Indochina & Left-Wing Escapism

...Shawcross makes a plausible case that the Nixon administration, weakened by Watergate and facing growing congressional resistance to the war, should have tried to replace Lon Nol with Sihanouk, perhaps through a deal with the Chinese, who felt that Sihanouk would be a more reliable ally than the Khmer Rouge against the Russians...

...The Lon Nol government was so critically weak by this time that Prime Minister Sirik Matak, who had been placed under house arrest, had warned that the country would fall to the Communists if Washington continued to sustain Lon Nol...

...The sanctuaries posed an especially acute threat since American forces were in the process of being withdrawn from Vietnam...

...withdrawal from the war, since it felt that U.S...

...Fighting exists only in the minds of some ugly Cambodians in Thailand and Paris...

...nor is it an apology for the Khmer Rouge...

...Our support for Lon Nol backfired since he was incompetent, and our military and economic assistance only contributed to corruption and inflation...

...But he minimizes the complexity of the decisions, and thereby overlooks the role that others played in bringing about Cambodia's destruction...

...The wreckage caused by the war, and by the American bombing in particular, made a harsh peace inevitable...

...to win precisely that mass support which the rhetoric of revolution had failed to engender...

...The Khmer Rouge, as Shawcross points out, were making a desperate push for complete military victory, apparently fearful that Hanoi might make a deal with Kissinger behind their backs...

...and the sanctuaries...

...Communist morale was low, desertions were increasing, and malaria had spread among the troops...

...Such losses probably could not have been sustained a second time, but after this attack was beaten back Congress terminated the bombing...

...According to the "Black Paper" recently published by the Cambodian Communists, there were 200,000 to 300,000 Vietnamese Communist troops in Cambodia in 1970, including the elusive COSVN, the central committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party...

...The foregoing has not been intended as an unqualified defense of Kissinger's Cambodian policy, but only as an attempt to show why Shawcross's harsh condemnation is unfair and does not do justice to an otherwise commendable book...

...The figure may be an exaggeration (Shawcross suggests that there may have been 60,000 North Vietnamese in Cambodia), but no one questions that Hanoi was using Cambodia as a base from which to attack South Vietnamese and American positions in the Mekong Delta and around Saigon...

...The United States chose the latter course, and who is not to say that but for Watergate and the destruction of Nixon's Presidency-contingencies that could hardly be foreseen in 1970-it would have worked...

...Stanley Hoffmann has urged anti-war protestors "to resist all attempts to make them feel guilty for the stand they took against the war.'' Hoffmann and others feel that Sideshow justifies such resistance...

...Shawcross believes it ''drained Vietnamization" by forcing South Vietnamese ground and air forces to fight in two countries...

...What happened in these and other attempts at negotiation remains hidden in a shroud of secrecy which Sideshow does little to dispel...

...Sihanouk, according to Shawcross, soon found the North Vietnamese presence in Cambodia "increasingly irksome" and complained in a letter to Le Monde in 1968 that "Asian communism does not permit us any longer to remain neutral...

...Shawcross scoffs at "the Sihanouk excuse" since he feels the administration's real purpose was to widen the war and to hide this from the American people...

...Yet he also points out that the bombing and later the invasion were intended to facilitate the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, which is a strange way to widen a war...

...Whether the invasion was successful is debatable...

...He agreed to an alliance with his enemies...

...But even if the Americans had wanted to help brtng him back, Sihanouk had made this virtually impossible...

...nor is it clear from the book that Kissinger did not try to involve Sihanouk in a political solution...

...But the anti-war movement never advocated this or any other policy intended to help the South Vietnamese more effectively resist the Communists...

...In fact, the appearance of objectivity conceals the surrender to demonology, the demon being Henry Kissinger...

...But such open apologists for totalitarianism are rather isolated today and have little influence...

...They were calculated steps, taken after sufficient provocation, which were intended to achieve a useful, if limited, military objective...

