April 23, 1970
Page 12795
ERA OF NEGOTIATIONS – PART V
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in a series of brief statements during the last month I have raised questions about the administration's Vietnam policies – its over-reliance on Vietnamization and neglect of diplomacy. I had hoped that these questions would be answered in the President's address to the Nation on April 20. Unfortunately, I do not find this to be the case. I find that many of the same inconsistencies remain between the administration's word and deed.
I listened to President Nixon, hoping that he might reveal the plan for peace that we have been promised since his campaign in 1968. I hoped that he might indicate a program that would bring our involvement to a speedy close. Instead, I heard a determination that the war must continue and that, at best, a year from today almost 300,000 Americans will still be fighting and dying in Vietnam.
The fact that our American forces in Vietnam have been reduced and that further reductions are contemplated is desirable, but it cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that, under present planning, more than half of the peak number of American troops will remain in Vietnam after 2½ years of the Nixon administration. Moreover, although President Nixon contrasts American casualties for the first quarter of 1970 favorably with first quarters of prior years, the fact is that the level of American casualties has remained high even as our troop strength has declined.
Indeed, in recent weeks, the rate of casualties has increased. Continuation of the present rate would mean that by a year from now – when the current installment of withdrawals is scheduled to be completed – an additional 6 to 7 thousand American boys will have been killed.
President Nixon's hopes for peace appear to be based on the illusion that Vietnamization can in time bring about a military victory. Although the President speaks of a political settlement as being "the heart of the matter" he makes no move to bring about effective and productive negotiations in Paris. We continue to be represented there by a career foreign service officer whom the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong consider as a subordinate with whom they cannot and will not negotiate. In addition, the promise that almost 300,000 American troops will continue a year from now to shore up the Thieu regime certainly removes any incentive for Saigon to negotiate a realistic political settlement. The President concedes that there has been no progress in Paris. But there can be no progress in Paris while we continue to downgrade diplomacy.
President Nixon offers only the prospect of further and futile military efforts to resolve an essentially political conflict. He tells us only that, over some indefinite period, all American combat forces are to be withdrawn. Are we to understand that noncombat forces will remain? We are not told whether or how many combat forces are to be withdrawn during the next month or 6 months or during the balance of 1970. Are we to understand that the President has given in to military insistence on a delay in any further troop withdrawals?
We are told that what was previously described as a firm withdrawal plan was in fact a strategy of "cut-and-try." Is the new program, with the timing and pace of withdrawals to be determined by developments elsewhere, any different?
What we do know is that we are asked to support, and to support indefinitely, a war in which somewhat fewer American troops continue to fight on an ever widening battlefield. We know too that the criteria for terminating American participation have now also been widened to include developments not only in South Vietnam but throughout Indochina.
Much has been made of the increased emphasis in the speech on the desirability of a political settlement of the war, but paying lip service to diplomacy is not enough. This administration must take a variety of steps to reinvigorate the process of negotiation and to bring an end to the killing in Vietnam.
In this respect the speech was a disappointment.
The President failed to name a high level replacement for Ambassador Lodge. It has now been 153 days since we had a high-level negotiator in Paris and North Vietnam's political representative at the talks has returned home. To let this post remain vacant for 5 out of the 15 months that the President has been in office is a poor way to give substance to the "era of negotiation" proclaimed by the President at the time of his inauguration.
The only new diplomatic initiative referred to in the speech was the French proposal to reconvene the Geneva Conference, and the NLF statement in Paris the day after the President's speech apparently killed that proposal. It has now been many, many months since this administration or the government in Saigon restated our negotiating position or attempted a major new diplomatic initiative.
The President's speech stated that we favored a "fair political solution" that "reflected the existing relationship of political forces within South Vietnam." But our negotiating position and that of the Thieu/Ky regime do not contain specific proposals to achieve this end. As I shall spell out in a future statement, it is not hard to see why this proposal has not been the basis for a political settlement between the Vietnamese factions which have been at war with each other for so many years.
