Burns and Novick Assassinate Kennedy

[Paul Rigby]

Washington Daily News, 23 December 1964, p.19

Our Ugly War

By Richard Starnes

The American military position in Southeast Asia has been untenable from the outset, but what is less clear is that it is morally indefensible as well.

The theory of U.S. intervention in Laos, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Thailand is much like John Randolph's celebrated rotten mackerel it shines and it stinks.

American meddling ostensibly stems from the highest motives. We have told the rest of the world, and convinced only ourselves, that we are spending and bleeding and dying to bring the blessing of self-determination, pop-up toasters, fly-proof latrines and other such hyphenated benefits to the heathen masses. We are persuaded that we must preserve them from the unspeakable oppression of communism, if we have to fricassee every man jack of them in napalm to do it.

Our position sounds as wholesome as a Voice of America biography of Louisa May Alcott. The truth is a far less lovely aspect of the mackerel.

It is no longer disputed in informed circles that the Viet Cong insurgency is supported, at least passively, by a large majority of the peasants in that non-viable non-country which we call South Viet Nam. Guerilla warfare withers and dies if it is not supported by the people, as was demonstrated when the British put down a superficially similar uprising in Malaya.

The Viet Cong are, to be sure, ardently supported by the communist regimes in China and North Viet Nam. But it is cynical rubbish to assert what appears to be the developing American policy that bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail can reshape the course of the war.

First, of course, is the fact that the guerrillas who now control most of South Viet Nam can survive and continue to fight even if all material support from the North is ended.

Next, the Ho Chi Minh Trail has no real existence outside the minds of American pseudo-experts eager to perpetuate the war. It is a tangled complex of jungle paths, largely invisible from the air. Its tentacles wind thru North and South Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. Indeed, if candor is permitted to illuminate the subject, the "trail" also must include the busy routes of the sampans and motor junks that ply the Tonkin Gulf.

Finally, Korea proved that absolute air supremacy is not enough to halt the coolie-borne commerce of war in Asia. To suggest otherwise now is corrupt, cynical and brutally immoral. Yet we learn thru devious contrived leaks that interdiction of the supposed communist supply routes is to be done, altho not honestly and overtly, by American-airmen.

This policy is one with all the other bankrupt policies that have been attempted in Southeast Asia. It will prolong a war that cannot be won and it will render the ultimate solution infinitely more difficult. It will take more lives, some of them American lives which our folkways tell us are the most valuable lives in the world.

So far as is known here, no American official has ever spelled out what American interests in Viet Nam required the nation to participate in the harlot war we are now fighting there. President Kennedy once attempted to do so with respect to Laos, when he was misled by the CIA and Defense Department into believing that bluff and bluster would save the day. But on Viet Nam we are offered nothing but stirring patriotic phrases while plans are matured for an especially dishonourable extension of the conflict.

Sooner or later the round-eyed warriors have to have the courage and wit to admit that Western civilization cannot be taught with jellied gasoline bombs. The people of Southeast Asia have had no peace for a quarter century. It is unthinkable that American policy can contrive to offer them none at this sad juncture.