The Destruction Of Cambodia

New book attacks U.S. policy

During the climactic years of the Viet Nam War, the Communist forces crossed the Cambodian border and established a whole network of secret bases, which they relied on to shelter and resupply their troops. To attack these "sanctuaries," the U.S. bombed the Cambodian countryside, then launched an armored "incursion" into the once neutral nation. Now a book by William Shawcross, who covered the war for the Sunday Times of London from 1970 to 1972, challenges that U.S. policy and charges that it contributed to the Communist takeover.

In Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, Shawcross does not minimize the difficulties that confronted the Nixon and Ford Administrations in Indochina. But he sharply criticizes the U.S. view that Cambodia was a minor adjunct to the Viet Nam War and that the strategy of the larger war justified spreading the fighting into a neutral land. President Nixon expressed that view when he said in December of 1970: "The Cambodians . . . are tying down 40,000 North Vietnamese regulars. If those North Vietnamese weren't in Cambodia, they'd be over [in Viet Nam] killing Americans."

Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued that the Vietnamese had already involved Cambodia in the war by establishing bases there. Shawcross cites previously classified U.S. documents to demonstrate that the ground fighting in Cambodia began only after the U.S. launched the secret B-52 raids in 1969. Those raids drove many Hanoi troops out of the border areas and into central Cambodia, where they inevitably tangled with the ill-equipped Cambodian army. As the fighting progressed, the Vietnamese forces inside Cambodia were steadily supplanted by the indigenous Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

Kissinger and other U.S. officials declared that Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk had "acquiesced" in the U.S. bombing raids and in fact "encouraged" U.S. intervention.* Shawcross calls that "questionable." Sihanouk himself, who was overthrown by General Lon Nol just two weeks before the U.S. invasion in 1970, told Shawcross that there was nothing he could have done about either the Vietnamese bases or the U.S bombing. But Sihanouk's doomed effort to keep Cambodia neutral, Shawcross believes, was the right policy in terms of Cambodia's own interests.

That was clearly shown, Shawcross writes, by the five years of destruction that followed Sihanouk's ouster, a destruction that Shawcross condemns as an excessive attempt to display U.S. strength in the area.

During those five years of fighting, a once fertile and peaceful nation became a wasteland. The capital, Phnom-Penh, swelled from 600,000 to more than 2 million, as refugees from the countryside sought first to escape the intensive U.S. bombing and later the increasing terrorism of the Khmer Rouge. Where rice had formerly been exported, starvation became commonplace. Inflation soared. Yet through all the suffering, Shawcross notes, Washington continued to support the "bankrupt" and "corrupt" regime of Lon Nol because he was willing, if far from able, to go on fighting the Communists.

Shawcross's conclusions are not original, but they are heavily documented.

He builds a strong case that Nixon and Kissinger repeatedly made the wrong choices in Cambodia. But Shawcross argues that the Nixon-Kissinger policies in Cambodia did not improve the U.S.'s military position in Viet Nam, and here he is on shaky ground. Furthermore, the chance of the U.S.'s restoring Sihanouk and negotiating a settlement in 1974 and 1975 was almost certainly far slimmer than Shawcross admits. And Viet Nam's recent invasion of Cambodia casts new doubt on whether anything could have preserved that nation's neutrality indefinitely. The key question was, and is, whether U.S. interests justified steps that helped destroy, to this day, a small and unsophisticated country.

If there is a single villain in Sideshow, it is Kissinger himself. He is pictured as a vain, shortsighted, ruthless and manipulative man, who purposely kept such colleagues as Defense Secretary Melvin Laird in the dark about his Cambodian policies in order to prevent any interference with them. In his forthcoming memoirs, Kissinger can be expected to tell his side of the story and presumably to offer his own documentation.

* Last week in Peking, Kissinger dined with the exiled Sihanouk, who pronounced him "a charming man.''

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