Finally, Mr. President, I would take issue with the extraordinary rhetoric which President Nixon put forward as the basis for his troop withdrawal announcement.
How is it possible under any stretch of the imagination to say, as the President told the Nation, that "the decision I have announced tonight means that we finally have in sight the just peace we are seeking." Negotiations are at a complete impasse. Today's meeting – the 64th – was a propaganda exchange. The war has widened in both Laos and Cambodia. Even if the President's highly optimistic statement that "pacification is succeeding" is accepted at face value, and few would do so, the best that can be said is that we are slowly disengaging from the war. But Vietnamization means only the continuation of Asians killing Asians, and it is hollow rhetoric to talk about a "just peace" now being in sight.
The time has come, and indeed is long since past, when we should move to create the conditions that will permit the political settlement which is the only hope for peace in Southeast Asia. It will require that we send to Paris a high ranking negotiator with direct and acknowledged access to the President. It will require that we make clear to the Saigon government that they can no longer rely on American military power to postpone forever their need to recognize the realities of political power in South Vietnam.
There is today less stability in Indochina than there was 15 months ago, when this administration took office. In those 15 months, 11,000 Americans have been killed – more than one-quarter of all American deaths in Vietnam. Our national interest demands a plan for peace.
I ask unanimous consent that an editorial and an article on this subject be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the items were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, Apr. 23, 1970]
THE LESSON OF LAOS
At one point last fall in the Symington subcommittee's hearings on Laos, Senator Fulbright said, almost plaintively, "I have never seen a country (the United States) engage in so many devious undertakings as this." The administration-censored transcript of the hearings published the other day fully bears out his lament. Until President Nixon, under the Symington spur, last month revealed selected aspects of the American presence in Laos, the American people knew only journalistic bits and propaganda pieces of a role that has cost them a couple of hundred lives and some billions of dollars over the last six years. Despite the (deletions), which at times make the transcript read like a drunk with hiccups, the Symington hearings fill in important parts of the record. They contribute substantially to the public's knowledge both of the military in Laos and the bureaucracy in Washington.
The rationale of successive administrations for deceiving Americans about their government's violations of the 1962 Geneva Agreements, which neutralized Laos, was put by William H. Sullivan. A Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Mr. Sullivan helped write the 1962 agreements and then served as Ambassador to Laos. He said that North Vietnam violated the 1962 accord from the start. In "proportionate response" the United States followed suit. To have admitted its violations while the Communists denied theirs would have put the Russians, who for their own reasons favored the continued neutrality of Laos, on the spot. A "senior Soviet official" had said that Moscow could wink at unofficial reports of American violations but would have to take cognizance of official admissions. In that event, the Geneva Agreements would have been demolished. Laos would have been "polarized." The Laotian government might then have invoked American aid under SEATO (sic) and thereby generated "a greater obligation and a greater immersion of American presence and pressure to go into Laos."
We note with some incredulity that the Senators interrogating Mr. Sullivan did not see fit to challenge the substance of the policy he was elaborating, as complicated and contorted as it is.
They did, however, challenge the secrecy in which that policy was fashioned and implemented. Senator Symington tellingly noted the irony of an open society running a closed policy.
Subcommittee counsel Roland Paul went a step further and asked if "the benefit to be gained by not acknowledging our presence in this area is, perhaps, outweighed by the credibility gap that is generated from the fact that our operations are so large and they are so widely reported by unofficial sources, which the administration either denies or evades?"
Precisely here, in our view, lies the heart of the Laotian matter: policy was woven out of strictly diplomatic considerations. Since the Congress and the people were not informed, they could not raise the questions and doubts that might well have exercised a restraining influence on single-minded policymakers. At the least, the exposure of American policy might have gained for it a more substantial measure of public support. It is a pity that Mr. Symington did not start probing the Laotian scene years earlier, when it could have made a difference.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE GENERALS
(By James Reston)
In announcing the withdrawal of another 150,000 American troops from Vietnam within the next twelve months, President Nixon said "this far-reaching decision was made after consultation with our commanders in the field and it has the approval of the government of South Vietnam."
