On Providing Aid toYesterday's Enemies

By LANCE MORROW

THE peace in Viet Nam may soon be almost as controversial as the war once was. After 46,000 Americans died in combat, after the nation bled $135 billion from its treasure and suffered a psychic dislocation as severe as any since the Civil War, the President would ask taxpayers for billions of dollars more. Much of it would go as a transfusion for the people and the regime that U.S. B-52s were bombing just a few weeks ago at Christmastime.

There is a concussion of future shock in the idea, a bewilderingly abrupt role reversal. The thought of bestowing American largesse on Hanoi, so recently the enemy at war, is already stimulating resentment, confusion and, occasionally strange alliances in the U.S. For different reasons, George McGovern and Barry Goldwater find themselves repelled by the idea. At the same time, the Nixon Administration is discovering improbable supporters--Edward Kennedy for example--in what is taking shape as a bitter congressional struggle over the issue. The debate embraces large questions of domestic priorities and needs, of the nation's responsibilities as a world power, its traditions of magnanimity and generosity, its moral obligations for the destruction wrought in Indochina.

The President has not yet announced any details ot his plan--last year he talked of a $7.5 billion program for all of Indochina over a five-year period, but the Administration is now deliberately vague about who would get what, whether it would be direct bilateral aid or part of a multinational reconstruction effort. Much is still up in the air: Indochina remains unsettled, fighting continues, and the rest of the American P.O.W.s must be returned.

The Administration and its critics are already embattled, however, over the principles involved. Although many liberals have long favored reconstruction as a moral necessity, Nixon's men would like to ignore the moral implications. For Nixon to get his aid plan past Congress, it may be crucial that the payments not be interpreted in any way as "reparations"--which would imply American guilt--but as a long-term investment in the stability of Southeast Asia.

Nixon himself has called the project an "investment in peace " And at a press briefing last week Henry Kissinger elaborated on that theme: "We are asking for support for the idea of such a program not on economic grounds, and not even on humanitarian grounds primarily, but on the grounds of attempting to build peace in Indochina and therefore to contribute to peace in the world." In an appearance b fore the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State William Rogers pursued the same cautious, pragmatic line suggesting a kind of moral neutrality regarding the war's devastations, looking forward rather than stirring again any possible questions of international guilt and innocence. Said Rogers: "There may be some longing among Americans tc withdraw from the burdens and responsibilities of an active role in world affairs. Twice before in this century, our initial reaction was to pull back and concentrate on domestic issues This time, I believe, we will not make that mistake."

That remained to be seen. As Wyoming's Senator Gale McGee warned Rogers, "The Congress is in a rather ugly mood " Many liberals, like McGovern, now argued that an Administration in the midst of performing radical surgery on so many domestic programs should not think of dispatching billions to North Viet Nam. It was an astonishing reversal for McGovern, who had proposed just last fall that the U S "join with other countries in repairing the wreckage left by this war." Last week he told the Senate: "I cannot b lieve the Administration wants to continue depriving urgent priorities at home so that we can send billions of dollars to a government the same Administration has been instructing us to despise until a few days ago."

Some Senate conservatives took the more direct and truculent line that the U.S. should never give aid to an undefeated former enemy still intent on toppling the Saigon government and on reunifying Viet Nam under Communist control Said New York's James Buckley: "North Viet Nam claims to have emerged as victor of the war. They have a record of violating past agreements and have yet to forswear their intention of controlling all of Indochina."

All during the war, Congress has been restive about Presidents committing the nation to a course of action and then demanding ratification of a fait accompli. That is one reason why the debate will be so volatile. In Chapter VIII, Article 21 of the Agreement on Ending the War, the President agreed to this language: "In pursuance of its traditional policy, the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam and throughout Indochina." For years America's official apologists repeated that the U.S. was in the war to "honor its commitments." Since the President made the aid commitment in the cease-fire agreement, the U.S. is presumably bound again to keep its word. Nor is the idea of financial help for the North a novel idea. Lyndon Johnson promised that the U.S. would provide aid, once the war was over, as far back as 1965.

In the history of human warfare, the notion of picking up one's enemy after the fight and binding his wounds is somewhat unusual--and seems logically almost a little perverse, though chivalrous. Among some primitive peoples, such as the Murngins of northern Australia, victors followed a sophisticated ritual not dissimilar to the Administration's intentions: they would pay reparations to a defeated enemy on the theory that this would mitigate the desire for revenge and thus restore conditions in which peace is again possible.

More often, a brutal and unarguable logic gave the spoils to the victor. The Greeks, for all their estimable civilization, frequently slaughtered and enslaved all unransomed prisoners, burnt the enemies' houses and crops, exterminated their livestock and destroyed their grain seed. The Romans razed Carthage and sowed its fields with salt. So it went. The New Testament enjoined Christian soldiers to make peace with their enemies; the commandment was not regularly observed. Medieval knights resumed their friendships after the joust, but less exalted soldiers were often slaughtered in captivity or sold into slavery.

