By PHYLLIS CLARKE

eee Cl ;
| Thee ark Clifford, former
lthngo,” °f Defense in the

aa ministration now
Pilon Should be a greater

ihe 2 Vietnam. Writing in
ting x ‘sue of Foreign Af-
oung Suggests that all U.S.
rees should be with-
100,099 ao the end of 1970,
He them this year.

" SUggests this is the way

ress
ure the Saigon puppet

ft

Am

| teat 5, oy to broaden its poli-

+| Share and assume its full

| Of the =

HR ain fighting. And if it

is, ; a itself with only

9s it 5 logistic support, he
yet Never wi

A a will. “The forces
\ a deployed and the
Me ny material costs we

mn)

| oe have become,
tion ey out of all pro-
| Mite our purposes,” he

Ut Prec;
Hing ty j., wdent Nixon isn’t go-
eae former defense sec-
the shots. In a fine
‘merican one-upman-

s
. confer! Over a television
te d ‘eg “I would hope
ia able beat Mr. Clifford’s
ve one just as I think we
\ i. When : little better than he
| ° Natio © was in charge of
it ae defense.” He sug-
 Woulg be Te than 100,000 troops
| With Peed out this year.
| ‘Dost inte 1S as background, it is
Ment i Testing to read a docu-
i onrented to the Stock-
Ng in on Vietnam in
i tes Policy analyzed United

Mee Pa

: Ptessor by Gabriel Kolko, a
\Dhiversit of history at the State
. o Y of New York at Buf-
War, author of The Politics

Of 1943.
‘Pape etican® 45 and The Roots

Forej 5,
et . deal reign Policy, the

§ specifically with the
ee January 1968.
| otding fpam at that time, ac-
rane had pe Kolko, “the Ame-
Ptimistic begun to believe the
the Order ees Washington
the lect them to issue for
® Situann Yea" but in fact
hore ae had never been
Stat advantageous for Unit-
\ pute a troops.”
This are ctS he presents to prove
8 follows:
ay ates pr aBe monthly casu-
1 Perce Or U.S. troops leaped
em. | in 1967 over 1966.
Ser}, Saigon army of “con-
I rete, in . business-officers”
aie? 5 Words of Senator
Senate 4 Clarke, men “who
Poorly led € people, are lazy,
‘ag Brett: they will conti-
ee ey chickens, rape vil-
they €n, and fight as badly
a get by with.”
| etican 20,000 of the best
&y, “2 soldiers were hope-
Mh pgynted down in the Khe-
5 Ang
4, 19gg °°" Starting January
_ + Came the Tet offensive

.

of which Dr. Kolko says, “De-
spite the initial attempts to con-
ceal the magnitude of the Ame-
rican defeats with optimistic
proclamations, ‘by the end of
the month the United States
could not hide the fact that it
had suffered the most profound
military defeat of the war and
that the illusion of future vic-
tory was a chimera.”

“By early March,” he goes on,
“officials in Washington were
acknowledging the Tet Offensive
as ‘a body blow,’ ‘a real punch
in the nose’ or the like, and
Vietnam as a ‘bottomless pit’.”

He then describes the prob-
lems that increased for the
Johnson administration leading
to the bombing halt speech of
March 31. This, according to the
historian, was “a ploy to buy
time to escalate the war, solve
political problems at home, and
rea$sure European financial
circles.”

- “Postponements in serious dip-
lomatic negotiations,” he says,
“partially attained the same
effect. Therefore the U.S. began
altering the explicit and implied
terms of the Johnson speech of
March 31st and to stress condi-
tions for peace that only made
more distant its attainment.”

From May to November,
Kolko says, “the U.S. saw the
Paris meeting as a means of
diverting the mounting internal
and world political pressures
even as it escalated the war.”

“U.S. refusal to consider a
negotiated settlement of the
war, on realistic terms, he says,
“was due not only to its instinc-
tive reliance on arms but also
on Washington’s profound pes-
simism regarding the political
future and viability of the
Thieu administration. This ab-
sence of significant local politi-
cal allies fills the U.S. with the
fear, should a diplomatic settle-
ment lead to American troop
withdrawals, that there would
be no avoiding the eventual tri-
umph of the NLF, which it ta-
citly acknowledges as the only
effective, authentic, and credible
political alternative to the pre-
sent American occupation.”

