The Indian‐Pakistani tragedy brings us back again to the fatal flaw in the organization of world politics: There is simply no effective world instrument for enforcing peace or compelling nations to settle their disputes by peaceful means.

The United Nations, which is sup posed to meet this responsibility, was ignored by the United States in the Vietnam war, by Britain and France in the Suez war, by Israel and the Arab states in the Middle East conflicts, by the Soviet Union in the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and now by India and to a lesser extent by Pakistan in the latest madness on the sub continent. No wonder, then, that it was impotent to avoid the Indian Pakistani war—though it might at least have tried in time.

It has been obvious for weeks and even months that India regarded the torrent of refugees from East Pakistan into India as an intolerable burden on her poor economy and even threat to the political stability of the region around Calcutta.

“War is always presented as being ‘defensive’ always ‘inevitable,’ and there is always the tragic promise that it will ‘settle’ things ‘decisively and finally.’

Prime Minister Gandhi of India made this quite clear during her recent visit to Washington. The brutal repression of the Bengali insurgents by the Pakistani Government, leading to the refugee problem, is well understood by President Nixon.

What is not understood is the decision of the Indian Government to use the brutality of the Pakistanis against their own insurgents as an excuse for dismembering the Pakistani nation, and resorting to the use of armed force to do so. And the difficulty of arguing against the use of military force from the other major capitals of the world is that the so called Great Powers have been doing the same thing themselves whenever they thought it was in their national interests, thus weakening their own and the U.N.'s capacity to avoid the latest calamity.

As usual, we are getting the same old misleading communiqu6s from the capitals concerned about who started the war. For Prime Minister Gandhi to talk about the “wanton and unprovoked aggression” of Pakistan, when her own Government's troops have been constantly inside East Pakistan and her colleagues have made no secret of their aid to the East Pakistani insurgents or their desire to see East Pakistan separated from West Pakistan, is really an affront to the intelligence of the world.

Her argument is that India has for months been putting up with the repression of the Bengali‐speaking rebels and that the world “ignored the basic consequences and concerned itself only with certain repercussions.” In short, that, getting no help from the world and faced with the provocation of the refugees and the Pakistani armed forces, India has no choice but to go to war.

Well, there is obviously a great deal to her argument about the Pakistani provocation but very little for resorting to the extremity of organized war fare to deal with it. The East Pakistani rebels were making progress toward the creation of an autonomous state, which would then have allowed India to return the ten million refugees to their native land, but her Government decided to hurry history along and use India's superior military forces to repel the enemy “decisively and finally.”

This is the way war is always excused. It is always presented as being “defensive,” always “inevitable,” and there is always the tragic promise that the war will “settle” things “decisively and finally.”

This has been the melancholy epitaph of the bloodiest revolution in history, the dream of Woodrow Wilson with his “war to end wars,” the boast of Hitler with his “thousand‐year German empire,” the nightmare of the Arabs in their wars against Israel and the tragedy of America's adventure in Vietnam.

There are obviously disputes and provocations in many parts of the world today that are regarded by both sides as “intolerable.” Moscow and Peking have an “intolerable” situation on the Sino‐Soviet border, but some how considering the alternative of war, they tolerate it; East Germany had an “intolerable” flight of refugees into West Germany but it built the Berlin Wall to deal with it rather than going to war.

Similarly, it would be easy to argue that life for both the Arabs and the Israelis is made intolerable by the Palestinian refugee problem and that North and South Korea are living under “intolerable” threats of war, yet some leaders in the world seem to have concluded that war is not inevitable but more intolerable than almost anything else.

This was actually the root principle of the U.N. Charter, but it has been violated almost from the day it was signed. And the answer to this is not that the U.N. Charter has failed, only that it hasn't really been tried. Mrs. Gandhi didn't even consider allowing U.N. observers to see what was going on along the Indian‐Pakistani borders, which is interesting, since she is now defending the war as a moral crusade against the Pakistani aggressors.