Sideshow Addendum

            This is an addendum to the book review in the previous post: Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross

            Specifically the purpose of this addendum is to use Sideshow to rebut the article recently published in The Atlantic: In Defense of Henry Kissinger by Robert D. Kaplan.

            (The purpose of this post is to show how many of the points recently published by Kaplan were rebutted years ago by Shawcross.  So I’ll try and contain myself to the points about Cambodia and the Vietnam War, and for the time being I’ll ignore the other issues like Kaplan’s ridiculous defense of Kissinger’s coup in Chile.)

           

            Firstly, Kaplan is eager to give credit to Nixon and Kissinger for reducing the number of American combat troops in Vietnam.  And from the standpoint of reducing American casualties in Vietnam and appeasing the American anti-war movement, Nixon and Kissinger do get some credit for this.  Nixon did reduce the number of American soldiers in Indochina, and encourage the South Vietnamese Army to take more of the casualties.

            However as Shawcross points out in his book, the fact that the South Vietnamese Army was supposed to take control of the war with a reduced American ground presence was precisely what made the invasion of Cambodia so ridiculous.  If you want to withdraw troops, the sensible thing to do is to reduce the war, not expand it into another country. Because the American troops were being withdrawn, the South Vietnamese Army was expected to do much of the fighting in Cambodia.  The South Vietnamese Army couldn’t even adequately defend their own government without American assistance, and now they were expected to take control of Cambodia as well.

            To quote another paragraph from Kaplan:

That successful troop withdrawal was facilitated by a bombing incursion into Cambodia—primarily into areas replete with North Vietnamese military redoubts and small civilian populations, over which the Cambodian government had little control. The bombing, called “secret” by the media, was public knowledge during 90 percent of the time it was carried out, wrote Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard professor who served on President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council. The early secrecy, he noted, was to avoid embarrassing Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk and complicating peace talks with the North Vietnamese.

            The biggest whopper in this paragraph doesn’t even need the benefit of Shawcross’s book, and can safely be rebutted with just a little bit of common sense.  Cambodia was secretly illegally bombed during 1969.  It was publicly and openly bombed during the 1970s.  Kaplan appears to be saying: “I don’t see what the big deal is.  We openly bombed Cambodia after we secretly bombed it, so why is everyone complaining about the secret bombings?” As if the fact that Cambodia was openly bombed in the 1970s retroactively changed the fact that it had been illegally secretly bombed in 1969. 

            Amazing that he argues this in print in a mainstream publication with no shame what-so-ever.  The things that some people will try and get away with saying in print are really astounding.  By this logic the Japanese government should try and say, “I don’t see what the big deal about Pearl Harbor is.  90% of the bombs we dropped on the US Navy were after we officially declared war.”

             But aside from that, in his 1979 book Shawcross had already shown that, contrary to Nixon and Kissinger’s claim, the areas secretly bombed in Cambodia had substantial civilian populations.

            Here are the Pentagon’s actual estimates as to how many Cambodian civilians lived in the areas secretly bombed:

            Area 353: 1,640 civilians

            Area 609: 198 civilians

            Area 351: 383 civilians

            Area 352: 770 civilians

            Area 350: 120 civilians

            Area 740: 1,136 civilians

            As Shawcross writes in the 1986 edition: “it was a lie for Kissinger and other officials to claim later (as Kissinger continued to claim in his memoirs) that the sanctuaries were “all unpopulated” by Cambodians...To Cambodians (as perhaps to many other people) these are communities, some of them sizeable…. If communities of 1,640 and 1,136 are “minimal” to [Kissinger’s supporters], I rest my case.” (Shawcross p. 442).

            As for the excuse that the secret bombing was simply to protect King Sihanouk from embarrassment, this is an old excuse used by Kissinger and his defenders, and Shawcross has more or less a whole chapter devoted to debunking this theory.  To quote from parts of it:

            …several points about Sihanouk’s role need to be repeated.  First, as has been noted, his aide Charles Meyers maintains that although (like any other Cambodian) he was happy to see Vietnamese bombed, he was never asked to approve a vast B-52 campaign and never did so. Secondly, if he did indicate his compliance to Washington, it was not regarded as very certain.  Throughout Menu [codename for the secret bombing campaign], the Joint Chiefs considered each of Abrams’ bombing requests individually, and in their replies they always reminded him what to do if the Cambodians made trouble: “After delivering a reply to any Cambodian protest Washington will inform the press that we have apologized and offered compensation.” Thirdly, Sihanouk had no alternative. American violations of Cambodian neutrality were as impossible to prevent as Vietnamese.  Each had to be tolerated in the hope that the war could at least be contained and a fullscale invasion by the United States—which Sihanouk knew, would have a devastating impact on Cambodia—could be prevented.

