Essay: HOW THE WAR IN VIET NAM MIGHT END

Friday, Aug. 09, 1968

PERHAPS nothing is more baffling about the complex war in Viet Nam than trying to imagine how it will end—foretelling the specific shape and nature of the final peace that somehow, some day must be made. How the U.S. extricates itself from Viet Nam is, for Americans and, in particular, for both political parties, the most important piece in the overall puzzle. Many lives and large issues of policy are at stake. Far more than was the case with the Korean War, how the Viet Nam conflict ends is apt to affect for years both the image Americans have of themselves and the image that the world has of the U.S. The U.S. should not leave Viet Nam in a way that divides the nation bitterly at home, gives excessive comfort to its enemies or undue doubts to its friends and allies.

So far, the Paris talks, bogged down on the issue of a total bombing halt, have produced little illumination about the means to the end. Nor can the ingredients of a final settlement be found in the publicly stated goals of the principal antagonists. Hanoi demands the complete withdrawal of all U.S. and other foreign forces from South Viet Nam, the reorganization of the South according to the National Liberation Front's political program, and reunification with North Viet Nam. For its part, the U.S. wants an end to all armed aggression against the government of South Viet Nam and assurances that the South Vietnamese can go their own way in freedom. These goals are so far apart that many would agree with the judgment of Edwin Reischauer, Asian scholar and diplomat, who says in Beyond Vietnam: "It is hard to envisage at this stage a negotiated settlement that is not virtually a surrender by one side or the other:

Both Hanoi and Washington may be at least partially paralyzed by that view. In a captured Communist directive released last month by the U.S., the Viet Cong command told its men that "only when, we have successfully accomplished the general offensive and general uprising will the negotiations demonstrate their significance, which consists of creating conditions for the enemy to accept final defeat and withdraw in an 'honorable' manner." In the U.S., government policy planners have done hardly any staff work on the actual nuts-and-bolts details of a settlement cease-fire arrangements, means of inspection for troop withdrawals, stages of reducing the fighting. One reason for the lack stems from the realization that such wargaming would probably become known and would add to the uneasiness that already besets South Vietnamese rulers and other U.S. allies in Asia. The more fundamental explanation is the assumption by many U.S. policymakers that the North Vietnamese are unlikely ever to accept a deal that preserves South Viet Nam's sovereignty and self-determination.


Agonizing Compromises

Source:time.com/