1863 



CASE four: the MEKONG PROJECT 



The conclusions of this study can be summed up as a defect in 

 timing. What was proposed as a short-run, reactive solution to an 

 exasperating national problem might conceivably have been successful 

 as a larger-scale, longer-term international initiative that might have 

 obviated the problem before it ever emerged. But the timing was 

 wrong: a U.S. effort to help itself to wriggle out of an unfortunate 

 excursion into ''remote area confhct" proved unpersuasive. But a 

 constructive program of regional development in a backward but re- 

 source-rich region following soon after the Geneva accords of 1954 

 (instead of the building of the flimsy SEATO defensive military al- 

 liance) might have won over all the nations of Southeast Asia to a 

 partnership that would have rendered ideological conflict unneces- 

 sary, unrewarding, and unpopular. 



The opportunity for massive but peaceful U.S. intervention in 

 Southeast Asia might have extended from any time after the initia- 

 tion of the Joint Study of Water Problems by ECAFE (U.N. Economic 

 Commission for Asia and the Far East) in early 1949. It might have 

 been initiated after France withdrew from colonial domination in 

 Indochina at the time of the Geneva Accords in .1954. It might even 

 have been offered as a substitute for propping up an ineffectual post- 

 colonial government in Saigon in 1961. 



As the study notes, there had been a progressive evolution of an 

 institutional framework for regional planning and development of 

 the Lower Mekong Basin from 1949 on: Studies were underway during 

 the years 1952-57; three important meetings took place in 1957, lead- 

 ing to the consolidation of effort in a permanent "Committee for the 

 Coordination of Investigations of the Lower Mekong." A program of 

 data collection was instituted following the institution of a special 

 project agreement between the United States and the so-called 

 "Riparian States" in November 1955, and the preparation of a "Re- 

 connaissance Report" in March 1956. Two years later, another report 

 was made on opportunities for regional planning and development of 

 the Lower Mekong; this report was by a U.N. team headed by Gen- 

 eral Wheeler of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and called for an 

 ambitious series of main stream civil works. Three years after that, in 

 early 1961, the Ford Foundation sent a study team to the area, and its 

 report — in July 1962 — envisioned primary reliance on the kind of 

 practical, small-scale but far-reaching, people-to-people program 

 characteristic of the early Tennessee Valley Authority operation in 

 the mid-1930s. 



It is not easy, even in retrospect, to say at what time a massive U.S. 

 support for regional development of the Lower Mekong Basin might 

 have been politically most acceptable, as well as technologically effec- 

 tive. But as subsequent events proved, the offer by President Johnson 

 at Johns Hopkins University, April 7, 1965, came too late. The 

 impetus of a nationaUstic-cum-ideological conflict in Vietnam was 

 already too strong, and U.S. initiative was replaced by a series of mili- 

 tary reactions of diminishing effectiveness and diminishing accept- 

 ability in both Saigon and the United States. 



It is possible that the U.S. difficulty in exploiting the diplomatic 

 opportunities of regional development of the Lower Mekong Basin lay 

 in the locus of the planning activity during the 1950s and early 1960s. 



