Suchergebnisse

The belated dismissal of murder charges against the eight Special Forces personnel in Vietnam throws into glaring relief what has been the least noticed aspect of an utterly regrettable war — the general incompetence of those charged with achieving that fata morgana, victory, or even a tolerable peace.The scandal itself will, no doubt, have been all but forgotten by the time these words appear, though leaving, to be sure, a residue of heightened mistrust of an Administration which could not foresee the public consequences of its actions, misjudged its own courage, and was guilty, moreover, of intolerable hypocrisy. Not to understand that the very climate of Vietnam, the violence, the suspicion, the tangled intrigues joining Americans to South Vietnamese, produced the casual murder of a double agent is to understand nothing at all of the consequences of the American intervention in this luckless corner of the world.

The British Minister of Defense, Denis Healy, has informed us that within minutes of the outbreak of hostilities every Soviet fleet unit in the Mediterranean would be sunk. Let us hope that he has supplied us with a long-overdue corrective to the near-hysteria evident in the press about the Soviet naval presence in the area.Presumably by citing the destruction of the Soviet fleet "within minutes" Mr. Healy is making reference to nuclear weapons—a most implausible scenario. But even in a limited encounter, held short of a nuclear exchange, it is hard to believe that the Soviet fleet would fare well in combat.

The last days of the old year underlined the painful truth once again — America is the blind giant, its three astronauts circling tlie moon in a dizzying display of technologic expertise, while on earth its diplomats and statesmen played out the bizarre farce attending the release of the Pueblo crewmen from North Korean captivity and simultaneously lapsed into an exchange of invective with the Saigon junta we once hailed as a vehicle for the constitutional salvation of South Vietnam.The Apollo 8 journey was, of course, wholly admirable—a stunning reversal of America's space fortunes in little more than a decade. What money, organization, application, and no doubt a vast engineering talent can do, the United States has done in space.

Examining traditional concepts of civilian war fare, the author finds that civilians have not normally been con sidered appropriate targets of violence and that civilian productivity and home-front morale are largely irrelevant in conditions of thermonuclear war, in which only forces in being are likely to be used and command and control are separate from the population at large. Under the circumstances, there are thus important moral and practical reasons for adopting "open cities" and sanctuary policies to spare civilians and re duce over-all deaths. Three cases are examined in detail: open cities and sanctuary policies to be enunciated now and at the time of a hypothetical war with the USSR; with respect to the Soviet Union's presumably reluctant Warsaw Pact al lies; and finally in the event of a future war, again hypotheti cal, with mainland China.

Following Stalin's death, party leaders in Moscow and the satellites made public pronouncements indicating a sharp break with Communist dogma. "New Course" policies included: concessions to agriculture and peasantry, re adjustment of proportions between heavy and light industry, increase in con sumer-goods production, sharp rise in living standards, and a new respect for "forms of Socialist legality." After the introduction of the first economic re forms the "New Course" took on a political dimension. East European party and governmental leaders found themselves in unfamiliar ground—it was no longer merely a case of what the center chose to do, but how the masses would respond. The "New Course" was not a success and initiative was passing from Communist hands. A strategy of restoration was initiated by Russian leaders who intended that 1955 should be a year of salvage, a going back to pre-"New Course" policy. However, in Eastern Europe this was too late.—Ed.