VIETNAM AND CAMBODIA
Chomsky, Noam & Morgenthau, Hans J. & Walzer, Michael
Recent events in Cambodia, even if reports exaggerate the magnitude of killings and enslavement, are so terrible that a number of commentators have seized upon them to call into question the...
...If the U.S...
...Assumption (2) has not been defended explicitly...
...undertook to help its clients "to defeat local Communist subversion or rebellion not constituting armed attack," with potential "use of U S military forces either locally or against the external source of such subversion or rebellion"—all as determined unilaterally by the U.S...
...But the present regime of the Khmer Rouge, with its peculiarly primitive brand of Communism, is not the result of Vietnamese expansion...
...Surely the key point is that we had no right to make such calculations at all—not on behalf of another nation and against the wishes of most of its people...
...But aside from the impossibility of foreseeing all the consequences of the loss of the Vietnam war, to forestall all possible consequences of the loss by winning it at whatever price would have violated the basic principle of foreign and military policy that the risks taken and losses incurred in a particular action must be proportionate to the chances for the success of that action...
...Their alliances are geopolitical, not humanitarian...
...military and the Vietnamese forces it organized...
...Recent events in Cambodia, even if reports exaggerate the magnitude of killings and enslavement, are so terrible that a number of commentators have seized upon them to call into question the validity of opposition to the American role in Vietnam...
...We read that we must overcome our "Vietnam hang-up" and be willing to use force to defend our interests, often disguised in cynical humanitarian rhetoric...
...In fact, the official claim always was that the U.S...
...say, much of Latin America, turned into a horror chamber in one of the recent successes of U.S...
...and (2) that the U.S...
...The American media have been deluged with denunciations of postwar Indochina, while more favorable accounts, however credible, receive little notice...
...the official defense is no less ludicrous than assumption (1...
...One who undertakes it must ask how his acts may help those who suffer, bearing in mind also the domestic consequences and the fate of future victims of the interventionist ideologies now being reconstructed...
...Is it true that liberal and left intellectuals have been amiss in not criticizing the Cambodian Communist regime, and if so, why...
...The U.S...
...One who protests barbarism or repression must consider the probable human consequences of his acts...
...It was meant as a summary of views now being expressed elsewhere...
...One who advocates the resort to force must present an overwhelmingly powerful argument...
...Thus I conclude that the moral case for resistance to the Vietnam war has not been impaired, but rather strengthened, by the catastrophe that has befallen Cambodia...
...that enabled the Communists to proceed with their more efficient and massive kinds of repression...
...Or we are informed that revolutionary regimes are capable of great brutality, as has been obvious for centuries, and that "we" should rise to the defense of peoples, not states...
...It is easy to avoid these considerations, but an honest person with true human concern will not lightly do so...
...Charles Meyer, who had long been close to ruling circles in Cambodia, warned then that "it is difficult to imagine the intensity of the hatred of the peasants] for those who destroyed their villages and their possessions" (Derriere le sourire khmer...
...We are sometimes told that "the story is more complex...
...war was intended to avert Khmer Rouge barbarity, or might have had this likely effect...
...One will of course win acclaim in the West by joining the chorus of protest focused on those who have escaped the Western orbit, but for ugly reasons...
...With comparable logic, Germans might have asked whether opposition to Nazi aggression should be reconsidered after the massacre of tens of thousands in France under American civil-military rule...
...In short, what do you think of all this...
...Furthermore, one may ask why the U.S...
...were no doubt corrupt and repressive, but never to the point of the present Cambodian government's total regimentation and even, apparently, genocide...
...Comparably, anti-Nazi resisters had the moral right to condemn the atrocities committed after liberation...
...American rightists have seized upon the Cambodian massacres in order to argue that our 1970 invasion was, so to speak, a prospective intervention against a bloodbath we rightly expected...
...Those who failed to devote their energies to ending the American war in Indochina bear a double burden of guilt: for the atrocities committed under American initiative, and for the legacy of starvation, disease, hatred and revenge that was a direct and predicted consequence of the attack on rural Cambodia...
