OCR Text |
Show Andy Hart j Lets Get 'Further In' Conflict With Viet Cong Aggressors The poor, old ignorant American citizen Is having a tough time understanding Viet Nam. There are South Viet leaders he's never heard of before, and military problems he still hasn't heard about, and newspaper stories that tell him nothing except that the same incomprehensible incompre-hensible dangers are still there, and getting worse. EVERYONE KNOWS what the possible answers are: get further in, get all the way out, or muddle along with crossed fingers. I think we should get further in, in care- 1 fully chosen ways we're already doing a little of that, but not enough. President Johnson John-son and whoever else was responsible re-sponsible did a fine thing when they stated that our retaliations would be flexible, and not one retaliation for every one serK ous attack bv the Viet Con? graphy doesn't matter any more. Fighter-bombers still have to go back some place to ram. and invading armies still have to jumP0."!" someplace. Indo-China, Malaysia and Indom would make a nice, pretty little Red arm rea ing out just south of the Philippines, art J north of Australia. Of course, an attaw Australia would mean real war. But the u would be better able to wage real . war as us if they could make that attack from nearm- The Chinese have all those men, of cour but they're lacking a lot else. Their air and navy are no match for ours, nor economy. Their economy, I think, is i tne cu we could afford a long, little war, and they couldn't. And tnais the sort of war we could get into now, Nam, against the Chinese. W but something we could handle. !o i u can afford to push a little. THEN THERE'S the fact that to be great people, on the wn0.!f ' " n if we on the winning side if they Posf f?Twe had pushed a little harder, we might nnu a lot more friends. h ii So I'd like to see a bit more pusn. more imagination. Why don't we w6 las working wholesale in Nortn Depart-(Maybe Depart-(Maybe we do, but if so the Deren ffe ment hasn't let me in on it.; yCong posi-getting posi-getting better intelligence on vie gaS tions? Why aren't we dropping 'aillages i in the middle of Viet Cong new South Viet Nam to soften tm&snZt's killing too many local civilians, u j ably an idiotic idea, but you see w u. something effective, but as """d, are"' expected as possible.) 'Why. ,J,tiatjve? we taking a little more of the imi j cat Being a poor, ignorant cm 'questions speak too authoritatively. But .reatened, where my freedom and life seem u don't like to lose. And South vi like as good a place as sit most to stop losing in Southeast v. Mr. Hart We should use that flexibility a little more vigorously than we are using it now. My main reason for thinking this is that I don't think we can afford to retreat totally from Indo-China and the loss of Viet Nam would require just that, since Laos is half gone already, and Cambodia looks to be waiting wait-ing for one more vote to come in on the Chicom side before declaring openly for them. I understand that we're digging in good' iii Thailand, so maybe we could hold on there without Saigon, but there'd be Malaysia for the Chinese to start in on next, and Indonesia is half theirs already. AND WE certainly can't jump back to the Americas and forget about everything else as some people have suggested. That sounds a whole lot like the isolationist and America first talk of the '30's, when Hitler was first spreading out; and isolationism won't help us any more now than it did then. Things have changed, but not so much that strategic geo- |