Sideswipe: Kissinger, Shawcross and the Responsibility for Cambodia
Rodman, Peter W.
Peter W. Rodman SIDESWIPE: KISSINGER, SHAWCROSS AND THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR CAMBODIA The crafty scholarship of William Shawcross. At the end of 1979 The American Spectator awarded its Worst Book...
...The ban on U.S...
...Had Shawcross noticed the discrepancy he might have guessed that the contemporaneous documents were more authoritative than the after-the-fact summary of 1973...
...Moreover, serious leadership and training deficiencies, combined with the absence of any U.S...
...Le Due Tho contemptuously dismissed the offer and insisted on the overthrow of the new Cambodian government...
...But he did not...
...On one page he asserts that "no Communist offensive had been launched" when the secret bombing began in 1969...
...To be sure, the remote sanctuaries along the border had been the subject of North Vietnamese occupation and American counterattacks...
...Lacking any authority to provide in-country advice or U.S...
...A look at the documents is illuminating...
...His tendentious account of the role of the U.S...
...68-71), citing Bowles's State Department briefing papers, Bowles's escort officer's summary report, and Bowles's cables to Washington...
...Outside sources of firepower were withdrawn so that they relied solely on their own firepower assets...
...The assertions that Hanoi really sought to topple the Cambodian regime, Shawcross now says, "have no basis in reality.'' This is first of all false and second of all a curious line of argument...
...One of the best is Cambodia: Year Zero by Francois Ponchaud, a French Jesuit who lived through the early horrific phases of the Khmer Rouge victory...
...Sideshow, p. 313) Shawcross's military critique is utterly disingenuous...
...Kissinger has published part of Sihanouk's verbatim remarks in his memoirs but it adds little to what was already available...
...Sideshow, pp...
...This will not be found in Sideshow...
...destruction of traditional social structures, organized religion, and even the family...
...nevertheless his book shows a clarity about Khmer Rouge motivations that Shawcross seems to have deliberately avoided...
...General Earle Wheeler forwarded the results to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird on April 9, 1969, in a lengthy memorandum with numerous appendices and maps...
...xvi) So we must look elsewhere for an explanation of the deportation from Phnom Penh...
...For example: a. There is very little mixing of the VC/NVA Forces with the Cambodian populace...
...Shawcross cites it as evidence for the following...
...None of this is mentioned in Sideshow...
...Sideshow, p. 113) It turns out that the quoted words attributed to General Abrams in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee were spoken in reality by Senator Stuart Symington...
...The administration was stuck with a failed policy, and its opponents were understandably sheepish at the results of an outcome they had long urged...
...the overall program was given the name MENU...
...His chapters on alleged "missed opportunities" to negotiate a settlement are undercut by the mountain of evidence that the North Vietnamese and later the Khmer Rouge rejected all American and Cambodian overtures to compromise.** As a work of history the book is worth**The "Black Book" published by the Pol Pot regime in September 1978 reveals the reason: The Khmer Rouge resisted all pressures for a cease-fire in 1972-73 because "if the Kampu-chean revolution had accepted a cease-fire it would have collapsed...
...Each, therefore, was concerned to attach all blame to the Cambodians and refused to analyze carefully the effect of his own work in Phnom Penh...
...If Kissinger's is indeed the most detailed and comprehensive description of the events of 1970- which it is-how this is a criticism of the Kissinger book is not obvious...
...Cover memorandum p. 2) Extreme care would be taken to attack only known enemy bases in Cambodia, thus minimizing the risk of engagement with Cambodian forces or of causing Cambodian casualties...
...Through the Freedom of Information Act, Shawcross gained access to thousands of documents relating to America's foreign policy in Southeast Asia...
...The reason for this exertion is obvious: If Sihanouk invited us to attack the North Vietnamese bases, then we were defending Cambodia's neutrality, not violating it, and the bombing of Cambodia appears in an entirely different light...
...The Nixon administration cited it when the Cambodian bombing became a cause celebre in 1973...
...Sihanouk's conversation with Bowles has become controversial...
...bombing halt in August 1973, the Khmer Army artillery and tactical air inventories were augmented because this solution provided less expensive and politically more palatable sources of firepower to offset the leadership and manpower deficiencies in the Khmer Armed Forces...
...But not to Shawcross...
...Sideshow, p. 350) General Palmer's end-of-tour report, for example, makes poignantly clear how even the minimum objective of achieving a military stalemate (for purposes of negotiation) was rendered impossible because the Cambodian Army's few advantages over the enemy were eroded by the progressive reduction of American aid...
...From these sanctuaries North Vietnamese forces launched forays into South Vietnam, attacking South Vietnamese and American troops and escaping back across the border into Cambodia where self-imposed restraints prevented our pursuit or retaliation...
...251-255) The distortion is calculated...
...However, their cumulative effect was to severely limit any MEDTC ability to ensure that millions of dollars in MAP [Military Assistance Program] funds were being well spent...
...followed this course it would help him solve his own problem...
...advisory or training effort, obviated major changes in the Khmer force structure, battle tactics or doctrinal reliance on firepower, even if sufficient time had been available...
...These accounts are quite moving, but Shawcross suppresses their principal points and turns the documents totally on their head...
...the Cambodian armed forces had never before been belligerents in full-scale hostilities...
...In July 1969, four months after the bombing started, he invited President Nixon to pay a visit to Phnom Penh and promised a warm reception...
...Shawcross failed to show up at our award ceremony-a practice that has become all too common with our laureates-but he was injudicious enough to challenge me to reveal examples of his legerdemain...
...Witness Westmoreland's message of April 21, 1970, that Phnom Penh was surrounded, quoted above, not to mention all of Sihanouk's public statements including his March 23, 1970, five-point declaration calling for the overthrow of the Lon Nol government, and the declarations of solidarity from the North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and Pathet Lao...
...Pursuit operations also could result in capture or destruction of munitions and supplies in the sanctuaries to which enemy forces are withdrawing...
...This is ridiculous...
