SHULTZ: Latin Role Linked to Viet ‘Lesson,’ U.S. Leadership

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, marking the 10th anniversary of the end of American involvement in Vietnam, said Thursday that Central America is in danger of going the way of Indochina if the United States repeats its post-Vietnam “retreat” from global leadership.

Speaking at a State Department ceremony two days after the House rejected the Reagan Administration’s plan to provide $14 million in aid to anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua, Shultz said that Americans should have learned in Vietnam the dangers of failing to support “those striving for freedom.”

He said that the insurgents, known as contras , are fighting “to save the people of Nicaragua from the fate of the people of Cuba, of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.”

‘Want Another Cuba?’

“The ordeal of Indochina in the past decade--as well as the oppressions endured by the people of Cuba and every other country where Communists have seized power--should teach something,” Shultz said. “Do we want another Cuba in this hemisphere? How many times must we learn the same lesson?”

He added: “Broken promises. Communist dictatorship. Refugees. Widened Soviet influence, this time near our very borders: Here is your parallel between Vietnam and Central America.”

Nevertheless, Shultz insisted that there is no Administration plan to follow the Vietnam analogy by sending U.S. troops to either Nicaragua or El Salvador. On the contrary, he said, support for non-communist forces in Central America is the best way to avoid the need to commit U.S. forces later.

“We should have learned that we must maintain the ability to engage with, and support, those striving for freedom, so that options other than American military involvement remain open,” he said.

Scathing Assessment

Shultz was scathing in his assessment of the results of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

“Our retreat created a vacuum that was exploited by our adversaries,” Shultz said. “The Soviets . . . took advantage of our inhibitions and projected their power to unprecedented lengths: intervening in Angola, in Ethiopia, in South Yemen and in Afghanistan.

“The American weakness turned out to be the most destabilizing factor on the global scene,” he said. “Once again it was determined--the hard way--that American engagement, American strength and American leadership are indispensable to peace. A strong America makes the world a safer place.

“The larger lesson of the past decade is that when America lost faith in herself, world stability suffered and freedom lost ground,” he said.

Shultz placed much of the blame for the failures of U.S. Vietnam policy on “apologists for communism” who minimized the atrocities of the Hanoi government and “magnified and condemned” the misdeeds of the South Vietnamese government.

“The litany of apology for Communists, and condemnation for America and our friends, is beginning again,” Shultz said. “Can we afford to be naive again about the consequences when we pull back, about the special ruthlessness of Communist rule?

“Those who assure us that dire consequences are not in prospect (if the Sandinista government consolidates power in Nicaragua) are some of those who assured us of the same in Indochina before 1975,” he said.

Shultz did not name the apologists. His spokesman, Bernard Kalb, refused to say who the secretary had in mind.

When he was told about Shultz’s remarks, Rep. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former Navy flier who spent six years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, said in a telephone interview that he agrees with the secretary of state that the situation in Central America is a dangerous one but urged the Administration not to overreact.

“There are similarities and differences between Vietnam and Central America,” McCain said. “The biggest difference is that there were 500,000 American boys in Vietnam and there are only about 50 American advisers in Central America. We have to make sure we don’t get into a situation where we have American boys in Central America.

“One of the lessons of the Vietnam War is that we can’t fight these wars for them,” he said. “We have to provide military, moral and economic support.”

Shultz said the results of Communist control of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos for the last decade demonstrate that the American war effort was “in the service of noble ideals--to save innocent peoples from brutal tyranny.”

“South Vietnam was not a Jeffersonian democracy with full civil liberties by American standards,” he said. “But the transgressions of the Thieu government pale into insignificance next to the systematic, ideologically impelled despotism of the regime that replaced it.

“Whatever mistakes in how the war was fought, whatever one’s view of the strategic rationale for our intervention, the morality of our effort must now be clear.”