Page 33 - Contrast1967November

(what he would congenitally abhor) because of our
"win" policy.

Our official reason for being in Vietnam has
been stated clearly by Dean Rusk.

"With its archipelogos, Southeast
Asia contains rich natural resources
and some 200 million people. Geo-
graphically, it has great strategic
importance--it dominates the gateway
between the Pacific and Indian Oceans
and flanks the Indian subcontinent on
one side, and Australia and New
Zealand on the other. The loss of
Southeast Asia to the Communists
w6uld constitute a serious shift in,
the balance of power against the
interests of the free world. And
the loss of South Vietnam would make
the defense of the rest of Southeast
Asia much more costly and difficult."

Behind this bit of logic is a distortion of
history and a historical .rationalization which
justifies our Vietnam intervention on the basis of
the Munich analogy or what Foster Dulles called
"the domino theory." Just as the allies sold out
at Munich in 1938 and eventually catapulted the
world into a major catastrophe, so a capitulation
to North Vietnam would mean that such dominoes as
Laos, Thailand, Burma, Japan, the Philippines, and
Hawaii would fall and so we would be engaged in
World War III. But as Senator George McGovern
muses, "We are left to wonder how a flotilla of
Vietnamese or Chinese junks is going to get by
the 7th Fleet en route to San Francisco." The
governor from South Dakota also astutely observes,

"The late Winston Churchill, who pre- .
dicted the subsequent aggression of Hitler
if he were not stopped at Munich, just as
clearly warned in 1954 against any interven-
tion in Vietnam by Britain or the United
States. He saw no analogy between Ho and
Hitler and flatly rejected the appeal of
Secretary of State Dulles in the spring of
1954 that Britain and the United States
should intervene against Ho on the side of
the French. It is regrettable that the
world did not listen to Churchill before
Munich; it is also regrettable that we
did not follow his warning against the
Vietnam intervention."

The American people seem, generally, to support
the war. The average person is not able and often
not interested to examine official government
policy. If our country is doing it, we assume it