...Wheeler memorandum, 20 November 1969, quoted in the 1973 Senate hearings, p. 152) Thus the source cited by Shawcross is not only irrelevant to his main point but in direct contradiction to it...
...bombing...
...road and trail networks including six bridges...
...If successfully exploited, this blow could change the whole balance of forces in Vietnam, severely curtail enemy capability in the vital III Corps area, and shorten the war...
...The "boat people" of Vietnam and the poison-gas campaign to exterminate the Hmong in Laos came a bit later...
...The Abrams/Symington exchange, even if quoted honestly, does not establish the crucial points...
...A fascinating revolution for all who aspire to a new social order...
...His vaunted research turns out to be slipshod, distorted by bias, and in some cases bordering on the fraudulent...
...Appendix B, p.8) The canard that we callously assumed the risk of massive harm to civilians should finally be laid to rest by Prince Sihanouk's recent memoirs...
...Shawcross's documentary evidence is so weak and so ten-dentiously handled that it casts serious doubt on whether his thesis holds any water at all...
...liquidation of the middle class and civil service...
...Left-wingers are repeating it fervently in the universities and other realms of the intelligentsia...
...airpower...
...But his own actions made this inevitable...
...A meticulous scholar would have noticed the discrepancy between the 1973 White Paper with the typographical error and the contemporaneous 1969 documents listing Base Area 740 as a MENU target...
...Nothing...
...Shawcross then invents a phony quotation from General Creighton Abrams: To escape the bombardment [Shawcross writes], the Vietnamese Communists had begun to move deeper into Cambodia-"thus," as Abrams later acknowledged to the Senate, "bringing them into increasing conflict with the Cambodian authorities...
...He faults the Congress, indeed, but only for the degree to which it acceded to admistration requests at all...
...321-322) but leaves the impression that it all dates from 1974...
...Under the Freedom of Information Act, he had, for example, an important cable of April 21, 1970, in which Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General William Westmoreland informed General Abrams in Saigon of the fact that Phnom Penh was surrounded and threatened: As you are certainly aware, there is highest level concern here with respect to the situation in Cambodia...
...Later they rejected a compromise because they smelled victory...
...The chronicle of Shawcross's errors is in itself a brief history of Cambodia's tragedy...
...Most soldiers in combat have "endured . . . punishment" but none before have murdered a third of the population of their country after the war was over...
...less...
...Shawcross prefers to regard the U.S.-South Vietnamese incursion as gratuitous and unprovoked, explained by the psychic aberrations of the Nixon administration: "the White House's truculence," Nixon's eagerness for "restoring his slighted authority" after domestic setbacks, "negligent and emotional decision making," and other ad hominem imputations of pathological aggression (pp...
...This exercise might suggest to an impartial observer that the United States took extraordinary pains to avoid civilian casualties...
...If we pursued VC forces into remote areas where the population would be unaffected he would "shut his eyes...
...To his embarrassment, a glaring error was discovered during the taping of David Frost's interview with Henry Kissinger in October 1979...
...Apologetics nonetheless...
...forced collectivization of agriculture...
...By mid-1974 fully 87 percent of all American military aid was being spent on ammunition...
...Yet Sihanouk and Lon Nol saw the menace elsewhere...
...The target area code-named SUPPER, against which 247 B-52 missions were flown, was Base Area 740 in eastern Cambodia-minimally populated by civilians and about 200 miles away from Base Area 704 which is in southern Cambodia along the Mekong River...
...Another source, a Cambodian intellectual, is quoted at length in reference to the 1972-73 period, but all the quotes describe Khmer Rouge organizational structure and political indoctrination, including their Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978...
...Presumably it is possible to invade a country, occupy a third of it, lay siege to its capital, and yet claim sufficient ambiguity about one's motives to render any counter-measures not only unwarranted but immoral...
...he allowed the Communists to ship war materiel to the port of Sihanoukville and then to transport it by a leisurely truck route to the sanctuaries along the border...
...The map and the relevant pages in his book were redone in subsequent editions...
...Indeed, it is one of the most impressive statements ever made of the case for attacking them...
...It is estimated that, as the enemy reaches his full deployment for the current offensive, and his operations begin to run their course, an opportunity will be presented in the HI Corps area to strike a strategic blow of major proportions...
...He had no White House documents, since they are exempt from the FOIA, yet he presumes to pass *New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979...
...If the Congress began to cut back aid or if the Khmer Rouge closed all lines of communication, then the government's troops would be deprived of "the quickfix" (to use another Cleland expression) which the Americans had thrust upon them...
...Part One, IV/B (2)) Feeling Sorry for the Khmer Rouge Shawcross at least acknowledges the genocidal brutality of the Khmer Rouge after they took power, in contrast to other prophets of the Left who still consider the charges to be imperialist propaganda...
...Therefore, as escalating prices drove munitions costs progressively higher, increasing rather than decreasing levels of MAP funding were necessary to promote successful achievement of U.S...
...The Strangulation of the Cambodian Army The Cambodian Army resisted the assault of the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge for five years, succumbing finally in April 1975...
...Shawcross excused his mistake on the ground that he had relied on a Defense Department White Paper submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 1973...
...Veterans of the combat zone are often possessed of a mad rage to destroy, and to avenge their fallen comrades...
...The book's evidentiary basis is shoddy and deceitful...
...With the U.S...
...A memorandum for Secretary Laird from General Wheeler dated November 20, 1969, recommended "additional" B-52 strikes against Base Area 740 in the MENU series...
...Authority to conduct pursuit operations to limited depths in Cambodia could result in destruction of enemy units involved as effective fighting forces, and could require the enemy not only to provide filler replacements to regenerate such units but also to provide new cadre leadership...
...Their struggle was prey to a host of difficulties: poor organization and logistics...
...151-153), to which Sideshow refers frequently...
...These are some of the lies that the left-wing brethren live by...
...It is an elegant polemic in which scrupulous regard for evidence has been swept aside by political bias and emotional compulsion...
