Dealing with the Devil
Dealing with the Devil Why is the U.S. helping the worst killers since Hitler? by Peter Grier On April 11, 1975, the chief of the United States mission in Beijing, George Bush, asked a...
...This one wasn't between executive branch factions...
...Why a nice country like America got on the same side of the table with the worst killers since the Nazis is a complicated story...
...For those who have preferred to ignore Indochina since the Vietnam war, here is a quick glossary of the players and their positions: KHMER ROUGE...
...So he scuttled the State Department vision of balanced openings to China and Vietnam in favor of the tilt to Beijing...
...action in the world, there wouldn't be any...
...We will not reward Vietnamese aggression of any kind," he said...
...It is, but that doesn't mean some policies aren't just plain wrong...
...Prime minister of the current Cambodian government, which was installed by the Vietnamese after they conquered Cambodia in 1979...
...When Vietnamese Sovietbuilt tanks rolled into Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978, the invasion could have been seen as a nationalist struggle best avoided by the United States...
...the thing to be disposed of may not cooperate...
...Milquetoast on China, the United States was anything but when it came to Vietnam...
...Even so, Thailand, the ASEAN nation closest to the action, has shown more courage on this point than the United States has...
...In the House, the feeling among some members was that the Democrats needed an opportunity to look tough in the context of their opposition to arming the Nicaraguan contras and Ronald Reagan's continuing diatribes about the evil empire...
...Players become one of the Great Powers, and negotiate with the others to strike alliances, make attacks, and divide up the spoils...
...Perhaps all parties involved will reach agreement on a transitional UN administration, and elections that cause the Khmer Rouge to fade gently into history will follow...
...If it is, what about our role in Afghanistan...
...If the Khmer Rouge take over, we'll share complicity Playing the China card in Cambodia fits beautifully with what might be called the Metternich Fallacy—the belief that morality plays only a bit part in foreign policy and that it's the country with the most ingenious schemes that wins...
...For Sihanouk it must have been a moment of supreme irony...
...The Khmer Rouge will get .01 percent of the vote in an election, providing their main backer, China, a facesaving excuse to drop them...
...The Khmer Rouge have an estimated 30-40,000 fighters, far more than the other resistance factions...
...In this climate of low interest, Solarz has risen easily to power...
...More likely it won't, and fighting will continue in a nation already as traumatized as any on earth...
...a former Khmer Rouge commander who defected to Vietnam in 1977...
...Somewhere along the way, the concept of morality was left out of U.S...
...And once again the United States may act too late to stop them...
...Bush, through a French diplomat, offered to fly Sihanouk back to his capital if he would agree to once again become head of state...
...policy is a strange one of quasi-alliance with a group that is officially an anathema...
...Equally unlikely is a peace agreement calling for a transitional power-sharing arrangement among the three resistance factions and Hun Sen...
...approach to Cambodia...
...Enmity was deep-rooted, particularly on the part of Cambodians, who had seen much of their territory gradually swallowed up in greater Vietnam...
...As far as he could see, all Vietnamese troops and advisers had indeed left...
...wouldn't even indirectly aid the Khmer Rouge...
...USSR...
...The glow of laying schemes is the thing...
...These are arguable questions, and the Fletcher School of Diplomacy types who run U.S...
...foreign policy learn to set them aside to prevent paralysis so that they can focus on perceived national interest...
...He seems a captive of the Khmer Rouge even as he denounces them...
...Largely due to Leach's efforts, the money was supposed to be for "nonlethal" aid—bandages and food as opposed to bullets...
...Maybe there are other solutions, but we haven't found any...
...That's what realpolitik is all about...
...Diplomacy" appeals to the Washington policy class...
...We have a scheme...
...Such an allparty coalition would be "extremely fragile and easily shattered so that it would not last long," judges a U.S...
...Is it moral to take bread from the mouth of a worker in South Africa through economic sanctions, if the end is pressure on the white regime...
...Nowadays China doesn't even amount to a glimmer of a reason for supporting the Khmer Rouge...
...This is a real board game published by Avalon Hill—a classic, in which every participant can play Metternich with his schemes...
...But it seemed that siding with a two-bit regional villain was surely defensible if it meant standing nobly against Soviet expansionism...
...China saw the new Indochina war as a Soviet-backed move against their own region of influence...
...In the three-andahalf-year period they ruled Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge killed more than a million people through execution, starvation, and overwork...
...If you wait too long, it could be just like 1975—too late to stop them...