Americans have not always been models of generosity either, as the nation's Indians can attest. Defeated in battle, they were forced from their lands, herded onto reservations, and left with little more than a strange language to learn. The South, too, still bears some scars from what was too euphorically called the Reconstruction. After the Spanish-American war, the U.S. seized Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and for a time occupied Cuba.

With the end of World War I, however, the U.S. began developing a somewhat more magnanimous style. A decade before he became President, Herbert Hoover organized the program that dispatched more than $7 billion in food relief for war victims on both sides as the Continent suffered through a postwar famine. "Why are we feeding Germany?" Hoover asked. "Because we do not kick a man in the stomach after we have licked him." He also argued that the aid was crucial "to maintain order and stable government in Germany." That vision, of course, soon disintegrated. The Germans were faced with war reparations totaling $50 billion. The country's various humiliations during the '20s eventually yielded up Hitler, then World War II.

When discussing aid to North Viet Nam today, most supporters of the idea cite the precedents of the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Japan in the years after World War II. America poured $6 billion into Japan's economy during the postwar decade. Since the Japanese national budget amounted to sums like $1.8 billion in 1950, it was a major priming of the economic pumps. In Europe, the U.S. spent $13 billion on the 17 non-Communist countries participating in the Marshall Plan, including, of course, Germany, which received $1.4 billion. It is now a familiar irony that the Germans and the Japanese have gone far, with American help, in attaining an economic power in the world that they catastrophically failed to achieve by war.

But the reconstruction of Germany and Japan can hardly be projected as a model for Viet Nam. The moral, political and economic conditions are too different. For one thing, it was some time after the end of World War II before the U.S. began serious aid; in Viet Nam, postwar economic aid is written into the cease-fire treaty. In Germany and Japan, the U.S. had defeated enemy regimes; it was possible to make a clear distinction between the people and their destroyed governments. Today, the people of North Viet Nam are still ruled by the same government the U.S. fought for a decade. In 1945 the U.S. was an occupying power, with a practical obligation to get the occupied countries operating again. Today, the U.S. is withdrawing its troops from Southeast Asia.

U.S. aid after World War II was designed in large part to protect the old Axis powers from Communist inroads. Today, with East-West trade increasing and ideological tensions relaxing, the President is advocating aid to a Communist system.

Another important distinction is that, in contrast to 15 the U.S. in 1973 did not win a war. A possibly closer parallel to the Viet Nam experience was Korea--and the North Koreans got not a cent of aid from the U.S., unless one counts their unexpected acquisition of the U.S.S. Pueblo.

What then is the American obligation to the North Vietnamese? Or is there any? At the center of the debate over aid to Hanoi will be the question of moral responsibility for the devastation of Viet Nam, the deaths of possibly 1,000,000 civilians, North and South. It seems likely that most Americans are impatient with the argument that the U.S. involvement was immoral. Or even if they think it was, they are weary now of entertaining the idea. Says the Hudson In stitute's Herman Kahn: "The average American feels no guilt about bombing North Viet Nam. If you present the issue on a moral basis, it won't go over at all. It would be admitting guilt."

Yet there is a moral obligation there. According to opinion polls in the last couple of years, most Americans were finally persuaded -- even without a sense of guilt -- that the U.S. should never have become involved in the war. When the world's wealthiest nation unleashes its firepower upon an Asian peasant nation -- even when that country is well-armed by bigger powers -- it does accumulate some heavy moral responsibilities. The fact that the U.S. has other debts to pay to its own people -- the poor, the aged, for example does not cancel the obligation to the Vietnamese. One need not necessarily speak of "reparations," with that word's con notation of guilt, or settle the vastly complicated political is sues of Viet Nam. To acknowledge the obligation, it is enough to understand that the U.S., for ten years, was involved in bru tal destruction there. No nation -- especially the "great and good nation" that Richard Nixon describes -- would want to walk away from the smoking ruins without trying to repair some of the damage.

But the Administration is not promoting its aid plan on an argument of moral necessity. The President's "peace with honor" carries no twinges of regret. And, tactically, it would probably be impossible to sell the aid program on the basis of moral obligation. Nor may it be necessary to do so. The Ad ministration's case is reasonably compelling when it argues that the aid is necessary to promote long-term stability. It can even be seen as an inducement to the North to be on its good behavior. The aim would also be to induce friendship for, or at least less hostility against, the South. At worst, it could be regarded as a characteristically American effort to buy off trouble. Whether it would work remains to be seen. The North Vietnamese, having absorbed so many years of war's punishment, may or may not be beguiled by whatever comforts the money could buy them. One immediate result, at least, would be an increase in American stature in the international community, a partial return to the nation's more humanely generous image.

Lance Morrow

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