...involvement in the war precisely because they felt that our policy was helping the Communists win...

...Sihanouk, in a recent interview, offered a more balanced assessment of the Cambodian tragedy when he was asked to place the responsibility for the expansion of the war into his country...

...Its immense documentation is wrapped around a central theme that is simplistic, tendentious, and inconsistent with much of the evidence that is presented...

...policy who urged that much greater attention be paid to the political dimension of the anti-Communist struggle, in particular to promoting democratic political and economic development at the village level...

...And surely the anti-war movement cannot escape blame either...

...The Khmer Rouge suffered immense casualties during the final weeks, higher even than those of the government forces...

...Even after the Khmer Rouge took over and Sihanouk had seen firsthand the appalling consequences, he continued to defend the Khmer Rouge, telling a group of journalists in Paris that everything they had done was "tres raisonable.'' Denying reports of massacres, he said that the new government has "succeeded perfectly in establishing authority and order...

...Sideshow is consistently illuminating in describing the profound distrust of the Cambodian Communists for their Vietnamese counterparts and in presenting the historical background of the Vietnamese invasion that led ultimately to the overthrow of Pol Pot and the imposition of a Hanoi puppet regime in Phnom Penh...

...Shawcross points out that the CIA vastly underestimated the quantity of supplies moving through Sihanoukville...

...the shattering of the old society and the transformation of the country into a huge slave-labor camp...

...In an article published last year in the New York Review of Books, Shaw-cross wrote that "Congress's refusal to appropriate more aid led to serious ammunition shortages and resulted in the Khmer Rouge victory of April 17 [1975...

...He had, it is true, preserved "the honest illusion of plenty, peace and security," but time and luck were running out, and he was overthrown in 1970...

...The connection between a harsh war and a harsh peace is very hard to establish...

...air power during their assault on Phnom Penh in 1973, losing more than half of their attack force and a quarter of their entire army...

...In Sideshow, he calls the congressional decision to cut off aid a "fatal vote" for Cambodia...

...It only demanded an immediate U.S...

...It is true that in the 1960s there were critics of U.S...

...Shawcross argues that the policy followed by Kissinger and Nixon destroyed Cambodia's tenuous neutrality and created the conditions for the growth of the Khmer Rouge...

...He does not believe, for example, that the U.S...

...Sihanouk himself had complained that "a vast part of our territory has been occupied by the North Vietnamese," but he was powerless to do anything about the occupation and did, in fact, consent to our bombing raids as long as we agreed not to embarrass him by making them public...

...Wars nourish brutality and sadism," he added, "and sometimes certain people are executed by the victors but it would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over...

...In the end, the Khmer Rouge, "born out of the inferno that American policy did much to create," won the war and imposed a ghastly despotism over the Cambodian people...

...The Khmer Rouge forces, says Shawcross, were "ravaged" by U.S...

...Who, indeed, would have believed that these things could be so, or that Vietnam would invade Cambodia and China Vietnam...

...And when the choice came down to helping non-Communist Cambodians resist a barbaric enemy, it chose to oppose such assistance and went so far as to portray the enemy as a liberator...

...Sihanouk continued to be of immense value to the Khmer Rouge, even as he admitted that they would "spit me out like a cherry stone" after sucking him dry...

...New York Times reporter Sydney Schan-berg, five days before the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, wrote that for "the ordinary people" of Cambodia, "it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone...

...Sihanouk not only allowed the North Vietnamese to establish the sanctuaries, but also permitted the use of the port of Sihanoukville for the import of vital military supplies which were transported to the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodian army trucks...

...American policy, according to Shawcross, brought this about and was, therefore, ''not a mistake...

...Shawcross provides these details, which makes his admiration for Sihanouk all the more remarkable...

...But while Sideshow can be read with great interest, it is a seriously flawed book...

...Moreover, we turned our backs on Prince Sihanouk, who held out the only chance for restoring Cambodia's neutrality or, at the very least, blocking a complete takeover, by the Khmer Rouge...