...I have a sense that this committee is trying to make a mark on this town, that we're going to be more anticommunist than Ronald Reagan...
...Playing the China card in Cambodia fits beautifully with what might be called the Metternich Fallacy— the belief that morality plays only a bit part in foreign policy and that it's the country with the most ingenious schemes that wins...
...In his memoir, Power and Principle, Brzezinski writes that in a January 1979 letter President Carter "reminded Moscow of its special responsibility for Hanoi's action and stressed that continued Vietnamese aggression could lead to serious problems for the USSR...
...I don't think that simply saying, well, let's recognize Hun Sen, let's talk to him now that Vietnam has left, is an answer that will get the U.S...
...approaches to Cambodia...
...This policy rolled along unchanged through the early, fiercely anticommunist years of the Reagan administration...
...Voluntary disarmament...
...By then the Khmer Rouge were reduced to desperate guerrillas, and Vietnam firmly controlled the Cambodian nation...
...body politic for it to condone the aggressive occupation of a neighbor by a country that had only lately been killing GIs...
...Furthermore, he Peter Grier is the State Department and Pentagon correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor...
...Sihanouk is still in exile...
...The murderous Khmer Rouge, having triumphed and fallen, are once again fighting their way towards Phnom Penh...
...Was it right to invade Panama, killing civilians and U.S...
...In Washington, assistant secretaries like to think they are tough...
...The problem is that so often there is legitimate moral ambiguity in foreign policy...
...In reply, Secretary Baker held out the promise of a UN-negotiated political settlement...
...If an ethical impact statement had to be compiled for every U.S...
...Zealpolitik Today the former U.S...
...With no money, no support, and no bullets, the last of the Khmer Rouge will live out their days as guerrillas, easily handled by Sihanouk or whatever democrat wins the vote...
...And the Chinese wanted the United States to support the Khmer Rouge...
...CHINA...
...is perhaps playing a greater role in facilitating the return of the Khmer Rouge than we would like...
...Placed in power by the French in 1941, Sihanouk ruled Cambodia with vigor and inconsistency before being ousted by right-wing legislators in 1970...
...Khmer Rouge leaders have indicated their willingness to go along with parts of this political vision...
...Sihanouk calls siding with them a "terrible choice" he is obliged to take...
...Main patron, banker, and armorer of the Khmer Rouge, China is motivated by a desire to inflict as much pain as possible on a nation it views as an ungrateful upstart and regional rival, Vietnam...
...has been playing "Diplomacy...
...It is full of conversations such as this: "If you support my Army Ruhr into Belgium, Bill's Army Gascony will be forced to cover Brest, thereby preventing him from building a fleet and allowing you to move into the Mid-Atlantic in two turns to make a strategic thrust at Portugal and Spain...
...They call it a simplistic way of looking at the world...
...In 1985, then-Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Paul Wolfowitz was testifying before Congress that military aid for the noncommunist rebel factions was a bad idea, and that the U.S...
...These warnings went unheeded...
...And the Chinese wanted the United States to support the Khmer Rouge...
...He's smart, energetic, and meddlesome— reportedly, during last December's Philippine coup attempt he requested an Air Force plane so he could fly to Manila to criticize administration actions on site...
...So it would be grossly imprudent not to regard him as to all intents and purposes a Khmer Rouge stooge," concludes John Pedler, a British journalist...
...The very phrase makes them uncomfortable, or impatient, or angry...
...Besides anti-Soviet sentiment, the other main reason for taking this line was that, above all else, U.S...
...officials held out such a withdrawal as the goal they were after...
...by Peter Grier On April 11, 1975, the chief of the United States mission in Beijing, George Bush, asked a storied prince to return to his homeland...
...officials— notably, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and his assistant secretary for East Asia, Richard Hoibrookethought exactly that...
...True, the Khmer Rouge were somewhat distasteful and hard to paint as aggrieved innocents...
...Kissinger's decision to play the China card against In July 1988, a senior administration official was asked what measures the United States had in mind to keep Pol Pot from returning to power...
...Far Eastern policy had become obsessed with keeping China happy...
...Having invaded Cambodia in the wake of brutal Khmer Rouge border raids, Vietnam has apparently now withdrawn its occupying forces but continues to provide arms and aid to Hun Sen...
...But Sihanouk himself has said that a UN role could require that a multinational U.S...
...troops, if democracy was the result...
...The Solarz system Foreign affairs is not traditionally popular on Capitol Hill, due to its inherent lack of vote-getting potential...
