VIETNAM
629
The best we can hope for in Vietnam is some sort of "neutralist" coali–
tion regime, in which the Vietcong would soon be the dominant force,
but which might spare Saigon a bloodbath. And perhaps some lessons
could be learn d from the debacle, so that, say, in the Dominican Repub–
lic and other Latin American countries better policies would be pursued.
I say "perhaps" because right now there is little evidence that this will
happen.
President Johnson also claims to be working for negotiations, but
on the basis of a more satisfactory balance of power. Can that be reached,
however, short of an enormous increase in military participation which
would bring with it a whole complex of new and grave risks? That is, the
effort to achieve a better balance of power will probably lead to a new
imbalance of power, but at an intensified and more dangerous scale, with
the major powers in Asia increasing their investment and therefore find–
ing it harder to reach a truce. The more intelligent people in Washington
seem now to realize that "victory" is out of the question, but in their un–
willingness to face defeat they may lead us into a magnified disaster.
Paul Jacobs
I think the basic conception of the statement in PR
is
faulty,
for it makes a separation between American policy in Vietnam and in the
Dominican Republic. I am convinced that both cases represent the carry–
ing out of the same basic policy, the same view of the world and the
U.S. role in it.
In the case of Vietnam, a tone of "a plague on both your houses"
pervades the analysis in PRo The U.S. policies are wrong, it says, but so
too are the policies of the Vietcong, North Vietnam and Communist
China. But in the Dominican Republic, the statement clearly states that
only the U.S. is wrong because we are not supporting "democratic
revolutionary groups."
This separation assumes that while there may be some justification
for our involvement in Vietnam because Asia may go Communist if the
American presence is withdrawn, no such justification existed in the
Dominican Republic. Thus, the statement's complaint about the Amer–
ican role in Vietnam is directed primarily towards its character, i.e., the
essentially military nature of the operation and not towards the general
problem of what role the U.S. ought to play in Southeast Asia.
But suppose, for example, that the charges of a possible Communist
take-over in the Dominican Republic were correct and that indeed, there