...In time it will assume the sacrosanct quality of so many other left-wing lies: the innocence of Alger Hiss, the Great Red Scare of the 1950s, the American responsibility for the origins of the Cold War...
...64), and anyone wanting an authoritative account of the active help Sihanouk gave to the North Vietnamese will find it in Sihanouk's recent memoirs...
...Nor have any of Shawcross's emotional rebuttals to the Kissinger book even addressed one of its most important revelations: that in secret talks with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Due Tho on April 4, 1970, Kissinger proposed joint diplomatic steps to guarantee the neutralization of Cambodia...
...It is not that Shawcross lacked information...
...yet the preceding page had quoted from a North Vietnamese document hailing the Communist spring offensive of 1969 because it killed more Americans than the Tet offensive of 1968 (pp...
...He began to write and speak more openly against the North Vietnamese...
...He apologizes that his documentation is incomplete and therefore not "conclusive evidence...
...Reestab-lishment of bases deeper in Cambodia would be very difficult for the enemy, due to increased visibility and the likelihood of confrontation with the Cambodian populace and forces, the International Control Commission, and the foreign press...
...b. Cambodian villages and populated areas are readily identifiable and can be essentially avoided in conducting preplanned operations into the base areas...
...What is more, Shawcross acknowledges only in passing what the memorandum emphasized over and over again: that civilian casualties would be "minimal," for the simple and obvious reason that the North Vietnamese did not allow any Cambodians anywhere near their military dispositions...
...It is a perfect example of the application of an ideology pushed to the furthest limit of its internal logic...
...Shawcross devotes a great deal of effort to the Bowles mission, attempting to discredit, evade, deny, or dismiss the administration's contention...
...Sideshow, p. 389) It is enough to make one feel sorry for the poor Khmer Rouge...
...It was the North Vietnamese assault of March-April 1970 that plunged Cambodia into war, whatever Sideshow's evasions...
...At the end of 1979 The American Spectator awarded its Worst Book of the Year award to William Shawcross for his epic bowl of applesauce, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia...
...anti-aircraft, field artillery, rocket, and mortar positions...
...The Left has been successfully disfiguring history for years...
...With only six base areas, one might have thought that Shawcross would get it right...
...The whole month of April is practically missing from the book-except for minor American actions after mid-April, without reference to the North Vietnamese attacks to which they were a response...
...Shawcross struggles without success to prove that both these propositions were false...
...President Nixon undertook the bombing of the Cambodian sanctuaries in the knowledge that 1) Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's neutralist leader, did not object to American military action against the North Vietnamese bases, and that 2) the risk of harm to Cambodian civilians was minimal...
...Pentagon accounts document this well, and Shawcross under the FOIA had access to two of the best: the end-of-tour reports of two American officers who headed the Military Equipment Delivery Team in Cambodia (MEDTC), Major General John Cleland and his successor, Brigadier General William W. Palmer...
...I have had the opportunity to examine a duplicate set of the government files that Shawcross obtained under the FOIA...
...Shawcross cites some of Quinn's account (pp...
...Shawcross's treatment of the Bowles mission is a sham...
...Generals Palmer and Cleland stress an obvious and totally different point: that Congressional restrictions made any other strategy impossible...
...By no stretch of moral logic can the crimes of mass murderers be ascribed to those who struggled to prevent their coming into power...
...and supplies have been moved into densely covered, unstruck areas...
...The Chiefs' warning seems to have made no difference...
...21) On April 17, 1975, a society collapsed...
...Shawcross argues in essence that American bombing in 1969 "destabilized" the neutral government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk...
...For antiwar critics had assured us beforehand that the collapse of the Lon Nol government would end the killing and be a blessing for the Cambodian people...
...This tends to be confirmed by the increased activity noted since mid-October approximately mid-way between Base Areas 350 and 351...
...35, 95, 113-114) It is difficult for anyone at this point to reconstruct North Vietnamese movements under the American bombings...
...His use of the document is either deceptive or notably inept...
...130ff...
...Sideshow is filled with countless other errors and distortions...
...And far from endorsing Shawcross's claim that they moved "deeper into Cambodia" into conflicts with Cambodian authorities, the passage describes the North Vietnamese as dispersing supplies, and secondarily personnel, into more isolated areas on the immediate periphery of the main base areas, or in between the various base areas, which were strung out along the Vietnamese border...
...The first document cited by Shawcross is General Wheeler's memorandum of November 20,1969, to Secretary Laird, which we saw earlier...
...It is at this point that the enemy force is most disorganized and vulnerable...
...They] organized a secret shadow army in Kampuchea...
...The passage cited by Shawcross actually reads: Supplies have been dispersed over a greater area than before...
...None of this is to be found in Sideshow...
...another is now being born from the fierce drive of a revolution which is incontestably the most radical ever to take place in so short a time...
...This concern has been heightened by the following: a. It appears that the success of NVA and VC troops to date have encouraged them to expand what may have been limited objectives initially to a current drive to isolate Phnom Penh...
...A few weeks ago during Senate hearings on the confirmation of Alexander Haig, some senators intoned the Shawcross thesis as though it had just been passed on to them by Herodotus in a vision...
...Shaw-cross's assertion that Base Area 704 was attacked by B-52s is totally wrong...
...He would earn credit for his honesty were it not for two paragraphs of thick insinuation that the United States had plenty of motive and its denials must always be suspect, as if only bad luck can account for his failure to unearth the "direct link...
...Shawcross pronounces the claim "questionable" (p...
...Senator Symington put forward the proposition that U.S...
...The claim of North Vietnamese "spreading in Cambodia" is repeated in another passage shortly thereafter...
...A massive, total operation such as this reflects a new concept of society, in which there is no place even for the idea of a city...
...escalating legislative prohibitions deprived the Cambodians of what assets they had...
...Sideshow, p. 130) There are one or two oblique references elsewhere in Sideshow that would indeed require Sherlock Holmes to piece them together and deduce that something was going on...
...Even Sideshow contains a damaging admission by Shawcross that "a government dominated by Hanoi" was the probable outcome if the United States did nothing (p...
