Word: mekong
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...While it is claimed that all American combat troops have been withdrawn from the IV Corps in the Mekong Delta, briefing officers fail to point out that 23,000 U.S. support troops and advisers remain. That figure is only 15% less than the total estimated Communist forces in the area-hardly a level indicating substantial self-sufficiency on the part of the South Vietnamese...
...troops. Viet Cong units are so depleted that Giap must furnish at least 70% of the guerrillas despite his dwindling reservoir of manpower. Increasingly, both North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units are composed of teenagers. What is more, many of the Northerners are being sent to the southernmost Mekong Delta, a sector that is unfamiliar to them but is rapidly becoming one of the most crucial areas of the war. To bolster South Viet Nam's defenses there, President Nguyen Van Thieu last week replaced two top military commanders in the Delta. The North, determined to discredit President Nixon...
...more serious problem is financing. President Nixon has given the Mekong project less support than Lyndon Johnson did. Washington has shortsightedly refused South Viet Nam's request that the U.S. contribute one-fourth of the money to build a $22 million bridge across the Mekong in the southern delta. U.S. officials contend that security problems and the cost of Vietnamizing the war make bridge-building unrealistic now. They deny any change in policy, saying that Nixon is simply waiting...
Executive Infighting. The most damaging threat to Mekong development has come from the United Nations. Eager to borrow big money from Robert McNamara's World Bank and other international banks the U.N. shook up the Mekong management two months ago in a way intended to heighten its appeal to Western capitalists and Asian Communists alike. Dr. C. Hart Schaaf, 57, an outspoken and visionary Indiana professor who in ten years as chief executive became known as "Mr. Mekong," was reassigned to Ceylon. U.N. executives felt that the chief should be non-American, particularly if the project is ultimately...
What made management sense to the U.N. did not conform to Asian values. Project members favored the imaginative and inspirational Schaaf. As for being palatable to the Communists, Schaaf says: "We want to produce irrigation and power for the people of the Mekong basin. We don't give a damn what their politics are." Representatives of the four nations refused to accept Umbricht, threatened to sever ties with the U.N. and hire their own man, an Asian from one of the Mekong countries. They finally approved William Van Der Oord, a U.N. official from The Netherlands-but only...