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University of Iowa anti-war protests, 1970

1970-10-07 ""Iowa City People's Peace Treaty Committee"" Page 23

Thieu's response to the Paris statement was to threaten Duc with immediate arrest upon return to Saigon and seizure of the issues of Tin Sang carrying the text of the document. It is a measure of Thieu's isolation that this did not deter Duc's immediate return. The chorus of protest generated by Thieu's threats did, however, prevent him from carrying it out thus far. 

The assessment of experienced observers in Paris places Thieu in a much weaker position at the present time than Ngo Dinh Diem just prior to his overthrow in 1963. That this assessment is shared in Saigon is partially born out by widespread rumors suggesting that Thieu will " pull a (Lyndon) Johnson" in the presidential elections scheduled for September 1971. There are, in fact, some indications that third parties have been trying to communicate hints of Thieu's "flexibility and political realism" to the PRG in the absurd hope of finding a spot for him in a future transitional government. 

V. Against this background the PRG Peace Initiative put forward by Mme Nguyen Thi Binh in Paris on 17 September 1970 takes on immense significance as the only viable and realistic basis for peace in Vietnam in the foreseeable future. The compatibility of this proposal with the Duc position comes as no surprise once we recognize them as responding to the same objective situation. A careful reading also renders Nixon's Five Point Proposal as a non-response motivated by propaganda and domestic political considerations. 

The cornerstone of the PRG proposal is acceptable by the US of the principle of total US military withdrawal by a reasonable and specified date. While the PRG set this date at 30 June 1971, clearly inspired by the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment, certainly no one can assume this detail to be subject to negotiation. Not so the demand to set some such date. Not only is this demand clearly justified on grounds of principle after one quarter century of continuous struggle against western imperialism but if reflects the military and political balance in South Vietnam.

Following acceptance of this principle, which would set a date for the termination of US belligerence in South Vietnam, immediate steps could be taken to safeguard US troops during the withdrawal period and talks to effect the release of US prisoners could begin. Indeed, according to private indications, the actual release of such prisoners could get underway before the withdrawal deadline if arrangements can be completed. These two points are clear and direct responses by the PRG to the two questions most consistently raised by US negotiators since the beginning of the Paris talks. Safety of US troops, it should be recalled, was given by Nixon as the main rationale behind the Cambodian invasion and the sole legal justification for continuation of US military operations in South Vietnam.

The sections of the PRG Peace Initiative [decling?] with methods for reaching a political settlement are at once more flexible and more precise than the earlier Ten Point Program offered in Paris on 8 May 1969. The steps outlined include a provisional coalition for the limited purpose of enabling " the South Vietnam people (to) decide themselves the political regime of South Vietnam through really free and democratic general elections... No party shall usurp for itself the right to organize general elections and lay down their modalities." It is important to note that nowhere is the total withdrawal of US troops mentioned as a pre-condition for either the formation of the coalition government or for holding elections. Furthermore, such a coalition will specifically include elements from the PRG, the current government in Saigon and person currently living outside Vietnam representing various forces in South Vietnam. The only people specifically exclude from such a provisional government are Thieu, Ky and Kiem. As Mme Binh put it in our conversations, " We have fought a quarter of a century in order to exclude three men from the government." In light of such explicit statements, Nixon's misrepresentation of this point can only be viewed as intentional and for the purpose of sabotaging prospects for negotiations. 

VI. Nixon's Five Point Plan offered on 7 October, far from being a peace initiative, is a carefully contrived mixture of duplicity, misrepresentation and emotive rhetoric designed to manufacture political legitimacy and domestic support for continuing the war along somewhat revised lines. This can be seen on the most cursory examination. 