...In a lecture at Harvard in March 1980, Sihanouk admitted what he said to Bowles...
...there had been occasional local incidents between North Vietnamese and Cambodian authorities...
...petty corruption...
...It sets out in detail the strategic importance of the enemy sanctuaries and the danger that they presented...
...23-24) Shawcross preferred not to call this strategic analysis to his readers' attention...
...The "Black Book" issued by the Khmer Rouge (Pol Pot) regime in September 1978 recounts: After the coup d'etat, of March 18th 1970, the [North] Vietnamese organized their nationals living in Kampuchea, they armed them and used them as particularly ferocious instruments of oppression against the people of Kampuchea...
...A private communique to the great artist would have fulfilled my Christian obligations, had the preposterous theme of the Shawcross book not come to be accepted by the Left as one of recent American history's Great Truths, namely: that the United States is responsible for the Cambodian holocaust...
...For three and a half lengthy pages he walks us through the Bowles mission (pp...
...Firepower and the logistics to support it became the two most important advantages FANK had over the KC [Khmer Communists], and by 1974 it was too late to change that orientation to any extent in the short term...
...And the definitive evidence for this is found in Shaw-cross's own sources...
...Lon Nol is describing a totally different cause and a totally different effect...
...In Cambodia that did take place...
...and the progressive, Congressionally mandated withdrawal of American military support-from the 1970 ban on U.S...
...Unfortunately, Mr...
...And as political apologetics it is obscene...
...The Prince went considerably beyond acquiescence, however...
...advisers, to the 1973 halt of U.S...
...Chester Bowles: The Missing Quotation Sihanouk was powerless to prevent North Vietnam's expropriation of Cambodian territory for prosecution of the Vietnam war...
...Shawcross cites Ponchaud extensively but never the passages stressing the ideological premeditation of Khmer Rouge policies dating back at least to 1972...
...It is a powerful account that Shawcross understandably did not want his readers to see: (1) Congressional Restrictions In January 1971, the Cooper-Church Amendment specifically prohibited "advisors" in Cambodia...
...objectives in Cambodia...
...JCS 05495, 21 April 1970) The North Vietnamese were systematically interdicting all the major roads and waterways that led into Phnom Penh, cutting off the highways particularly to the north, east, and south of the city and blocking traffic on the Mekong River that was the city's lifeline...
...Sihanouk's balance of right against left became more precarious...
...The reader turns eagerly to Sideshow to see what this brilliantly comprehensive investigative reporter has to say on the subject of this North Vietnamese invasion...
...The map on page 27 of his book labeling Base Area 704 as target area SUPPER is also wrong...
...The North Vietnamese responded with the humani-tarianism for which they are renowned: They invaded the rest of Cambodia...
...By quoting selectively he develops a tendentious thesis of his own to explain Cambodia's failure...
...RET In April 1975, the Communist Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia, emptied Phnom Penh of its entire population, and embarked on a nationwide campaign of terror and destruction that claimed the lives of somewhere between one million and three million Cambodians-out of a total population of seven million...
...To understand it, one must leave historiography and explore the realm of psychiatry...
...In view of the U.S...
...From interviews with refugees fleeing Cambodia in 1973 and 1974, Quinn pieced together a detailed description of Khmer Rouge totalitarian practices and shows that they began in some areas in late 1971...
...The North Vietnamese] secretly organized a shadow national administration in Kampuchea, particularly in the north-east zone...
...The effect was inevitable...
...A similar memorandum of November 25, 1969, again listed Base Area 740 as a MENU target...
...Or he could have checked with the Defense Department, as he did in October 1979, six months after the publication of his book and only after Kissinger pointed out the error...
...It does not always happen, however, that victorious armies have endured such punishment as was inflicted upon the Khmer Rouge...
...What Shawcross failed to mention to NBC News is that he had two documents in his possession making clear that Base Area 740, not 704, was one of the six targets of the B-52 bombing program...
...The New York Times reported the rapid advance of the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia throughout the period and published a map on April 18, 1970, showing them already in control of a third of the country...
...Four years later, British journalist William Shawcross produced a book entitled Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia* As its subtitle suggests, it attempts to prove American responsibility for the horrors wrought by the Khmer Rouge...
...Close scrutiny of the materials shows that the evidentiary basis of the book is so seriously flawed as to discredit his whole enterprise...
...109-111...
...This would seem to say something about how "neutral" Cambodia was under Sihanouk...
...eleven North Vietnamese base camps and bivouac areas...
...What Rodman has discovered is that Shawcross is even slipperier than I reported in our February 1980 issue...
...he has suppressed entirely a mountain of evidence in his possession that contradicted his principal points...
...Shawcross was a godsend...
...Shawcross later retreated to the narrower assertion that "many" of the individual clashes listed in Kissinger's book "have never been mentioned before, neither in Nixon's announcement of the invasion, nor anywhere else...
...But there is more...
...government study by Foreign Service Officer Kenneth M. Quinn...
...respect for 'the ways of the people.'" (pp...
...Sihanouk drew closer to the United States...
...He pointed out that while he could not say this publicly or officially, if the United States followed this course, it might even help him to solve his problem...
...He could not say this publicly or officially, but if the U.S...
...He quotes from the memorandum in the most selective fashion {Sideshow, pp...
...This avid observer and barometer of the balance of power now saw the United States as a potent counterweight to the hated North Vietnamese, restoring his country's freedom of action and enhancing-yes, enhancing-its neutrality...
...Sideshow, p. 95) General Wheeler's memorandum, however, turns out not to refer to "spreading the fighting'' at all...
...The first memorandum was published in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings of 1973 (pp...
...But Cambodia had never been at war...
...The evidence of Father Ponchaud and Kenneth Quinn that the Khmer Rouge were totalitarian thugs in 1971 and 1972 contradicts the thesis that Shawcross struggles mightily but in vain to prove: that it was American bombing that turned the Khmer Rouge into butchers...
...Undoubtedly they moved to evade the precisely targeted attacks...
