Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman; Noam Chomsky

Author:Edward S. Herman; Noam Chomsky
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781407054056
Publisher: The Bodley Head
Published: 2011-07-18T05:30:07+00:00

5.5.3. THE PARIS PEACE AGREEMENTS

The Tet offensive convinced large sectors of elite opinion that the costs of the U.S. effort were too high. Lyndon Johnson stepped down. In what was termed by the government a “bombing halt,” and reported as such, the bombers were shifted from North Vietnamese targets to Laos, where the defenseless rural society of scattered villages in the North was demolished, and later Cambodia, where the same was true on an even more horrendous scale. U.S. forces undertook the violent and destructive post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign in the South, and bombing was intensified to “step up refugee programs deliberately aimed at depriving the VC of a recruiting base,” in accordance with the advice of pacification director Robert Komer in April 1967.136 The Phoenix program was established to destroy the “infrastructure” of the NLF by terror. The burden of ground fighting was shifted to Vietnamese forces supplied and directed by the United States, and U.S. conscripts were withdrawn, a more typical pattern for colonial wars that essentially duplicated the earlier French effort to reconquer Indochina. And the United States finally agreed to pursue the path of a negotiated settlement, although still not relinquishing the aim of preventing the unification of Vietnam and retaining Indochina, apart from North Vietnam, within the U.S. global system.

This was not the maximal goal the United States had pursued; thus in the late 1950s the U.S. government still hoped for unification of Vietnam under anti-Communist leadership, and the U.S. client regime always regarded itself as the government of all of Vietnam (GVN = Government of Vietnam), and so declared in the first and unamendable article of its constitution. But by the late 1960s, if not before, control over all Indochina apart from North Vietnam was regarded as the maximum goal attainable. As we have seen, opportunities for a peaceful diplomatic settlement had long existed, but they had never been pursued because they were regarded as inconsistent with the essential goal: preservation of an “independent” South Vietnam that would be a U.S. client state.

By October 1972, the negotiators in Paris had reached the essential terms of an agreement: the 9-Point Plan. President Nixon, however, objected to the terms of the agreement, and the Thieu government in Saigon was completely opposed to them. Nixon’s hope was to delay further negotiations until after the November presidential elections, when he would have more leverage.137 The delay would also permit a vast shipment of arms to the GVN, something that would surely be prohibited by the agreements.

In an effort to pressure Nixon to sign the agreements, the DRV made the terms public on October 26 in a radio broadcast. In a Washington press conference, Kissinger stated that the Radio Hanoi broadcast gave “on the whole a very fair account,” then offering the following paraphrase: “As was pointed out by Radio Hanoi, the existing authorities with respect to both internal and external politics would remain in office” in the South. Thus Kissinger sought to insinuate that according to the accurate

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