...That is true...
...It only demonstrates the continuous moral responsibility statesmen bear for the unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences of their actions...
...Consider the factual and moral premises that allow this question to be seriously raised...
...attacks on Cambodia escalated...
...Nevertheless, their success undercut the moral and political rationale for intervention...
...has the right to exercise force and violence to avert potential crimes...
...Let us assume the accuracy of the condemnations of the Khmer Rouge (noting, however, that the susceptibility of intellectuals to fabricated atrocity stories has been no less notorious since World War I than their apologetics for some favored state, and that skepticism is aroused in this case by the many documented falsehoods...
...Before the massive American intervention began, the Communists had already succeeded in making themselves the chief representatives of Vietnamese nationalism...
...primarily, those of the American government and its client regimes, or elsewhere, when there is a likelihood that protest can contribute to the relief of human misery...
...There is ample reason to adopt as a guiding principle the restriction on use of force, now codified in law, to self-defense against armed attack...
...Cambodia was an island of relative tranquillity prior to the American 386 invasion of 1970, though it had repeatedly been attacked by American and U.S.-backed forces since 1957 and there was limited local insurgency, aroused by government repression, by the late 1960s.As Vietnamese were driven to a narrow border strip by the savage American military operations of early 1967, direct U.S...
...That is why, for example, Amnesty International urges that one write politely to the most miserable tyrant...
...foreign policy...
...The U.S...
...was dedicated to destroy...
...intervention had few historical parallels...
...Should we have taken additional risks in order to save Cambodia from a catastrophe unforeseen and unforeseeable with an at best illusive chance for success...
...won its filthy war in South Vietnam, decimating the local forces that resisted American violence and the peasant society in which they were rooted, thus guaranteeing North Vietnamese dominance of the wreckage and leaving ample opportunity for the hypocrites who now bewail this consequence of the American war that they supported...
...It was the secret plan that was pursued...
...But they show little interest, and are in fact supporters of the Khmer Rouge against the Soviet-supported Vietnamese...
...This is indeed the decisive point...
...The 1970 invasion helped organize the Khmer Rouge rebellion as thousands of peasants rallied to the resistance under the impact of the vicious bombing and ground attacks of the U.S...
...q Note: To avoid any ambiguity or worse, let me make clear that the statement to which the participants in this symposium have responded was meant by its author, myself, not as an expression of personal or editorial opinion...
...Similar remarks apply in the case of Vietnam and Laos...
...reasonable enough (and no less familiar) if the term "we" refers to individuals, though it is easily transmuted to refer to state power in a new version of colonialist doctrine...
...The chain of events that culminated in the destruction of Cambodian society and, perhaps, of the Cambodian people started with the American extension of the Vietnam war into Cambodia through the massive bombing of Cambodian territory...
...By the time the first North Vietnamese battalion was detected in the South—more than two months after the initiation of the systematic bombing of the North and the far more extensive bombing of the South—more than 150,000 South Vietnamese had been killed "under the crushing weight of American 387 armor, napalm, jet bombers and, finally, vomiting gasses," according to the judgment of Bernard Fall, a committed hawk who turned against the war because he feared that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity .. . is threatened with extinction" as "the countryside literally dies under the blows of the .. . [American] military machine...
...turned to direct military action by 1962 and an outright invasion of South Vietnam in 1965...
...As had been predicted, a major effort is underway to reconstruct the interventionist ideology that eroded as popular opposition to the Vietnam war developed...
...Principled opponents of that war should now devote themselves with no less energy to attempting to heal its wounds and help its victims— those in exile, those who are oppressed, and those who are struggling to construct a viable society from the ruins left by American terror...
...hence, they say, it was appropriate to support the anti-Communist South Vietnamese as a "lesser evil" whose victory would at least have prevented the horrors of Communist Cambodia...