...Prince Sihanouk is rather more honest, telling the Cambodia Affairs Institute in Washington ten years after his overthrow: "If I lost my Fauteuilpresi-dentiel and my Chamcar Mon Palace in Phnom Penh to Marshal Lon Nol who occupied them for five years, it was because I tremendously helped the Viet-cong and the North Vietnamese.'' North Vietnamese Assault on Cambodia: The Missing Month of April Like Sherlock Holmes's dog that didn't bark, the most striking distortion in Sideshow is an epic event in Cambodian history that is simply omitted from the book...
...The war and the causes for which it was fought had brought desolation while nurturing and then giving power to a little group of zealots sustained by Manichean fear...
...Frost based the accusation on the following passage in Sideshow: Three of the fifteen sanctuaries-base areas 704, 354 and 707, which had "sizeable concentrations of Cambodian civilian or military population" in or around them-were not recommended for attack at all...
...Seven months after the bombing began, if Shawcross is to be believed, the Cambodian government should have complained of the American bombing as the cause of disruption and "destabilization" that Shawcross is so eager to prove...
...The savagery was systematic-forced dispersal of whole populations...
...Possibly most important of all, however, is the fact that once US/RVNAF [U.S./South Vietnamese] pursuit operations have been undertaken, the enemy would be forced to adjust to the possibility of future pursuit operations, and would not be able to operate in border areas with confidence that sanctuary was available nearby...
...whether Sihanouk actually told Bowles that the United States was free to bomb the sanctuaries cannot be definitely determined from the sanitized State Department papers," he writes...
...The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT...
...The Shawcross book was widely praised for its impressive documentation, even by some who did not entirely swallow its conclusions...
...After the B-52 bombing started in 1969 and was reported in the American press, Sihanouk responded in similar terms publicly: He complained if Cambodians were hurt but did not object if we attacked the Vietnamese Communists who were illegally occupying a portion of his country...
...This Defense Department statement indeed listed Base Area 704 as one of the six base areas targeted in the MENU program, apparently by a typographical error...
...So whatever the book's value as psychotherapy, as a history of Cambodia it is a joke...
...Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life," was the headline of a piece in the New York Times on April 13, datelined Phnom Penh...
...This was published seven months before Sideshow appeared but Shawcross does not refer to it...
...as well as numerous bunkers, trenches, and defensive positions -none closer than one and one-half kilometers to any civilian habitation...
...JCSM-207-69, 9 April 1969, Appendix E, p.27) [T]he enemy's military forces in Cambodia habitually occupy areas close to the SVN [South Vietnam] border and away from significant Cambodian presence...
...Nor is it likely that the Army Chief of Staff would tell a powerful senator on the Armed Services Committee that he was full of baloney...
...The evacuation of Phnom Penh follows traditional Khmer revolutionary practice: ever since 1972 the guerrilla fighters had been sending all the inhabitants of the villages and towns they occupied into the forest to live, often burning their homes so they would have nothing to come back for...
...FANK was equipped with the means to employ it in large amounts...
...When it became apparent that the "insurgents" were rapidly evolving into main force units in their own right, the U.S...
...We accorded the book high marks for Shawcross's masterful juggling of documents and for his assiduity in propounding themes at once illogical and moronic...
...The official reasons certainly had something to do with the decision to clear the city, but they do not seem sufficient...
...The genocide was premeditated, motivated by ideology, and the work of political fanatics...
...training, any improvement in FANK leadership was predicated on almost non-existent Khmer initiatives since American officers were too restricted to assist...
...air operations, to the 1975 strangulation of military supplies...
...the second memorandum was released to Shawcross in 1977 under the Freedom of Information Act...
...Sideshow, p. 114) Lon Nol was writing of incidents of conflict between the North Vietnamese and Cambodian troops, thus confirming what General Abrams "acknowledged" to Senator Symington...
...Shawcross's thesis is that American B-52 bombings of remote sanctuary areas in 1969-1970 forced the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops to push their supply bases "deeper into the country" and "spread the fighting out from the border areas,'' thereby disrupting Cambodian politics and "destabilizing" Sihanouk's rule...
...In the following piece, Rodman shows one of the ways the surgery is accomplished...
...I suppose I could have kept this matter private-a mundane scandal known but to Rodman, Tyrrell, Shawcross, and Shawcross 's favorite cleric...
...It was after a month of these assaults that the United States and South Vietnam launched the so-called Cambodian incursion on April 30 to block the North Vietnamese and to protect American and South Vietnamese lives against the vast new North Vietnamese military base ballooning over all of eastern Cambodia...
...Even Shawcross describes this (p...
...But it was too convenient to be true...
...Command] because the best place to conduct such operations is against his rallying and collection points in Cambodia...
...Never does Shawcross quote a word of what Sihanouk said to Bowles on the subject...
...b. Most lines of communication leading into Phnom Penh from the north, east, and south have been interdicted by enemy forces and the security of Phnom Penh and the Cambodian Government appears to be seriously threatened...
...However the Army's inability even to maintain the strength of its intervention brigades, let alone achieve significant growth, soon became self-evident...
...For example: An appropriate time to undertake operations to destroy an enemy force is subsequent to a contact in which the enemy has been defeated and is withdrawing...
...a less explosive form of retaliation seemed warranted...
...But Shawcross nevertheless excuses the atrocities by another line of argument: that they were all America's fault...
...The State Department escort officer's report of the Bowles mission, which Shawcross received under the Freedom of Information Act, contained evidence that could not be more conclusive, which Shawcross chose to conceal from his readers: Then, in one of his amazing reversals [the report read], the Prince said he would not object if the U.S...
...The same thing could have been found in Chester Bowles's memoir Promises to Keep, published in 1971: Later, in a quiet private visit, Sihanouk volunteered that he would not object to the United States' engaging in "hot pursuit" in unpopulated areas of Cambodia...
...judgment above all on White House decisions...
...The new Cambodian government, even before it stripped Sihanouk of his powers, formally asked the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in mid-March 1970 to vacate their Cambodian sanctuaries...
