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Single Bulwark. To some critics of American policy, it seemed that Khanh was right when he accused Washington of dreaming. It can be argued that there is nothing wrong with a military dictatorship in a war-torn country; that even in peacetime many Asian nations can function only under such rule; and that the army is, after all, the only halfway stable and reliable force in South Viet Nam. Is the U.S. trying to apply the good government standards of the League of Women Voters in a country that could not possibly understand the workings of democracy?
The State Department indignantly denied all such imputations of idealism. U.S. policy was opposed to military rule, State argued persuasively, because the generals had tried it twice before and failed; they lacked the experience, the patience and the popular support to run the country. But obviously no civilian had been able to run the country either.
Still, Taylor insisted that Huong had made a promising start-but that he could not govern with the army holding the real power. In part at least, Taylor was acting with an eye on the Buddhists, who were also demanding a return to civil rule. Perhaps this might yet be brought about in one of those face-saving devices that in Viet Nam are as frequent as coups. Adding to the uproar, a well-timed bomb presumably planted by the Viet Cong blasted the Brink Hotel in downtown Saigon, which serves as a U.S. officers' quarters, injuring 98 people, including 63 Americans, and killing two Americans.
Much of all this was a shuddering reminder of the endless, circular debates during the Diem era, when the U.S. decided that Diem must go because the war could not be won without political stability in Saigon-while a minority argued that there could be no political stability until the war was at best beginning to be won. By again arguing that nothing could really be accomplished in South Viet Nam until Saigon had a more or less stable civilian government of "national unity," Washington was probably insisting on the impossible. And by publicly quarreling with the army while pinning its hopes on Suu, Huong and the civilians of the High National Council, the U.S. just might be staking its whole position in South Viet Nam on two old men and a museum.