The British press has seized with delight on the news that Saigon has "succeeded' in getting more of its troops into the town of An Loc, besieged for two months. What does this 'symbolic victory' really mean? It means in fact that it is the liberation forces who have 'succeeded' in getting the Thieu regime to pour a large part of its forces in the Saigon area into relieving a target deliberately selected for its strategic irrelevance. In this kind of war the need to achieve 'symbolic victories" is itself a mark of weakness.
It is already becoming clear where those liberation forces withdrawn from An Loc have gone. Reports from around Saigon (e.g from Peter Arnott of A.P.) tell of the NLF reoccupying the refuges and bases from which they launched the attacks of the 1960's. It was the threat of the success of these attacks that brought about the escalation of U.S. involvement in ground warfare. Here and in the Mekong Delta the withdrawal of Saigon troops to defend' places like An Loc has allowed the local LF very swiftly to undo the results of several years" "pacification". The areas "pacified" by the Australian units are now 50 percent back in NLF hands. Throughout the Delta Saigon troops have had to retreat from hundreds of small military posts. This is the real war.
Throughout the country the same quiet reestablishment of P.R.G! authority has been taking place. A part from the province of Quang Tri, the liberation forces have also gained control of the highland and coastal have become well emplaced around most of the main bases and population centres of Sowthern Vietnam-Hue, Da Nang, Kontum, Pleiku, Binh Dinh and so on. Pressure can now be built up or released on them in accordance with their fundamental strategy of wearing away the core of the Saigon troops. The final element in the strategy of the liberation forces is the political front they hope to build up in the cities against the Thieu regime and its puppet status. The recent repression by the Saigon regime of its "legal" opposition shows how afraid it now is of this. Letters smuggled out of South Vietnam (Le × Monde, 10 June) speak of students, university staff and religious leaders arrested and their organizations driven underground. But even the regime's own National Assembly had refused Thieu the further emergency powers he had asked for.
U.S. TACTICS In their bombardment of the DRV 2, American reactions have now been reduced to the most brutal essentials of class war. Eye-witnesses have confirmed the DRV government claims that the bombing is now being used so indiscriminately as to be simply an instrument of terror. Pentagon spokesmen now refer to their target as the Hanoi-Haiphong military complex', apparently having concluded, quite rightly, that schools, hospitals, flats, textile factories and hydro-electric plants are all "weapons' in a people's war. At any rate these have been the recent targets. Even more ominously, Professor Yves Lacoste the French geographer has shown that the dykes and levees built up by generations of Vietnamese peasants to prevent the Red River from inundating vast areas are now threatened. U.S. raids in their vicinity are timed to coincide with the heavy rainfall in the mountains which causes the river to put most strain on them. When the weakened walls collapse, the U.S. will try to put the blame onto the Vietnamese themselves for ignoring water management during their 'invasion' of the South. Needless to say the teams of workers who start repairing the damage immediately, have to contend with bombardment by anti-personnel weapons. With more than half of America's 390 B-52's now operating over Vietnam, the liberation forces still have few effective weapons against them. Although the Soviet GANEF and GRIFFON missiles could certainly change this, and although the former at least is already being delivered to Egypt, they are still denied to the Vietnamese. So widespread has the bombing become that even China seems suddenly to have remembered that revolution is not a spectator sport. But her protests at the threat to her national security would have carried more weight had they not coincided with news that Henry Kissinger is off to Peking again.
Of course, for political reasons the "withdrawal" of U.S. forces has to continue but by now this has become pure sham. In order to get the number of men in Vietnam down to 49,000, several air force units are being transferred towns of North Vietnam, the masters of the from Da Nang to Thailand, from where they will continue to be used exclusively over Vietnam. By Ist July there should be about as many U.S. military in Thailand as there are in Vietnam. With the 42,000 men of the Seventh Fleet there will by then be altogether some 140,000 U.S. forces still involved directly in the Indochina theatre, which must be near the optimum number for the war of aerial and coastal bombardment that this has become.
JUNE 4th DEMO The demonstration in London on 4 June against U.S. aggression, and in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle, marks in some ways a re birth of the movement in this country. Despite very bad weather, several thousands listened to the speakers, including representatives of the DRV and the PRG, and then marched in a militant mood to the U.S. embassy at Grosvenor Square. The range of organisations that took part was much wider this time than it has been for some years, and marks the beginning of a realisation that the struggle in Vietnam has been continuing, and is as relevant to revolutionaries now as it ever was. Obviously we cannot expect the relationship between the revolutionary left in Britain and the Vietnamese Revolution to be the same in 1972 as it was in 1968. But by becoming involved in a wider range of struggles we have become much stronger than we were then, and that much more able to spread awareness and support for this great revolutionary movement in Indochina throughout all our new areas of work. Duncan MeNiven NOTES: 1. Provisional Revolutionary Government (of South Vietnam) 2. Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam)
They thereby lay the base for a still more ex-