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By Root 2822 0

and unchanged”—the reason for the parentheses being that this “constitutional structure” identifies the GVN as the government of all Vietnam. This “constitutional structure” also outlawed the second of the two parallel and equivalent parties, along with “pro-communist neutralism” and any form of expression “aimed at spreading Communist policies, slogans and instructions”; and the GVN announced at once that such “illegal” actions would be suppressed by force, while President Thieu stated that “this is solely a ceasefire agreement, no more no less.”142 With these declarations, the United States and its client regime thus nullified the central principle of the Paris Agreements, and flatly rejected the provisions for “the two South Vietnamese parties” to achieve “national reconciliation and concord” by peaceful means without forceful measures or repression.

In short, the United States announced at once, clearly and without equivocation, that it intended to disregard every essential provision of the scrap of paper it was compelled to sign in Paris.

Kissinger attempted to obfuscate the matter in his January 24 press conference, reprinted in full in the New York Times.143 He claimed, falsely, that “we have achieved substantial changes” from the October 9-Point Plan, thus implicitly offering a justification for the Christmas bombings. He stated that “what the civil war has been all about” is “who is the legitimate ruler of South Vietnam” and “is there such a thing as a South Vietnam even temporarily until unification,” claiming that the United States had achieved its objectives on these points by virtue of the “specific references to the sovereignty of South Vietnam” and “the right of the South Vietnamese people to self-determination”; and he claimed that the United States had also achieved its goal with regard to the status of the demarcation line.

All of this was blatant deception. The wording of the agreements reflected the DRV-PRG position in all the respects Kissinger mentioned, while Kissinger’s insinuation that the agreements permitted the United States to recognize the GVN as “the legitimate ruler of South Vietnam” is in explicit contradiction to the agreements he had just signed, as is his attempt to create the impression that the “civil war” is “between North and South Vietnam.” The core provision of the Paris Agreements establishes the GVN and the PRG as “the two South Vietnamese parties,” parallel and equivalent, to move toward unification with the North, abrogating the provisional demarcation line, which has no political status. Kissinger was attempting to confuse “sovereignty of South Vietnam” with “sovereignty within South Vietnam”; the latter is what the war “was all about” from the outset, and the agreements simply reiterated the position of “the enemy” that this was a matter to be settled by the two South Vietnamese parties without external interference, as in the October 9-Point Plan.144

Just as in October, the purpose of this obfuscation was, in Nixon’s words, “to make sure that our version of the agreement was the one that had great public impact.” And again it succeeded. The media—without exception, to our knowledge—accepted the Kissinger–White House version as expressing the contents of the agreements, enabling them to interpret the PRG-DRV insistence on the actual terms of the Paris Agreements as an effort to disrupt them. Thus Joseph Kraft, a liberal dove on these issues, wrote that “Much of the blame goes to the Communists” for the subsequent breakdown of the cease-fire, because “Hanoi has never abandoned the objective of unifying all of Vietnam”; that is, Hanoi has never abandoned its objective of living up to the terms of the Geneva Accords of 1954, now explicitly reiterated in the Paris Agreements of January 1973.145 As a dove, he also added that “just as much of the blame goes to President Thieu”—but none, of course, can be assigned to Washington. He cites Communist military actions in the South and dispatch of equipment as the major reason for the breakdown of the cease-fire, citing no evidence;