A standstill cease-fire in the context of South Vietnam is a political question and not merely a military one. Any attempt to ascertain who controls which areas would necessitate surfacing the entire guerilla apparatus and open identification of all cadre and NLF sympathizers thereby exposing them to the full force of Saigon's repression and US military annihilation. In the absence of US withdrawal this would amount to suicide or surrender, the choice resting on the tender mercies of Thieu-Ky-Khiem and Nixon. Insistence that the cease-fire extend over all of Indochina should be sufficient to discredit Nixon's plan except among stalwart know-nothings who still believe that Hanoi controls every resistance movement in the area from NLF and Pathet Lao to the Khmer United Front and the growing Thai movement. The call for an Indochina Conference by Nixon. after unilaterally turning the conflict into an Indochina War by invading Cambodia, can only be characterized as unmitigated gall. The clear purpose of this move, consistent with Nixon's entire performance in office, is to downgrade the importance of the Paris talks and divert attention from the Eight Point Initiative of the PRG. The very manner of issuing the Five Points, over domestic TV prior to its presentation in Paris, bears this out. While sounding reasonable to an uninformed public it lays the groundwork for a prolongation of the war. The slightest reflection on the complexity of convening such a conference, the time it would take to organize it and bring all the parties together, and the pace at which discussions would proceed at such a gathering should make it crystal clear that Nixon has no thought of an early end to the war. 
(GREENBLATT cont. on page 24)

(continued from page 10)
Biting the Fishhook
entitled them to attempt it on purely logistical grounds. 
On April 22 and 23, fighting continued in Svayrieng Province, where by now the South Vietnamese has massed 5,000 troops. 76 On the 23rd Takeo and Angtassom remained under Communist siege, but except for what seemed to be a symbolic attack on the town of Kep on the Gulf of Siam, " a traditional watering place of the colonial elite in Cambodia," 77 the only new fighting was in Kompong Cham Province north east of the capital. Here, by April 26, the Communists had created a united front committee to take over the Krechem District on the border. 78 We will never know for sure, but given the early mass demonstrations against the coup in Kompong Cham Province, it seems likely that the "foreign invasion" carried out here was actually a joint operation by pro-Sihanouk Cambodians and Communists pulled back from the border.79
By April 24, the Communists had evacuated Saang, indicating again that they were not so much interested in controling the Government as in intimidating it. 80 But Lon Nol had already heightened the sense of crisis two days earlier by making a direct appeal to Washington for both arms and the return of the ethnic Cambodian Special Forces proteges who had been serving and training in Vietnam for years, and Cambodian legislators had added to the clamor the next day with a plea to Sihanouk's American friend, Senator Mansfield to put his prestige on the line for a "country in danger." 81
Although neither Lon Nol nor the Communists probably knew the details, by April 24, the First Cavalry was getting ready to move into the Fishhook from Tayninh and Binhlong Provinces and "artillery was being massed and (South Vietnamese) Government troops were being reinforced along a 230 mile section of the Cambodia border. "82
At this point, given a Commander in Chief unwilling to restrain the military and end the war, there was really no way for the U.S. and South Vietnam to turn back. Congressional critics at home expressed alarm, and such friends of the U.S. as Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik make vain efforts to discourage even a small quantity of arms to Lon Nol. 83 Yet even as Malik spoke, the U.S. and South Vietnamese high commands, having provoked the Communists in Cambodia into mounting a significant but essentially symbolic show of force, were beginning to deploy at the border the most massive concentration of troops and equipment yet to be seen in the Vietnam war.
This latter fact no doubt made it much easier for the Joint Chiefs to convince Nixon that the United States could widen the war and then constrict it quickly to maximum advantage. It is also probably that, despite canards such as COSVN, United States intelligence knew in advance that the invading allied armies would encounter only the small amount of resistance in most places that they did. For, as Parrot's Beak and the Fishhook expanded and new incursions were planned and executed, it became clear that the Communists. no matter how many tens of thousands of them there were across the border, were ill prepared to stand and fight. But by the time it mattered little in practical terms what bogus military imperatives the generals had fed to their President.

