Rodman Responds
Rodman, Peter W.
Peter W. Rodman RODMAN RESPONDS Sideshow: Still fraudulent after all these words. With great abandon Mr. Shawcross flings accusations of war crimes and responsibility for three million deaths,...
...The insinuation of American barbarity was too important to the book...
...Shawcross's evasions are feeble...
...that they intended all along to destroy Cambodian society in order to reconstruct it according to their fanatical theories...
...Cambodian army's weaknesses and unavoidable to rely on firepower...
...His "research" turned out to be filled with glaring errors, sleight of hand, and calculated omissions that amounted to suppression of inconvenient evidence that contradicted his arguments...
...I am saddened that Mr...
...27) shows no change in their extent or location over the period of the bombing...
...At the end of March and beginning of April, North Vietnamese troops broke out of their sanctuaries and invaded the interior of Cambodia, overrunning Cambodian towns, military posts, and lines of communication, surrounding and laying seige to Phnom Penh, the country's capital, all the while recruiting guerrillas and building up a shadow army and shadow administration to take over the country...
...Shawcross claiming that the conversation did not take place...
...The debate, then, would seem to be between those who opposed the Khmer Rouge after 1975 and those who opposed the Khmer Rouge before 1975, when it could have made a difference...
...He has no evidence, only surmise and insinuation...
...many were mentioned in Nixon's speeches and even reported in the New York Times...
...The evidence of what the North Vietnamese were doing is overwhelming, unambiguous, and irrefutable...
...How nice...
...Shawcross's argument...
...Chester Bowles: The Missing Quotation: Sihanouk's conversation with Chester Bowles in January 1968 was the earliest of many utterances in which the Cambodian chief of state invited American attacks on the illegal North Vietnamese military bases in Cambodia...
...That B-52s instead of fighter-bombers were used is a red herring...
...The explanation he ignores-or rather suppresses-is the one explanation stressed clearly by two of his principal documentary sources: that the Khmer Rouge's motivation was ideological...
...The consequences for Cambodia would have been the same...
...Shawcross considers this a "singularly earnest and beautiful" analysis, I consider it an obvious evasion...
...That his key sources had "almost unanimous contempt for Henry Kissinger" is a good clue to the personal bias that animated his whole enterprise...
...Shawcross is now in essence conceding that key arguments of the Nixon administration were true, that he has no answer to the new information revealed in the Kissinger memoirs and elsewhere, and that he has no new evidence to fill in the gaping holes that I found in his documentation...
...This is one of the most important events in Cambodia's history...
...I can understand his discomfiture...
...It says nothing about forcing the North Vietnamese to spread deeper into the country, or about undermining Sihanouk...
...Destabilizing'' Sihanouk: The Elusive Evidence: If I can understand his somewhat incoherent explanation under this heading, Mr...
...It was the first of a dozen occasions when the United States proposed the neutralization of Cambodia, and Hanoi flatly rejected it...
...Shawcross urges, not only would South Vietnam and the 400,000 American troops there have been put in serious jeopardy, but the North Vietnamese would have had to resort to the Khmer Rouge to help govern Cambodia just as they resorted to the Khmer Rouge to help prosecute the war...
...China, North Vietnam, the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge, and the Pathet Lao all immediately joined in the call for the overthrow of the Cambodian government and promised assistance...
...On the B-52 bombing which had begun ten days earlier, he took exactly the position he had told Bowles he would take: He could not endorse it publicly, even though he really wanted us to do it...
...Shawcross finds it...
...Shaw-cross's "explanation" of Khmer Rouge behavior is always in terms of their response to dirty deeds done to them by others...
...the truth is that Bowles published the same account ten years ago in his memoirs...
...There is simply no way for Mr...
...In his March 28, 1969 news conference, of which Shawcross makes so much, the Prince accused the Communists of "bringing] the war to our country...
...Shawcross never explains what he thinks the North Vietnamese were up to...
...In Sideshow he falsely accused the White House of ordering B-52 attacks against a particular base area that the Joint Chiefs had recommended against attacking because it was heavily populated by Cambodian civilians...
...Nor were the North Vietnamese "pushed" into Cambodia, as Mr...