...It doesn't, and the effort to use the book for this purpose is a different kind of sideshow-a maneuver by a political group in retreat to protect its flanks by deflecting attention away from its own ignominious errors to what it claims were the errors of others...

...Sihanouk had "sacrificed the independence and the chance for unilateral action that a waiting period in France might have afforded him...

...Those who said it couldn't happen were wrong and helped bring about the disaster...

...Sihanouk continued to play the Americans and the Communists off against one another, but with ever less success...

...and the death by execution, disease, forced labor, and starvation of a quarter of the population, a figure that may even underestimate the carnage...

...But Kissinger is portrayed as truly diabolical-entrapping helpless individuals in his wicked intrigues, destroying anyone who dared to differ with him, sacrificing morality, principle, people, and whole nations to his geopolitical designs and ruthless quest for personal power...

...Cambodia, being a country blessed with rich agricultural land and a relatively small population, can be revived without any major reconstruction program " But as we now know, even such a "tendentious" forecast of "abnormal behavior" would have come nowhere close to predicting the full extent of human destruction wreaked by the Khmer Rouge: the emptying overnight of all the cities and towns...

...This, too, was a decision that had much to do with the destruction of Cambodia, and it wasn't reversed even after a congressional delegation visited Phnom Penh and learned of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge...

...The heart of Shawcross's brief against Kissinger, a point he returns to again and again, is that Kissinger obstinately refused to have anything to do with Sihanouk, even when it had become clear that a Sihanouk-led coalition government was the only realistic alternative to total control by the Khmer Rouge...

...This view is taken both by those who refuse to protest against Communist atrocities, since they do not hold the Communists responsible for what has happened, and by those who do protest but refuse to re-evaluate their position on the war...

...His chapter on the Khmer Rouge is the most informative history of Cambodian Communism that is available to the general reader, and he does not, like Chomsky and other apologists, try to hide or minimize the crimes committed by Pol Pot...

...It is the need to absolve and vindicate the anti-war movement that explains the exultant reception that has greeted the appearance of William Shawcross's new book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia.* Sideshow is, as the critics assert, a worthy book: carefully researched, passionately argued, and often extremely provocative...

...He was considered an unreliable showman who was resigned to a Communist victory in Indochina and whose pro-Hanoi "neutralism" in the 1960s significantly strengthened Hanoi's position...

...Some groups and individuals-among them the American Friends Service Committee, Noam Chomsky, Dave Dellinger, and William Kunstler-have denied that atrocities have occurred...

...The New York Times called Kissinger's overture "a major shift" in U.S...

...and that when asked, if they had it to do all over again would they still flee Vietnam, the reply would invariably be, Of course...

...In the first place, Washington's low opinion of Sihanouk was based on long experience...

...Now that the evidence is in, the consequences of that choice are clear...

...During the last desperate defense of Phnom Penh, when Congress was debating the aid cut-off, Sihanouk sent a cable to congressional Democrats assuring them that a Khmer Rouge government would have "no intentions of making Cambodia a socialist or popular republic, but a Swedish type of kingdom...

...This view actually prevailed with the adoption of the pacification program in 1968...

...To be sure, in the aftermath of the war, totalitarian regimes were established throughout Eastern Europe, including the eastern part of Germany...

...He blamed all parties to the conflict-the U.S., the North Vietnamese, and the Khmer Rouge-and then added: "But perhaps I also, I was guilty, because I had a very difficult policy to practice, so I could not avoid some responsibility...

...The people who opposed the American effort to resist a Communist military victory in Indochina have not had an easy time dealing with the grisly consequences of the victory they helped make possible...

...However the issue of efficacy is resolved, the fact remains that the bombing and subsequent invasion were not, as Shawcross suggests, impulsive acts by a President who admired the movie Patton and felt the need to assert America's prowess and by a National Security Advisor anxious to prove his mettle...

