Essay on the Cambodia Campaign by Travis Donselman

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Winning the Battle, Losing the War:

The Effects of American Intervention on Cambodia

ABSTRACT

While lauded (and accurately so) as the greatest success of the Vietnam War, serious

misjudgments and miscalculations by the United States government made the tactical success of

the Cambodia Campaign a strategic failure.

TACTICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE CAMBODIAN CAMPAIGN

Ironically, if anything, it was the tactical intelligence prior to launching the invasion that

worried the Joint Chiefs of Staff the most. Once asked by Nixon to draw up an invasion plan,

High Command realized the intelligence problems it faced. Abrams, who was to oversee the

operation, decided to go forward with it even as he realized he would be unable to make air

reconnaissance of the border for fear of tipping the Americans’ hand. Nighttime forays by

Special Forces were likewise not an option because of the thousands of anti-personnel mines the

US Air Force had strung along the part of the border. It was this portion of it, called the

Fishhook, that interested Abrams and Washington the most, for it was here that the Central

Office of South Vietnam (COSVN) was believed to be.

Even with the dearth of intelligence that Abrams had, he planned an invasion that proved

to be a resounding success. Thousands of tons of Vietcong supplies were recovered, heavy

casualties were inflicted on enemy forces, and few casualties were sustained by ARVN troops

and even fewer by American ones. Furthermore, the Vietcong was forced to divert troops to

Cambodia, bringing a respite its attacks in South Vietnam.

Winning the Battle, Losing the War

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This was what Nixon had hoped for. Aside from destroying COSVN and cutting the

VC’s supply chain, Nixon had been seeking to buy time for Vietnamization. He thought he

could accomplish this by moving the battleground to Cambodia. In addition, Nixon knew that

with its sanctuaries obliterated, the Vietcong would be unable to launch a strike from the west

into Vietnam for at least a year. By forcing the Vietcong to launch incursions from Laos and

North Vietnam, ARVN and US forces would be better able to repel them, as forces to be moved

from the Cambodian border to the Laos border and the DMZ. General Abrams had told Nixon

he needed two years at least for Vietnamization; afterwards, Abrams said the Cambodian

Campaign had given him four.

In June of 1970, the administration and the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not have

envisioned a better opportunity to extricate US soldiers form the quagmire that Vietnam had

become. In three months, Lon Nol’s pro-American government has replaced Prince Norodom

Sihanouk’s non-aligned one, Sihanoukville (renamed Kompong Som) had been closed to

Chinese traffic, enemy forces swept to the farthest reaches of Cambodia, and Hanoi embroiled in

quagmire of its own. Nixon, Abrams, Wheeler, and others within and close to the administration

hailed the Cambodian Campaign as the biggest success of the war, even surpassing Tet.

Ironically, the two biggest successes on the battlefield would prove to be the two biggest set-

backs to the war effort. And the Cambodian Campaign, being the bigger success, was, naturally,

the bigger disaster.


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STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT OF THE CAMBODIAN CAMPAIGN

If a tactical success, the Cambodian Campaign had three devastating ramifications for

American aims in Cambodia: the loss of Sihanouk to the Khmer Rouge, the bombing of the

Cambodian countryside, and the presence of South Vietnamese troops in Cambodia.

The decisions of 1970 paved the road for the Khmer Rouge’s victory in the Cambodian

Civil War. In what would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, faith in the Domino Theory

precipitated an American course of action that induced a Communist takeover of Cambodia. By

widening the war in Cambodia, the United States more than Sihanouk, the Vietcong, or the

Khmer Rouge brought the country under Communist control.

Even if American goals had simply been to keep Cambodia from falling to the Marxist-

Leninist strain of the movement, which Moscow oversaw, the United States failed in this. As is

well-known, the Maoist the Khmer Rouge ruled was toppled by the newly unified Socialist

Republic of Vietnam, a Soviet ally. In its place, the Vietnamese set up a puppet regime, the

People’s Republic of Kampuchea, one on six states the USSR recognized as fully socialist. At

best, Americans only delayed Cambodia falling into the hands of the Soviets by some four years

—and at what a price!

THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS

Outside of the Nixon administration and the Pentagon, the consensus is that the Khmer

Rouge’s rise to power would have been impossible had Sihanouk stayed in power. Such is

William Shawcross’s thesis in his book Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Destruction of

Cambodia. Two-pronged, his thesis argues that that the deposition of Sihanouk as well as the

American bombings of Cambodia created the conditions that led to Pol Pot’s victory over Lon


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Nol.1 Foremost among these conditions are an illegitimate government and universal suffering,

Shawcross states.2

No doubt Pol Pot was skilled at exploiting both of these conditions. Only a man of his

Machiavellian genius could have propelled a rag tag band of peasants into a revolutionary police

force that controlled a country more tightly than any in history. In this, Pol Pot is not unique.

