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Show DESERET NEWS ANOTHER VIEW SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH Wheeler Tells It Like It Is NOT We Stand For The Constitution Of The United States As Having Been Divinely Inspired PAGE 12 A EDITORIAL SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 1969 An editorial from the BEACON JOURNAL, Akron, Ohio Can Nixon Heal Rift With Thieu? Are there really no serious disagreements between Washington and Saigon that need to be ironed out during Sundays meeting on Midway between Presidents Nixon and Thieu? That would seem to be the case judging from the short time that has been allowed for the meeting, and from the extensive consultations between Thieu and Nixon that are supposed to have taken place before the American president announced his recent eight-poipeace plan. But when the Nixon plan is compared to Mr. Thieus own recent formula for settling the war, there seem to be significant points of difference that make the Midway meeting look like more than just a personal session between the two leaders. Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt compelled to speak out the other day in defense of military spending, to answer some of the growing charges of waste being - industrial military lodged against the complex. There is no malignant, conspiratorial grouping dedicated to foisting off unneeded weapons on our fellow countrymen, said the nations top soldier. Perhaps Gen. Wheeler knew what was ccm-inAt any rate, his attempts to assure the American people that theyre getting their moneys worth in weapons systems was lost like a hie in a hurricane when the true extent of PenContagon waste was revealed by a subcommittee. gressional The Pentagon is wasting literally billions of dollars each year in bloated and inflated defense budgets, according to the subcommittees findings, documented in a report entitled The Economics of Military Procurement. Unneeded weapons and hardware that fail to nt Among the points of difference are these: North Vietnamese troops have to withdraw from South Vietnam as a condition for ending the war. Thieu says the Viet Cong armies also have to depart. Many inhabitants of the South. Even so, it Viet Cong are shouldnt be too hard to resolve the difference by agreeing to give troops fighting in the South the choice of withdrawal or laying down their arms. 2. Nixon proposes establishment of base areas for American and North Vietnamese forces during the phased withdrawal. Thieu fears this would amount to a partitioning of South Vietnam. Whether or not it would actually amount to partition depends largely on where the base areas were located. Since the complete and sudden withdrawal of the enemy is unlikely, what other alternative is there? 3. Nixon calb for elections as soon as possible after establishment of an international body to verify troop withThieu says there drawals and to help arrange a cease-firshould be no elections until 1971, as provided by South Vietnams constitution. Thieu seems to be playing for time in which to solidify his own political position. But if his country isnt united behind him now, its hard to see how two more years of strife and uncertainty will help. 4. Nixon says election procedures should be worked out in talks between the Saigon government and the Viet Cong. Thieu insists that the elections be organized by his government alone. The Cong, however, cant be expected to go along with such an arrangement, since it would give Thieu the upper hand. If former ambassador Averell Harriman is anywhere near right in saying the Communists would poll less than 20 per cent of the vote in an honest election, Thieu should have little to fear. 5. Nixon says the U.S. is willing to accept neutrality for South Vietnam if thats what the people want To the Saigon government however, neutrality is taboo. The U.S. itself prefers staunch allies to lukewarm neutral?. But after all, we are supposed to be fighting for the South Vietnamese right to and that includes the right to turn neutral if they so choose. Despite these differences. Americans should not despair. President Syngman Rhee of South Korea was much more intransigent that Thieu but was finally brought around. In fact, with American casualties in Vietnam having in which exceeded those in Korea, a Korean type settlement there is no formal peace treaty but the fighting virtually stops looks better all the time. . . desert for nearly 100 miles, across which Moses plodded and the Israeli tanks sped . . . 