...He will have to come up with something better than complaining that he never heard of this evidence before, for that only confirms that he wrote his book in woeful ignorance of much of what really went on...
...Shawcross would have us believe...
...The Kissinger memoirs quote from the verbatim transcript...
...In subsequent public remarks throughout 1969 he dropped even the pro forma criticism and virtually endorsed the bombing...
...It is interesting how he...
...Shawcross deliberately avoids...
...He has written a book on the Cambodian war that deliberately omits the most crucial event: the North Vietnamese invasion that began it...
...Cleland and Palmer pointed out that congressional restrictions on U.S...
...Sideshow did tell us, for example, about Khieu Samphan's doctoral thesis, written in Paris in 1959, which called for the wholesale uprooting and reshaping of Cambodian society...
...The Vietnamese never objected to the Khmer Rouge's internal policies, only to their independence of Hanoi...
...on March 23, in Peking, he announced formation of a liberation army and a government-in-exile...
...my article quotes from the State Department summary...
...If Mr...
...Shawcross simply asserted this in various places in Sideshow, without analysis...
...Shawcross misleadingly and selectively used Generals Cleland's and Palmer's military reports to support a thesis very different from what the reports contained...
...I can only guess at Mr...
...I have accused him of making excuses for Khmer Rouge genocide, and I maintain my view...
...Shawcross now acknowledges ("admits to be true...
...He should not pretend, however, that it is a serious history of Cambodia...
...Shawcross has already admitted this blunder, and it is probably cruel of me to keep rubbing it in...
...Kissinger's memoirs present considerable documentary evidence that the United States regarded the status quo ante as the best attainable situation and was caught by surprise by the coup...
...There can no longer be any doubt that American bombing of the North Vietnamese bases had the explicit and continued support of Sihanouk...
...In a November article in his journal Le Sangkum he continued to complain only of Communist "subversion, aggression, infiltration, and occupation" of his country...
...Is Mr...
...William Colby, by the way, remains convinced that the Cambodians acted completely on their own without American involvement, and tells me that he told this to Mr...
...Shawcross now in disorderly retreat, as the accuracy of the Nixon administration's account of what Sihanouk actually said has been established beyond doubt...
...In fact the North Vietnamese invasion was "provoked" only by the new Cambodian government's demand that they leave Cambodian soil...
...As for the North Vietnamese, how their 1978 invasion of Cambodia could have prompted the Khmer Rouge to murder three million of their own people in 1975 is beyond me...
...Shawcross's motives for trying to cover up the premeditated, ideological origins of the Khmer Rouge genocide...
...In fact, American bombing had ended twenty months before the Khmer Rouge carried out their systematic murder and destruction after victory in April 1975...
...Shawcross's conclusion either...
...the targets of aerial attack were specific military facilities within those base areas...
...In his famous paragraph on page 389 of Sideshow, the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in April 1975 is explained as the inevitable result of their "fear," their "rage to avenge their fallen comrades," and the "punishment" they had "endured" at the hands of the Americans...
...Let me take my original points in order...
...Shawcross hastened to assure us that "the methods . . . prescribed . . . were essentially moderate" {Sideshow, p. 243) -the implication being that there could not possibly be a connection between this totalitarian doctrine of 1959 and the very same policy implemented with savagery in 1975...
...Feeling Sorry for the Khmer Rouge: Mr...
...Their early efforts were limited only by their limited means-as Shawcross's quotation from Quinn confirms ! Khmer Rouge brutality, increased as time passed because their power and territorial control increased as time passed...
...What the Chiefs' Memorandum Really Said: One of Mr...
...Amid all the overwrought and at times incoherent bluster, Mr...
...Shawcross suppresses their analysis, attacks their reliance on firepower, but has no alternative strategy to offer-because his real argument {Sideshow, p. 350) is that Congress should not have allowed any help to the Cambodians at all...
...Hanoi's negotiator, Le Due Tho, in his meeting with Kissinger on April 4, rejected the American proposal for neutralization of Cambodia and demanded the overthrow of the Cambodian government...
...Shawcross got his wish...
