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Banned
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Scout, how would you react if doubt were to gain enough of a foothold in your "thinking" to cause you to take a serious look at everything you "know" about Vietnam?
Consider that Jane Fonda is villified by folks of your opinion....when it is entirely possible that she was a humanitarian whistleblower, and GW Bush, as US ambassdor to the UN, lied to the world to cover for war criminals in the white house. I know it's probably too great of a threat to your "belief system", but others can judge for themselves:
Quote:
http://www.agrnews.org/issues/200/culture.html
If you only knew: insiderism and Secrets
By Bill Boisvert
With each new corporate scandal reminding us how far out of the loop we are, Americans are obsessed with insiders. We are convinced that inside information is superior to public information, and lionize whistle-blowers who lay bare the hidden workings of power. But strangely, when revelations come, they invariably do no more than affirm what is already common knowledge. When the secret tobacco company files surfaced in the ’90s, a development hyperbolized in the movie The Insider, the revelation they contained was that — steady, now — cigarettes are addictive and bad for your health. And if Congress ever succeeds in prying loose the secret files of Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, will anyone be shocked by the discovery that Enron was rewriting the nation’s energy regulations?
One touchstone of the cult of insiderism — the idea that what the public knows is a smokescreen of lies, that what’s really going on goes on behind the closed doors of institutional secrecy — is the Pentagon Papers. When this top-secret government study of US policy in Vietnam through 1968 was leaked, the legend goes, it told the real story — the inside story — of Vietnam, documenting the callousness of policy-makers’ calculations and the duplicity with which they were sold to a gullible Congress and public. The revelations provoked unprecedented acts of censorship. The Nixon administration went to court to try to bar newspapers from publishing the documents, making the Papers a cause célèbre. The controversy set a template — a conspiracy of the powerful, unmasked by a crusading press that rouses an enraged populace from its slumber — that would inform populist iconography for a generation to come.
But like other insiderist legends, this tale is a myth.
<b>Although the Papers stood the official story on its head, they had virtually no effect on Americans’ perceptions of the war. For all the commotion surrounding their publication in June 1971, they were yesterday’s news. By that time, six years of stalemated fighting had discredited the government’s claims of progress. TV newscasts had broadcast the devastation of South Vietnam by US bombing and search-and-destroy missions. A huge anti-war movement had grown up to contest the government’s pronouncements on the conduct and motives of the war. “We had to destroy the town to save it” had become the war’s absurdist epitaph.</b> By June 1971, the Tet Offensive had driven Johnson from office, the My Lai massacre had made the front pages, students had been shot at Kent State, Jane Fonda had been to Hanoi and a majority of Americans were telling pollsters the war was morally wrong. <b>There was no one left to disillusion.</b>
That’s the unintended irony of Secrets, a memoir by Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. His premise is that “secrets of the greatest import ... can be kept reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders,” to the detriment of democracy. It’s a dubious claim that’s hardly borne out by the evidence in his book, and it’s part of a wrongheaded but still influential idea on the left — that the American people are innocents whose inchoate anti-imperialism will erupt once the facts about the government’s interventionist schemes are exposed. These misapprehensions mar Ellsberg’s often very perceptive account of the times, causing him to grossly inflate the relevance of inside information to the forces that shaped the Vietnam era.
Ellsberg went from high-level berths at the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation, advising the likes of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, to center-stage in the peace movement, getting maced by cops while marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Noam Chomsky. Along the way, he spent two years in Vietnam, nominally with the civilian pacification program, but really as a student-at-large of the war.
Ellsberg was an insider at the Pentagon, in the rice paddy and on the picket line. The breadth of his experience is probably unique and gives him, at times, a sharply insightful perspective.
By the time he returned from Vietnam in 1967, Ellsberg says, the policy establishment agreed with him that the war was a lost cause; but despite his and others’ arguments for de-escalation, the war dragged on. And there was a deeper problem, which Ellsberg points out to Kissinger:
“It will become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have [super-secret] clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know?’ ... You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. ... You’ll become something like a moron ... incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have.”
As insiders stopped listening to the world, the world stopped listening to insiders.
