Hanoi's Kind of Escalation

Even before the first U.S. bombing raids on oil depots at Hanoi and Haiphong June 29, North Viet Nam's leaders threatened to stage "war criminal" show trials of captured American airmen. Last week, after a strident propaganda barrage from Hanoi, that threat seemed likely to become reality.

Apart from its eagerness to retaliate for the bombings, Hanoi clearly hoped to use the hostages to buoy its people's morale -- a need demonstrated in a much ballyhooed broadcast at week's end in which Ho Chi Minh vowed to fight on "five, ten, 20 years or longer."

American pilots have repeatedly been paraded before hostile street mobs during the past fortnight, possibly to whip up the populace for more drastic action. At one display, said the Communists, there were cries from the crowd:

"Down with the American aggressors!

Death to you who have massacred our dear ones!" Radio Hanoi reported blandly " that and the mob might was otherwise "highly disciplined have been prompted to "tear Johnson's sky warriors to pieces." With an obvious eye toward using their "testimony" in drumhead trials, the North Vietnamese also announced that a number of prisoners have "confessed" their guilt.

Flouted Convention. North Viet Nam is known to hold prisoner 34 American pilots; as many as 200 more, officially listed as missing, may also be in Hanoi's hands. In putting them on public display, Hanoi has already violated the 1949 Geneva Convention (which it signed in 1957) guaranteeing prisoners of war protection against "insults and public curiosity." By trying them, the enemy would flout another convention provision, prohibiting reprisals against prisoners. Hanoi's answer is that the Geneva Convention does not apply be cause the U.S. is fighting an undeclared "aggressive war" -- even though Article 2 holds unequivocally that the convention is binding in "all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict."

The Johnson Administration moved urgently last week to forestall the trials and the prospect of executions. It dispatched cogent appeals to Moscow, Cairo and other capitals, also won assurances from Britain's Harold Wilson and India's Indira Gandhi that they would take up the issue during their visits to Moscow. To underscore these maneuverings, Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned that maltreatment of American airmen would be considered "a very grave development indeed."

"Plea for Sanity." Plainly, Hanoi hopes that by punishing Americans it would help dampen U.S. determination to prosecute the war -- or at least discourage continued bombing. Actually, the effect would certainly be precisely the opposite, inflaming the American public and all but eliminating the domes tic dissension that Ho Chi Minh interprets as evidence that the U.S. will pull out of Viet Nam. Indeed, warned Georgia's Richard B. Russell, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, executions of American pilots would "bring about the application of power that will make a desert of their country." U.N.

Secretary-General U Thant appealed to Hanoi to refrain from escalating the war by staging the trials.

As everyone but Hanoi seemed to realize, such reprisals would, in Senate Republican Whip Thomas Kuchel's words, "unite the American people as no other act could." That prospect was made unmistakably clear last week by 18 Democratic Senators who have been among the harshest critics of U.S. war policy, among them Oregon's Wayne Morse and Arkansas' William Fulbright. Issuing a "plea for sanity," they warned that executions "would drastically reduce the influence of all those in the United States who have tried to curtail the fighting" -- including, of course, themselves.

Some observers suspect that the Communists intend to condemn U.S. pilots to death, then relent as a demonstration of Uncle Ho's benevolence. But Hanoi's consistent misreadings of American psychology in the past give no assurance that North Viet Nam's leaders will not carry through with their own grisly kind of escalation.

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