The War: New Alarm, New Debate

I COULD close my eyes," said Missouri's Senator Stuart Symington last week, "and as I listened to those briefings, I could hear the same thing I heard in Saigon five years ago." What Symington and other war critics thought they detected was another new upsurge in the Indochinese war, caused, paradoxically, by the Administration's complex efforts to extricate the U.S. from Viet Nam.

At the weekend, apprehension intensified with reports of a South Vietnamese attack on Communist forces across the Laotian border. The presumed goal: to dislodge the enemy from his sanctuary and interrupt a heavy flow of supplies, as was done in Cambodia last spring (see THE WORLD). An evident further goal: to reduce Communist pressure on the regime of Cambodian Premier Lon Nol. Such a campaign, pitting Saigon's forces against North Vietnamese regulars and other Communist troops on the Ho Chi Minh Trail through southern Laos, would involve high stakes. Among the possibilities would be a serious defeat for the South Vietnamese army or, conversely, an ARVN victory that could close the Ho Chi Minh Trail's vital flow of Communist supplies southward. The entire situation in Indochina could change drastically.

At a press conference. Secretary of State William Rogers said that the U.S. would be justified in supporting that kind of attack in Laos with airpower. As he spoke, heavy U.S. air raids in the area continued, ostensibly aimed at North Vietnamese supply and infiltration routes. Earlier, U.S. bombers and helicopters provided massive support for Saigon's troops in Cambodia. A group of G.I.s working in civilian clothes turned up last week at Phnom-Penh airport. Their mission was innocuous and brief--the removal of damaged American helicopters. Increasingly, such incidents aroused an anxiety that, despite the anticipated end of American combat engagement in Viet Nam. the U.S. risked stumbling into the farther jungles of Cambodia and Laos.

Double Folly. Nothing could be more remote from Richard Nixon's intentions. To accept willingly new U.S. ground-combat commitments in Southeast Asia would be folly on both strategic and political grounds, and the White House knows it. The quarrel is not over U.S. intentions but over the methods by which Nixon seeks to leave the field. While convincing the home audience that the U.S. is irreversibly quitting the war, the President must keep Hanoi sufficiently off balance to avert any military disaster until American forces are well clear. Thus the rationale for the Cambodian and Laotian air actions. What disturbs antiwar critics, though, is that the U.S. has increasingly put itself in the position of preserving the Lon Nol government.

The statements of U.S. intentions have grown more than somewhat confusing. Last week Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that "we will use, as necessary, sea and air resources to supplement the efforts and the armed forces of our friends and allies who are determined to resist aggression." That seemed to pledge considerable military might, short of ground forces, to secure Lon Nol or a similarly inclined Cambodian leader. Two days later Rogers said: "The U.S. is not fighting for the defense of Cambodia. The U.S. is fighting to protect American soldiers in Viet Nam."

Stupid Wars. Behind this semantic dispute between State and the Pentagon, the Administration seemed to be testing the limits of last year's Cooper-Church restriction forbidding the use of U.S. ground troops or advisers in Cambodia. (A similar measure, adopted in December 1969, prohibits sending U.S. ground forces to Laos and Thailand.) After hearing Laird's testimony, Armed Services Chairman John Stennis declared that "the margin is so thin" in Cambodia that it might be necessary to loosen the strictures of Cooper-Church to allow some U.S. personnel to act as air controllers on the ground. Was he launching a trial balloon for the Administration? The idea provoked a bitter comment from South Dakota's George McGovern: "Any Senator who talks about sending American forces into Cambodia should lead the charge himself. I'm fed up with old men sending young men out to die, particularly in stupid wars of this kind."

Most Senate critics agreed that the Administration had not yet violated the letter of Cooper-Church, although the feeling was widespread that its spirit had been abused. Moreover, as Edmund Muskie said, the air operations in Cambodia did at least "stretch" Nixon's own stated policies. On June 30 the President had promised that ''there will be no U.S. air or logistical support" for South Vietnamese missions in Cambodia. Nixon claimed only the right to send "air interdiction missions against enemy efforts to move supplies and personnel through Cambodia toward South Viet Nam."

Despite such contradictions. Secretary Rogers' assurances about Cambodia mollified the doves and middle-readers somewhat. But Congress remained suspicious. McGovern and 20 other Senators introduced a Viet Nam Disengagement Act, designed, like a bill defeated last summer, to set a specific date (the end of this year) for the total withdrawal of U.S. forces. In the House, New York's Jonathan Bingham, with 69 cosponsors, proposed to ban U.S. air and sea operations in Cambodia.

It is true, as the Administration argues, that the monetary cost of the war has dropped from $28.8 billion in 1968 to $14.5 billion in 1971, that American casualties have decreased by from 70% to 75% and that the number of sorties flown by U.S. aircraft over combat zones has been reduced by some 50% compared to 1968. It is also true, as Vermont's Senator George Aiken said, that if U.S. operations in Indochina become markedly more ambitious, "It would result in an uproar in this country that would make what happened last May look like a Sunday school picnic."

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