...It is a system of rule which requires not merely the suppression of all opposition or the elimination of any mode of activity that is independent of the state, but also the positive identification of every individual with the objectives and methods of the party...

...But there is no getting away from the main event, which is what has happened in Indochina since 1975...

...Certainly not the anti-war protestors who proclaimed with passionate intensity that no fate for the Vietnamese,could be Carl Gershman is Executive Director of Social Democrats, USA, and a regular contributor to Commentary magazine...

...He describes, for example, how Cambodia could not avoid becoming involved in the Vietnam war between 1965 and 1970...

...planes were bombing Communist forces besieging Phnom Penh...

...West Germany and Japan suffered tremendous destruction during World War II, yet both emerged as prosperous, enormously successful democratic societies...

...He knew exactly how brutal the Khmer Rouge were, but in public he repeatedly discounted fears of a bloodbath and thus helped sow a deadly illusion...

...The idea that American policy created the Khmer Rouge is thus called into question by Shawcross's own words...

...American propaganda...

...This was a very weak excuse...

...It is totalitarian...

...But it would be absurd to argue that the war's destruction produced totalitarianism, when it is clear that the sole cause was the imposition by force of Communism...

...engineered the coup in 1970 that brought Lon Nol to power, nor does he deny that Sihanouk knew of the B-52 raids in 1969 and might even have been "a party to the conspiracy...

...Perhaps for this reason, some opponents of the war now insist that they knew all along how terrible Communism would be for the Indochinese, and that they opposed U.S...

...policy...

...Thereafter, the Cambodian army was on its own...

...The issue of Cambodia's lost neutrality is also not as clear-cut as Shawcross judges it to be...

...But in keeping with the book's polemical thrust, Shawcross blames even this decision on Kissinger and Nixon, who had "radicalized" Congress by feeding it "lies" during the Watergate investigation...

...The day after the coup, he flew from Moscow to Peking, where he immediately established a united front with the Khmer Rouge...

...At that point the U.S...

...It is, in other words, a system from which individuals must flee in order to-preserve their humanity and often their very lives...

...Who would have believed it, for example, if one had said that tens of thousands of Vietnamese, in an unprecedented mass exodus, would uproot themselves from their ancestral homeland and take to the sea in flimsy boats, knowing full well that they stood as good a chance to drown as to survive...

...participation in a "civil war," apart from the nature of that participation, was unwarranted and immoral...

...It was, as Shawcross states, "a fateful decision...

...Communism doesn't become totalitarian because of the condition in which Communists find society when they take it over...

...and that if they were lucky enough to survive, they would probably be pillaged by pirates from Thailand, ignored in their distress by passing ships, and shunted about from one Southeast Asian port to another before being permitted to set up temporary camp in some desolate place swarming with thousands of other desperate, homeless, exhausted, and often infirm Vietnamese...

...It was an alliance, Shawcross admits, of "enormous importance" to the Khmer Rouge, who were able to use Sihanouk's "persona...

...Shawcross is generous toward many American officials, among them former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and former Secretary of State William Rogers...

...If Sihanouk had wanted to talk with Kissinger, he couldn't very well refuse to do so because of the bombing, without which a political solution would have been impossible...

...Shawcross observes that "Sihanouk's domestic position had deteriorated because of the war'' and economic mismanagement, while his "Phnom Penh court degenerated" as he continued to indulge his decadent habits...

...He announced his desire to restore relations with Washington and privately indicated that he would not object to American attacks on the North Vietnamese sanctuaries...

...When he was overthrown in 1970 (largely as a result of what Shawcross calls his "uncharacteristic misjudgments"), Washington was happy to see him go...

...The issue of the attack on the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia is a case in point...

...But there is no getting around the fact that this claim, which was a fundamental contention of the anti-war movement, has been shown to be utterly wrong...