...In his view, Vietnam was a client state urged on by the Soviets in an effort to make a strategic thrust against the Chinese, Cambodia's ally...
...John Kerry questioned the continued full support of the tripartite resistance: "I'm deeply concerned that our current policy...
...But it's 1990 now, and the Vietnamese have apparently pulled out and gone, leaving the Hun Sen regime they installed in their wake...
...In 1985, Solarz decided that the logical end of the U.S...
...Cambodia policy...
...Legislators who take to it always face the danger of the "Chuck Percy Syndrome," after the former GOP senator from Illinois who was defeated partly because voters thought he was spending too much time hobnobbing with foreign dignitaries and not enough time in Alton or Chicago...
...was in China as the nominal representative of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, though in fact he detested and feared them and was as much prisoner as emissary...
...While Vietnamese troops remained in Phnom Penh, the policy had some cover...
...Either through a direct agreement between the resistance coalition and the Hun Sen government or under UN auspices, all the different political factions in Cambodia will agree to free elections...
...Is covert lethal aid always wrong...
...As a result, the Fletcher class leaves its "moral judgment" switch off...
...But that same year a new Washington intramural battle over Cambodia broke out...
...People bicycle down them," he says...
...The Cambodian killing fields, the emptying of the cities, the mindless xenophobia—all that may yet return...
...approach to Cambodia could be the horror of the return to power of the Khmer Rouge...
...In 1989 the issue of forthright lethal aid arose: The White House went to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees with a request for covert funds to arm the Sihanoukist factions...
...Remember that it was Gorbachev's visit to Beijing that forestalled the crackdown on the Tiananmen protesters...
...But as the experience with the Nicaraguan contras shows, the concept of "nonlethal" aid is a convenient fiction...
...The vision held in Foggy Bottom and ASEAN embassies goes like this: We'll be able to defang the Khmer Rouge with a comprehensive political solution...
...Perhaps...
...He turned down the U.S...
...Set aside for a moment whether Cambodia should have been seen as a superpower cockpit at all...
...Now he was living in a Beijing mansion and filling his time with cooking experiments...
...This fallacy of statesmanship animates the U.S...
...The only questions are: When do you fight them, and who does the fighting...
...In other words, get your friend to leave Cambodia to its genocidal maniac rulers or we'll tip the global geostrategic balance against you...
...Far Eastern policy had become obsessed with keeping China happy...
...Most officials just aren't used to thinking in moral terms...
...chief of mission is president...
...UNITED STATES...
...Where Baker, sponsor of two secret post-Tiananmen, high-level China missions, wants to go is Beijing...
...In deference to China, the ASEAN nations have taken a strong stand against Vietnam from the first days of the Cambodian operation...
...In reality, they are men with drivers who cannot imagine the toughness of those in the jungle...
...In 1982 Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger swung through the region and took the opportunity to reiterate U.S...
...Stooge of the Rouge Ignited by an obsession with China and superpower politics, fueled by congressional macho posturing, it seems to be something driven by people who aren't watching where they're going...
...the Soviets was in its day brilliant, establishing a rapprochement with a country showing some domestic promise while giving much pause to a menacing Soviet Union...
...This is the Khmer Rouge, not the Boy Scouts of America...
...peacekeeping force—presumably to protect against the Khmer Rouge—remain in the country for 10 years or more...
...Thai Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan has hosted three Hun Sen visits, and in January, 90 Thai MPs delivered Chatichai a petition calling for the ouster of Cambodian guerrillas, including the Khmer Rouge, from Thai territory...
...In Phnom Penh "whole streets that were blocked off because Vietnamese advisers lived there are now open...
...At last, after years of moral complexity in the Far East, the United States has found a place where it can remove all ambiguity from its actions: In Cambodia we are doing a bad thing for a bad reason...
...In his excellent history of 1970s Indochina, former Far East Economic Review correspondent Nayan Chanda tells a story he heard countless times in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, involving three Khmer forced laborers in 1820 who were punished by their Vietnamese overlord for not working hard enough...
...As late as July 1988, Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Gaston Sigur was telling Congress: "We have refrained from establishing normal diplomatic relations with Vietnam as a demonstration of our opposition to Vietnam's illegal occupation of Cambodia...
...Compared to the tripartite resistance, "I'll take Hun Sen," says Charny...
...coldness to Vietnam as long as Cambodia was occupied...
...During his visit to Washington in January 1979, Deng Xiaoping spoke ominously of teaching Vietnam a lesson, foreshadowing the punitive Chinese attack against Vietnam that was to follow shortly thereafter...
