Page 29 - Contrast1967November

between the north and the south caused the Vietnam
conflict as much as anything else.

Now it is to this illegitimate government alone
that we made a commitment. \vhen President Johnson
says that we are in Vietnam "to fulfill one of the
most solemn pledges of the American nation" he is
referring to a commitment made to our own puppet
government in Saigon.

Diem's intransigence and increasingly
inefficient government, again supported by the U.S.,
forced many patriotic, non-communist Vietnamese
into the National Liberation Front. This was the
only effective way they could protest Diem's
dictatorship and the American policies which they
found reminiscent of French imperialism.

As one Vietnamese Buddhist monk puts it,
"They (the Vietnamese) were increasingly convinced
that the Americans were not in Vietnam to protect
the freedom and democracy of the Vietnamese, but
to defend their own national self-interests and
the interests of the so-called 'free world'''.

It is for this reason that Senator Wayne Morse
has made a case for the illegality of the war.
To my knowledge, the case has never been refuted.
It is illegal under the Constitution in that no
declaration of war has been made and that we
cannot reconcile the war under Article One, Section
Eight of our Constitution. It is also in violation
of the United Nations Charter and the Geneva
Agreement which we did not sign but verbally

pledged to recognize. (If Korea comes t~ mind,

remember that we went into that conflict with all
the legality available at the time.)

Morse continues, "It (the war) is illegal, in
my judgment, for failure to carry out our true
responsibilities under SEATO, which are quite
different from the belated claims of the Secretary
of State that SEATO gives us justification for the
inhumanity that we are guilty of in conducting
this war. It's very interesting that the Secretary
of State in March, 1965, put out a State Department
paper for legal justification of our course of
condUct in South Vietnam and it didn't even mention
SEATO."

And let us not forget that the Bay of Tonkin
Resolution (making the conflict an executive war
and which, according to Congressman Charles
Mathias, would never be passed today) only served
to hide these embarrassing mistakes of judgment.

There are other reasons why our presence in
Vietnam is unnecessary and highly dubious.