One Problem, Two Solutions

Almost everyone sensed that it was close to a moment of truth in South Viet Nam, and last week two leading U.S. political columnists offered their solutions. They were about as contradictory as could he.

Something Better. To Walter Lippmann, from the start it was "a grievous mistake to have involved ourselves so much in a part of the world where it is impossible for a non-Asian country to win a war against Asians." Nor, in Lippmann's view, did proponents of a "clean war" in Viet Nam-one fought in the skies rather than on the ground-have any case: "The fact is, that if we make the Vietnamese struggle 'our war,' we shall have to fight on the ground to hold South Viet Nam. There is no use fooling the American people into thinking that a war for villages in the jungles and the swamps can be a clean war in the skies."

And if the U.S. continues to let things drift, said Lippmann, "I am inclined to think that American intervention will end, not with a bang but with a whimper. We ought to try for something better than that." Lippmann's "something better" called for nothing less than U.S. withdrawal, not only from Viet Nam. but from all of the Asian mainland. "It will be done as part of some much larger and more elaborate diplomatic proposal and action-one directed at something far bigger than South Viet Nam-at an Asian settlement from Siberia to the Himalayas, from the Mekong to the Yalu."

That sounds, of course, like a call for a complete U.S. retreat. But Lippmann has a fall-back plan that might not save face but will keep some troops nearby. "To promote the eventual negotiation," he wrote last June, it should be made clear "that it is not our intention to withdraw and wash our hands. It is no less essential to make military dispositions in the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, which make it clear that when our troops withdraw from the mainland, the American presence will remain."

No Way Out. But making things clear that way was far from satisfactory to Joseph Alsop, now on one of his innumerable trips to Asia. To him the problem of Viet Nam was, above all else, a matter of facing reality, of winning the war first. "It is almost comically silly," Alsop wrote from Saigon last week, "to try to organize the kind of government in Viet Nam that will win the august approval of American editorial writers who know nothing of Asia and always seem to forget that the alternative is the bleak and ruthless tyranny of Asian Communism. There is no way out any longer, except to try to deal with the war crisis first, and to leave the political situation for later consideration. Dealing with the war crisis is the only way to create the essential conditions for comparative governmental stability. The government is unstable precisely because the war is going badly.

"If stern measures are not taken pretty soon to change the course of this war, the U.S. is almost certainly doomed to suffer the greatest defeat in American history. Pearl Harbor, after all, was a mere episode. But defeat here will be both shattering and final; and both its character and its consequences will make it a bitter new experience for the United States." Moreover, Alsop added, President Johnson cannot avoid blame in such an eventuality: "It will be his defeat, as well as a defeat for the American people and for millions of unhappy Vietnamese."

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