628
IRVING HOWE
maintain urban outposts in South Vietnam-especially if the Chinese
decided (as it might be to their advantage) not to intervene directly. But
there is no reason to suppose that this would do anything but further
inflame Vietnamese hostility against the white invaqers and provoke
some of the elements supporting the Saigon regime into a "neutralist"
deal with the Vietcong. As long ago as last February, the
Wall Street
Journal
had to remark:
It is doubtful that Europe could have been reclaimed from
the Nazis if the peoples had any sympathy for Hitler or were un–
interested in his removal. It looks increasingly doubtful that we
can maintain a position, much less win a war, in South Vietnam
against the opposition of apathy in the "ally."
Whether the South Vietnamese are quite as attached to the Viet–
cong as certain Pekingesque professors and an uneducable minority among
U.S. pacifists maintain, can be questioned; but that they are disaffected
from the Saigon regime seems beyond doubt.
It is too late.
Perhaps, just perhaps, there-was a chance in the middle
fifties to establish a government in South Vietnam that would satisfy the
needs of the peasants, institute some reforms in the cities, ventilate the
country's political life and thereby provide a rallying ground against the
not-yet-overwhelming guerrillas. That chance has been lost, and in politics
such chances do not soon come a second time. The disaster in Vietnam
was due to the class selfishness and blindness of the local leadership, and
to the failure of the U .S. government to understand, or its refusal to
accede to, the social upheavals in the "underdeveloped" countries. In the
grip of sterile notions about "free enterprise" and "strong man rule," our
policy helped prepare the ground for Communist victory.
"We" have lost, no matter who "we" is taken to signify: U.S. na–
tional interests, simple anti-Communism, or the cause of humane and
democratic values (only the last of which matters overwhelmingly in
regard to Vietnam). It is therefore necessary to negotiate with the Com–
munists, not out of any fatuous notions that the Vietcong once fully
in
power, is likely to do anything but institute a Communist-style dictatorship.
No; we must negotiate because years of disastrously reactionary policies
have destroyed the possibility of a democratic alternative in Vietnam,
because we have no further moral right to inflict a war upon a people
that has suffered twenty-five years of bloodshed, artd because the only
way of defeating the Vietcong militarily-a large-scale war-would bring
consequences far worse than would follow from a Vietcong victory. And
we should recognize that negotiations, if now undertaken, could not magic–
ally transform the unhappy reality, but could only register it realistically.