Then came the Nixon admini-
stration and its attempt to car-
ry forward the bankrupt policies
on Vietnam. But problems con-
tinued to mount. The attempts
to solve the problems of the
world economy, gold and bal-
ance-of-trade ran head-on into
the expenditures for continued
operations in Vietnam. Highly
militaristic elements wanted the
defense budget of $80 billion
divided so that more would go
to aerospace and missile branch-

-es, Kolko quotes the Wall Street
- Journal which said the position

of these men is “that the war
should be wound up if it can’t

be won soon.” :
“To obtain a ‘deescalation’ of

the war on the Vietnamese
side,” Kolko points out, sa per-
manent partition of Vietnam,
and. to. extend the patience of
the American establishment and

public with the war was John-
son’s strategy. Nixon’s first ac-
tion as president was to con-
tinue this complex response to
a changing, yet more complex
reality in the hope it would suc-
ceed, It has not, and it cannot.”

“In the last analysis,” he con-
tinues, “however, we can only
be certain of one thing: that the

U.S. cannot obtain even a par-—

tial, much less total victory in
Vietnam. Far above all else, the
strength of the Vietnamese peo-
ple themselves in their just
struggle against the American
invasion has shown that Nixon
must sooner or later adapt his
diplomatic strategy to the mili-
tary and political realities of
Vietnam. The U-S. ability to re
alize its unattainable ends in
Vietnam is still limited, and the
inexorable lesson of the past
year and one-half is that its
time is running out.”

“The lesson of Vietnam,” Dr.
Kolko concludes, “is that bar-
barism is not necessarily syno-
nymous with military or politi-
cal victory, and that the geno-

setts

A Canadian in the GDR

SA

cidal logic of indiscriminate
mass destruction has proved ‘it-
self incapable of attaining that
victory. For, unlike Europe dur-
ing the Second World War, the
Vietnamese people are not pas-
sively waiting to be destroyed
under the sheer mathematical
superiority of their tormentor’s
fire-power. On the contrary, they
know that their survival is de-
pendent ultimately on resistance
and on rallying to the cause of
the NLF to seek an end to the
war, via honorable negotiations

pets and stage settings

chat with the driver, as it is
from Berlin.

_ He was a young man,
tied and had a nine-year
about 700 marks a month,
wife’s earnings as a

of course,
2¥4-room apartment
cleaner? Yes. TV? Certainly.
Oh no, he was quite
how women are. .

my direction.
something else. Now it’s a n

satisfactory.

him.

in his twenties, mar-
old son. He averaged
supplemented by his
hairdresser three days a
week. They could have managed on his salary
alone, but his wife found it interesting to get
out of the house a bit. The extra money was,
very welcome. They had a modern,
which they had complete-
ly furnished. Washing machine? Yes. Vacuum

I asked if he lacked anything. He personally?
satisfied. “But you know
.” an apolgetic glance: in
“My wife, she always wants
ew sofa. The old
one doesn’t suit her any more.” It was a good-
natured complaint. He seemed inclined to allow
his wife free rein in the decorating department.

Beefs? Of course he had some. Men’s shoes,
for example. He would like to see more variety
although he admitted the quality was
In general, though, he was well
satisfied with his life. Unemployment was
something of which he could barely conceive.
The thought of a man having no work in spite
of being healthy and willing to work was in-
comprehensible and would be unbearable to

Like so many citizens of the GDR he has
relatives in West Berlin and West Germany.
When’ they come for a visit there are often
long and sometimes hot political arguments.

a two-hour ride

A long chat in a taxi

By LAURETTA RIX

How does an ordinary taxi-driver live in the
GDR? How much does he earn? What is his
standard of living? What are his special prob-
lems? The shortness of the usual taxi ride plus
my own shyness and lack of fluency in Ger-
man normally would prevent my being able
to get the answers to these questions.

The other day, however, I had to deliver to
the DEFA Film Studio in Babelsberg some pup-
I had designed. This

gave me the unique opportunity to have a long

But some of his relatives, who are most pro-
nounced in their support for the “western way
of life’? and use its most shiny material bene-
fits to augment their arguments, are forced to
admit in the long run that all they have man-
aged to acquire could be lost overnight through
_ sickness, loss of job, etc. and that they, in
fact, had no real security. ,
; My taxi-driver friend seemed quite sincere ©
in saying’ he would not trade places with his ©
relatives. because he could see that the stand-
ard of living in the GDR was consistently ris-
ing without any accompanying loss in security
or social benefits. He was also very proud that ©
no nazis or neo-nazi party could possibly hope *
to have any influence in his country.

SPAGIFIC TRIBUNE SHOUINE 2A

if possible, but by prevailing in
the field of combat if necessary...
The war, the extravagent and
indiscriminate use of weapons,
has now become fully self-
defeating for the U.S. It is this
supreme irony, this inability to
translate machinery into either

military or political victory,
that the U.S. must now con-
front.” |

Is it perhaps the recognition
of this truth that underlies
Clark’s article and Nixon’s an-
nouncement of last week?

omens :
PP yeED {|