Stop Nixon: Now More Than Ever

WITH EACH NEW outrage of the American war policy in Vietnam, the coalition of opposition to those policies has grown broader. Now, in the aftermath of President Nixon's Christmastime carpet bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the coalition against his tactics in Vietnam has grown to include the leaders and members of the Democratic caucuses of the House and Senate as well as significant elements of the executive bureaucracy itself. And, if published reports are correct, the Defense and State Department bureaucracies, as well as members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have also opposed the President's latest bombing campaign.

It has been the motivation behind the bombings that has added these latest members to an already, mixed group of political bedfellows. Nixon's bombing was not for military but for psychological purposes, these were terror bombings designed to frighten North Vietnam into capitulation at the negotiating tables. The parallels between President Nixon's actions in the past weeks and the policies of Adolph Hitler are obvious enough Fortunately. Nixon's most recent war comes how-else can we describe the bombing of so many more civilians with such impunity have provoked a more widespread response from Americans than any previous tactic of the war. Yet many, many Americans feelings have become numb to the horror of the war being waged in their names. The question is not whether Nixon has temporarily taken leave of his senses, but whether his moral senses have ever been equal to the responsibility of commanding America's devastating military power.

In 1969, this newspaper called for support of the National Liberation Front. We continue to believe that of the committed political elements in Vietnam, the NLF is the only one which has shown itself capable of winning widespread popular support and the only one likely to heal Vietnam's wounds after so many years of war. The immediate political task at hand is to end American involvement in the war, opening the way to a political settlement among the Vietnamese.

With so many members of Congress angered with the President's latest extention of his constitutionally limited war-making powers, as well as his inroads into Congressional decision-making authority on social and economic issues, the Congress may now provide the cutting edge for serious anti war measures. Now, more than ever, is the time to petition all the representatives in government to cut off funds for the war-through letters and telegrams, phone calls, personal visits, and anti-war demonstrations. The nine-point draft treaty worked out by American and Vietnamese negotiators in October is a sufficient basis for settlement. Congress needs only to force the President to sign what he ought to have signed last fall in order to bring the war to an end.