Word: saigon
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...Saigon's reverses on the battlefield prompted President Ford to promise that he would ask Congress for $300 million in supplemental funds for new weaponry for Saigon, increasing the current $700 million already appropriated for 1975. Proponents of the request will surely argue that Saigon's shortage of ammunition and aviation fuel seriously hurt its cause in Phuoc Binh and will weaken its defense of other Communist targets. Administration spokesmen predicted that some emergency funds would be approved, but the heavily Democratic Congress, already preoccupied by recession, the oil crisis, and the confrontation in the Middle East...
...newspapers preferred to put it--their first provincial capital since they took An Loc, later destroyed by American bombers, during the spring offensive of 1972. The peace agreement initialed two years ago this Thursday by the four parties to the war--the United States, the Provisional Revolutionary Government, the Saigon government, and North Vietnam--was supposed to put an end to battles for provincial capitals. It was supposed to move the violent military struggle that killed Vietnamese and devastated their country to a new plane, in which political and intellectual struggle could decide the country's future...
...partly because it would have meant that refugees driven into Vietnam's cities when American planes bombed their villages--the effect that Samuel P. Huntington, Thomson Professor of Government, described as "forced-draft urbanization"--could return to the countryside. In the countryside, they were beyond the reach of the Saigon government's police, and besides, Vietnam's peasants had always been the NLF's main social base--that was why forced-draft urbanization was such an effective strategy. Though military tactics were the only ones by which a Saigon government primarily representing South Vietnam's landlords and small business class...
Such optimism underestimated the American and Saigon governments' resourcefulness and determination. New "aid" programs--for example, a Food for Peace program, in which Washington bought food and then sold it to South Vietnamese importers, donating 80 per cent of the proceeds to Saigon's army, navy and air force--took the place of more immediately visible forms of American intervention. And Saigon troops continued to mount attacks on the majority of South Vietnam controlled by the PRG--so that the first year of "peace," by the Saigon government's figures, resulted in about 50,000 deaths and thousands more refugees...
...resistance to Saigon's president, Nguyen Van Thieu, mounted not only in the countryside but in the cities, not only among sympathizers with the PRG but among life-long anti-communists, and as Thieu stepped up his attacks on these opponents as well, it became clearer than ever that Thieu's government bore with it no hope for peace and democracy. And for all the courage of Thieu's liberal opponents, two decades of civil war have made it plain that the PRG speaks for most of those Vietnamese farmers who are not simply weary of the war, that...