...Father Frangois Ponchaud was exactly on the mark when he described Khmer Rouge atrocities as "a perfect example of the application of an ideology pushed to the furthest limit of its internal logic...
...He is free to write a hatchet job on Henry Kissinger any time he wants...
...He became much friendlier to the United States and warmly invited Nixon to visit Phnom Penh...
...The theory that our bombing brought down Sihanouk is one of the most crucial points of Mr...
...For example, he foolishly cited a JCS memo that really deals with Hanoi's dispersal of supplies in areas between the base areas, not the spread of the fighting to the interior, and an article by Lon Nol complaining of increases in numbers of Viet Cong in the base areas,.not their being driven out of them into the country...
...Shawcross has reduced the debate to the level of personal abuse...
...Shawcross flings accusations of war crimes and responsibility for three million deaths, yet he howls "smear" when someone challenges his scholarship...
...Shawcross's book dealt with this whole episode dishonestly and he should not pretend otherwise...
...The base areas he lists ranged over dozens of square miles or more...
...Shawcross's real problem is not that he is being persecuted by the Thought Police but that he is unable to rebut any of my points...
...Indeed, more of his documents contradict it than support it...
...The systems analysts were wrong on this as they were wrong on the logistical importance of Sihanoukville, a similar example of intelligence analysis influenced by dovish preferences...
...Shawcross for his always guarded, qualified, half-hearted criticism of the Khmer Rouge...
...All the JCS memoranda proposing B-52 missions specified that the designated targets were kilometers away from civilian habitation...
...These authors understood the Khmer Rouge with a clarity that Mr...
...Kenneth Quinn showed that they carried out the same totalitarian practices systematically, as a deliberate act of policy, in all areas they controlled as early as 1971...
...In Sideshow he quoted selectively and deceptively from a 1969 memorandum of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make precisely that accusation...
...Base Area 704: The Wrong Box: Mr...
...I take this as a welcome retraction of the clear and repeated insinuation in his book...
...Shawcross to deny that they happened...
...In December in the same magazine he praised the Nixon Doctrine and welcomed American military power as the only hope for Cambodia's survival...
...Shawcross, alas, still seems not to understand his own documents...
...The minimal population figures he lists in fact prove my point...
...Sideshow fiddled with the evidence so that North Vietnamese actions appeared as minor movements for defensive purposes and as nothing more than a pretext for opportunistic American aggression...
...It was the North Vietnamese, not the Americans, who wrecked the equilibrium of neutral Cambodia...
...The fact remains that he cannot substantiate it...
...The Abrams-Symington exchange, even if quoted honestly-as I stated in my article -does not establish Mr...
...And as I have shown in my article, none of the documents that Mr...
...And what is the evidence of Communist intentions in that period...
...It is interesting to watch Mr...
...Shawcross disputed this as "questionable...
...The North Vietnamese Assault on Cambodia: The Missing Month of April: How pleasing it is to see that Mr...
...aid and advisers are what made it impossible to remedy the...
...I did commit the appalling crime of circulating an earlier draft of my findings, which obviously embarrassed him a great deal...
...Shawcross is essentially admitting that he has no new evidence to salvage what I demonstrated to be yet another series of unsubstantiated claims...
...The facts are now clearly in the public domain, and they destroy Sideshow's argument.f I am delighted to see Mr...
...If Mr...
...Prince Sihanouk, immediately after his ouster, threw in his lot with the Communists and publicly demanded the overthrow of the new Cambodian government...
...it is corroborated by all other evidence including contemporary news accounts.** The North Vietnamese attacks enumerated in the Kissinger book are taken from contemporary internal reporting...
...Sihanouk makes this point at excruciating length in his memoirs, describing the logistical, materiel, training, artillery, and tank support provided to the Khmer Rouge by Hanoi.ff Had we turned Cambodia over to the North Vietnamese in 1970, as Mr...
...My article in The American Spectator was a careful examination of his use of documentary sources...
...that the North Vietnamese launched major military operations throughout eastern Cambodia after Sihanouk's ouster, weeks before the U.S.-South Vietnamese incursion of April 30, 1970...
...I atoned for my sin by going public, which has upset him even more.* Mr...
...One final point, on the alleged unconstitutionally of the President's conduct of the Indochina war...