Much of Secrets is an account of Ellsberg’s efforts to escape this hall of mirrors. As his frustration over the war mounted, he gravitated to the peace movement and began to experience the paradigm shift that was radicalizing so many others. Indeed, his was a classic ’60s journey of protracted consciousness-raising. The tension between his insider and outsider perspectives led to what was clearly an intellectually and emotionally traumatic break with the Rand-Pentagon elite. His leaking of the Papers may have been on some level an atonement for his past association with it.
In reading the Papers, Ellsberg found that policy-makers understood from the outset that South Vietnam was unsalvageable, that US intervention would require upwards of a million troops (and possibly nuclear weapons), and that even then victory would be doubtful. Rather than being misled by bad advice, presidents from Eisenhower to Johnson had gone against the insider consensus, dragging the American people along through manipulation and fraud. Ellsberg therefore decided to breach the wall of secrecy shielding “inordinate, unchallenged executive power” from accountability for its “desperate, outlaw behavior” in Vietnam.
His portrait of an executive branch run amok is no more tenable than the quagmire theory. It downplays serious disagreements among advisers about the prospects for intervention and gives short shrift to the political context of presidential decision-making.
Domestic opinion was never uniformly dovish (Ellsberg admits that the public were usually more hawkish than the insiders), and presidents acted with an eye to powerful pro-war constituencies. As late as the summer of 1967, Senate hawks held hearings demanding an escalation of the air war. Far from a “desperate, outlaw” tangent, presidential policy persistently aligned itself with domestic political pressures.
Even the Tonkin Gulf incident, exhibit A in Ellsberg’s indictment of executive branch deception, tells more about congressional acquiescence than presidential perfidy. Ellsberg quotes Sen. William Proxmire saying he would not have voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had he known the incident was a fraud, but lets this self-serving excuse pass without asking why Proxmire felt a bloodless patrol-boat skirmish justified writing a blank check to the president for unlimited war. Instead of probing congressional support for the war, he offers a morality play about a Machiavellian executive and a bamboozled legislature.
One could argue that the public would have been more dovish had they possessed inside information; that’s Ellsberg’s rationale for leaking the Papers. But secrecy never impeded a substantive anti-war critique, as Ellsberg’s own experience shows. Writing of an anti-war demo in April 1965, just weeks after American ground troops landed in Vietnam, he notes that the speakers “were on solid ground, even if they didn’t have inside information.” They had their own sources, no less (and perhaps more) informed than the Pentagon. Indeed, Ellsberg’s own keenest insights into the war’s illegitimacy, he tells us, came from reading French historians, not the Papers. The truth was out there — theorized by intellectuals, reported by journalists, confirmed by veterans, propounded by activists — from the start, even if it took a while to sink in.
Because Ellsberg still sees the war as a struggle between policy factions arguing over intelligence estimates, the larger picture eludes him. Vietnam was not the pet project of a rogue president or a coterie of planners; it was a product of the Cold War consensus. It was the long, twilight struggle Kennedy promised us, a reprise of conflicts over Korea or Berlin of the sort the country had decided it would fight without a clear-cut victory. Insider pessimism was matched by a conviction, widely shared by the body politic and policed by anti-communist ideologues, that the effort was worth it.
The war would therefore end not with the revelation of secrets but with a revolution in consciousness that repudiated the Cold War consensus — one grounded in public weariness with the material and moral costs of “twilight struggles” and swayed by the New Left’s overt anti-imperialism and nonviolence. Ellsberg’s own change of heart on the war was a microcosm of how that revolution reoriented public attitudes. The revolution penetrated the Pentagon Papers themselves. “A feeling is widely and deeply held,” wrote Assistant Defense Secretary John McNaughton, “that ‘the Establishment’ is out of its mind ... that we are trying to impose some US image on distant peoples we cannot understand (any more than we can the younger generation here at home).”
The Papers were an anti-climax. The war continued; six months after their publication, Ellsberg glumly notes, they had accomplished “nothing.” Thus Ellsberg’s hopes that the Papers would help thwart Nixon’s secret intentions to expand the war in Indochina proved illusory.
But the Papers’ effects were illusory largely because Nixon’s plans were not secret — even the “secret” bombing of Cambodia was rather promptly reported in the New York Times — and not out of line with public opinion. Indeed, the Nixon administration, for all its skulduggery, shows quite dramatically the irrelevance of insiderism. <h3>Nixon deliberately cultivated a reputation for desperate outlawry to frighten the Communists. Unlike the Papers, his secret tapes, which Ellsberg generously quotes, are unsettling to this day:
Nixon: I still think we ought to take the [North Vietnamese] dikes out now. Will that drown people?
Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.
N: ... I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?
K: That, I think, would just be too much.</h3>
N: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? ... I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.
Nixon settled for conventional bombing, with the proviso that “we’re gonna bomb those bastards all over the place. Let it fly, let it fly.” But despite his deranged bunker mentality, his overall policy was one of dutiful de-escalation and withdrawal — cannily calibrated to undercut opposition to the war and win re-election in a landslide. As much as he longed to, he could not ignore the new consensus that the country would not bear any burden or oppose any foe, and that some things would just be too much — the unfinished revolution in consciousness we call the “Vietnam syndrome.”
By focusing public ire on corporate evildoers and corrupt politicians, by deflecting attention from bad policy to the cover-up of bad policy, the cult of insiderism has left a pernicious legacy. Take the 2000 presidential election, a textbook case of an insider cabal — the Jeb Bush-Katherine Harris cabal, the Supreme Court Five cabal, take your pick — thwarting the popular will, and also a textbook case of insiderist obtuseness. The firestorm over a few hundred Florida ballots took the spotlight off Gore’s extra half-million ballots; while in the debate over which gang had betrayed the Constitution, the Constitution’s betrayal of democracy by way of the Electoral College was swept under the rug. Thus an opportunity for systemic reform, embedded in a priceless teachable moment of constitutional crisis, was dissipated in a trivial search for villains.
Even worse are the insidious long-term effects of insiderism. By deriding the machinery of democratic governance as a sham that disguises the behind-the-scenes machinations of insiders, it implies that democratic government is for suckers, that democracy is inescapably the captive of well-connected interests at odds with the public good. The result is to further a political culture of irresponsibility and uninvolvement that lets everyone off the hook — legislators, who ratify bad policy behind feigned ignorance and belated outrage, and the public at large, who retreat from the hard work of political engagement into free-floating cynicism.
Ellsberg’s concerns about the constitutional separation of powers and abuses by the executive branch are pertinent today, as an undeclared war gathers under the most venal and secretive administration in recent history. The Republicans’ wholesale auction of policy to campaign donors, their lockdown on formerly public information and their penchant for incognito detentions make such anxieties plausible again. And unlike the witch hunts of the Clinton years, suspicions about the Bush administration are well-founded in real damage done to the public weal.
But it would be a mistake to revive the cult of insiderism. All of Bush’s misdeeds are done in the glare of press coverage, with the informed consent of Congress. And they are in no way a departure from our national culture of heedless, oil-addicted crony capitalism. Bush comes from Texas; Texas doesn’t come from Bush. What we need is not secret information, but a revolution in consciousness that will, as in the ’60s, challenge the national consensus in far-reaching ways.
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Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-21-NBC-9.html
NBC Evening News for Friday, Jul 21, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing
Abstract: (Studio) Pentagon refutes charges that American planes are bombing dikes in North Vietnam.
REPORTER: John Chancellor
(Man Ha, North Vietnam) Rice is North Vietnam's most important crop. Most is grown in fertile Red River Delta. Majority of nation's. population lives here. Widespread network of irrigation canals, dams, locks, and dikes covers area. It provides rice fields with water, even during dry season, and protects lowlands against floods, in rainy season. Village officials say dike attacked by American bombers on June 18. Bomb craters on dike shown. Repair work underway.
REPORTER: Erik Eriksson {Swedish TV}
(Studio) North Vietnam refuse NBC news team admission to country. Eriksson reports raise questions. He was shown what North Vietnam wanted him to see, but extensive damage to civilian areas were filmed.
REPORTER: John Chancellor
(Pentagon) Pentagon officials don't dismiss Eriksson report as pure propaganda. They say, however, American pilots are assigned only military targets. They think it a gross distortion to compare bombing of North Vietnam with W.W. II when cities deliberately wiped out (Rotterdam, Dresden, Hiroshima). North Vietnam air defense located in population ctrs. near military targets. US planes go after missile and gun sites before they attack aircraft. Some stray bombs may hit villages. American planes also tune in on radar signals to knock out installations. If radar is turned off after bomb dropped, it goes wildly astray. Deny Eriksson report Phuc Loc was bombed.