...and murderous repression within the American sphere—in Timor or Uruguay, for example—is consistently ignored...
...in January 1973 was virtually a paraphrase, in essentials, of the program of the South Vietnamese forces that the U.S...
...the real world is more complex than our descriptions, a fact that may be exploited by the cynical or deluded to dismiss its salient features as a guide to attitude and action...
...First of all, moral—as legal— obligations are subject to the qualifications expressed in the principle of Roman law that nobody is obligated beyond his capacity (ultra vires nemo obligatur...
...can do, beyond recording and protesting the slaughter...
...We think the issues raised here are sufficiently important to warrant a discussion among those who, for often sharply different reasons, opposed the Vietnam war...
...One could wish, as most writers in Dissent did, that a "third force" had emerged, capable of rallying the country and challenging Communist hegemony in the nationalist movement...
...Do the recent events in Cambodia warrant a reconsideration of our opposition to the Vietnam war...
...But such a force did not exist in sufficient strength...
...war in Indochina was in part a civil conflict, though in scale and savagery the U.S...
...at once installed a client regime in South Vietnam that abrogated the terms of the Geneva settlement and initiated a program of repression and massacre...
...Like most colonial wars, the U.S...
...By virtue of its historic role in defense of freedom and human rights within its own sphere of influence, perhaps...
...some of us in the antiwar movement knew that all along...
...We cannot escape the world in which we live, inconvenient though that fact may be...
...should be uniquely privileged to serve as global judge and executioner...
...There exists then a causal nexus between American policy with regard to Cambodia and the catastrophe that has recently befallen the country...
...Unless the goal of protest is self-aggrandizement or service to one's state, finite energies will be distributed in accordance with likely impact...
...Again, discussion is superfluous...
...The argument made by such writers is that South Vietnamese governments supported by the U.S...
...Perhaps only the Chinese could do the job quickly and economically, on the model of the Indian intervention in Bengal...
...It was the policy of the United States to involve Cambodia in the active military operations in order to facilitate victory in the Vietnam war...
...The Cambodian Communists are, by all reports, fanatic and brutal rulers...
...Individuals may differ in their assessment of these complex issues, but they deserve more careful attention than they often receive...
...The peace treaty signed but immediately undermined by the U.S...
...It may be that Cambodian neutralism would not in any case have survived the Communist seizure of Saigon...
...was defending South Vietnam from "aggression from the North...
...History must be rewritten and principle revised to conform to the needs of a power that will be called upon to lead the industrial capitalist world in the "North-South" conflict...
...On this assumption, should we reconsider opposition to the Vietnam war...
...It was the policy of the Cambodian ruler, Prince Sihanouk, to keep Cambodia out of the armed conflict between the United States and North Vietnam...
...Escalating the conflict had the effect of expanding it as well, and ultimately of dragging down the neutralist government of Cambodia...
...That should not surprise us...
...One can easily see why...
...Similar considerations apply here...
...Now we are asked whether opposition to the U.S...
...No doubt, they were bad representatives...
...Who can say what the extent of the death and destruction would have been had we actually fought our way to "victory...
...If the massacres described in the French and American press have actually taken place on the scale reported, and if they are continuing, then it seems to me that foreign intervention to stop the killing—what the lawyers call "humanitarian intervention"—is clearly justified...
...Thus, even if one had held the United States morally responsible for what has been happening in Cambodia, it would not be held responsible for any particular policy of implementing that moral obligation...
...operations in Vietnam and Laos...
...When resistance ensued, the U.S...
...nor could 500,000 American troops ever have evoked it, even if that had been their purpose...
...By May 1967 the Pentagon was concerned that Cambodia was "becoming more and more important as a supply base—now of food and medicines, perhaps ammunition later," an obvious consequence of U.S...
...It may yet be resumed: the end of European rule has often resulted in the quick 390 reestablishment of precolonial political patterns...
...Assumption (1) is ludicrous in the light of the factual record...