Prince Sihanouk, whatever his imperfections in the departments of economic development and personal moderation, was an unflinching realist. The fact that in the sixteen years since Geneva he had steered his county clear of the Indochinese vortex of war and subversion suggests he was a true patriot. As long as he could keep Cambodia out of the Vietnam war, it looked at the end of 1969 as if Cambodia might wholly escape the military disasters of post-Geneva Indochinese conflict. The record of the past and the thaw in United States - Cambodia relations Sihanouk had been cultivating in 1969 prophesied a truly neutral and peaceful future for Cambodians, notwithstanding their encirclement by western-supported governments. 
Lon Nol and his colleagues could not accept such a future for their country or their fellow 

[insert] Secretary Rogers: " The President has the problem: Do you continue fighting the war in a way that doesn't make sense, or do you change it?"
Senator Symington. " I thought we were going to stop the war, not change it."
Transcript of Proceedings
Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Washington D.C.
Washington D.C.
April 27, 1970 

citizens. Typical myopic opportunists of the order of Diem, Thieu and Ky, they well comprehended the fobles of American militarism and anti-Communism which could be put to service in their own drive for personal glory and power. While the colonial imperialism of the French had introduced them to the lessons of ruthlessness and exploitation, they now demonstrated that the legacy of contempt for their peasant countrymen had become their own. 
The damage, tragic and irreparable, was done. 
From the American and South Vietnamese side, the starring role of the generals by no means explains the whole story. There were many stages in the genesis of United States involvement in Cambodia in the second half of March and the first two weeks of April when President Nixon could have bridled the American and South Vietnamese military and left the Cambodian generals to face the music against their ousted leader and his foreign and domestic supporters. The Communists, as they had been doing for years. would have continued to use the sanctuaries along the South Vietnamese border. 75 They might even have done this, since spreading the war was not to their advantage and Lon Nol's army without American and South Vietnamese support carried them no threat, without heeding Sihanouk's call for an "army of liberation>"
A good psychological chronicle might go a lot further than the analysis presented here in resolving why Nixon seemed to identify his manhood with standing up to the Russians in Egypt, the anti-Carswellians in the Senate, the Indochinese leftists in Peking, and the bums in the universities. Such a chronicle would not be necessary to establish why Thieu and his cronies were only too ready to perpetuate the Vietnam war by broadening it. 
But the critical observation about Cambodia remains that, as Presidents change, the United States is left year after year with essentially the same military establishment. To this establishment, burned out croplands, scorched flesh, obliterated settlements, 24-hour curfews, and bomb induced "relocation centers" have become as much an accepted part of life as megadeaths and overkill. Today, as a result another Asian people is being consumed in the fires of war fueled by the American military machine. It may not end until the land of freedom and democracy disburses a heavy dose of its own medicine on itself. 
23

Saving...