Exploiting rather than creating conditions of social foment has been the modus operandi of all

successful indigenous Communist revolts: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spartacus Uprising, the

Yugoslav Underground, the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and the French

Indochina War. The single unsuccessful one in the above list, the Spartacus Uprising, almost

never took place. Rosa Luxemburg only gave way to Liebknecht after fervently opposing

revolution, arguing that conditions were not yet ripe. All (skilled) Communist revolutionaries

know the role of social conditions in mass mobilization.

The Work of Chalmers Johnson

In his work Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, Chalmers Johnson gives a more

academic analysis of these conditions necessary for revolution than Shawcross does.

Specifically, Johnson examines the rise of Communism in China during the Sino-Japanese War.

Johnson’s central thesis is that the Japanese invasion brought such condition of wretchedness

that it drove the Chinese peasants into the Communist camp. As Chalmers, a self-professed Cold

Warrior, puts it, “[O]nly in those circumstances in which the most patriotic act is to join the

Communist Party does a Communist movement become a mass movement.”3

1 Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Destruction of Cambodia. Revised ed. Simon and Schuster: New York, 1981, p. 4442 Op. cit., p. 633 Blowback. Henry Holt and Co: New York, 2000, p. xxvii


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Importantly, there is a strong resemble between post-Sihanouk Cambodia and Japanese-

occupied China. The resemblance is not lost on Johnson at all:

[W]ithout the United States government’s Vietnam-era savagery, [Pol Pot] could have never come to power in a culture like Cambodia’s, just as Mao’s uneducated peasant radicals never would have gained legitimacy in a normal Chinese context without the disruption and depravity of the Japanese war.4

Classical Marxist doctrine holds that the misery of the masses will become the very source of

their liberation. Johnson’s analysis of the Chinese Revolution makes the same conclusion,

though rejects the underlying analysis. Rather than the class consciousness of Marxism, Johnson

argues that nationalism, a bourgeois disease of the mind, rallied the Chinese peasants to Mao’s

cause. Certainly, Maoism revised fundamental parts of Marxism-Leninism. No doubt to the

most important one from a practical standpoint was making imperialism central to his

philosophy. In order to ignite revolution in a feudal state, Mao replaced proletariat revolution

with national “people’s wars” of liberation, imperial powers standing in for capitalists.

Because Mao focused on Asian fraternity more than the international solidarity of Marx

and Lenin and the colonial exploiters more than the industrial ones, it perhaps is not far to

conclude that either Marx or Johnson was wrong about the cause Communist revolutions, Marx

in his theory of class consciousness and Johnson with his peasant nationalism hypothesis. There

are ways, in fact, to reconcile class consciousness with peasant nationalism.

Likely, it was peasant nationalism—an ill-defined term, as it is—more than any sense of

class solidarity that swelled the ranks of the Khmer Rouge. This is probably the case wherever

oppression stems from a foreign invasion or a government perceived to be a puppet of a foreign

regime. While a bit pedantic, the point is important in that it undercuts left-wing and right-wing

interpretations of the Cambodian struggle insofar as theory is concerned. Extreme ideologues on

4 Blowback, p. 12


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both ends of the spectrum mitigate the role the widespread violence in Cambodia played in

undermining social stability. Both American and Marxist apologists insinuate that the Khmer

Rouge was an inevitability.

While there is no need to further consider these interpretations, it should be stated that,

common to Johnson and Marx, is the belief—Johnson’s derived empirically and Marx’s from

theory—that revolution begins with misery. Further conditions strengthen but do not cause the

revolution, or so Johnson, who gives a very detailed account, holds:

(1) The traditional rural elites evacuated . . . and left the peasants to fend for themselves . . . (2) The Japanese failed to create a Chinese government that could obtain popular support . . . (3) Japanese propaganda . . . (4) the Imperial Army drove out the KMT and then, in effect, left the territory empty for the Communists to enter.”5

With minimal revision, each of these could aptly describe Cambodia in the early 1970s.

In general terms, Johnson is arguing that (1) the collapse of traditional authority, (2) the lack of

support for a government, (3) the dissemination of propaganda, and (4) the loss of security forces

in an area all contribute to the success of a revolution. Whereas misery is necessary to instigate

armed revolt, the success of that revolt has to do with the collapse of authority in all its forms

and the manipulation of attitudes.