1. Nixon says only life-lon- g e. Where Peace Resides In the two years that have passed since the last armed conflict between Israel and the Arabs, it has become War was badly misnamed. painfully clear that the week one side or the other without a has gone by Hardly blood. more of Instead spilling lasting only six weeks, the war as of this week has gone on for two long years. Unhappily, the prospects are that it will go on much longrocket er, and get much worse. So bad have attacks and guerrilla clashes become that leaders in Cairo are war in the Middle East is inevitasaying that another ble. Its all too easy for such predictions to become once enough people believe them. Yet, during the past two years, the best minds of the diplomatic community have tried just about every means possible to bring peace to the Middle East. But the turmoil in the Middle East is not a failure of human ingenuity but of human will. Peace is to be found not if it in clever formulas but in the minds and hearts of men exists there. really If genuine peace is to come to the Middle East in our time, it will come only if men of all nations there sincerely want it. all-o- ut Six-Da- y Arab-Israe- li all-o- ut self-fulfilli- By NORMAN MOSS Newspaper Alliance To Moses, the Sinai TEL AVIV Desert meant time. Forty years of wandering for the Israelites, so that the generation of slaves could die out and be ret, and placed by another hard, Land. Promised to the capture ready To the Israelis of today, it means time also. Twelve minutes flying time for the fastest plane in the Egyptian Air Force, time to take some action before the bombers are over Tel Aviv and their airfields. This is all it means. It is why Israel intends to hold on to the Sinai Desert until a peace settlement with Egypt is achieved, something that is not in sight. It does not mean valuable land, or living space, because no one wants to live in Sinai. This must be the most worthless piece of disputed real estate in the world. But after 19 years of having Egyptian forces poised 30 miles from its biggest city, Israel is going to keep that big. empty space between its population and the Egyptians so long as the present tlueat exists. 1 went on a tour of Sinai, with an Israeli army officer as an escort and two other cars for company. We started in the Gaza Strip, Samsons last home, a short, fertile coastal strip filled with greenery and Arab refugees, and sped through it quickly. There have been attacks in the Strip on Israeli vehicles. We broke out into the desert at Rafah, where, on June 5, 1967, Israeli tanks first broke through the Egyptian armor in the first, bloody battle of the Sinai campaign and paved the way for the ensuing advance. Here and there at Rafah, and all along the desert roads, there is an occasional rusting wreck of a tank or truck, or, occasionally, a field gun. Sometimes, vultures cluster on it in a black cloud, as if remembering their meal there. We took the coast road, and all along one side was a single line of tall, waving palm trees, lining a white beach 50 miles long. Occasionally, at the beginning, we passed an Arab village, consisting of a few clay or wattel huts and a camel or two sitting languidly in the shade, and also an incongruous looking a boat, for the Arabs of the feature which is why 67 leading economists this week advocated cominterest ceiling on governplete elimination of the 4 ment bonds. That ceiling has been in effect since 1918 and is clearly outmoded in an era when government bonds in the market are bringing yields of 6(c . As the economists observed, the ceiling may have hurt homeowners by compelling the U.S. Treasury to concentrate on short and medium term financing. To the extent that funds were withdrawn from thrift institutions for the purchase of these Treasury securities, the institutions ability to finance homeowners may have suffered. Heavy short term debt compels the Treasury to finance frequently. Use of longer term securities would make the budgetary cost of interest charges less unstable. But does all this necessarily mean the interest ceiling on government bonds should be eliminated completely? If that happened, thrift institutions might be put at a competitive disadvantage unless the restrictions under which they operate were eased. So, instead of eliminating the interest ceiling, how ( aboutpaising it? 0 now a ghost town. It looks eerie from this side, the huge empty office blocks, hotel. the stilled cranes, the canal-sid- series of salvos last November in which Israelis were killed. This time, Israel replied with what strategic analysts in America call compound escalation: enlarging the area of conflict. Israeli planes struck deep inside Egypt, bombing the Naj Hamadi bridge over the Nile and a power station. There are occasional rifle shots. When two photographers with our party went over to the canal bank and crouched down to take pictures of the other side it is only a quarter of a mile wide at this point the officer waved them back. he exThe Egyptians get nervous, 24 e The canal itself is a ghost waterway, with muddy, still waters these days. In the middle you can see the ships that have been stranded there since the war, still manned by their crews. There are 15 of them, permanently at anchor in the middle of the unchanging waters, one of them an American ship. The sand dunes stretch up to 100 miles inland to the mountains in the cen--ter, and Mount Sinai. It might be thought that Mount Sinai, the place where God handed down the Ten Commandments to Moses, should be the holiest place to