...If some of the systems analysts on Kis-singer's staff were skeptical of a North Vietnamese intention to overrun the country in April, the Asian and military experts on the staff were not...
...The truth is that the illegal North Vietnamese sanctuaries were an affront to Cambodian dignity and a disruptive element in Cambodian politics from the beginning (1965)-which is why Sihanouk invited the American bombing in the first place...
...Since I have demonstrated that this was not true, he now assures us heatedly that he did not mean to exaggerate the danger to civilians...
...Shawcross quote from -his 1979 interview with Sihanouk, in which the Prince confirms yet again that he invited American bombing of the North Vietnamese sanctuaries...
...In Sideshow, eager to show That the bombing was in defiance of Cambodia's wishes, Mr...
...Perhaps he thinks a "liberation army" is formed for the purpose of tourism...
...The Pol Pot document of 1978 is accurate on Hanoi's organization of a guerrilla army and shadow government, however "disgraceful" Mr...
...This is the same issue that was involved in the NSDM 89 directive...
...But it was the North Vietnamese who built them up as a military power and contributed decisively to their victory...
...bombing drove the North Vietnamese so much deeper into Cambodia in 1969-70 that it "destabilized" Sihanouk's neutralist regime...
...Unfortunately, even that gives too much credit to Mr...
...Shawcross is quite proud of having written articles critical of the Khmer Rouge after April 1975...
...Shawcross regards all this as "ambiguous," he is beyond the reach of rational argument...
...The Strangulation of the Cambodian Army: My point here was a very simple one and is unrebutted...
...Shawcross's only excuse is that he did not have the information when he wrote his book...
...The real difference between Shawcross and Kissinger is that Kissinger thought the free Cambodians had a right to survive, and Shawcross did not...
...But Mr...
...I found voluminous discrepancies between what the documents said and what Sideshow claimed they said...
...Shawcross's principal charges in Sideshow was that American bombing of North Vietnamese bases wantonly risked the lives of Cambodian civilians...
...The Kissinger book quotes extensively from the official transcript...
...And the 1973 Senate hearings provided repetitive evidence that the North Vietnamese did not allow Cambodians anywhere near their military complexes...
...The map in Sideshow (p...
...Shawcross invoked in Sideshow supports his alternative accusation: that the U.S...
...In a May 13 news conference (and in an August 22 conversation with Mike Mansfield), Sihanouk professed indifference to the B-52 attacks against the North Vietnamese bases and objected only if we injured Cambodians...
...He is still unable to show, first of all, any American involvement in the decision of Sihanouk's own parliament and government to depose him as chief of state on March 18, 1970...
...He later admitted that the base area was not attacked-but he changed nothing in the book except one sentence and the label on a map...
...it remains, even though the "evidence" supporting it has been removed...
...Sideshow somehow neglected to mention it...
...His attempt at rebuttal is as deceptive as his book...
...On the contrary, Sihanouk's recent memoirs would seem to confirm that the Vietnamese sanctuaries remained quite limited in size until after Sihanouk was overthrown...
...It made no difference to Sihanouk at the time...
...The North Vietnamese thus announced their intention to overthrow the Cambodian government, and they were on the way to doing so...
...Likewise the meeting between Le Duc Tho and Kissinger on April 4, 1970, was indeed a pivotal event...
...First, Sideshow is nothing if not an exercise in shifting the blame for Khmer Rouge atrocities onto others...
...It is not subtitled ' 'The Khmer Rouge and the Destruction of Cambodia" (or even "The North Vietnamese and the Destruction of Cambodia") but "Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia...
...The first significant South Vietnamese cross-border operation took place only at the end of March, and with Cambodian permission, as reported in the New York Times of March 28, 1970-roughly "simultaneously" with the beginning of the North Vietnamese march westward (as Sideshow, p. 130, indeed admits...
...The book's excerpt from General Westmoreland's cable of April 21, 1970, for example, conveniently omitted the passage (quoted in my article) in which the magnitude of the North Vietnamese threat to Phnom Penh is described...
...Of course the Khmer Rouge grew from nothing...
Vol. 14 • July 1981 • No. 7