The Coup against Sihanouk in Cambodia

The coup d’état of 1970 brought to power a government lacking popular support. The

new government then embarked on a course of war with North Vietnam that destroyed not only

whatever support it did have but the entire Cambodian nation. Secretary General of the Chinese

Communist Party at the time, Geng Biao said after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, “If the United

States did not instigate Lon Nol . . . to take advantage of Sihanouk’s trip abroad to stage a coup

5 Peasant National and Communist Power. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 1972, p. 70


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and overthrow the monarchical government, the situation would not have been like this today.”6

Hun Sen, a Khmer Rouge leader before turning on the movement and has since became prime

minister of Cambodia, was of the same opinion as Geng. While Kissinger remains adamant that

the American intervention slowed a Khmer Rouge victory that was inevitable, disinterested

observers, taking the position of Geng and Hun Sen, maintain that by not exercising its influence

to restore Sihanouk to power and then by waging a military campaign to save Lon Nol’s regime

from collapse, the United States exacerbated the Cambodian Civil War.

The American Response to the Coup

The ouster of Sihanouk was welcomed by the United States and undoubtedly done

with its acquiescence. Little more than a month after Lon Nol’s coup, Nixon told

Kissinger he unequivocally supported the new regime. The Lon Nol regime, Nixon

explained, was “the only government in Cambodia in the last 25 years that had [had] the

guts to take a pro-Western and pro-American stand.”7 Kissinger, while fearful of

widening the war, was pleased to see Sihanouk removed on a personal level, as he hated

him.8 As telling were the actions of Washington in the coup’s immediate aftermath. In a

1979 interview with Shawcross, Sihanouk pointed out that if the United States had

wanted to restore him to power, all they would have had to have done was withhold aid

from Lol Non’s regime, for the regime would have been completely at the mercy of the

Vietcong in that case.9

6 “Geng Biao’s Report on the Situation in Indochinese Peninsula.” Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 11, no. 3, 1981, p. 381.7 Quoted in Nalty p. 1878 Shawcross, William p. 3919 Op. loc.


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Sihanouk’s point, while well-taken, is not as certain as he makes out. Likely, the

Vietnamese would have restored Sihanouk, for they were not opposed to his rule and

knew that he had broad support among Cambodians. The possibility still remains that the

North Vietnamese would have installed a puppet regime as they did after toppling the

Khmer Rouge. In 1979, Hanoi could have just as easily put Sihanouk back on the throne

rather than declare the PRK. Yet, on the whole, Sihanouk’s belief is well-founded.

There was a crucial difference between 1970 and 1979. In the first year of the decade,

Vietnam was at war. In 1979, the nation was at peace for the first time in 40 years.

Vietnam had the resources to devote to propping up a puppet regime in a decimated

neighbor. Certainly, the leadership in Hanoi knew it had the backing of Moscow. More

critical, however, was the caution that American foreign policy in the aftermath of

Vietnam. It is doubtful that Carter, given his human rights-based foreign policy, would

have ordered arm strikes or that Congress, given the nation’s mood, would have

authorized ground forces.

Simply, the United States in 1970 made no attempt to restore Sihanouk to the

throne but it was not desirous of his return. The United States was the first nation in the

world to extend recognition to the new government in Phnom Penh. Military and

economic aid soon followed. The amount received by the new government per annum

equaled all the aid Sihanouk had received in the entire decade he maintained diplomatic

relations with the US. Far from mourning the loss of Sihanouk, who was making it a

point to normalize relations with the US at the time of his ouster, Nixon was so anxious

to keep Lon Nol’s regime afloat that he ordered the Cambodian Campaign for that reason

alone in spite of concerns voiced by advisors, Kissinger among them.


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While clearing out the Vietcong sanctuaries and destroying the elusive COSVN

were, of course, important objectives as well, the timeline bears out that it was the

impending fall of Phnom Penh that moved the President to act. Only the year before,

Nixon had told the Joint Chiefs of Staff to put any plans for a Cambodian invasion on the

back burner. He stayed the course up until late April, when Vietcong forces had moved

to within twenty kilometers of Phnom Penh. Suddenly, Nixon ordered bold action to

show Lon Nol that he had Washington’s support10 and announced his decision days later

on national television on the 30th of April.

The record, as documented above, undermines assertions by Kissinger among

others that Washington favored Sihanouk as Cambodia’s head of state. Sihanouk

recounted to Shawcross a dinner he shared with Kissinger in 1979. Something of an

attempt to rapprochement, Kissinger began the conversation by telling, “You must

believe that we were favorable to your returning to power and we did not like Lon Nol.

