University of Virginia Library

Indochina Tragedy...

President Nixon's decision to invade
Cambodia with American and South
Vietnamese troops is certainly a ghastly and
tragic move on the part of the United States.
But it is more than that. It is a move that casts
off all regard for what we should have learned
by our mistaken involvement in Vietnam and
is another calculated effort by the
Administration to split the country at a time
when we so desperately need a feeling of
unity and trust.

This Administration, by word and deed,
has purposely polarized two vast segments of
the country. When President Nixon made his
speech on Vietnam in November, he called on
the "silent majority" for support for his
withdrawal policies. He and his majority have
been gripped with fear on a monolithic
communist ideology ever since the battles of
World War II subsided. The events since that
time have taught them nothing. They still
suffer paranoid reactions to what they believe
is an immoral doctrine. In this atmosphere of
fear and distrust the President charts a foreign
policy based on good and evil rather than on
the realities of the time.

The President is a shrewd politician. He
realized in November that he had the support
of the majority of Americans who are still
wrought with fear of Communism and flock
with blind faith to a leader who seems to
make all the complexities of world and
national events so simple. By exploiting that
majority President Nixon has consciously
turned his back on a significant number of
Americans who vehemently oppose United
States involvement in countries torn by
internal civil wars.

When hundreds of thousands of dissenters
gathered in the nation's capital last November,
the President watched a football game. When
students torn with indignation and frustration
started protesting last Thursday, the President
responded with an epithet. Perhaps we have
reached an impasse. Thousands of Americans
feel out of the political process, totally
powerless to influence their own fate. We have
finally had confirmed the fact that Spiro
Agnew has represented the true convictions of
the President all along. Moderate and liberal
students, finding they have no place in the
American political process, have discovered
their only viable outlet of expression in the
radical movement.

"A house divided against itself cannot
stand," said Abraham Lincoln over a hundred
years ago. President Nixon has repeatedly
ignored that wise statement and knowingly
polarizes the country to the point that both
extremes are now resorting to violence. The
Administration's position can only encourage
an escalation of the internal strife.

We no longer trust the President, whose
credibility gap has even widened beyond that
of former President Johnson. He says he is not
escalating the war, yet widens the battle area.
He says that the activities in Cambodia do not
constitute an invasion, yet American and
South Vietnamese troops roar across
Cambodian soil, finding very little of the
purported massed invasion force. His
spokesmen say that the "upgraded preventive
protection" type of action now being taken in
North Vietnam does not constitute bombing,
yet the bombs now fall over Vietnamese
cities.

The President implied that his decision
took the greatest courage and that he has put
his country above his political future. We
disagree. Wouldn't the admission of our past
follies and mistakes in Southeast Asia have
taken much more courage? When will we
admit that we have been wrong? With each
new battlefield death our mistake is
compounded. How many more men must die
before the grave mistake becomes apparent to
even the President?

Our government, once boldly dedicated to
the faith that freedom can prevail through
reason and justice, now has assumed the role
of the aggressor abroad and the repressor at
home. Scholars are turned away from our
shores because of their thoughts, individual
rights wither because they are too
"dangerous" to maintain in a world in which
Communism exists, and fair trials are anything
but certain. The gravest danger to this nation
is not found in a rice paddy ten thousand
miles away, nor even on our college campuses,
but at the center of our government — the
Nixon Administration.