...says Jeremy Stone, son of I.F...
...The United States voted with the majority...
...policy towards postwar Cambodia from the outset: overemphasis on superpower involvement, too much Washington intramural politics, and a considerable desire for revenge against Vietnam...
...Asia, even by those who wish it weren't so...
...But do we really believe this...
...If it does, the United States will bear heavy responsibility for the tragedy...
...Every dollar not spent on food is one freed up for AK-47s...
...A trade embargo had been placed on Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, and the American public and Congress had no interest in extending a hand to a nation that had so recently bested them on the battlefield...
...Abiding by the ballot box...
...Is any change in U.S...
...It is not enough to say we abhor it and will throw it away when it is no longer militarily useful...
...had often been poor, and U.S...
...Stephen Solarz as its instigator, and it ended by opening a pipeline of U.S...
...Where else in the world are we continuing to pursue a policy which began as anti-Soviet and pro-Chinese...
...It is set in the year 1901, in Europe...
...Brzezinski cautioned the Soviets that "their actions might have some impact on the nature of the American-Chinese relationship...
...As for Prince Sihanouk, he is no longer the man he was...
...The problem is, the Khmer Rouge have guns...
...By the morning of April 12, the Khmer Rouge were in the Phnom Penh suburbs, and ho one could guarantee Sihanouk's safety if he returned...
...It might have been asking too much of the U.S...
...officials had given tacit support to the rebels who had toppled him...
...The current flurry of international diplomatic activity over Cambodia may yet produce some sort of workable, UN-sponsored peace plan...
...In words that subsequent events have given more meaning than he intended, Brzezinski wrote that "I secretly wished that Deng's appreciation of the uses of power would . . . rub off on some of the key U.S...
...At the same time, there was still reluctance on the part of the State Department to be drawn into a greater role in the Cambodian conflict...
...His relations with the U.S...
...Will they really just wither away, these men who have killed millions...
...Stone, president of the Federation of American Scientists and a fierce critic of U.S...
...PRINCE SIHANOUK...
...Admittedly the situation in Cambodia is far from simple...
...In Cambodia, the government of his replacement, General Lon Nol, was tottering as the fighters of the leftist Khmer Rouge battered their way towards Phnom Penh...
...At last year's Paris peace talks, to everyone's astonishment, the Khmer Rouge said OK to quarantine zones...
...But the United Nations Credential Committee voted 6-to-3 to let the Pol Pot regime keep its UN seat...
...State Department officials say they don't want the Khmer Rouge back in power...
...There doesn't seem to be much weighing as to whether it is right to grope for a perceived advantage in the superpower game by allowing the most evil political faction in the world to continue to exist, not to mention to support it...
...This is not anything that we have carefully worked out, by any means, or thought about to the degree, or extent of what is possible," he said...
...The illogical outcome of this approach, as applied to Cambodia, became apparent in late 1979...
...Even though the administration hadn't requested it, Solarz pushed for $5 million in aid to the fighters of Prince Sihanouk and Son Senn...
...where we want to go," said Baker...
...Joel Charny, the regional director of Oxfam America, a nonprofit international agency that funds development and disaster relief in poor countries, was impressed by a visit to Cambodia earlier this year...
...And what might those threatened "serious problems" be...
...Still the unspeakable thugs they used to be, still apparently headed by the notorious Pol Pot and his henchmen, the Khmer Rouge are the strongest faction in the tripartite force fighting the incumbent Cambodian government...
...Once Vietnam's main backer, the Soviet Union may well have pushed for the Vietnamese troop withdrawal...
...Between 1985 and 1988, Congress voted $5 million a year in aid to the resistance...
...It began in Congress, with Rep...
...In July 1988, a senior administration official, briefing reporters on a trip by Secretary of State Shultz to Asia, was asked what measures the United States had in mind to keep Pol Pot from returning to power...
...Similar votes transpired in subsequent years...
...Mostly one—a united U.S.-Sino front...
...The Exciting Game of International Intrigue...
...Surely this is geopoliticism run amuck...
...Head of one of two noncommunist resistance factions, and main political spokesman for the tripartite resistance, Sihanouk is continuing his uneasy association with the Khmer Rouge, who are probably responsible for the death of at least 15 of his relatives...
...Brzezinski considered relations with Vietnam a minor issue—one that threatened better ties with China...
...Probably not, if Secretary of State James Baker's comments on the subject early this year are indicative...
...Cambodia and Vietnam, after all, had been vacillating between uneasy cooperation and war for centuries...
