El Salvador: keep your eye on the ball - guerrilla offensive compared to Tet offensive in Vietnam

KARL MARX was only half right. History Can occur first as farce, and then again as farce. What we are now witnessing in El Salvador is an attempt to replay the Vietnam farce.

In Vietnam, the Vietcong had no chance of winning on the ground. They could murder some mayors and schoolteachers but they could not seize and hold anything important. But their handlers had a good idea: if they couldn't win the war in Saigon, they would win it in the United States. We now know that many, if not all, of the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in flames were drugged and programmed. Their "final statements" were written for them and mimeographed. The press was alerted to the forthcoming "suicide," time and place. Never mind. It was socko in America, and led to the overthrow of the Diem government, a succession of Abbott-and-Costello governments in Saigon, and the Americanization of the war.

The great Tet offensive of 1968 was a disaster for the Vietcong, effectively wiping them out as a fighting force. Never mind. It was a media success, shifting the political balance in the U.S. against the war. To snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, it only remained for Congress to deny ammunition to the South Vietnamese Army and for the North Vietnamese Army to launch a conventional tank and rocket attack, winning the war.

The recent uprising of the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador was Tet all over again. As in the real Tet, what the guerrillas could not win on the ground they hoped to win in the United States. Their attack was aimed above all at the left wing of the Democratic Party, and the message was: The war cannot be won.

The six murdered Jesuits are the Buddhist bonzes in this scenario. It is possible that they were killed by rightists. However, on the principle of cui bono? (who benefits?) it is also possible that they were killed by Communists wearing army uniforms. Certainly the deaths of the Salvador Six help the Communist side in the American political equation. (On August 29, 1939, Hitler concocted a Polish invasion of Germany by dressing concentration-camp inmates in Polish uniforms and shooting them at the border. Claiming Polish aggression, Hitler sent his Panzers in on September 1.)

It is not surprising that, as in Tet, the guerrilla surge in El Salvador produced no popular uprising. The president of El Salvador, Alfredo Cristiani, won office in an internationally supervised election. The Communists refused to participate in the election, knowing very well that they could not receive even 10 per cent of the vote.

Th"Tet" in El Salvador was probably a desperation venture. The Communist strategists must have been aware that their support from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is no longer absolutely assured. No foreseeable Czech or East German government is Ekely to be interested in Central American insurgencies, though Nicaragua is a faithful supplier, as the downed plane with its cargo of high-tech weapons dramatically illustrated.

There are two additional factors that were present in Vietnam but are missing from the Salvadoran equation. 1) There is no equivalent of the North Vietnamese regular army on hand. 2) President Bush is not distracted by a Watergate fiasco.

The last best hope of the Communist guerrillas in' El Salvador will inevitably be a cry for "negotiations," which will echo in the halls of Congress, megaphoned by the left wing of the Democratic Party and the left wing of the Catholic and Methodist churches, and by such Neanderthals as former ambassador Robert White, all of them midwives of tyranny.

COPYRIGHT 1989 National Review, Inc.
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