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ws) wee & . « o CAN’ WE 'WETHDRAV rao iy By Howard Zinn é ¢ *} since American forces were increased there. On the ott hand, look at Burma, which has a thousand-mile border jith Communist China, which has no American troops protecting itiegiet no alljapée with the United States and which is main- taining its independence as a nog f?ommunist States kh, Don't we need to. contain China? All large nations tend to want to influenc: the nations on their borders, and China is no ezception. But Ho Chi Minh does not want China to dominate Vietnam; Communist countries eveitywhere (look at Yugo- slavia) have a fierce determiyation to run their own affairs. Tronically, the more troops we pour into Vietnam, supposedly to contain China, the more we make Hanoi dependent on China. And another irony follows: it may well be that the strongest guarentee against Chinese domination of Southeast Asia is a Vietnam united under Ho Chi Minh, who is a national hero to many Vietnamese as the leader of their independence struggle against the French. If American soldiers would leave Vietnam, the Vietnamese, no longer needing Chinese aid, could stand on their own feet. IT SEEMS to me we must recognize two profound truths of this century. The first is that the great problems afflicting two-thirds of the world-— poverty, disease, tyranny-- cannot be solved by war. The second is that so long as such problems exist, people in Asia, Africa, Latin america, will revolt, and the most useful thing we can do is not to crush these revolutions by force, but to use our great resources in cre:-ting conditions where both communist and non-Communist countries can move gradually toward mote prosperous, more free societies. (Rr «<\) ‘ Can NaS BSS \y evar “f HL ( ~ eees'I'm sorry that I ever started beating you over the head, and I know that it's wrong; but, now that I'm commited to this course of action, you can't expect me to just pull out.!t