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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 1. 28th February 1973

Bombing Revealed Nixon's Weaknesses

Bombing Revealed Nixon's Weaknesses

It is important to understand that the Peace Agreement signed in Paris at the end of January was a product of the present political and military situation in Vietnam and not a cynical deal forced on the Vietnamese by their major socialist allies China and the Soviet Union.

The United States Government signed "the surrender document" (and forced its hireling Thieu to do so too) because it had finally realised that there was nothing to gain and a good deal to lose, by continuing the war. The Americans' political and military weakness was shown up very clearly by the fact that the document it signed in January was practically the same as the draft agreement Nixon had declined to accept last October.

In October Nixon decided that he would throw all his air power into a final effort to bomb the North Vietnamese into submission. Over Christmas especially he unleashed greater destructive power on North Vietnam (and especially Hanoi) than had ever been used before. The only concession the Americans got was agreement by Hanoi to increase the number of mutual observers to supervise the end of hostilities. But as Goodstadt noted in the Far Eastern Economic Review, "this issue is of such small practical significance (given the confusion which must arise in a struggle for power, over individual hamlets, between guerilla forces and platoons of regular troops) that it was hardly worth the cost — in terms of destruction of life and property — of the barrage which President Nixon unleashed as a Christmas gesture towards Hanoi". The heroic resistance of the Vietnamese to that aggression and the unparalleled wave of international pressure it created showed the Americans that the only move they could make was to try and cover "up their defeat and get out as quickly as possible.