...But in the last decade the United States has frequently found itself blindly doing things for China that not only make no strategic sense but are also morally disastrous...
...aid for the Khmer Rouge...
...It was just too late," Sihanouk later told an interviewer...
...HUN SEN...
...Military units will move to quarantine zones in the country and voluntarily give up their arms...
...Ultimately the aid package passed by a large margin...
...Army War College study...
...This is one of the most inexplicable horrors of modern times, a guerrilla group from Stephen King...
...The exile was Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, a small man given to nervous giggles and strangely effective political theatrics...
...American officials have no illusions about the Khmer Rouge...
...It used to be that U.S...
...They never work out—but, oh, weren't they brilliant...
...Provider of aid for Sihanouk and his fellow noncommunist leader Son Sann, the U.S...
...The Prince's entourage is penetrated by the Khmer Rouge . . . his army is likewise penetrated in key positions...
...In Cambodia the U.S...
...Even though President Carter, human rights advocate, had called the Khmer Rouge the "greatest violator of human rights" in the world, his administration voted to give them international recognition...
...Not only have these two powers since swapped images—they're not even that mad at each other anymore...
...Some high U.S...
...When a policy rolls in that is clearly wrong, it still gets waved right on through the planning department...
...I know...
...Tanks again Three problems combined with the overarching China fixation to dog the U.S...
...They say they don't want them back in Phnom Penh...
...The Khmer nation has long served as a regional Belgium, a battleground for larger neighbors who don't want to fight on their own territory...
...Gathering evidence indicates that Hun Sen is neither an abandoned puppet nor a closet Khmer Rouge but the closest thing to a legitimate leader that the traumatized nation has had in many years...
...One major lesson of this move was that outmoded Chinese tactics were little match for a battle-hardened army, but that didn't stop Brzezinski from admiring Deng's style in his memoirs...
...VIETNAM...
...That is tough competition," he said at the time...
...attitude imminent...
...With domestic tax and budget cuts high on the Reagan agenda, Nicaragua was the only nonSoviet foreign issue that got much attention in the White House...
...hopes the Khmer Rouge role in the resistance somehow will disappear or be contained by Sihanouk political magic...
...We can't disagree with Sihanouk," says a State Department official...
...But Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the new Indochina war as a black-and-white struggle between superpower proxies...
...They took the country back to a proclaimed "Year Zero" and made grass grow in the streets of Phnom Penh...
...On Capitol Hill he is widely considered Mr...
...The United States strongly backs Sihanouk and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), both of whom consider the Khmer Rouge a military tool and a bad guy who is easier to deal with if he's on your side...
...If the Khmer Rouge are to be kept from ever again seizing Cambodia, they will have to be defeated in war...
...The United States felt that Sihanouk, a nationalist figure still beloved by peasants, was the only one who could head off a Khmer Rouge victory...
...I play it with them myself...
...offer...
...But the American change of heart had been too long delayed...
...The Vietnamese buried the hapless Khmers to their necks, so the story runs, and used their heads to support a kettle for boiling water," writes Chanda...
...Jim Leach, a moderate Republican and ranking minority member on Solarz's subcommittee, opposed the aid...
...His solution: Arm the noncommunist factions of the tripartite resistance...
...With strong White House backing—including Dan Quayle's presence in the Senate chamber in case his tie-breaking vote was needed—the concept of lethal aid for Cambodia was approved by both the House and Senate last July...
...decision makers...
...Charny says the most important thing is that Hun Sen has struggled to rebuild the country and shows little evidence of Khmer Rouge-like brutality...
...This is not anything that we have carefully worked out, by any means, or thought about to the degree, or extent of what is possible," he said, displaying a startling lack of follow-through...
...But the U.S...
...But the fundamental reason is that America's long-standing fascination with China was transformed by Henry Kissinger's realpolitik into a religion, one which leads its many zealots to bend over backward, in the face of all kinds of contravening developments, just to be China's friend...
...Under the guidance of would-be China hand George Bush, this past year the fixation became particularly absurd and embarrassing: What was the point after Tiananmen Square and the triumph of glasnost...
...Start a war, lose a turn Throughout the years of the Reagan and Bush administrations, rhetoric against the Khmer Rouge has increased, but the policy of tacit support has persisted, as China continues to cast its large shadow over the problem...
...At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee annual kickoff hearing, Sen...
...But in one of those strange twists that gives geopolitics a bad name, the United States is for all practical purposes a Khmer Rouge ally...
Vol. 22 • April 1990 • No. 3
