The John Birch Society on Vietnam. (Worth Repeating).

During the Vietnam War era, Americans were presented two choices regarding the conduct of the war: Maintain the status quo, which meant fighting a long, protracted, costly conflict with victory an elusive goal; or cut and run.

There was, however, a third alternative that Congress and the mainstream media largely ignored. That alternative was to win the war quickly and then get out. Robert Welch, the founder of The John Birch Society, expressed this position in the conclusion of a widely distributed essay entitled The Truth About Vietnam: "In this writer's opinion, we should never have become involved in Vietnam at all. But ... we are too deeply involved today to have any honorable way out except through victory. It should be our determination not to escalate this war, nor to prolong it, nor to muddle through it, but to win it." (Emphasis in original.)

Written in early 1967, that article contained important insights about the Vietnam War that are all the more amazing when read more than three decades late, The following material is excerpted from this extraordinary piece. (The full text is available at www.jbs.org/vietnam/ in the "Vietnam: A 'No Win'War?" section.)

Why fight 'em in Vietnam and help 'em everywhere else? And if you do not believe we are helping the Communists everywhere else, you need only to read your daily papers. In fact, the Administration is right now moving heaven and earth to bring about more so-called trade with Soviet Russia and all of its satellites. Most of this trade turns out, in any final analysis, to be simply gifts in one form or another from the United States. Yet Moscow and these satellites are supplying most of the war materiel to be used by the Viet Cong in Vietnam against our soldiers there, while Washington helps to keep these Communist regimes in power and in position to do so....

[O]ur boys in Vietnam are being killed by Russian bullets fired from Russian guns, while the Johnson Administration sends the Soviets wheat to feed those who are making the guns and the bullets. [During the war, members of The John Birch Society collected about two million signatures on a petition to Congress to "stop, promptly and completely, giving aid in any form, directly or indirectly, to our Communist enemies."]

How is it possible that supposedly mortal enemies, namely the Viet Cong and ourselves, while locked in a so-called battle to the death, can keep on declaring time out for holidays, huddles, and repairs? What kind of a war is this? In a football game there can be time out because the conference or the league controls both sides, and the enemies are not really enemies but friendly rivals who are doing it all for sport. Is some similar conference or league running both sides of this war, and is it all just a show? If so, have our boys who are maimed and killed been let in on this fact?

Are we actually at war in Vietnam, or aren't we? In one breath we are given to understand that this is simply a "police action," within a friendly nation, to help the government and people of that nation protect themselves from Communist guerrillas. (Communist guerrillas, incidentally, whom we -- meaning the Roosevelt Administration -- set up in business under Ho chi Minh, in 1944 and 1945, with American money, equipment, and support.) In the next breath, the President himself tells us that "this is war." And we now read about more and more bombing raids by American planes over the territory and capital of a supposedly independent nation, North Vietnam. But if this is war, then what happened to Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 11 of the United States Constitution which decrees that only Congress can put this nation into war?

Since we are in a war, even though an undeclared war, why do we impose, or allow to be imposed, so many incredible handicaps on our men who are trying to fight it? Our bombers are regularly required to fly dangerous missions with only a small fraction of the effective bomb load they could carry. To enter North Vietnam they must fly a specified route, well known to the enemy, which makes the operation so dangerous that the pilots call this route "slaughter alley." In bombing the supply route to the Viet Cong, known as the Ho chi Minh trail, through Laos, our bombers are required to confine their attacks to targets within 204 feet from the trail itself. So the Communists, when they see American planes coming, merely pull aside until they are 205 feet from the road, and figuratively thumb their noses at the helpless American pilots.