The distinction is clear. He "consulted" his commanders in the field but didn't get their "approval." In fact, there was bitter opposition to this move both by General Abrams and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the President is now caught between the antiwar elements who want him to get out faster and his military chiefs who want him to slow the retreat.
THE CONFLICT
This is one of those situations where it would probably be wise to follow the Administration's slogan: Watch what we do rather than what we say. The main thing is that, despite the expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, despite the diplomatic, stalemate in Paris peace talks, and despite the warnings of his military advisers, the President is sticking to the schedule of withdrawals and committing himself to a flexible but faster pull-back in the next year.
There are risks in this for the President, not only in Vietnam but within the Pentagon and the command in Saigon. For General Abrams is known to feel that the President has now reached the point of changing fundamentally the combat forces in the field without changing Abrams mission.
What General Abrams is saying is that his troops are being taken from him faster than he thinks prudent in the present state of readiness of the South Vietnamese and the widening war by the North Vietnamese. What the President is saying, in effect, is what Senator George Aiken urged him to say long ago: "We've won, so bring the boys back home."
It would probably be a mistake for the antiwar elements at home and the North Vietnamese officials in Hanoi to ignore this increasingly difficult relationship between the President and his principal military chiefs.
He has not said when in the next twelve months he will cut the 150,000 but he has imposed his authority as Commander in Chief on his subordinates. He has given a somewhat rosier picture of the situation in Indo China than his commanders would make themselves, and therefore he is vulnerable to the charge – which President Johnson would never face – that he has given them an assignment but not the men to carry it out.
THE PRESIDENT'S WARNING
This was clearly in the President's mind in his latest report on Vietnam. "While we are taking these risks for peace," he said, they [the enemy] will be taking grave risks should they attempt to use the occasion to jeopardize the security of our remaining forces. . . My responsibiliy as Commander in Chief of our armed forces is for the safety of our men, and I shall meet that responsibility."
Here what the President says should be be taken with the utmost seriousness. For if he personally takes the responsibility for withdrawing troops against the advice of General Abrams, and the enemy then launches an attack that threatens a major military defeat or even the destruction of Abrams' command, it is not too much to say that he will use any weapons at his command – any weapons – to avoid destruction of his remaining troops.
Anybody who has watched Mr. Nixon over the years is bound to understand how reluctantly he would reject the advice of his military commanders, how careful he would be to avoid an open confrontation with them on a military judgment, and how violently he would react if he thought his decision was in danger of producing a massacre or even a humiliating defeat.
This is the new thing in the situation. He has left himself some leeway to keep most of the 150,000 in Vietnam until late in the twelve-month period. He has obliquely suggested a political compromise that would leave the Communists in charge of the areas they now hold, and he has surrounded it all with victorious rhetoric, which his commanders don't quite believe and even resent.
In short, Mr. Nixon is now approaching that delicate point of withdrawal which President de Gaulle faced in his retreat from Algeria. De Gaulle managed it only with the greatest difficulty, against the advice and, some thought, the honor of his responsible officers, and it was not accomplished without revolt among the officers.
President Nixon is not faced with anything so serious as this, but he is now coming into the most difficult part of his policy, and even those who might wish him to move faster, have to give him credit for sticking to the direction and pace of his retreat, even if he calls it by the name of victory.
[From the New York Times, Apr. 22, 1970]
POLITICAL NEED FOR PULLOUT IS BALANCED AGAINST GENERALS' WISH FOR FLEXIBILITY
(By Max Frankel)
WASHINGTON, April 21.– The first reactions here to President Nixon's latest report on Vietnam focused on his obvious effort to balance the political pressure for more troop withdrawals against the military's request for a show of strength on the battlefield in the next few months. The President found his compromise in the kind of annual timetable that he had refused to proclaim last autumn. He committed himself to the minimum withdrawal rate of 12,000 men a month over the coming year. But he left his generals free to argue for slowdowns and speed-ups as the course of battle changes, provided only that they scale down to 284,000 men by next spring.
