n086  1807  21 Apr 85
BC-SAFIRE-COLUMN
Commentary
Eds. 9th, 10th grafs, boldface words are italics.
ESSAY: Saigon And Managua
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
c.1985 N.Y. Times News Service
    WASHINGTON - The remarkable thing about the 10th anniversary of the
fall of Saigon is this: We celebrate the occasion by deciding whether
or not to heed its lesson in Central America. The basic difference
between the president and the Congress is about what that lesson was.
    If you believe that Vietnam was an exercise in American imperialism,
doomed from the start and needlessly prolonged, then you come down on
the side of the Democratic leadership in Congress: You equate the
contras with the ''corrupt dictatorship in Saigon'' and refuse them
the guns they need to defeat their Communist enemies.
    Contrariwise, if you believe that our attempt to save South Vietnam
from Communist takeover was nobly motivated, and failed only because
a defeatist media and Watergate-emboldened doves in Congress were
able to strip South Vietnam of our protection, then you stand with
President Reagan: You see the Managua Communists as the puppets of
Havana and Moscow, and you are eager to supply the contras with the
ammunition needed to help the anti-Communist Nicaraguans bring down
the Moscow-backed regime.
    That is looking at the issue in its starkest terms. Let us grant
that there are shades of gray that doves and hawks do not like to
think about.
    For example, there must be plenty of doves who derided talk 10 years
ago of incipient ''blood baths,'' and who sincerely believed that
life would be better for the people of Southeast Asia after our
involvement was ended, who now feel a personal guilt for the genocide
that followed. Not for them the easy out of the Shawcross Theory,
which turns truth on its head and blames the Americans for somehow
transforming the gentle Khmer Rouge into murderers of defenseless
millions.
    For an example on the other side, I know there are hawks who cannot
go along with President Nion's judgment that Congress alone was the
cause of Saigon's downfall; we think that Congress did not help, but
that the South Vietnamese government did not have the stamina to
withstand for long the continual pressure from the North.
    But mind-sets on which great decisions turn do not lend themselves
to shades of gray. Therefore, doves do not concern themselves with
the fact that this Communist threat is near our borders, within our
sphere of influence, and not half a world away; nor do hawks trouble
themselves that our vigorous response to the export of revolution is
surely an attempt to help overthrow a government in place, and not,
as in Vietnam a decade ago, to prevent its overthrow. Those are
debating points, and such points do not decide great debates.
    What does determine whether American foreign policy leans toward
isolation or leans toward intervention? Where is the handle on whose
version of the lesson of Vietnam shall prevail in Central America?
+ 1/8.Stridency is a loser.Shrillness in advocacy turns the
general public off. The dove's attacks on the contras as fascist
thugs, or their mean-spirited charge that Reagan is spoiling to use
U.S. troops in a good little war, will present the hawks with a
target of extremist America-haters. In the same way, the president's
elevation of the anti-Communists to the ''moral equivalent of our
Founding Fathers'' invites mockery; more important, the misuse of the
FBI by the CIA to harass U.S. citizens returning from Nicaragua will
turn public opinion against the hawks.
    2.Presidential priority is a winner.A recently elected
president who considers this issue to be of utmost importance can
bring even an opposition Congress along. In November 1969 Richard
Nixon mobilized the ''silent majority'' in a television speech that
knocked the doves back for years; later he let the Soviet leader know
that Vietnam had priority over summit chances.
    Reagan is unwilling to expend political capital on what is said to
be a losing vote. That means he does not consider this sufficiently
important, or it means he is fearful of legislative defeat. A radio
spot on the eve of a great decision is a joke; better to lose than to
run from a fight. Instead, the president will come before us to plead
for a cut in domestic spending, and triumphant isolationists will
send a few bandages to the contras through the U.N.
    Let the vote be recorded, and let the president consider recovering
by recognizing a Nicaraguan government-in-exile. This vote goes far
beyond a rebuff to the contras: It is each congressman's expression
of his understanding of the lesson of Vietnam.
