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A Note on Vietnamization
- Abstract
NATHAN GLAZER (p. 33) tells us that he is embarrassed to add to the millions upon millions of words which have already been written on Vietnam. I too find myself embarrassed, if for slightly different reasons from the ones he gives, to be writing about Vietnam. Like him, I have always refrained out of a certain diffidence toward the experts from writing about Vietnam, although (like him too, I imagine) I have made two or three speeches on the war. The most recent of these speeches, delivered in the fall of 1969, on the day of the great Moratorium, urged, on the basis of arguments very similar to those Mr. Glazer elaborates here, an immediate American withdrawal from what was then still being called the war in Vietnam.
Of course by the time the Moratorium was held, the President had already informed the world that he had decided against an immediate withdrawal and in favor of a gradual disengagement, to be completed presumably by 1972. An immediate withdrawal-so he obviously thought-would guarantee the loss of South Vietnam to the Communists; he was therefore determined to move out in stages and in such a way as to give the South Vietnamese a fighting chance to defend themselves against a Communist takeover after the last American was gone.
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