REPORTER: Robert Goralski
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Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...24-ABC-17.html
ABC Evening News for Monday, Jul 24, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / United Nations and Administration
Abstract: (Studio) United States bombing of North Vietnam touches off controversy between United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim and Secretary of State William Rogers.
REPORTER: Howard K. Smith
(DC) Waldheim almost calls Nixon administration liars. Says North Vietnam dikes have been bombed by US. Rogers calls accusation false; says Waldheim helping North Vietnam in world-wide propaganda campaign. United States Ambassador to United Nations George Bush meets with Waldheim.
REPORTER: Ted Koppel
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Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-25-ABC-5.html
ABC Evening News for Tuesday, Jul 25, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing-Dikes
Abstract: (Studio) There have been charges that United States is deliberately bombing dikes in North Vietnam. Actress Jane Fonda ends visit in North Vietnam.
REPORTER: Howard K. Smith
<b>(Paris, France) Miss Fonda shows film to back her charges that United States is bombing North Vietnam dikes and other civilian targets. [FONDA - says although bombs are falling on North Vietnam, it is an American tragedy.] Says every American President involved in Vietnam war is guilty of treason. [Her film of her North Vietnam tour shown. Shell holes in rice fields and dikes shown.</b> She meets with 7 American POWs who say they feel they are being used as political weapon by United States and want families to work for peace.]
REPORTER: Lou Cioffi
(State Department) State Department briefing called off. Officials were to have shown pictures of damage to North Vietnam dikes located near military installations, making point that dikes were not the target. Secretary of State Rogers denied yesterday that United States planes were intentionally hitting dikes.
REPORTER: Ted Koppel
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Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...25-NBC-10.html
NBC Evening News for Tuesday, Jul 25, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing-Dikes
Abstract: (Studio) President Press Secretary Ron Ziegler says North Vietnam having success with campaign to get world to believe United States is systematically bombing dikes in North Vietnam. Says they are not military targets. If dikes are destroyed, serious flooding would result. <b>Yesterday United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim said he had info. dikes were being bombed. Secretary of State William Rogers complained. American ambassador to UN, George Bush, discussed matter with Waldheim.
REPORTER: John Chancellor
<b>(NYC) [BUSH - told Waldheim there is a massive North Vietnam propaganda campaign on United States bombing of dikes.</b> Bush convinced that Waldheim did not mean to lend credibility to view that United States was deliberately bombing dikes.]</b>
(Pentagon) Admin. denies deliberate bombing of dikes, but says they may be hit when part of military targets. Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim says North Vietnam antiaircraft batteries, bridges, rds. electric power plants, fuel pipeline are often on or near dikes.
REPORTER: Ron Nessen
(Studio) Waldheim refuses further comment on dikes. <b>Actress Jane Fonda says she saw 2 dikes hit by American bombs during recent visit to North Vietnam. Insists she did not go on Radio Hanoi to urge American servicemen to disobey orders.</b>
REPORTER: John Chancellor
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Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-25-CBS-7.html
CBS Evening News for Tuesday, Jul 25, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing-Dikes
Abstract: (Studio) American ambassador to UN, George Bush, says he is certain United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim didn't mean to side with Hanoi when he said he had information North Vietnam dikes were bombed by US. State Department postpones news conference to demonstrate proof bombs were not dropped on dikes deliberately.
REPORTER: Roger Mudd
<b>(State Department) Columnist Joseph Kraft, returning from North Vietnam, saw bombed dikes but does not think there is a policy for their systematic destruction. [KRAFT - describes bomb damage to 2 dikes at Phu Loc and Nam Dinh.</b> Says these random hits indicate no orderly plan to destroy hydraulic system is in effect.] China accuses United States of launching 100 bombing raids on dikes and dams.
REPORTER: Marvin Kalb
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Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...8CD85F468785F9
U.S. ISSUES REPORT TO REBUT CHARGES ON DIKE BOMBINGS; Intelligence Document Says 12 Hits Were Unintentional and Damage Was Minor U.S. Releases a Report Rebutting Dike Charges
Jul 29, 1972, Saturday
By BERNARD GWERTZMANSpecial to The New York Times
Page 1, 858 words
DISPLAYING FIRST PARAGRAPH - WASHINGTON, July 28 -- The Administration today released a Government intelligence report finding that American bombing had damaged North Vietnam's dike system at 12 points. But the report concluded that the hits were unintentional, their impact was minor "and no major dike has been breached." ....
