[lit-ideas] Hearts and minds
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 19:04:47 -0700
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=f158e8ed-005b-47e1-bc8c-c7bd090c1e2b&k=65443
Friday » May 26 » 2006
Kissinger told China communist takeover in Vietnam was acceptable: documents
Calvin Woodward
Canadian Press
Friday, May 26, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) - Former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger quietly
acknowledged to China in 1972 that Washington could accept a communist
takeover of South Vietnam if that evolved after a withdrawal of U.S.
troops - even as the war to drive back the Communists dragged on with
mounting deaths.
The late U.S. president Richard Nixon's envoy told Chinese Premier Zhou
Enlai: "If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to
be able to accept it in Indochina."
Kissinger's blunt remarks surfaced in a collection of papers from his
years of diplomacy released Friday by George Washington University's
National Security Archive. The collection was gathered from documents
available at the U.S. government's National Archives and obtained
through the research group's declassification requests.
Kissinger's comments appear to lend credence to the "decent interval"
theory posed by some historians who said the United States was prepared
to see Communists take over Saigon, as long as that happened long enough
after a U.S. troop departure to save face.
But Kissinger cautioned in an interview Friday against reaching easy
conclusions from his words of more than three decades ago.
"One of my objectives had to be to get Chinese acquiescence in our
policy," he said.
"We succeeded in it and then when we had achieved our goal, our domestic
situation made it impossible to sustain it," he said, explaining he
meant Watergate and its consequences.
The papers consist of some 2,100 memoranda of Kissinger's secret
conversations with senior officials abroad and at home from 1969 to 1977
while he served under presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford as national
security adviser, secretary or state and both. The collection contains
more than 28,000 pages.
The meeting with Zhou took place in Beijing on June 22, 1972, during
stepped-up U.S. bombing and the mining of harbours meant to stall a
North Vietnam offensive that began in the spring. China, Vietnam's ally,
objected to the U.S. course but was engaged in an historic thaw of
relations with Washington.
Kissinger told Zhou the United States respected its Hanoi enemy as a
"permanent factor" and probably the "strongest entity" in the region.
"And we have had no interest in destroying it or even defeating it," he
insisted.
He complained Hanoi had made one demand in negotiations he could never
accept - that the United States force out the Saigon government.
"This isn't because of any particular personal liking for any of the
individuals concerned," he said.
"It is because a country cannot be asked to engage in major acts of
betrayal as a basis of its foreign policy."
However, Kissinger sketched out scenarios under which Communists might
come to power.
While the United States could not make that happen, he said: "If, as a
result of historical evolution it should happen over a period of time,
if we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able
to accept it in Indochina."
Pressed by Zhou, Kissinger further acknowledged a communist takeover by
force might be tolerated if it happened long enough after a U.S. withdrawal.
He said if civil war broke out a month after a peace deal led to U.S.
withdrawal and an exchange of prisoners, Washington would probably
consider that a trick and have to step back in.
"If the North Vietnamese, on the other hand, engage in serious
negotiation with the South Vietnamese and if after a longer period it
starts again after we were all disengaged, my personal judgment is that
it is much less likely that we will go back again, much less likely."
The envoy foresaw saw the possibility of friendly relations with
adversaries after a war that, by June 1972, had killed more than 45,000
Americans.
"What has Hanoi done to us that would make it impossible to, say in 10
years, establish a new relationship?"
Almost 2,000 more Americans would be killed in action before the last
U.S. combat death in January 1973, the month the Paris Peace Accords
officially halted U.S. action, left North Vietnamese in the South and
preserved the Saigon government until it fell in April 1975.
Whether by design or circumstance, the United States achieved an
interval between its pullout and the loss of South Vietnam but not
enough of one to avoid history's judgment that it had suffered defeat.
---------------
Robert Paul
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