Thieu's response to the Paris statement was to threaten Duc with immediate arrest upon return to Saigon and seizure of the issues of Tin Sang carrying the text of the document. It is a measure of Thieu's isolation that this did not deter Duc's immediate return. The chorus of protest generated by Thieu's threats did, however, prevent him from carrying it out thus far. The assessment of experienced observers in Paris places Thieu in a much weaker position at the present time than Ngo Dinh Diem just prior to his overthrow in 1963. That this assessment is shared in Saigon is partially born out by widespread rumors suggesting that Thieu will " pull a (Lyndon) Johnson" in the presidential elections scheduled for September 1971. There are, in fact, some indications that third parties have been trying to communicate hints of Thieu's "flexibility and political realism" to the PRG in the absurd hope of finding a spot for him in a future transitional government. V. Against this background the PRG Peace Initiative put forward by Mme Nguyen Thi Binh in Paris on 17 September 1970 takes on immense significance as the only viable and realistic basis for peace in Vietnam in the foreseeable future. The compatibility of this proposal with the Duc position comes as no surprise once we recognize them as responding to the same objective situation. A careful reading also renders Nixon's Five Point Proposal as a non-response motivated by propaganda and domestic political considerations. The cornerstone of the PRG proposal is acceptable by the US of the principle of total US military withdrawal by a reasonable and specified date. While the PRG set this date at 30 June 1971, clearly inspired by the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment, certainly no one can assume this detail to be subject to negotiation. Not so the demand to set some such date. Not only is this demand clearly justified on grounds of principle after one quarter century of continuous struggle against western imperialism but if reflects the military and political balance in South Vietnam. Following acceptance of this principle, which would set a date for the termination of US belligerence in South Vietnam, immediate steps could be taken to safeguard US troops during the withdrawal period and talks to effect the release of US prisoners could begin. Indeed, according to private indications, the actual release of such prisoners could get underway before the withdrawal deadline if arrangements can be completed. These two points are clear and direct responses by the PRG to the two questions most consistently raised by US negotiators since the beginning of the Paris talks. Safety of US troops, it should be recalled, was given by Nixon as the main rationale behind the Cambodian invasion and the sole legal justification for continuation of US military operations in South Vietnam. The sections of the PRG Peace Initiative [decling?] with methods for reaching a political settlement are at once more flexible and more precise than the earlier Ten Point Program offered in Paris on 8 May 1969. The steps outlined include a provisional coalition for the limited purpose of enabling " the South Vietnam people (to) decide themselves the political regime of South Vietnam through really free and democratic general elections... No party shall usurp for itself the right to organize general elections and lay down their modalities." It is important to note that nowhere is the total withdrawal of US troops mentioned as a pre-condition for either the formation of the coalition government or for holding elections. Furthermore, such a coalition will specifically include elements from the PRG, the current government in Saigon and person currently living outside Vietnam representing various forces in South Vietnam. The only people specifically exclude from such a provisional government are Thieu, Ky and Kiem. As Mme Binh put it in our conversations, " We have fought a quarter of a century in order to exclude three men from the government." In light of such explicit statements, Nixon's misrepresentation of this point can only be viewed as intentional and for the purpose of sabotaging prospects for negotiations. VI. Nixon's Five Point Plan offered on 7 October, far from being a peace initiative, is a carefully contrived mixture of duplicity, misrepresentation and emotive rhetoric designed to manufacture political legitimacy and domestic support for continuing the war along somewhat revised lines. This can be seen on the most cursory examination. A standstill cease-fire in the context of South Vietnam is a political question and not merely a military one. Any attempt to ascertain who controls which areas would necessitate surfacing the entire guerilla apparatus and open identification of all cadre and NLF sympathizers thereby exposing them to the full force of Saigon's repression and US military annihilation. In the absence of US withdrawal this would amount to suicide or surrender, the choice resting on the tender mercies of Thieu-Ky-Khiem and Nixon. Insistence that the cease-fire extend over all of Indochina should be sufficient to discredit Nixon's plan except among stalwart know-nothings who still believe that Hanoi controls every resistance movement in the area from NLF and Pathet Lao to the Khmer United Front and the growing Thai movement. The call for an Indochina Conference by Nixon. after unilaterally turning the conflict into an Indochina War by invading Cambodia, can only be characterized as unmitigated gall. The clear purpose of this move, consistent with Nixon's entire performance in office, is to downgrade the importance of the Paris talks and divert attention from the Eight Point Initiative of the PRG. The very manner of issuing the Five Points, over domestic TV prior to its presentation in Paris, bears this out. While sounding reasonable to an uninformed public it lays the groundwork for a prolongation of the war. The slightest reflection on the complexity of convening such a conference, the time it would take to organize it and bring all the parties together, and the pace at which discussions would proceed at such a gathering should make it crystal clear that Nixon has no thought of an early end to the war. (GREENBLATT cont. on page 24) (continued from page 10) Biting the Fishhook entitled them to attempt it on purely logistical grounds. On April 22 and 23, fighting continued in Svayrieng Province, where by now the South Vietnamese has massed 5,000 troops. 