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 {|