a superpower. Apparently, a large part of the urban population has been evacuated, and industry has been decentralized. Food rationing and air defense, we are told, function well. When the American bombers appear, every one takes cover in one of the innumerable ditches and pipelike, underground one-man shelters. Legions of auxiliary forces are permanently at work repairing damaged roads. Where small trucks are no longer able to pass, tens of thousands of bicycles, or simply human shoulders, carry with ant-like efficiency whatever must be transported. Above all at night, it seems, supplies and reinforcements pour southward – not to be deterred by the bombardments.
Moreover, the western correspondents who have been temporarily admitted to North Vietnam and have been shown certain specific sectors of the war scene, all concur in stating that American bombs have taken their toll among the civilian population. In addition, they convey the impression that the bombing is more likely to strengthen the spirit of resistance than to weaken North Vietnam's military staying power.
Not only the Pentagon but also The New York Times and the London Times, which printed Salisbury's reports, have since then pointed out editorially that no war can be waged without damaging housing and injuring sectors of the civilian population. In the face of a deluge of suggestions it will be well to remember how strangely the various aspects of total and limited war have so far been juxtaposed in this conflict. Neither the Vietcong nor the Communist aggressor from the North have spared the "population" that was hostile to them in South Vietnam. The monstrous chronicle of butchery, torture and arson in villages which would not submit to them is well-known. But the Americans have so far consciously refrained from destroying North Vietnam as an economic organism. They have neither bombed key industries, nor dams, nor ports. They have limited themselves to the attempt of impeding or paralyzing the transportation of war supplies from the North to the South by bombing roads, fuel depots and defense plants, thus hoping to contribute to the efforts of bringing Hanoi to the point of negotiation. In so doing they have lost five hundred or more planes, and this principally perhaps because they have always tried to come as close as possible to their targets, to spare the civilian population and to make a direct hit. It is a war in which the North wanted, and still wants, to convert the South to Communism, whereas the United States is willing to let the North remain Communist once a peace agreement is reached.
No one will deny Ho Chi Minh and his followers some grudging respect. It takes a great deal to put up a fight in the name of national independence against the Japanese, the French, the internal forces of opposition and the Americans. But Ho Chi Minh and his adherents were – needless to say – engaged in waging not only an anti-colonial war of independence, which ended in 1954, but also a Communist war of conquest, in which they also nearly succeeded in 1965. They are representatives of a system which is inevitably ruled by compulsion and in which human dignity is of infinitely less importance than in the free world. No western correspondent will be able to ascertain within a few days' time how much the North Vietnamese population's war effort is based on voluntary patriotism and how much derives from the fact that the only way to survive under Communist rule is to cooperate. Since 1954 a million people, refusing to support the regime any longer, have "voted with their feet," that is, have fled to the South.
The facts relayed by western news agencies differ considerably from the reports written by the western correspondents who have been traveling through a few carefully chosen sectors of North Vietnam, convinced that Washington's policy, which has always been determined by the extremely difficult choice between two evils, was wrong from the start. The standard of living in North Vietnam has remained one of the lowest in the whole world. The bombing has seriously checked production, distribution and supplies. Hundreds of thousands of men are required to make only the most urgent repairs on all that is destroyed daily. The 45,000 Chinese who mend railways and roads create an unwelcome dependence on China, as do the bad harvests that have made Chinese grain imports a necessity for North Vietnam. Disease and hunger weaken the fighting contingents headed for the South.
According to reliable sources there are also "counter-revolutionary" centers of opposition in North Vietnam, against which the public is warned by the North Vietnamese press. Moreover, there are tensions within the North Vietnamese leadership similar to those between Hanoi, Peking and Moscow. So far those leaders have prevailed – in Hanoi apparently headed by Secretary General Le Duan – who want to continue the war with the South. But differences have arisen over the manner in which it is to be conducted: with the support of larger regular units, or once again solely by means of guerrilla warfare.
The quarrels with Peking, which keeps calling for intransigence and teaches lessons but remains carefully aloof, have become more frequent. Conversely, the influence of Moscow, which has after all strengthened North Vietnam's air defense, has grown accordingly. But the Soviet Union, too, offers advice – North Vietnam is to effect a compromise – which has so far not been accepted by Hanoi.
In this situation, in which the Vietcong and Hanoi certainly still hold their basic position, but in comparison to 1965 have nevertheless clearly been forced into the defensive, Washington is being assailed from all sides by demands that it discontinue the bombing of North Vietnam – unilaterally and for good – in order to prepare the way for the negotiation of peace. Such requests come from Moscow, in the name of the Hanoi "moderates" so to speak, from Paris, from U. Thant, from The New York Times, discreetly from Prime Minister Wilson, and are also part and parcel of the Pope's mediation efforts. One seems to have forgotten that the American bombardments of North Vietnam were already stopped for several weeks more than a year ago.
The Communists made use of that interval to prepare new military advances – just as they made use of similar intervals in Korea; in Korea incidentally the will to fight to the victorious end was also proclaimed by the North with seemingly unswerving purpose and then suddenly dropped for the sake of negotiation when the enormous reserves, the endurance and the limited war aim of the opponents were belatedly recognized.
That the present onslaught of demands – some of which smack of appeasement – is met by Washington with the statement that the bombardments will be stopped only when the other side has given some indication that it will reciprocate, is understandable considering all that has been learned in dealing with Communist opponents in Europe and in Asia so far. Only if an American delegation were to arrive at a new Geneva Conference with the resignation displayed by the French and the British in 1954 would there be reason to deplore Washington's fatal blunders.