We liked you.”11 Ironically, Kissinger is the one that impugns his own credibility.

Nixon’s statements quoted earlier about supporting Lon Nol at all costs come from

Kissinger’s memoir The White House Years.

Kissinger was right if he meant that the Nixon administration was less hostile to

Sihanouk that earlier administrations. It was earlier presidents who had driven Sihanouk

into the Communists’ arms and Nixon had worked hard to mend relations with Sihanouk

during the first year of his presidency. Nixon’s predecessors had been far from straight

forward in their dealings with Sihanouk. Eisenhower, as was his wont, ordered a covert

operation to overthrow Sihanouk in 1959. To be carried out by a right-wing rebel group,

10 Natly p. 18611 Shawcross, p. 403


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the Khmer Serei, and Thai forces at Washington’s behest, the Bangkok Coup, which

shared the fate of the Bay of Pigs invasion, ruptured good will between the countries five

years into Cambodian self-rule. Further straining relations was the political refugee

status the Bangkok extended to the fleeing Khmer Serei militants. Prior to the Bangkok

Plot, eastern Thailand had been the group’s training grounds and its sanctuary until Son

Ngoc Thanh, the group’s leader, returned from exile following Sihanouk’s fall. Despite

vociferous and frequent complaints from Sihanouk, Washington did not pressure

Bangkok to expel the group. This was only to be expected, as the CIA had been the ones

to arrange for the Khmer Serei’s safety in Thailand with Bangkok in the first place.

Despite the failure of the coup, Washington continued to funnel money and

weapons to the Khmer Serai up until the last days of Sihanouk’s reign. Relations with

the US were finally severed by Sihanouk in 1963 ostensibly as a result of border

incursions by Thai and South Vietnamese forces that Sihanouk believed the United States

was behind.

The history between Sihanouk and the US shows why the former would be

skeptical of Kissinger’s claim. To all appearances, the United States, as in the cases of

Iran and Guatemala, had been seeking to remove an independently-minded leader with an

anti-Communist one, in this case, the Japanese collaborator and one-time fascist Son.

Even if Washington had no knowledge of coup d’état, the fact that Washington did

nothing to restore Sihanouk to power is not excused, a point Senator Symington made in

his questioning of Abrams in the hearings on the Cambodia bombings before the Senate

Armed Services Committee.12 Washington would have met no opposition from

12 Hearings on the Cambodia Bombings before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, p. 358


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Cambodians nor Beijing and Hanoi, both of which spent the month after the coup trying

to get Washington to broker a deal with Lon Nol to restore Sihanouk to power.

That Sihanouk had broken relations with Washington does not accurately portray

the relationship between Cambodia and the United States at the time of his deposition.

Nor can the act been taken as proof of Communist sympathies. Far from flirting with

Communism, Sihanouk closed Sihanoukville to Communist arms shipments in early

1969. If Sihanouk followed any ideology, it was nationalism. Critics of the regime point

to his professed creed of Buddhist socialism as evidence of a left-wing ideology , and yet,

the term itself implies a wholesale repudiation of dialectical materialism. About

Sihanouk’s Buddhist Socialism, which Sihanouk also referred to as Khmer Socialism,

Roger Kershaw explained:

[I]t was a socialism . . . far removed from the ‘scientific socialism’ of Marx and Lenin . . . more like the translation of the teachings of Buddhism into political, economic and social terms. Essentially pragmatic, it drew its inspiration directly from religious principles, preaching mutual self-help and social action as the means for man to surpass himself in the struggle against evil and social injustice.13

Even Sihanouk’s much discussed economic reforms in 1964 were not any more radical

than those being undertaken in Europe at the time. More telling would be the fact that

Sihanouk, so powerful he could have pushed through any agenda did not call for land

reform despite disparities in property among the rural Cambodians, who made up eighty-

five percent of the population. This could have been a political calculation as he did not

want to lose the support of the wealthiest land owners, who essentially governed the rural

communities and were strong supporters of the monarchy. If so, Washington had even

less reason to fear a Communist-type revolution that would have led to the

collectivization of land.

13 Monarchy in South-East Asia: The faces of tradition in transition. Routledge: London, 2001, p. 55


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Sihanouk’s Foreign Policy

Washington failed to grasp that history, in fact, more than ideology guided

Sihanouk’s policy. While Sihanouk did want to send a strong message to the

Communists about the violations of Cambodian borders, as was his stated reason for

closing Sihanoukville to Communist traffic, in actuality, Sihanouk feared Hanoi was

preparing to annex Cambodia. He was cutting off the Vietcong’s primary route for

munitions to foil any such aspirations.