Mr. Nixon's speech last night was also notable for its strong new appeal for negotiation of a political settlement.
Despite his optimistic reading of the military situation and his contention that a "just peace" was now in sight, Mr. Nixon went out of his way to encourage the Soviet Union and North Vietnam to join him on what he called "a better, shorter path to peace."
In this, he reflected the views of some his advisers who see no possibility of real disengagement from Southeast Asia without negotiation and of some who remain convinced that Hanoi is at this moment trying to choose between a painful war of attrition and a more forthcoming attitude at the conference table.
MOVEMENT IN "RIGHT DIRECTION"
Presumably. Mr. Nixon's choice of tactics at this stage will be sufficient to meet his immediate political problems. His minimum withdrawal schedule would still meet his basic desire get American troops out of ground combat in Vietnam before the start of the 1972 election campaign. In the meantime, most Americans will probably endorse the view of the Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, that the movement at least "is continuing in the right direction – out"
Only a few of Mr. Nixon's potential Democratic rivals in 1972, led by Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, publicly criticized the speech as too ambiguous and the troop withdrawal formula as too elastic. They were particularly disturbed by the President's resolve to base future judgments on the military action in Laos and Cambodia as well as in South Vietnam.
But it is precisely this concern here with the new situation in Cambodia and with the festering problem of Laos that has complicated the Administration's view of the war and kept alive the hopes of some leading officials for a settlement by negotiation.
Mr. Nixon has long heard suggestions from the Pentagon, for instance, that he forget about negotiations. Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird never has placed much faith in the Paris peace talks and has urged that everything be risked on a relatively rapid troop withdrawal and transfer of combat duty to the South Vietnamese Army.
COMBAT VICTORY FORESEEN
The Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military commanders have tended to view political compromise as unnecessary. They have felt that the allied forces were making considerable progress on the ground and have predicted frustration if not outright defeat for the North Vietnamese, if only American troops are not withdrawn too hastily.
The President has thus far managed with a combination of these approaches: "Vietnamization" of the war effort and American troop withdrawals to persuade Americans that the end was near, combined with "pacification" and other military activity to sap the strength of the enemy forces.
At the advice of his diplomatic advisers, however, Mr. Nixon has also kept open an invitation to serious negotiations. And though the words in which he discusses negotiation undergo only subtle changes, he appeared particularly eager to stress this approach in last night's statement.
The fear that Hanoi will extend the war deeper into Laos and Cambodia is one reason for this emphasis. Though judged here to be exhausted by war and overextended throughout Indochina, the North Vietnamese are respected in Washington for their tenacity.
PERIL OF WIDER WAR SEEN
If they widen the war, American disengagement will become even more difficult, no matter how successful the operations inside South Vietnam. Even if they were only to occupy Eastern Laos and Cambodia and threaten South Vietnam with massive invasion, the costly American effort to disengage slowly could turn out to have been a waste.
Mr. Nixon is hesitating on Cambodia's request for military aid because he does not wish to provoke Hanoi into a wider conflict. He is being told that the North Vietnamese are probably facing difficult decisions at this stage and that he must combine a show of confidence with signs of interest in a political settlement to help persuade them to negotiate.
The conviction that Hanoi has not yet totally rejected the idea of negotiation accounts for the White House's eager interest last week in reports of a possible Soviet interest in a new Geneva conference. The President believes that Moscow will make no move on Vietnam unless authorized to do so by Hanoi. And though the latest report of Soviet interest in negotiation has since been officially contradicted, Mr. Nixon went out of his way last night to try to keep it alive.
Thus Mr. Nixon's speech was essentially a three-pronged effort. The first part dealt with his immediate problem of having to announce more troop withdrawals. His peroration exuded confidence that the end was in sight and that the enemy had miscalculated at every turn.
But the heart of the statement was a diplomatic appeal calling "upon our adversaries to join us in working at the conference table."