    
nyt-04-21-85 2106est
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n029  1018  27 Apr 85
BC-LEWIS-COLUMN
(Commentary)
ABROAD AT HOME: The Lessons of Vietnam
By ANTHONY LEWIS
c.1985 N.Y. Times News Service
    BOSTON - We went into Vietnam, Henry Kissinger wrote recently, on
the assumption that Hanoi was ''the cutting edge of Sino-Soviet
global strategy.'' But ''in retrospect,'' he said, ''we know that
Hanoi was working for its own account.''
    In other words, that comment blandly tells us, the founding premise
of the war was false. We did not have to fight in Vietnam to contain
the two great Communist powers. Indeed, the Chinese and Soviet
governments detested each other. The only thing that kept them
together for years was the Vietnam War.
    Beware Ignorance: That is the first profound lesson of the American
war in Indochina. The United States should not undertake large
foreign enterprises without some knowledge of the people and interest
involved, and of the relevant history. It should not make commitments
in the dark.
    That may seem obvious. But the officials who took America into the
war were ignorant of the most obvious facts of history: that Vietnam
and China had been bitter enemies for 2,000 years, for example. The
notion that Vietnam was a stalking horse for Chinese aggression was
laughable to anyone familiar with the area, but leaders of the U.S.
government acted on that premise.
    Beware Simple Analogies is a related lesson. We looked at Vietnam
and saw Munich. But the people and the history were altogether
different. The immediate backdrop was colonial, for one thing, a fact
with reverberating consequences. General de Gaulle tried to tell us,
but we would not listen.
    The danger of analogies has to be emphasized, because we are hearing
them again. Secretary of State Shultz tells us that Nicaragua is
Vietnam - as if there were no history of American intervention in
Nicaragua, no general Latin resentment of such intervention. If
Shultz could free himself from the grip of that simple-minded
analogy, he might think about how Mexico and Brazil and Venezuela
would react if we succeeded in overthrowing the Nicaraguan government.
    Know the Limits of Power: another necessary lesson. The United
States is the greatest military power on earth, with weaponry enough
to destroy all life 10 times over. But it does not follow that we can
impose our view whenever and wherever we want: not even on a country
as weak and poor as Vietnam.
    Have we learned that lesson? It seems not, for 10 years after the
Communist victory many voices are telling us that we could have won.
    Yes, the United States could have wiped Vietnam off the face of the
earth. But sane Americans do not mean that when they speak of
winning; they mean imposing a lasting political settlement that would
have left South Vietnam under a non-Communist regime. And how could
that have been done - by a permanent American occupation force?
    The point is that we had tried everything else: saturation bombing,
defoliation, massive intervention in the politics of South Vietnam,
remaking its army on American lines, enormous military aid. It didn't
work, and our own military specialists know why. We were up against
an enemy with an unimaginable willingness to take casualties, an
enemy fighting in its own country and prepared to wait us out, an
enemy that was everywhere.
    Kissinger, in his recent reappraisal of Vietnam, said we really had
won when we signed the Paris accords of 1973, but Watergate so
weakened Richard Nixon that he could not enforce them. To put it
plainly, he could not resume bombing when he wished.
    Once again Kissinger seems to have confused the United States with
Prussia. The chance that our society would have accepted repeated
reintervention in Vietnam after 1973 was nil, with or without
Watergate. And that leads to the final lesson.
    Know Ourselves: Our effectiveness in the world depends on keeping
faith with our character. America has a certain vision of itself, a
moral vision, and its strength wanes as it departs from that vision.
    It is the lesson that Kissinger cannot grasp. He complains that
Congress in mid-1973 voted to prohibit U.S. military action in or
over Indochina, but he fails to mention why. With the Vietnam truce
on, Nixon had shifted the B-52s to Cambodia and was bombing that poor
country - without a shred of legal authority to do so.
    ''America's very anguish testified to its moral scruples,''
Kissinger concedes. But he does not see that the scruples really
matter - that our influence in the world rests as much on our example
of freedom and economic strength as on our considered use of arms. We
are more effective when we do not pursue the obsessions of a Vietnam.
    
nyt-04-27-85 1319est
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