Word: nlf
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...machinery continued to pound away at all of Indochina. President Nixon's November 1969 nationwide address-the Vietnamization speech, largely of Kissinger's design-was an attempt to buy time for the war by neutralizing domestic opposition, time which would be spent to practice strategy and tactics against the NLF and Hanoi. As one former White House consultant recently put it. "It then occurred to people that what he [Kissinger] basically had in mind was a policy of threat." And the U. S. invasion of Cambodia some months later demonstrated clearly that the political strategy had remained the same, regardless...
...pursued through negotiation. Part of this belief doubtless sprang from what one colleague later called a "David Susskind syndrome," the notion that on first meeting one's opponent face to face the conflict could rapidly be solved; but Kissinger's optimism was borne of a deeper attitude that the NLF and the North Vietnamese, dedicated revolutionaries though they were, would one day be responsive to the overwhelming power of the American military, that they could be threatened and-if necessary-beaten into submission...
Further, it revealed deep ignorance of psychological realities in Indochina. How, after years of American falsehood and aggression, could the NLF and the North Vietnamese trust the United States to keep its part of such a delicate bargain? And why, in turn, should the insurgent forces, after years of being beaten and brutalized by the U. S. military machine, care to allow the continuation of the Saigon regime-however temporarily-for the simple sake of American prestige? For in fact, the liberation forces in Vietnam, after years of struggle and base building, could not be expected to behave like...
...United States lay in its monopoly of physical force, and that if the military were exposed to defeat, if her troops were bullied and thwarted by a group of Vietnamese guerrillas, then the last strain of American credibility would be irretrievably lost. And the result was that as the NLF and Hanoi continued to prevent final U. S. victory, Washington would become bolder in its threats and more willing to engage in the wholesale use of military force...
...part, Kissinger is certainly willing to escalate further. He is hard-line and uncompromising. The more frustrated a problem gets, the more vindictive and personalized his judgment becomes. And he has yet to recognize that it would require little less than wholesale slaughter to defeat Hanoi and the NLF in their active lands. "Henry," an ex-aide said recently, "is not willing to accept the imbalance of power which is there as a reality...