Word: guerrillas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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President Johnson, speaking at Omaha in June 1966, argued that "What happens in South Vietnam will determine--yes, it will determine--whether ambitious and aggressive nations can use guerrilla warfare to conquer their weaker neighbors." The Administration views the underdeveloped world as a dry tinderbox of social and economic injustice ruled by weak and inept regimes; it believes that a spark from China may engulf the whole third world in revolutionary flames; it fears the emergency of increasing numbers of "regimes responsive to Peiping's will." How tenable are these views of "wars of national liberation...
...Chinese communists are the classic practitioners of successful guerrilla warfare. China was a country mired in social and economical injustice, with an impotent and corrupt government. Nevertheless, the Red Army was on the verge of destruction when the Japanese invasion in 1937 drove the Nationalist and warlord forces away and thus allowed the guerrillas to enter the villages not only as reformers but also as effective champions of nationalism in opposition to a foreign invader. Mao Tse-tung rode to victory on these two waves of support. It was foreign occupation of China and not some magic Maoist technique which...
Successful guerrilla-led revolutions, which the Administration insists on calling "wars of national liberation"--a communist term carrying the connotation of Chinese domination--are rare because all of the conditions necessary for their success seldom occur simultaneously. Such wars have succeeded only where the guerrillas have seized both the mantle of social revolutionary or reformer and that of nationalist hero who drove out the foreigner--as in Yugoslavia, China, Algeria and Vietnam. Where guerrillas have been unable to capture the banner of nationalism--either because of ethnic problems, as in Malaya, or because of the absence of a foreign invader...
Even so, the great majority of Army men, who got the M-16 long before the Marines, swear by it. So do the Viet Cong. Indeed, Le Xuan Chuyen, a former North Vietnamese lieutenant colonel and veteran of 21 years of guerrilla warfare, calls the M-16 "an excellent weapon." Le Xuan, the highest-ranking Red defector to date, says the V.C. also have gripes about the M-16s they have captured. They find the M-16 ammunition almost impossible to procure...
...already begun to chatter. For the first time, an unsettling outbreak of incidents took place along the front?any one of which might have touched off wider war if either side had really wanted it. In the first combat deaths of the crisis, two Israeli soldiers and a Syrian guerrilla were killed when an Israeli patrol clashed with a group of infiltrators near the Syrian border at Kfar Hanassi. Earlier, also near the Syrian border, an Israeli armored car ran over an Arab-planted mine and blew up, injuring seven soldiers...