76 On the 23rd Takeo and Angtassom remained under Communist siege, but except for what seemed to be a symbolic attack on the town of Kep on the Gulf of Siam, " a traditional watering place of the colonial elite in Cambodia," 77 the only new fighting was in Kompong Cham Province north east of the capital. Here, by April 26, the Communists had created a united front committee to take over the Krechem District on the border. 78 We will never know for sure, but given the early mass demonstrations against the coup in Kompong Cham Province, it seems likely that the "foreign invasion" carried out here was actually a joint operation by pro-Sihanouk Cambodians and Communists pulled back from the border.79 By April 24, the Communists had evacuated Saang, indicating again that they were not so much interested in controling the Government as in intimidating it. 80 But Lon Nol had already heightened the sense of crisis two days earlier by making a direct appeal to Washington for both arms and the return of the ethnic Cambodian Special Forces proteges who had been serving and training in Vietnam for years, and Cambodian legislators had added to the clamor the next day with a plea to Sihanouk's American friend, Senator Mansfield to put his prestige on the line for a "country in danger." 81 Although neither Lon Nol nor the Communists probably knew the details, by April 24, the First Cavalry was getting ready to move into the Fishhook from Tayninh and Binhlong Provinces and "artillery was being massed and (South Vietnamese) Government troops were being reinforced along a 230 mile section of the Cambodia border. "82 At this point, given a Commander in Chief unwilling to restrain the military and end the war, there was really no way for the U.S. and South Vietnam to turn back. Congressional critics at home expressed alarm, and such friends of the U.S. as Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik make vain efforts to discourage even a small quantity of arms to Lon Nol. 83 Yet even as Malik spoke, the U.S. and South Vietnamese high commands, having provoked the Communists in Cambodia into mounting a significant but essentially symbolic show of force, were beginning to deploy at the border the most massive concentration of troops and equipment yet to be seen in the Vietnam war. This latter fact no doubt made it much easier for the Joint Chiefs to convince Nixon that the United States could widen the war and then constrict it quickly to maximum advantage. It is also probably that, despite canards such as COSVN, United States intelligence knew in advance that the invading allied armies would encounter only the small amount of resistance in most places that they did. For, as Parrot's Beak and the Fishhook expanded and new incursions were planned and executed, it became clear that the Communists. no matter how many tens of thousands of them there were across the border, were ill prepared to stand and fight. But by the time it mattered little in practical terms what bogus military imperatives the generals had fed to their President. Prince Sihanouk, whatever his imperfections in the departments of economic development and personal moderation, was an unflinching realist. The fact that in the sixteen years since Geneva he had steered his county clear of the Indochinese vortex of war and subversion suggests he was a true patriot. As long as he could keep Cambodia out of the Vietnam war, it looked at the end of 1969 as if Cambodia might wholly escape the military disasters of post-Geneva Indochinese conflict. The record of the past and the thaw in United States - Cambodia relations Sihanouk had been cultivating in 1969 prophesied a truly neutral and peaceful future for Cambodians, notwithstanding their encirclement by western-supported governments. Lon Nol and his colleagues could not accept such a future for their country or their fellow [insert] Secretary Rogers: " The President has the problem: Do you continue fighting the war in a way that doesn't make sense, or do you change it?" Senator Symington. " I thought we were going to stop the war, not change it." Transcript of Proceedings Senate Foreign Relations Committee Washington D.C. Washington D.C. April 27, 1970 citizens. Typical myopic opportunists of the order of Diem, Thieu and Ky, they well comprehended the fobles of American militarism and anti-Communism which could be put to service in their own drive for personal glory and power. While the colonial imperialism of the French had introduced them to the lessons of ruthlessness and exploitation, they now demonstrated that the legacy of contempt for their peasant countrymen had become their own. The damage, tragic and irreparable, was done. From the American and South Vietnamese side, the starring role of the generals by no means explains the whole story. There were many stages in the genesis of United States involvement in Cambodia in the second half of March and the first two weeks of April when President Nixon could have bridled the American and South Vietnamese military and left the Cambodian generals to face the music against their ousted leader and his foreign and domestic supporters. The Communists, as they had been doing for years. would have continued to use the sanctuaries along the South Vietnamese border. 75 They might even have done this, since spreading the war was not to their advantage and Lon Nol's army without American and South Vietnamese support carried them no threat, without heeding Sihanouk's call for an "army of liberation>" A good psychological chronicle might go a lot further than the analysis presented here in resolving why Nixon seemed to identify his manhood with standing up to the Russians in Egypt, the anti-Carswellians in the Senate, the Indochinese leftists in Peking, and the bums in the universities. Such a chronicle would not be necessary to establish why Thieu and his cronies were only too ready to perpetuate the Vietnam war by broadening it. But the critical observation about Cambodia remains that, as Presidents change, the United States is left year after year with essentially the same military establishment. To this establishment, burned out croplands, scorched flesh, obliterated settlements, 24-hour curfews, and bomb induced "relocation centers" have become as much an accepted part of life as megadeaths and overkill. Today, as a result another Asian people is being consumed in the fires of war fueled by the American military machine. It may not end until the land of freedom and democracy disburses a heavy dose of its own medicine on itself. 23