Judaism. Actually, the rabbinate is not convinced that this is the real Mount Sinai, so the only shrine there is in a Greek Orthodox monastry at the summit. The road back was long and empty. The traffic was military, some of it booty captured by the Israeli Army during the six-da- y plained. There is also, at El Arish, a United Nations post, for U.N. truce observers still patrol the canal in their blue forage caps, racing to the scene of any trouble unarmed, communicating with their opposite members on the Egyptian side, and arranging a halt to the firing. coast are fishermen. The last town, some 60 miles from Gaza, was El Arish, a place with one dusty street, gathered around an Egyptian-buil- t military post, it looks like a setting in a Foreign Legion movie. Then the open desert for nearly 100 miles, the land across which Moses plodded and the Israeli tanks sped, to El Kantara and the Suez Canal. El Kantara is by shells, and empty. To safeguard the 300 or so inhabitants from the effects of Egyptian shelling, the Israeli Army has evacuated them all to El Arish. When we were there, one army truck remained piled high with pathetic furnishings; one could discern in the pile some worn mattresses, kitchen chairs, a kettle, a brightly colored cushion. Ever since the war ended with the Israeli troops pulled up on one side of the Suez Canal, there have been occasional exchanges of gunfire, usually started by the Egyptians. These culminated in a fly-blo- pock-marke- d six-da- y Let Bonds Compete For years this page has called for an increase in the interest paid on U.S. savings bonds to make them more competitive with the interest paid by banks. The same principle also applies to other Treasury bonds, perform up to minimum contract specifications are only part of it, maybe the most excusable part. For there is understandably a place for experiment and research, a need to try something new and sometimes fail, if the U.S. is to stay ahead of its potential enemies in sophisticated aircraft, missiles, armaments. bomber, cancelled after it Thus, the XB-7cost $1.3 billion, was not a total failure. It bridged some technological gaps, solved some North American The man in charge of the command post when we dropped in was Major Lars Svetland of the Swedish Army, an elegant figure with neatly dressed khaki pants, a scarf at his throat n force He said men of the are on call and race in jeeps to wherever the shooting is, and that they dont carry arms. But he wouldnt admit to concern over any danger. (One U.N. man only was slightly wounded). he Besides, said, for a soldier from my part of the world, it's quite a good idea to spend a while serving where something is hap- war: Every 40 miles or so, there would be six-da- y a village of a couple of dozen dwelling places, where the women would be working at a well, or walking along bent double with a huge load of straw on their backs. pening. It's quite a sought-afte- r job. We drove down the Israeli side of the canal, and found soldiers well dug in. s in the sand They had built dunes, reinforced by sandbags. Inside there was a corrugated metal floor, comfortable beds, a radio set and a chessboard. Diversions are organized for the troops. On the day I was there, a lecture was scheduled on the student revolt in the United States, given by a professor of American studies at the Hebrew University, who was being flown in. The mens only complaint is that, because of the danger, theirs is one of the few army posts where there are no girl soldiers. Mast of the built-uareas along the canal are on the Egyptian side. The Egyptians evacuated more than 50,000 people from the other side of the canal. Ismailia, once a bustling port city, is dug-out- p Sometimes, many miles from any dwelling place, we would pass a pair of robed Bedouins on their camels, or, perhaps, a herdsman with his flock of goats or donkeys. The Israeli authorities give some help to the Sinai villages, and those Arabs who are made unemployed by the departure of the Egyptian Army get government relief. But the Israeli military presence in Sinai is not an occupation. The desert is so vast that army and local populace can go their separate ways without ever meeting, and broadly speaking, tiiey do. For most of these villagers and the nomadic Bedouin, life has changed little since the days of Moses. A few soldiers become fascinated by the desert, by the huge vistas and the challenging emptiness. It brings cut in some people a mystical strain. They want to return to it again and again. But these are rare birds. Most soldiers stationed there feel like the one who remarked to me No wonder Moses thought hed found the Promised Land. Hed just spent 40 years in Sinai. engineering problems. The more serious charge against the military establishment results from its slipshod bidding croand accounting procedures, its anything-goe- s nyism with certain favored contractors, its willingness to accept and conceal outrageous industry profit margins as part of doing business. The result of the absence of effective cost