From The Victoria Teach In

But the whole point of our discussion today is that the struggle in Vietnam has been escalated to the point where it's no longer simply a grass-roots revolutionary war.

I Want to talk now about how this has happened, and how much it is logically a development of the revolutionary strategy pursued by the Vietcong.

There are are three major Communist theoreticians of revolutionary war: Mao Tse-tung of China, Vo Nguyen Giap of North Vietnam and Che Guevara of Cuba (at least that's where he lives now).

The works of all three can be studied in English, and if you read them you should, quite soon, be struck by the emphasis they all lay on the idea that revolutionary organisation is military organisation, and by the emphasis which Mao and Giap lay on the idea that the guerrilla army must in the end become a regular army and engage in regular warfare, moving divisions and corps about the landscape and fighting pitched battles.

Guevara is the only one of the three who hasn't this stress on regular warfare, and the reason is that Guevara is the only one of the three who saw the regime he was attacking disintegrate before any battles were fought.

Mao and Giap, on the other hand, began their careers as revolutionary organisers in conditions of civil war, where politics was already a matter of the movement of armies—Mao in the era of the Chinese warlords; Giap in that of the collapse of the Japanese occupation and the attempt of the French to reoccupy—and both won their victories on a foundation of revolutionary authority but by regular military means.

Mao marched his armies south from Manchuria, Glap at Dien Bien Phu became the only Asian Communist to destroy a large Western force in a classic pitched battle of fortress type. But this makes Mao and Giap unique figures, not only among Communists but among all other practitioners of revolutionary war.

It's important to remember that revolutionary war is not a Communist invention, let alone a Communist monopoly: it was practised by the Irish against the British in 1919-21, by the Palestine Arabs against the British in 1936-38, by the Israelis against the British in 1946-48, by the Indonesians against the Dutch about the same time, by the Mau Mau in Kenya in the early fifties and by the FLN in Algeria from 1954 to 1962; and only the last of these owed any significant debt to Asian Communist theory.

Now the importance of knowing this is that once we remember that it is not a Communist monopoly, we are forcibly reminded that it cannot be understood, solely in terms of Communist theory.

Historical

What is the importance of this? Communist theory culminates in a revolution, the violent transformation of the political system within which the revolutionary war goes on.

Now of the wars I have mentioned only two, those fought by Mao in China and by Castro and Guevara in Cuba, were fought simply against a native ruling system. All the others were fought against the armies of foreign countries, having bases and controlled by political systems elsewhere, and present in the land where the struggle went on to exercise colonial or mandatory or interventory authority.

Now when such armies suffer defeat, even in revolutionary war, it is not because they have suffered revolutionary transformation or liquidation, or because they have been defeated in the field in the classic sense. They are defeated when the political system that controls them, perhaps thousands of miles away, becomes unwilling to support them any longer: and this happens when the price in men, money, embarrassment or danger becomes heavier than that system is willing to pay.

The British sought a truce with the Irish in 1921 because the alternative was military government of the whole of Ireland and they didn't want to do that: the French quit Algeria in 1962 because to remain would have giver the army too loud a [unclear: voice] French politics, and they didn't want that to happen.

Revolutionary war helped [unclear: tr] bring that situation about, but the decision in each case [unclear: w] taken within a political system which the revolutionaries could only affect externally and marginally.

Bargaining war

Now what I think the [unclear: Lenini]s theories of Mao and Giap don't allow for is that the same [unclear: thinp] happened when the French [unclear: lef] North Vietnam in 1954.

page 7

They had suffered a defeat [unclear: field—]Dien Bien Phu remains [unclear: ue—]but their army had not a destroyed and was holding Red River delta in strength [unclear: Giap] and the Viet Minh [unclear: probably] have been unable [unclear: defeat].

[unclear: hey] left because the price of [unclear: any] more than hold the a would have been the [unclear: dis] [unclear: of] French conscript divi[unclear: ders] to reinforce the colonial [unclear: which] had done all the thing; and this the French [unclear: universities] and electors were unwill[unclear: ed] to do.

[unclear: As] far as the French were con[unclear: ned] Giap had not carried [unclear: enough] a revolution; he had won war, in the purely classical [unclear: se] taht he had convinced a [unclear: tign] power that it wasn't worth [unclear: on] paying the price of [unclear: fur] [unclear: conflict].

[unclear: War] is a bargaining process, and was making the French pay [unclear: e] than they wanted to give, had moved—I think without [unclear: knowing] it—from the plane [unclear: evolutionary] politics to that of international politics. What he was a favourable settlement. [unclear: ow] that, it seems to me, gives the contact in which to inter[unclear: act] what is happening now. The [unclear: teong] got into a revolutionary [unclear: and] have been doing well [unclear: it].

According to Giap's doctrines, never—though not Guevara's— [unclear: y] could not win it until they [unclear: hold] step their military divisions [unclear: h] to brigade and divisional level. [unclear: haps] they were on the point of [unclear: ng] that, but it doesn't matter. [unclear: e] Americans have forestalled [unclear: step] by moving in troops of [unclear: own] to the tune of several [unclear: isions], with more to come; it's troop movements which mat-more than the bombing raids.

[unclear: scalation]

[unclear: doing] this they are sending and Giap the following mes[unclear: es:]

[unclear: : You] can't win without fighting at divisional strength, and [unclear: re] have more divisions than you have.

[unclear: : We] are willing to send those [unclear: ivisions], and therefore to do that the French were not will[unclear: g] to do in 1954.