...They also taunt opponents of the Vietnam war who had been outspoken in criticizing South Vietnamese repressions while failing to be equally outspoken about what is now happening in Cambodia...
...For obviously, even if the United States were resolved to act it would be unable to do so without disproportionate risks and losses...
...Those who devoted themselves to ending American aggression and who now work to reverse the inhuman policy of refusing reparations or even aid to its victims have a moral right to condemn repressive acts of the regimes that have arisen from the ruins...
...R eturning to the specific questions of this symposium: events in postwar Indochina amply reinforce the moral imperative of protest and resistance against the American 388 war...
...The U.S...
...In truth, the risks that we were taking and the losses we incurred in the Vietnam war were already out of all proportion to the chances for success...
...Others may well be accurate in their condemnation, but it reeks to high heaven...
...This was well before the murderous American bombings of the 1970s, which surely inflamed peasant hatred and desire for revenge...
...Whether they take action or not, however, there is nothing that the U.S...
...It is quite another matter to assume that because of this causal nexus the United States had a moral obligation to prevent what has been happening in Cambodia or at least to alleviate the present sufferings of the Cambodian people...
...attack on rural South Vietnam, later all Indochina, was legitimate, in the light of postwar suffering and atrocities that are in large measure a result of this aggression...
...I am in complete agreement with Michael Walzer's answer...
...Do the recent events in Cambodia warrant a reconsideration of our opposition to the Vietnam war...
...This is not to say that the United States bears a direct moral responsibility for what has been happening in Cambodia...
...One who raises this question must be assuming (1) that the U.S...
...is entitled to launch a major war to avert potential barbarism, then a fortiori it is entitled to invade countries where state violence currently proceeds...
...Now we can only hope for local resistance...
...Internal documents were more honest...
...imposed as a basis for its intervention had negligible support...
...Government analysts never doubted that the South Vietnamese enemy was the only mass-based political force, while the regimes the U.S...
...Or would you agree with those who believe that it was precisely the reactionary character of the South Vietnamese regimes supported by the U.S...
...Surely, the absurdities of this position are obvious...
...The truth is that we had other purposes in mind, and that the bloodbath, at least in its present form, might have been avoided had we stayed out...
...In other words, if the United States had not made Cambodia an active participant in the Vietnam war, Cambodia would, in all likelihood, have been spared the recent catastrophe...
...q The events in Cambodia raise in an acute way some fundamental questions about American foreign policy in general and our policies in Southeast Asia in particular...
...Such wars are generally brutal, and the domestic losers often suffer grievously...
...If honest inquiry reveals terror and repression, protest is legitimate...
...sent its troops into Vietnam to reverse the verdict of a local struggle, and we could only do that, with some hope of winning, by escalating and prolonging the struggle and imposing enormous losses on the Vietnamese people...
...A Russian who condemns American behavior in Vietnam or Chile may speak the truth, but we do not admire his courage or moral integrity...
...When the French first established their colonial empire in Indochina, around 1850, the Vietnamese were in the process of conquering Cambodia, and that process might simply have been resumed, even if Sihanouk had remained in power...
...Not only do we lack the capacity for a surgical strike, we also lack credibility as defenders of human life in Southeast Asia...
...q It was never necessary, in order to oppose the American war in Vietnam, to defend the Communist regime in the North or the likely successor regime in the South...
...389 The critics of the opponents of the Vietnam war conclude from the present Cambodian catastrophe that the United States should not have reconciled itself to losing the Vietnam war at the price of the misery, if not destruction, of the Cambodian people...
...The central responsibility for Americans is to try to modify policies that we can influence...
...In March 1969, shortly after the "secret" bombings began, Sihanouk vainly called upon the Western press to publicize his government's protest over the "criminal attacks" on Khmer peasants...
...Immediately after the Geneva accords of 1954, the U.S...
...I don't know how to weigh those losses against the subsequent costs of Communist tyranny...
...it is the direct, if unintended, result of the American war...
Vol. 25 • September 1978 • No. 4