...In the last eight years, degree, law, moderation had been forsworn...
...lack of training and the technical know-how to maintain and use equipment...
...Considering how much of the weight of Shawcross's entire argument rests on this complicated syllogism, it is striking how weak is the evidentiary basis for it...
...Only the base areas in which the danger to civilians was found to be "minimal" were recommended for targeting...
...The North Vietnamese changed all that...
...In fairness to the agile Prince, however, in the late 1960s he began to feel put-upon by the heavy-handed North Vietnamese and tried to square accounts by telling American officials that he would not object at all if the United States attacked the Vietnamese Communist bases and drove them out of Cambodia...
...When Kissinger described these North Vietnamese attacks in his book and the David Frost interview, Shawcross took evasive action...
...Both these things did happen and each contributed toward making the fall of the regime inevitable...
...The only account in Sideshow, remember, is that the North Vietnamese moved westward to "secur[e] their lines of communication.'' What is the evidence...
...Conversely, Cambodians rarely go into areas under de facto control of the VC/NVA...
...See Carl Gershman's "Cambodia and the Prince" in the September 1980 American Spectator.-Ed...
...But Shawcross was unapologetic...
...Shawcross is not really recommending an alternative approach to assistance...
...American bombing had ended twenty months before they came to power...
...Shawcross has been backtracking lately, writing in a recent Harper's that the movement, of North Vietnamese "deeper into the country" may not have been very extensive but that "a few miles deeper" was enough to disrupt Cambodia's political equilibrium...
...bombings and ground probes from South Vietnam must have induced the North Vietnamese "to expand their areas of control or operations, thus bringing them into increasing conflict with the Cambodian authorities," Abrams indeed "acknowledged" this in the vaguest terms (' 'Yes, I think that is a fair statement...
...engaged VC/NVA [Viet-cong/North Vietnamese Army] forces on Cambodian territory, both sides would be guilty of violating Cambodian soil, but the VC/NVA would be "more guilty" (sic...
...For "that means that, in the debate that has riven our country for 10 years, Henry Kissinger is right and William Shawcross is all wrong.'' What the Chiefs' Memorandum Really Said Nixon ordered the B-52 bombing of certain North Vietnamese sanctuaries on the Pentagon's assurance, secondly, that attacking them posed minimal danger of Cambodian civilian casualties...
...And neither General Abrams nor Senator Symington even touched upon the two central steps in Shawcross's argument: that the bombing drove the Vietnamese and the war "deeper into Cambodia" and was responsible for Undermining Sihanouk's government...
...instead of improving the intrinsic fighting quality of Lon Nol's troops, Cleland created a fatal new dependency in them...
...The evacuation of Phnom Penh was planned months before...
...they placed the condemnation precisely where it belonged...
...advisers meant that there was no possibility of "improving the intrinsic fighting quality of Lon Nol's troops," as Shawcross professes to recommend...
...While Shawcross may not have had a verbatim transcript, he had an explicit summary of what Sihanouk said...
...Ponchaud is a friend of Shawcross and no defender of American policy...
...In the course of events, 247 B-52 missions were flown against it...
...his argument is that no assistance should have been given the Cambodians in the first place...
...directives pledging support by North Vietnamese cadre and armed forces for the FUNK...
...engaged in "hot pursuit" in unpopulated areas...
...Most observers ascribe the coup to Cambodian popular resentment at the continuing North Vietnamese occupation of Cambodian territory tolerated by Sihanouk...
...Unfortunately we do not have General Abrams's own analysis because Senator Symington moved to a different subject...
...In sum, the U.S...
...Nevertheless, Shawcross is confident enough to inform his readers that his documents "suggest that it is not so...
...The deeper reason was an ideological one, as we later saw clearly when we learned that the provincial towns, villages, and even isolated farms in the countryside had also been emptied of their inhabitants...
...Seldom has FANK outmaneuvered the enemy-he has outgunned him...
...In fact, the United States was taken by surprise...
...The book advertises itself as based on "thousands of pages of classified U.S...
...It is a compendium of errors, sleight of hand, and egregious selectivity...
...It was this wholesale North Vietnamese assault on eastern Cambodia, beginning in late March 1970, that plunged Cambodia into the Indochina war for the first time...
...Shawcross accomplishes this by quoting at length only from the caveats that the memorandum's draftsmen included for the sake of honesty: that all estimates of likely civilian casualties were "tenuous at best," that "some Cambodian casualties" would likely be sustained in certain kinds of military operations, and that the "surprise effect" of attacks could tend to increase the danger, "as could the probable lack of protective shelters around Cambodian homes to the extent that exists in South Vietnam.'' On reading the Chiefs' memorandum carefully one finds, first of all, that these acknowledged risks to civilians applied to combined air and ground operations against the sanctuaries, not to aerial attacks on specific military targets ordered by Nixon...
...Ponchaud writes, for example (emphases added): [AJccusing foreigners cannot acquit the present leaders of Kampuchea: their inflexible ideology had led them to invent a radically new kind of man in a radically new society...
...The point was made repeatedly, in passages that Shawcross found inconvenient to call to the reader's attention...
...28-29) to imply a callous disregard for human life-exactly the opposite of the memorandum's obvious meaning...
...The Symington-Case Amendment of February 1972 prescribed that the total number of U.S...
...Of course, if the U.S...
...Palmer Report, 30 April 1975, Part One, IV/B (1)) (2) Reliance on Firepower FANK was originally conceived as a "light infantry force" designed to fight "Khmer Insurgents...
...The antiwar movement's temptation to gloat at the long-predicted collapse of the "corrupt" anti-Communist regimes of Indochina was quickly stilled by the tales of holocaust that emerged from Cambodia...
...One hopes that no craven sophistry will ever induce free peoples to accept the doctrine that Shawcross embodies: that resistance to totalitarianism is immoral...
...There is but one disingenuous descriptive sentence, ascribing only defensive motives to the North Vietnamese: [T]he North Vietnamese moved westward into Cambodia with the apparent intention of securing their lines of communication...