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Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...04-NBC-11.html
NBC Evening News for Friday, Aug 04, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Bombing-Dikes
Abstract: (Studio) 8 years ago today, American planes bombed North Vietnam for first time. 250 more attacks carried out yesterday. 3 Senators accuse Nixon administration of deliberate bombing of North Vietnam dikes: Senators Edward Kennedy, John Tunney, and Fred Harris. White House calls action irresponsible and helping enemy propaganda effort.
REPORTER: Garrick Utley
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Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-10-CBS-5.html
CBS Evening News for Thursday, Aug 10, 1972
Headline: Paris Peace Talks
Abstract: (Studio) United States Ambassador William Porter says tone at Paris Peace Talks has improved. Communists claim Americans bombing North Vietnam dikes; cite statements by Senator Edward Kennedy, actress Jane Fonda, and Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
REPORTER: Dan Rather
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Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...16-ABC-14.html
ABC Evening News for Wednesday, Aug 16, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Clark
Abstract: (Studio) Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, back from North Vietnam tour, appears before Senate subcommittee
REPORTER: Howard K. Smith
(Capitol Hill) [CLARK - reports extensive bomb damage to North Vietnam dikes. Hopes it was not deliberate.] Senator Edward Kennedy chairs committee Senator Hiram Fong suggests dikes used for military purposes. Defense Department photograph shows oil drums stored on dike. [CLARK - saw no military targets on dikes. Shows bomblets from North Vietnam. Said used to kill people. Said dropped in populated area of Hanoi.]
REPORTER: Sam Donaldson
(Pentagon) [Pentagon Press Secretary Jerry FRIEDHEIM - denies American use of antipersonnel bombs in North Vietnam.] Pentagon releases reconnaissance photos showing antiaircraft and artillery weapons on top of dikes.
REPORTER: Roger Peterson
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Quote:
http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu...-16-NBC-2.html
NBC Evening News for Wednesday, Aug 16, 1972
Headline: Vietnam / Clark
Abstract: (Studio) Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark testifies before Senate subcommittee that he saw widespread damage to civilian installations in North Vietnam, caused by American bombing.
REPORTER: John Chancellor
(DC) [CLARK - shows antipersonnel bomb he brought back from North Vietnam.] [Senator Hiram FONG - asks if dikes looked deliberately bombed.] [CLARK - hopes bombing of dikes was not deliberate-fears it was.] [FONG - displays Defense Department photos of oil drums stored on dikes.] [CLARK - says he saw mo guns or SAM's mounted on dikes. Requests Defense Department photos of Thanh Hoa hospital after it was bombed.]
(Pentagon) Senator Edward Kennedy requests reconnaissance photos of bombed areas of North Vietnam. Defense Department photos of military targets on dikes shown, described.
REPORTER: Robert Goralski
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Scout, I can't help thinking that you have a long history of supporting politicians who are as "dumb as dirt". Multiple chances to learn strategic lessons.....and today the US military is in a similar position in 2 countries, as the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1988, and the US, in 1972, and.....????
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Echoes of Vietnam; A Superpower Is Desperate to Leave, But in Afghanistan It Is the Russians; [News Analysis]
CRAIG R. WHITNEY, Special to the New York Times. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Apr 8, 1988. pg. A.13
LEAD: Only a few weeks ago, the Reagan Administration seemed to be risking failure in the Afghan peace talks - insisting, because its conservative supporters in the Senate insisted, on the right to keep supplying the insurgents with weapons after a Soviet withdrawal began, despite an earlier pledge to cut them off.
<b>In fact the risk may have been blown out of proportion, exaggerated by distorted memories of how the Vietnam War was lost to the Communists after a ''sellout'' cease-fire 15 years ago. There are parallels - in Afghanistan this year, as in Vietnam in 1973, a superpower tired of entanglement in an unwinnable war is determined to get itself out. But this time it is the Soviet Union.</b>
Most doubts here about the seriousness of the Soviet intention to leave vanished in early February, when the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, made a speech on Soviet television saying he was ready to begin a pullout of the 115,000 Soviet troops from Afghanistan by May 15 if agreement could be reached in the negotiations in Geneva sponsored by the United Nations. A political settlement of the civil war in Afghanistan, he said, was up to the Afghans afterward.