...It is also the most ambitious attempt yet made to hold the United States responsible for the fate that has befallen Indochina since 1975, specifically the Cambodian holocaust...

...A more frequently heard argument is that terrible things have happened but that it is all the fault of the United States...

...But it is not clear from the book that Kissinger did not seriously explore this option...

...Whether Kissinger will be able adequately to defend himself against the charge that he treated Cambodia only as a sideshow to the Vietnam war and never considered how his policies would afect the well-being of that small country is a different question...

...worse than the war and life under Thieu, and that a Communist victory would bring reconciliation, reconstruction, and, most of all, peace...

...But he writes as if, in fact, the answers were easy...

...They fight from their nightclubs there...

...At the end of the book, Shawcross writes that "it has not been the purpose of this investigation to suggest that there were any easy answers...

...Had anyone been asked ten years ago what consequences a Communist military victory would have for the people of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, he would probably have been dismissed as a reactionary demagogue possessed of a wild and fertile imagination had he ventured to predict what has actually happened in Indochina under Communist rule...

...And who could have imagined the holocaust that has taken place in Cambodia...

...Our attack on the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, first by the secret bombing in 1969 and then by the invasion in the spring of 1970, embroiled the country in the war, drove the Communists deeper into Cambodia where they recruited among the peasantry, and created a vast refugee problem which disrupted the cities and the economy...

...Shawcross points out, for example, that Kissinger sought to meet Sihanouk in Peking during the summer of 1973...

...was faced with a difficult decision...

...They might salvage a measure of honor were they to admit that this is so...

...During the final siege of Phnom Penh, Shawcross writes, it fought with "extraordinary bravery," a performance that doesn't conform to the usual disparaging characterization of the government forces...

...At every stage of the war, he comments, American policymakers were faced with choices, and Shawcross feels they chose wrongly to a degree that is criminal...

...Here again the issue was not as simple as Shawcross suggests...

...it was a crime.'' Shawcross is a competent journalist, and his book is not an exercise in crude anti* Simon & Schuster, $13.95...

...The anti-war movement's claim that Communism in Indochina would be more humane may be testimony to the effectiveness of Communist propaganda and the capacity of some people for self-delusion, as well as to the sheer perni-ciousness of some others...

...The anti-war movement cannot honestly deny its share of responsibility for the Cambodian holocaust...

...Like everybody else, it, too, was faced with choices...

...Were we, at our peril, to respect Cambodian neutrality while Hanoi flouted it at will...

...And who would have believed that tens of thousands of other Vietnamese, mostly ethnic Chinese, would be charged an exorbitant exit fee, stripped of all their possessions, and forcibly expelled, thereafter left to fend for themselves on the high seas and to plead for sanctuary in Southeast Asian countries which regard their expulsion as an act of aggression by Vietnam...

...The argument that opposition to the war was inspired by anti-Communism is ludicrous on the face of it, and is advanced today only to absolve the anti-war movement of responsibility for the consequences of the Communist victory and to protect the credibility of the anti-interventionist position regarding American foreign policy...

...In the end the Khmer Rouge prevailed for a reason that seems anti-climactic in light of all the complicated analyses advanced to explain the Cambodian debacle: The government forces simply ran out of ammunition...

...Only the bombing was preventing them from seizing Phnom Penh...

...Alternatively, it could have tried to root out the sanctuaries once and for all and strengthen Cambodia as an anti-Communist ally of South Vietnam...

...But Sihanouk rejected it on the grounds that he couldn't talk to Kissinger while U.S...

...One hopes that Kissinger's forthcoming memoirs will shed some light on these matters...

...According to Shawcross, it could have encouraged Lon Nol to preserve Cambodia's "flawed neutrality," but this "probably would have meant a government dominated by Hanoi and at the very least it would have allowed the Communists continued use of Sihanoukville...

...At the same time, Vietcong terrorist incidents in the Delta and Saigon military regions fell by half in 1971, the year following the invasion...