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the American troops were being withdrawn, the South Vietnamese Army was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:
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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