invasion. of North Viet Nam is now inevitable. The military long ago sold the President. on the necessity of. a great victory. So, we bombed the North and defoliated.in the South, we threw 300,000 men into the . field, we tried pacification programs, we offered Ho Chi Minh bribes in the form of TVA programs.. And, still the little men of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army, kept coming on.
We can 't seem to beat then. And ‘though they certainly. cannot
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defeat us now, they seemingly can't lose either. But here in America, patience is being exhausted. People want to know why the most powerful nation on earth has been fought to a standstill in a tiny halfcountry in Asia. ‘They want results. They want action.
“The invasion of the North would at least give the illusion | of action. We-have gone through a series of drastic changes in this commitment in:South Viet Nam that started off as advisory, shifted. “to the defense of military installations, turned into “search and. destroy". operations as our:allies, the South Vietnamese, started. quitting in droves. Now we need something that looks like an. offen- Sive.
Be On paper; ‘the. troops will land ‘north of the ‘17th ‘parallel, probably around Vinh. The American voter will cheer, the President! s popularity will zoom (as it did after bombing oil dumps in Hanoi and Haiphong) and the North Vietnamese will collapse.and sue for peace. Only the military mind is capable of such self- deception.
I just wonder what the situation would be in Washington if 300,000 Chinese Communists were fighting in Mexico, in a war whose roots were political, on the side of the Mexican Communists. Back in 1964, Lyndon Johnson had some idea of what would happen. We might yet find the Chinese armies: coming down those jungle. trails, and if that happens, I hope I'm working on something urgent in Tierra del Fuego. Arrogance” and abstraction might yet kill us all.
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