The following is the complete text of an editorial which appeared in the February 243 issue of the Wall Street Journal, the most authoritative national business and financial daily newspaper in the United States. The editorial appeared under the title, "The Logic of the Battlefield."]
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We think the American people should be getting ready to accept, if they haven't already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed; it may be falling apart beneath our feet. The actual military situation may be making academic the philosophical arguments for the intervention in the first place.
Granted, there is an opposite theory, the "last gasp" notion that the weeks'-long wave of assaults on cities and hamlets is the enemy's final outburst before greatly decreasing the war's intensity and coming to the bargaining table. Perhaps it will turn out that way, but right now the evidence does not lend the theory much support. .
Hanoi is believed to have relatively large numbers of troops still uncommitted in North Vietnam. The Communists appear to be getting ample supplies of weapons from the Soviet Union and Red China. As long as the arms keep coming and there are Vietnamese Communists to use then, you would suppose they could keep up the struggle more or less indefinitely. Thus far, at least, they are showing with a vengeance their ability to sow destruction and demoralization everywhere.
Meantime the present South Vietnamese government, never very impressive, looks worse and worse. Most important, the government can't protect the people even in the heart of the cities. The Saigon- U.S. effort to secure villages and woo villagers to the government side has been brought to a halt. This is a government and a nation in chaos; how long can it go on? The failing, it should be stressed, is not in U.S. will or valor, but basically in something lacking in Vietnam itself.
As for the U.S. military undertaking, the current tactic is sad to see: The wholesale destruction of towns and cities in order to "save" them, killing or making homeless refugees out of thousands more civilians. While it is certainly true that an American commander has to destroy a building or a town if he considers it necessary for his soldiers' safety, the scale on which it is going on is hardly endearing the U.S. or Saigon to the populace.
Hence the question: Are developments on the ground making hash of our original commendable objectives?
The U.S. went in to keep South Vietnam out of Communist hands. But no matter what our forces do, they can't seem to do that. If practically nothing is to be left of government or nation, what is there to be saved for what?
The U.S. also went in to demonstrate to Communist China that it couldn't get away with this kind of indirect aggression and that it hadn't better try direct aggression either. But the Communists are getting away with it; they are putting the mighty U.S. through a wringer, and they may be encouraged to try more of it.
Should such be the upshot, that the U.S. abandons the effort not because it "should" do so but because its purposes have become irrelevant in the light of events on the battlefield and of Vietnamese politics, let no one blink the fact that it will be a disaster. It will be a stunning blow to the U.S. and the West in the larger struggle with international communism. At home it will be a traumatic experience to have lost a war in which thousands of Americans died in vain.
The only thing is that continuing in circumstances so unprepossessing could be a worse disaster. If it had in fact been possible for the U.S. to intervene three years ago and accomplish, at reasonable cost, the objective of saving South Vietnam, it probably would have been well worth doing. But since it seems increasingly doubtful that the original purposes can any longer be achieved, the logic of the battlefield suggests that the U.S. could get forced out of an untenable position.
We don't know that the possibility is being squarely faced in Washington; it seems rather unlikely. The Administration insists that the Communist drives are failing of their aims, which Senator Fulbright describes as "wholly irrational, a fantastic analysis." President Johnson seems more firmly committed to Vietnam than ever.
Now stubbornness up to a point is a virtue, but stubbornness can also go beyond the realm of reasonableness. We believe the Administration is duty-bound to recognize that no battle and no war is worth any price, no matter how ruinous, and that in the case of Vietnam it may be failing for the simple reason that the whole place and cause is collapsing from within.
Conceivably all this is wrong; conceivably the Communists are on the brink of defeat and genuine peace talks are about to begin. It doesn't look that way, and as long as it doesn't everyone had better be prepared for the bitter taste of a defeat beyond America's power to prevent.