Since Moscow was no longer insisting on leaving a Communist-dominated government in power after it left, the main political question for the Reagan Administration was how easy the United States should make it for the Russians to get out. An Embarrassing Hitch
''They invaded that country, and they have to get out,'' a senior Administration official said at the time.
But there was an embarrassing hitch: Two years ago, American negotiators had pledged in the United Nations talks to guarantee that all ''outside interference'' - including supplies to the insurgents - would stop once a Soviet withdrawal began.
President Reagan, who according to his advisers was aware of the pledge to stop supplying the guerrillas, nevertheless said, ''You can't suddenly disarm them and leave them prey to the other Government.'' The Russians, for their part, had made no promise to stop aiding the Government in Kabul.
So conservatives in Washington, inside and outside the Administration, began pressuring the President to insist that the Russians also stop sending supplies to Kabul. Without such a provision, Senator Gordon J. Humphrey, Republican of New Hampshire, said in Geneva yesterday, President Reagan should reject the agreement. Supplies for Both Sides
But Administration officials discovered a face-saving way out of the quandary: if the Russians were determined to get out, and apparently resigned to leaving their Afghan allies to an uncertain fate, the United States could insist on the right to keep supplying the insurgents as long as the Soviet Union kept supplying Kabul.
When the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, was in Washington last month, he apparently agreed to this idea.
The Afghan Communist leader, Najibullah, is believed to have objected, which is why American diplomats believe Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Shevardnadze took him to Tashkent, the largest Soviet city near Afghanistan, for some serious talk yesterday and today.
Since they got him to agree that the ''last obstacles to signing the agreements have now been removed,'' as a joint Soviet-Afghan statement put it today, the Russians can now free themselves for foreign-policy initiatives elsewhere unencumbered by the heavy mortgage of foreign military intervention in an Islamic third-world country. A Question of Survival
What happens to their ally is not so clear. Even if the Soviet Union keeps supplying it, how can Mr. Najibullah's regime, which controls little more than the area around Kabul and has hundreds of thousands of well-armed insurgents sworn to bring it down, survive without the Soviet Army's help?
The circumstances seemed strongly reminiscent of the arm-twisting that President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger had to do on on their nervous ally in Saigon, Nguyen Van Thieu, when the United States finally decided to get out of Vietnam.
Then, after an offensive by the Communist forces of North Vietnam in 1972, the United States reached agreement with Hanoi on a cease-fire and a withdrawal of American forces - only to be thwarted by Mr. Thieu, who correctly feared that his Government could not survive on its own. ''I see that those whom I regard as friends have failed me,'' he said.
He stalled until January 1973, when Mr. Nixon had to threaten the South Vietnamese leader with ''inevitable and immediate termination of U.S. economic and military assistance which cannot be forestalled by a change of personnel in your Government,'' before Mr. Thieu bowed to the cease-fire terms. Conservative Support
As in Afghanistan, the cease-fire in Vietnam did not come with a finished political settlement. During the next two years, the Soviet Union and China continued to supply the North Vietnamese with military aid, while Congress cut back aid to the South Vietnamese. Mr. Thieu lost his nerve, and when Hanoi staged a new offensive in 1975, Saigon was quickly overrun.
So in Afghanistan in 1988, conservatives in Congress - who saw to it that the Afghan guerrillas were supplied covertly with arms, ammunition and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to fight Soviet helicopters - were determined not to leave them in the lurch.
In fact, both the insurgents and the Kabul regime have reportedly been oversupplied in recent weeks by their superpower patrons as a hedge against a negotiated arms cutoff.
In Congress and in the Administration, the view is that Mr. Najibullah will probably not survive in power very long after the Russians leave, no matter now much aid they give him. But if the Communist regime does fall, what will succeed it is not so clear.
The guerrillas are divided, but a victory by them could lead to an Islamic fundamentalist regime in Afghanistan, linked to Iran, which has also supplied them. In that case, all the sophisticated Stinger missiles now being rushed to the insurgents could become a threat to United States interests.
But in their eagerness to speed a Soviet withdrawal, few officials here seem to be much concerned with such long-term questions.
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