controls, coupled with a number of policies and practices discussed in this report, said the subcommittee, has resulted in a vast subsidy for the defense industry. Some of these policies and practices are: Supplying contractors with government-owneproperty, plants, equipment and working capital in the form of progress payments which bear no relationship to actual progress in work comd pleted; Granting exclusive patent rights for inventions produced on government work; Permitting contractors to pyramid profits by subcontracting to other companies; Relying on contractors cost estimates, and permitting extensive use of change orders which allow firms to boost profits. With all this to hide, it is little wonder that Pentagon brass ignored standard auditing practices and .made life 'difficult for employees who sought to bring about Gen. Wheeler said, in defense of the military industrial complex, there is a necessary rela-- , tionship between those who make weapons and those who use them. It is a relationship which should be sanctioned by law and good taste, however, and not practiced under the bed. If an Army enlisted man ever tried to cover up the way Gen. Wheeler did he would be quickly And if the general is not going to tell the truth then he should get himself better camouflage. Otherwise, he is going to take a lot of bombing from members of Congress and decent American citizens who can see' through the general like looking through a sieve. cost-cuttin- -- court-martiale- GUEST CARTOON "Let's quit kidding ourselves." Portland Oregon Kong: Listening Post To Great Enigma TIONG KONG The Pearl River junks tie up in the shadow of the fabulous skyscrapers here and unload Red Chinese pigs, and cabchickens bages for the benefit of 4 million beleaguered appetites. Contrariwise, in the neat and antiseptic atmosphere of the Bank of China, the world's most sophis-- t blackmail i cated and ransom game is played. Mr. Jones In 50 currencies Chinese everywhere make remittances to help support relatives behind the Bamboo Curtain and, unlike most bankers, the bland gentlemen of the Bank of China can do more than impose a service charge. They are able to arrange other inducements to keep the money coming. Down Gloucester Road, surrounded by shops stuffed with silk and pearls, the Peking Review is plastered on s display windjjw; JENKIN LLOYD JONES Extra Good News! The 9th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was elected today. An extremely enthusiastic revolutionary atmosphere prevailed. When the names of the great leader, Chairman Mao, and his close comrade, Vice Chairman Lin Piao, were read, prolonged applause resounded through the hall and the delegates burst Into hearty cheers: Long live the great, glorious and correct Communist Party of China! Long live Invincible Mao thought! And up at the village of Lok Ma Chau, tour buses climb to the little hilltop pavilion and tourists stare across the Sham Chun River to the quiet paddies of the most inscrutable country on eai th. What's going on among Red China's three - quarters of a billion human beings? Hong Kong's U.S. consulate is the largest and busiest in our Foreign Service, for f, is our listening post to the great enigma. Tse-tun- g But U.S. Consul - General Edwin W. Martin says. There are almost no reliable statistics. Overt intelligence, the analysis of published figures and reports, is usually the best intelligence, he explains. For Red China there is none. Over in Taipei, James Shen, vice minisof foreign affairs for Chiar.gs Taiwan government, Is proud of the Nationalist Chinese agents, and certainly the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu teem with ter daring frogmen. "What happens in the coastal provinhe says, we know immediately. ces, Events in the Interior require a few days. But Taipei's U.S. Ambassador Walter P. McCunaughy, one of the most experienced Nowhere of our China hands, cautions, else in the world arc we so involved with pure deduction. When Maos Great Leap Forward fal- tered and the back-yar- d furnaces c,esed pouring out expensive metallic junk, Mao lost control and came close to disgrace. From 1958 to 1966 Liu Shao Chi was the true power. Then Mao closed the universities and colleges and called out the students in the Great Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards rioted in the cities and smashed the party apparatus. This fixed Liu. But soon the Red Guards, themselves, became an embarrassment and a menace and the force of the army was needed to put them down and exile the leaders as joyous helpers on the farms. In the meantime, the Nationalist Chinese talk Jess of mass movement across the Yellow Sea and more of subtler approaches to tcppt'ng communism in China. Eat the Generalissimos son, Defense Minister Chiang Cliing-kuo- , is just back from what lie described as a tremendously conference with Thai officials successful and he hinted at Nationalist military aid against Red Chinese insurgents in northern Thailand. As one Taipei official pui it: We are thinking of joe back door. |