            Most important of all in American terms, the issue that Kissinger has consistently failed to address is that in the context of United States law Sihanouk’s attitude was irrelevant. The whims of, and the constraints upon, a foreign prince are not grounds for the President to wage war.  The Constitution gives the power to declare war, to make appropriations and to raise and support armies to Congress.  By informing only a few sympathetic legislators in a general way of the bombing, the White House was deliberately usurping the Congress’ constitutional rights and responsibilities.

            The evidence indicates that “the Sihanouk excuse” was merely that: the secrecy, the wiretaps, the burning and falsification of reports, were principally intended to conceal the administration’s widening of the war from the American people. Even after 1970 when Menu had ended and Sihanouk, exiled, no longer needed protection, Nixon, Kissinger, Rogers, Laird, Elliot L. Richardson and other officials all continued to assure Congress, press and public, without equivocation, that the United States had scrupulously declined to attack Communist positions in Cambodia before spring 1970. Officially, highly classified Pentagon computer printouts of the bombing of Indochina continued to show “Nil” for Cambodia in 1969. (Shawcross p. 94-95)

            Another paragraph from Kaplan:

            Despite the North Vietnamese invasion of eastern Cambodia in 1970, the U.S. Congress substantially cut aid between 1971 and 1974 to the Lon Nol regime, which had replaced Prince Sihanouk’s, and also barred the U.S. Air Force from helping Lon Nol fight against the Khmer Rouge. Future historians will consider those actions more instrumental in the 1975 Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia than Nixon’s bombing of sparsely populated regions of Cambodia six years earlier..

           

            Kaplan is completely in the wrong when he tries to blame the Khmer Rouge victory on the U.S. Congress instead of Nixon/Kissinger.

            The first point is that Nixon had already (arguably illegally) by-passed Congressional authority by authorizing the invasion of Cambodia.  Placing restrictions on the US invasion was the only way that Congress could hope to re-assert its authority, and the result should have been entirely predictable.

            It was an historic act, the first time in the history of the war that Congress legislated to restrict the President. It had far-reaching implications. Politically, the important point is that it was not spontaneous; the legislature had been provoked by the President into taking this step.  (Shawcross 164).

            The US congress did attempt to cut funding to the Lon Nol regime, but as Shawcross details in his book, Nixon and Kissinger found a lot of clever ways around this, and lots of money did flow into the Lon Nol regime during this time period.  Shawcross argues that this money was destructive.  It encouraged corruption in the Lon Nol regime, and it made the Lon Nol regime entirely dependent on the United States for its defense. 

            Furthermore, a fair amount of Lon Nol’s commanders were making accommodations with the Khmer Rouge and selling their weapons to the communists.

            Given this state of affairs, it’s difficult to see how things could have been improved even if more money had been pumped into Lon Nol’s government.

            But besides this, it was precisely the US Air Force bombing campaign which destroyed the social infrastructure of the Cambodian countryside, and encouraged recruitment to the Khmer Rouge.

            One final point—and this is not in Shawcross’s book (because it only came to light in 1994), but it must be made here: we now know that Nixon and Kissinger sabotaged President Johnson’s 1968 peace talks with North Vietnam.  This is important to keep in mind, because if you read Kaplan’s article, he mentions several times that Nixon and Kissinger inherited an already disastrous war from the Johnson administration, and whatever unfortunate choices they had to make in Vietnam and Cambodia must be read in that context. Don’t believe it.

            Also for the same reason you can disregard paragraphs like:

           
Some prominent American protesters even visited North Vietnam to publicly express solidarity with the enemy. The Communists, in turn, seduced foreign supporters with soothing assurances of Hanoi’s willingness to compromise. When Charles de Gaulle was negotiating a withdrawal of French troops from Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s (as Kissinger records in Ending the Vietnam War), the Algerians knew that if they did not strike a deal with him, his replacement would certainly be more hard-line. But the North Vietnamese probably figured the opposite—that because of the rise of McGovernism in the Democratic Party, Nixon and Kissinger were all that stood in the way of American surrender. Thus, Nixon and Kissinger’s negotiating position was infinitely more difficult than de Gaulle’s had been.

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