We first went into Vietnam, or made it theoretically our protege nation, in 1954, by throwing the French out and putting the Communists in. As so-called "observers" at Geneva in 1954, but really running the show, we turned the top half of the country over directly and officially to the Communists, and set up an anti-Communist government in the bottom half, exactly as we had done in Korea in 1948. In both cases we thus prepared the way for the Communist aggression from the northern part into the southern part, and for the war that would follow, exactly as the Communists were already planning. There was a tremendous difference in the caliber and quality of the two governments, of South Korea and South Vietnam respectively. But both were eventually to be overthrown by conniving from Washington, when they had served their purposes as foils in the long-range Communist strategy.

Vietnam is almost exactly half way around the world from Washington, D.C. It would be impossible for the United States, in fighting a war, to have longer or more difficult or more costly supply lines for its troops.... While the length, size, and complexity of the supply lines will make it easy for Communist traitors at a hundred points along those lines subtly to sabotage and misdirect and confuse the equipment our boys need in the field; and to do so a great deal more extensively than in the worst of our similar experiences so far. These disadvantages to ours elves, and advantages to the Communists, would be almost overwhelming. Is this why Vietnam has been picked for the crucial battleground?

If this Administration or any Administration really and truly did want to fight the Communists and save some other nation or people, why not run the beasts out of Cuba instead of Vietnam? Cuba was really our protege nation, and for a much longer period of time than the present gang in Washington have pretended to hold South Vietnam in that esteem. Cuba is right at our doorstep, and a Communist regime there is infinitely more damaging and more dangerous to ourselves than one in South Vietnam, on the other side of the world. For a war in and over Cuba, and even if you give consideration to some nonsense about the Soviets coming into it, most of the advantages, as to supply lines and style of fighting, would be with us instead of with our enemies. Can you or anybody else name one reason why we should not be fighting the Communists, if at all, in Cuba instead of in Vietnam? Or do the powers which control Washington want us to be fighting only where we are at the greatest possible disadvantage, and where our inabi lity to win can be made to seem plausible?

History shows clearly that [U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam] Henry Cabot Lodge played a leading role in turning Algeria over to the Communists. He has been similarly helpful to the Communists in many other times and places. History also shows with equal clarity that [OSS/CIA operative] Edward Lansdale played a leading role in originally driving the French out of Vietnam to make it easier for Ho chi Minh and his Communists to seize the country. Yet for the past couple of years the direction of our war in Vietnam, supposedly against the Communists, has been virtually in the hands of those two men. Why? With all of the patriotic Americans there are to choose from, why would any Administration which really wanted to stop Communist aggression in Vietnam put our effort in the hands of men who have always been willing to yield to, or even actively to support, Communist aggression?

The American people always have been, and still are, willing to make more sacrifices, and to put up with more demands by their government, for the sake of fighting Communism, than for any other purpose. The two greatest aids to the worldwide Communist advance since 1945 have been the American foreign aid program, and the United Nations. Yet both were sold to us as means of opposing Communism. And these tremendous drains on our national resources and national sovereignty were accepted for that reason.

One hundred percent government is Communism. A growing obsession on the part of the American people with an interminable, ever larger, and ever more horrible war, could enable this or any future Administration not only to increase taxes and controls and government paternalism to fantastic levels. But it could increase its arbitrary powers and its detailed reach over the lives of all individual citizens, and suppress mercilessly all opposition to its policies and its decrees, until the tentacles of this central government in the United States would be hardly distinguishable from those of the central government in Moscow or in Peking. The conditions and the time would then be ripe for the long-planned worldwide merger. Have all the steps toward this hundred percent government already been plotted and timed? Are the current proposals for greatly increased Social Security payments, for an enormously expanded budget, and for increased powers and agencies of the federal government on every side, simply taken from t he blueprint which has been prepared long in advance?

In this writer's opinion, we should never have become involved in Vietnam at all. But, regardless of how we got there, or who put us there, we are too deeply involved today to have any honorable way out except through victory. It should be our determination not to escalate this war, nor to prolong it, nor to muddle through it, but to win it. A great American once said: "In war, there is no substitute for victory!" This is certainly one time and place in the history of our nation when we must not even consider any substitute. Victory, Then Peace! must be our slogan and our goal.