Three: We are in fact willing to pay a higher price than any you are willing to make us pay—to be exact, we are willing to send so many divisions that you cannot get them out without a bigger war than you ore willing to fight.

Four: How about it?

I think the last two messages are getting sent; they are to the extent that this policy is being rationally conducted, and all wars are an unstable mixture of rational and irrational behaviour. There are two things which either side can do with its military power: try to win the war with it,or try to use it in such a way as to ensure a favourable settlement.

The Vietcong military power consists in guerrilla fighters, very efficient at grass-roots level and up to about battalion strength, but at a disadvantage when they try to go higher. What they can do with these is try to control so much South Vietnamese countryside that there is no longer any South Vietnamese government or anything for it to govern.

Their refusal to negotiate shows that at present they are confident of doing pretty well at this— though whether they think they are going to win, in the sense that the Americans will get discouraged and go home, or whether they think there will be nobody left to negotiate with but themselves, is uncertain; as Leninist thinkers, they probably don't mind much which it is.

The American military powers consist in infantry divisions, unlikely to be defeated in the field but of uncertain ability when it comes to grass-roots warfare. They can either try to defeat the Vietcong in part or all of the countryside, or simply ensure by the mere fact of continuing to exist and do, within limits, what they like that no Vietcong victory can be more than a partial one— assuming, that is, that nobody starts a major war to get them out and that they don't start a major war in order to beat the Vietcong.

These are two assumptions that I find quite easy to make: but it does no harm to watch closely and be ready to shout loudly at the first sign of either going wrong.

Before the bargaining

Now the American troops will have to do quite a lot of Vietcong fighting, first because there has to be some Southern social structure left to defend, and second because the worse they can hurt the Vietcong the better their ultimate position will be.

It doesn't seem likely that they'll try to beat the Vietcong all by themselves, though nobody knows how a revolutionary war would go against an opponent willing to go on putting in infantry on a scale capable of controlling the whole countryside—because no one era has been willing to go that far.

But in all probability, the American electorate's natural dislike of casualty lists that go above a certain figure—and not one you can accurately predict—will stop them attempting that.

The point is that, although the revolutionary war at the grassroots will continue and be one of the major determinants of the outcome, the American strategists have, by the simpleact of putting in more divisions than the Vietcong can eliminate, escalated the war from the level of revolutionary struggle to the level of international bargaining.

The present exchanges between Washington and Hanoi demonstrate that Hanoi demands that any negotiation involves the Vietcong as parties: the Americans reply that the Vietcong can attend only as part of a North Vietnam delegation. Hanoi refuses.

Now what this means is that the American build-up has been a successful attempt to involve directly in the situation the northern Communist Governments— Hanoi and Peking—who are giving the Vietcong various sorts of backing: it doesn't matter a damn what sorts: and that this policy has taken matters to the point where bargaining—if not what we normally mean by negotiation— has in fact already begun. I want to conclude by saying a word about that.

War has been described as a bargaining process. It can of course be a pure conflict in which each side is trying simply to destroy the other; but short of that, and even to some extent within that definition, it is also a competition in which each side tries to show itself willing to pay a higher price, and to make the other pay a higher price than it is willing to pay, for what each respectively wants.

Looked at in that way, war is a kind of deterrence, and deterrence a kind of negotiation; the difference between the three is not so great, as long as war stays short of a species of insanity called total war.

Nuclear weapons simply serve to underline that point. Any war short of a total war is a process in which each side wheels up its guns and tries to stay in the field until us opponent decides it isn't worth going on; a revolutionary war involving a foreign based third party is no exception.

A nuclear confrontation is exactly the same, with the important exception that the weapons mustn't actually go off. In between the two you find limited wars, in which the fighting is kept within the limits and you try to create situations in which the other side can't get what it wants without going further outside those limits than it's willing to go.

What we have here is a limited war, going on in a revolutionary context.

It follows from this that there are certain words, often used rather loosely, which we have to learn to use much more carefully. One of them is "escalation," another is "negotiation." All war is escalation, but if you will accept the word "negotiation" as equivalent to "bargaining," all war is negotiation.

In a limited war context, the threat to escalate is a form of negotiation. So people who demand negotiation as an alternative to war should be careful to study closely what they are saying. It's easy to imagine that negotiation is simply a display of sweet reason, in which parties abandon conflict and embrace discussion, leading to a rational composition of their differences.

But if you will kindly examine the cause of any negotiation that has ever taken place, you will discover that it isn't like that at all. Nations and so forth negotiate to win, to get what they want; it's a continuation of conflict by other means — not surprising, since if there wasn't any conflict, if they didn't want different things there wouldn't be anything to negotiate about.

Negotiation

Now if there's to be negotiation replacing armed conflict, each party will have shown itself willing to use arms in pursuit of what it wants.

They are now willing to leave off using arms, but they still want whatever they wanted before. Consequently, one of the things they are negotiating about is the extent of each party's willingness to stop using arms: which means that the arms each has, its willingness to use them and its prospects of success with them, are stilt very much part of the situation, only partially modified by whatever has brought about willingness to negotiate.

If this is true even after both sides have got to the conference table, it can be title before it— when, for instance, each side is making declarations about the terms on which it would be willing to stop fighting and begin to negotiate. To talk like this is a form of negotiation: it is a means of stating what you want and what you are prepared to do for it; it is also,

(Continued on page 11)