...Even the map on page 27 of Sideshow showing the Communist base areas in the 1969-70 period offers no indication of any change in their location or extent over those two years...
...The Nixon administration in early 1969 lifted some of these restraints...
...272-277) relies on a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff report that is itself wildly erroneous...
...And he blames not the enemy's flight from American bombing in Cambodia but the enemy's withdrawal (repli) from South Vietnam, made necessary (as Shawcross notes) by American and South Vietnamese clearing operations in South Vietnam...
...Vietnam critics could now "resist all attempts to make them feel guilty for the stand they took against the war,'' as Stanley Hoffmann urged them in an enthusiastic review...
...Bowles was skeptical, but Sihanouk's position never deviated from this...
...Incidentally, Rodman's scholarship appears all the more exquisite when one considers the lofty laudations Shawcross has received for his "scholarship...
...Government documents" obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA...
...taught the Khmer Armed Forces to survive through firepower...
...Its author, Sydney Schan-berg, had comforted us a month before with a report that the Khmer Rouge would be more moderate after victory and that fears of a bloodbath were unfounded...
...The option of conducting pursuit operations has essentially been withheld from COMUSMACV [the U.S...
...In 1979, four years after the Khmer Rouge victory, the North Vietnamese invaded Cambodia again, demonstrating that the heirs of Ho Chi Minh never had the slight-est intention of tolerating a truly independent Cambodia, even an independent Communist Cambodia...
...This is one of the central theses of his book, and for it he offers no documentation whatsoever: All wars are designed to arouse anger, and almost all soldiers are taught to hate and to dehumanize their enemy...
...And of course the brethren are very fine at spreading them...
...However, even with his increased dispersal of personnel and supplies, the enemy continues to use portions of his old areas...
...c. Very few permanent structures exist in the base areas outside the Cambodian villages...
...The bombing was destabilizing him...
...police terror-and it was all standard Khmer Rouge practice in all the areas they controlled in Cambodia from as early as 1971...
...Rodman is one of the few scholars who actually bothered to check Shawcross's work...
...Before the March 1970 coup that overthrew him, Sihanouk writes, the North Vietnamese sanctuaries were "limited to a few outlying and uninhabited sectors along the Cambodia-Vietnam borderline...
...His book is not subtitled "The Khmer Rouge and the Destruction of Cambodia," but "Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia.'' The viciousness of the Khmer Rouge he attributes to a paroxysm of vengeance, a seizure of "Manichean fear" induced by the severe "punishment" inflicted upon them in the years of their struggle-that is to say, by American and Cambodian efforts to resist them...
...Its elaborate documentation is impressive only if one has not seen the original documents...
...The Joint Chiefs of Staff examined 15 North Vietnamese base areas in Cambodia with the explicit mandate, inter alia, to consider the risk of harm to civilians...
...This North Vietnamese assault would seem to have little to do with "securing their lines of communication," as Sideshow fatuously claims, but a great deal to do with strangling the lines of communication of the Cambodian capital...
...165...
...Absolutely nothing...
...two storage areas...
...It is an article of faith in and-American demonology that the United States had a hand in the coup...
...The erroneous figure "proving" American barbarity was too tempting to admit of noticing discrepancies...
...FANK was provided modern equipment but was denied the overall training, technical know-how, and military professionalism desperately needed to modernize it in the areas of tactical leadership, staff planning and coordination, personnel and financial management or logistics operations...
...and that America's prolongation of the conflict for five years paved the way for the victory of the Khmer Rouge and accounted for their genocidal brutality after they took power...
...What future possibility could be more terrible than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now...
...In a book so fawned over for its scholarship, this is remarkable sleight of hand...
...Vietnam experience, the intent of these restrictions is understandable...
...military staff notebooks on the formation of Cambodian units led by North Vietnamese cadre and of signal battalions, and so on...
...Base Area 704 appeared on the White House's Menu as Supper...
...Phnom Penh itself owed its expansion to French colonialism, Chinese commerce, and the bureaucracy of the monarchy, followed by that of the republic...
...The towns of Cambodia had grown up around marketplaces...
...February 25,1971- and not find that the North Vietnamese invasion of eastern Cambodia was the reason for the allied military operations of April 30, 1970...
...Embassy in the bombing procedures of 1973 (pp...
...Shawcross naturally pursues this line of enquiry, only to admit in the end that he can find "no direct link" between the U.S.'government and the coup plotters (Sideshow, p. 112...
...asked Anthony Lewis on March 17, 1975, urging a cutoff of American aid...
...Virtually all those that do exist are enemy-occupied...
...He said this to various visitors, one of the most important being Ambassador Chester Bowles, who on January 10, 1968, met with the Prince in Phnom Penh on a mission for President Johnson...
...A terrifying one for all who have any respect for human beings, (p...
...objective of keeping FANK alive and the GKR [Government of the Khmer Republic) viable was assured through the quick-fix of massive U.S...
...How perfectly natural that they would up and murder three million of their own people...
...Appendix C, pp...
...in Cambodia, as the Chiefs reported, it [the bombing] forced them to "disperse over a greater area than before...
...The raids spread the fighting out from the border areas...
...He writes of the increase in numbers (accroissemenf) of Vietnamese Communist forces in their base areas-not the spreading out of these bases...
...192) Shawcross had another important source as well: a U.S...
...How psychologically comforting to have in hand a convoluted theory and purported evidence that American government decisions were the propelling force behind the horrible events after all...
...This is public knowledge...
...that the U.S.-South Vietnamese incursion of 1970 triggered the bloody war in Cambodia that engulfed the country...
...Abandoning the Cambodian government was "for the good of the suffering Cambodians themselves," the Los Angeles Times assured us on April 11...
...Shawcross's other tack has been to claim that Hanoi's intention in devouring eastern Cambodia in March-April 1970 "has never been proven" and has always been in dispute...
...Stephen Young, Assistant Dean of Harvard Law School, heard Sihanouk's lecture and called it "an incredibly significant admission...
...personnel in Cambodia should not exceed 200...
