(4 of 4)
Ho also undoubtedly reasons that a guerrilla war cannot be readily turned on and off because a sense of momentum and inevitability is essential. Once Hanoi goes to the conference table, Ho is well aware that the Viet Cong morale may collapse. Besides, Hanoi may well feel that intransigence is already reaping its rewards. Under international and domestic pressures, Washington continues to modify and codify in advance the Allied conditions for peace, making real or apparent concessions to the Reds. Ho may feel that he must not negotiate precisely because the U.S. seems to want to so badly.
Next Moves
Far from defeated, though admittedly not winning, with his armies and political cadres still substantially intact, convinced that he can outwait the U.S. in the war, why should Ho, from his point of view, come to the negotiating table now?
The U.S. will attempt to answer that question in a variety of fresh pressures on Ho. The Pentagon is pressing for—and likely to get after the elections—presidential authority to expand the list of targets for air raids around Hanoi, adding new power plants, railroad junctions and freight yards, and defense factories. American troops are likely to move into action in the Delta, hitherto the province of the South Vietnamese army, where scant progress against the enemy has been made and where live half of the nation's people.
Most important of all, both U.S. and South Vietnamese troops will put 50% of their numbers next year into guaranteeing security for areas wrested from the enemy—thus giving the Vietnamese pacification teams the shield they have lacked so far in getting on with the business of nation-building. That alone, in the long run, can defeat the Communists as no series of battlefield setbacks seems likely to. As it was in the beginning, so the Viet Nam conflict remains today, for all its bristling clashes of armies, primarily a political war for the allegiance of people. If and when the Communist control of the countryside begins to crumble, most Saigon observers think the long awaited signal for peace from Hanoi will not be far behind.