FOR THE first time since Dien Bien Phu, the armies of North Vietnam have moved en masse against a Western power intent on ruling in their country. The current offensive in Vietnam is not politically senseless, nor is it an exercise in random brutality; it is firmly rooted in the political torment and human anguish that have been created by American policy. And we can only hope that the Americans and their South Vietnamese mercenaries will suffer the same fate as did the French in 1954.

For all the chaos and destruction which the war has caused in Vietnam and in this country, the issue at stake is a relatively simple one: whether the American client regime of Nguyen Van Thieu will be allowed to impose its political will on the people of South Vietnam. This has been the central issue of the Paris negotiations, and it is the crux of the current stalemate. The position held by North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government in the South is that the Thieu regime must give way to a neutral coalition government which will then supervise elections in South Vietnam. But the United States has consistently stipulated that elections take place under the aegis of the current Saigon regime, a situation that would amount to no genuine elections at all.

It is clear that Hanoi and the PRG cannot accept the central demand of Washington's position, and it is evident that the position is an unfair and inflexible one. Yet President Nixon and his advisors have decided that their holding the Saigon regime in place is essential to America's credibility as a global power, and they have decided that the regime must be upheld at any cost. Invasions and ceaseless bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the drastic and brutal air strikes on North Vietnam in late 1970 and 1971, and a grueling three-year pacification program in South Vietnam's countryside are the concrete results of Washington's failure to gain acceptance of its puppet regime at the Paris talks.

ALONG WITH its policies of military coercion, Washington has consistently attempted to make Hanoi appear the guilty party in the collapse of the negotiations. And it is an effort that has continued since the abrupt dismissal last July of the U.S. delegate in Paris, David Bruce, who was apparently fired for having advocated serious consideration of the PRG's Seven Point proposal. Bruce's successor, William J. Porter, formerly in charge of pacification for South Vietnam, was not sent to Paris to undertake serious negotiation; he was sent there to engage in reckless provocation, to treat the representatives of Hanoi and the PRG in such a gross and banal fashion that the other side--or so Washington hoped--would break off the talks. Last January 25, Nixon abruptly disclosed the existence of secret talks between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. In what was undoubtedly a highly distorted account of those negotiations, the President destroyed the only remaining channel of effective discussion for the simple purpose of winning domestic and international public support in his continuation of the war. And when Hanoi and the PRG refused to play into his hands by boycotting the public sessions in Paris, Nixon broke off those talks himself, allowing Porter to declare that the negotiations could resume only if the other side demonstrated first that it was interested in "serious" talks, which presumably meant talks on American terms.

It was in this context of continued American intransigence, capped by Porter's statement that the representatives of the Vietnamese liberation forces would have to grovel on their knees before him in order to get the talks resumed, that the North Vietnamese offensive unfolded last week. And since the offensive began, the U.S. position has hardened even further. For the first time since 1968, the American command has begun systematic, round-the-clock bombing inside North Vietnam. And Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced late last week that the bombing would not stop until North Vietnam began "serious" negotiations with the United States. The statements by Laird and Porter have thus placed Hanoi in the position of having to beg the United States to stop bombing North Vietnam--or to overthrow the Saigon regime and forcibly dislodge the U.S. military machine from all Indochina so that further bombing is impossible.

THUS FAR, the United States has refrained from enacting the more drastic possibilities of escalation because it has been caught in a bind by North Vietnam's clever timing. The President is scheduled to travel to Moscow next month for talks with Soviet leaders and the possible signing of a partial ABM treaty, and his advisors are extremely edgy about undertaking any action against Moscow's allies in Hanoi that might provoke Soviet cancellation of the summit meeting. By staging its offensive at this time, North Vietnam has skillfully exploited the internal contradictions of Washington's policy: after all, the United States really should not be able to make peace with the Soviet Union while it continues its war against North Vietnam.

Nonetheless, the unmistakable objective of the current North Vietnamese drive is the overthrow of the Saigon regime. And if events in South Vietnam should soon reach a stage where Washington feels it must act decisively to save the regime, even at the expense of the Moscow summit, we must brace for the possibility of further American escalation in the war. There are several possibilities for what form this new escalation might take: sustained bombing of North Vietnam above the 20th Parallel, air raids on Hanoi and Haiphong, the destruction of North Vietnam's irrigation dikes, or the use of tactical nuclear weapons to rout the North Vietnamese from positions in South Vietnam. And we cannot stand by passively, as we have done so often in the past, if a new escalation against the real forces of freedom in Vietnam is perpetrated by our government. We must poise ourselves for resistance and be able to act with decisiveness and resolution. We must march and demonstrate in the streets, we must engage in civil disruption, we must abandon our complacent posturing and convince our government that it cannot wage war against the Vietnamese people and keep order in this country at the same time. And we must determine that our resistance is to be meaningful and lasting.

IT REMAINS FOR the Vietnamese to accomplish what no antiwar movement in this country has been able to do: to rid South Vietnam of the Thieu regime and end American involvement in Indochina. Yet that does not diminish the feeling that our support for the North Vietnamese in the time of their greatest anguish and trial must be strong and convincing. The Vietnamese fighters whom American planes are bombing are not our enemies: they are the only progressive force in South Vietnam. It is time we realized this, and put our realization into practice. And the time has long since arrived for an immediate and total U.S. withdrawal and for an unambiguous defeat of America's puppet regime in South Vietnam. The sooner they come, the better.