...These predictions turned out to be horribly wrong...
...At a time when major American troop withdrawals were being planned, the North Vietnamese shelled a number of cities in South Vietnam, in flagrant breach of the pledge that had been the quid pro quo for President Johnson's halt to the bombing of North Vietnam...
...In a letter to Nigel Ryan of NBC News on October 10, 1979, Shawcross acknowledged that his book was wrong- and then offered an explanation as false as the original error...
...According to the JCS memorandum of November 25, 1969, Base Area 740 contained enemy troop concentrations...
...It was an experience full of surprises...
...Beginning in about 1965, North Vietnam established a string of military bases on the territory of neutral Cambodia, along the border, just opposite South Vietnam...
...Destabilizing" Sihanouk: The Elusive Evidence Sihanouk was deposed as Cambodian Chief of State on March 18, 1970, by his own government and National Assembly...
...The people of Cambodia paid the price...
...Nor does it always happen that such an immature and tiny force comes to power after its country's social order has been obliterated, and the nation faces the danger of takeover by a former ally, its ancient enemy...
...It is interesting to read what else the 1969 documents contain...
...Now I have asked Peter Rodman, formerly of the National Security Council Staff and currently Henry Kissinger's research assistant on the Kissinger memoirs, to illuminate the Shawcross method of cooking up history...
...Shawcross then resorts to a more complicated line of argument to establish American responsibility...
...Base Area 704: The Wrong Box From the Joint Chiefs' memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians...
...This is, of course, ridiculous...
...David Frost, informed of the error by Kissinger, was sufficiently embarrassed to request that the taped segment be deleted from the NBC program broadcast on October 11, 1979- It was deleted...
...Without the time or inclination to verify his evidence, reviewers seemed mesmerized by invocation of the Freedom of Information Act, as if it were a voodoo incantation that paralyzed all critical faculties...
...It has been a demanding task...
...This time Shawcross invokes an article published in Sihanouk's monthly journal he Sangkum in October 1969 written by Sihanouk's Prime Minister and Defense Minister., Marshal Lon Nol: . . . their spread [Shawcross writes] was due [in Lon Nol's words] to flooding and to "the operational pressure exerted by their adversary," that is, to clearing operations by American and South Vietnamese troops...
...American bombing reached its peak in the spring of 1973...
...This set off a chain of events that ultimately engulfed Cambodia in ten years of bloody conflict...
...29) The only problem with this is that Base Area 704, because of its sizeable number of civilian inhabitants, was never a target of the B-52 bombing...
...Shawcross did neither...
...How politically convenient to be able to focus responsibility on a Republican administration for the most gruesome outcome of a failed military commitment begun under two liberal Democratic Presidents...
...Frost hurled at Kissinger the accusation that the White House ordered hundreds of B-52 attacks against a North Vietnamese base area in Cambodia that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had specifically recommended against attacking because it was heavily populated by Cambodians...
...But there were no recriminations in America...
...This piece might not stop the Left from spreading its mumbo jumbo on Cambodia, but it will make the Left's job more difficult, at least among the literate...
...Sideshow, p. 312) Shawcross second-guesses the American strategy and blames Generals Cleland and Palmer for the disaster that befell the Khmer National Armed Forces (FANK): Cleland explained the rationale-and, unconsciously, its serious implications-in his end-of-tour report: "The FANK depend on firepower to win...
...Then along came Shawcross...
...Sweeping out of their bases along the border, they attacked and overran Cambodian military outposts, Cambodian towns, Cambodian roads, and Cambodian river communications all over the eastern half of the country, linking their scattered sanctuaries into one massive continuous base area aimed at South Vietnam and advancing westward on Phnom Penh, surrounding and menacing the capital with the evident intention of intimidating the new government into passivity, surrender, or collapse...
...Yet no one could possibly read the Nixon administration's public statements of the time-April 30, June 3, June 30,1970...
...soldiers' notebooks detailing North Vietnamese activity in forming and training guerrilla units...
...Shawcross has admitted the error...
...It refers rather to the enemy's dispersal of supplies "over a greater area than before...
...The article was entitled: "The Implantations of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Along Our Frontier...
...But rather remarkable in this article, seven months after the beginning of the MENU bombing, is the absence of any reference to North Vietnamese "spreading" and, indeed, the complete absence of any mention of the U.S...
...Among North Vietnamese documents captured by the allies in the post-April 30 sweep through the sanctuaries were guidebooks for the organizing (by the North Vietnamese) of the Sihanouk-proclaimed "National United Front of Cambodia" (FUNK) at the hamlet and village level to take power after the overthrow of the Lon Nol government...
...Shawcross certainly had enough documentation to show that the American government at the highest levels had good reason to believe the worst about North Vietnamese intentions...
...The crucial questions are where, and to what extent, and with what traceable consequences...
...No one in the Nixon administration was eager to resume the bombing of the North...
...On the ground, the North Vietnamese efforts to establish (and dominate) the insurgency aroused the resentment of, among others, the Khmer Rouge (the Cambodian Communists, who came to power in their own right five years later...
...Proper management and effective use of the equipment provided was apparently to be learned by a trial and error, do-it-yourself process which time would not permit...
...All this had to be swept away and an egalitarian rural society put in its place, (p...
...His first response was to claim that Kissinger's account of the North Vietnamese assault was an afterthought: "[A]t the time of the [U.S.-South Vietnamese] invasion, neither Nixon nor Kissinger mentioned these moves or used them to justify American actions," Newsweek reported him as claiming...
...He dismisses the generals' own analysis (without informing his readers of its contents) in a crude ad hominem attack: These reports must be read with caution, since each man was anxious to promote his own career in the Army despite the Cambodian debacle...
...As that firepower was increasingly denied to them because of escalating munitions costs and reduced funding, the only remaining option appeared to be manpower...
...It is the responsibility of any intelligent journal of opinion to keep the record straight even from the credulity of senators...
...There is more to this April 9, 1969 memorandum...
Vol. 14 • March 1981 • No. 3