The anxieties Khmers have about Vietnamese invasions are hard to appreciate but might

be compared to those felt by the French over German aggression from the Franco-Prussian War

to World War II, only mixed with the irredentism of the inter-war Germans. Cochinchina,

including the most important Cambodian port, Prey Nokor, was a part of the Khmer Empire until

absorbed completely by an expansionist Vietnam state in 1778. The port of Prey Nokor was

renamed Saigon. Even centuries later, Cambodians have not forgotten this. As recently was the

mid-19th century, Prince Norodom, the great grandfather of Sihanouk, urged French officials to

not include Cochinchina as part of their Vietnamese colony; he argued that it was the proper

possession of Cambodia. Even today, there are large Khmer-majority pockets throughout this

part of Vietnam, which makes up the lower third of the country. Even as late as Pol Pot the

Cambodian government was asserting claims to the region, and his obsession in this regard,

brought about the fall of the Khmer Rouge when he ordered an invasion of Cochinchina. The

war-time propaganda of the Khmer Rouge as well made frequent mention of Cochinchina as well

as frequent attacks on the Vietnamese, North and South alike, suggesting that hard feelings were

alive and well in the general population as well.


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Indelibly etched in the Khmer psyche, Cochinchina among other memories as well as

xenophobia—Khmer culture is Indic, Vietnamese Sinic—have made neutralization of Vietnam

Cambodia’s top foreign policy priority for 150 or more years, even prior to sovereignty. So

threatened by Vietnam did Cambodians feel during French expansion into Indochina that Prince

Norodom ceded Cambodia’s independence to France in order to safeguard what remained of his

country from the Vietnamese. Such a lesson was not lost on Sihanouk. His remarks, while in

and out of power, express profound fear and distrust of the Vietnamese.

Hanoi’s Communist orientation did not assuage Sihanouk’s fears and for good reason.

The professed anti-nationalism of Beijing and Moscow never stopped them from annexing

territory, irrespective of what their neighbor’s creed was. If anything, Lenin, Stalin, and

Khrushchev showed that Communists could be more expansionist than the imperialists they

denounced. Ho Chi Minh too did not hide his belief that Hanoi had the prerogative to dictate

policy for all of Indochina. Ho said during the nascence of the Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge,

“The Vietnamese Party reserves the right to supervise the activities of its brother parties in

Cambodia and Laos.” Telling of the tension between Cambodia and North Vietnam in this

regard are the speeches Sihanouk and Ho Chi Minh would make on Indochina. While Ho

emphasized the desirability of an Indochinese federation and closer ties once liberation had been

completed, Sihanouk would make copious use of the phrases territorial integrity and respect for

national sovereignty.

A North Vietnamese victory in Saigon was Sihanouk’s greatest fear. Had

Washington understand that, it would have seen that there was room for a strategic, if

furtive partnership with Phnom Penh. As it is, the Pentagon, State Department, NSC,

CIA, and White House only understood Sihanouk at the most superficial level: that he


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was not an American ally. In responding at the Congressional hearings to Senator

Symington’s bewilderment at the Cambodian coup, Abrams, the lead commander in

Vietnam, stated:

[A]ll of the weapons and munitions that supported the enemy in military region IV, III, and the major part of military region II were coming through Sihanoukville . . . so I did not like what was happening in Sihanouk’s Cambodia.14

Abrams failed to empathize with the (perceived) adversary, which McNamara argues is one of

the eleven deadly sins of war making.15 Abrams was not alone in this, nor was it limited to one

side of the political aisle. Specifically about Vietnam, McNamara wrote: “Our judgments of

friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the

people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.”16 If anything, the

Republican picture of Sihanouk was of a man who harbored dishonorable, if not dangerous leftist

sympathies. Democrats, in contrast, painted him as a cautious head of state forced to play

political calculus in a booby-trapped environment. John Foster Dulles’ pressure on Sihanouk to

join SEATO, Abrams’ remarks that he was glad Sihanouk was gone, Nixon’s decision to send

South Vietnamese forces into Cambodia—each act belies a parochial view, ignorance or

defiance on the part of a policymaker unable or view Indochina through Khmer eyes. These

three decision-makers branded Sihanouk either soft or even sympathetic to Communism for

whatever decisions of his thwarted their own agendas for Cambodia, whether they be declining

membership in SEATO, allowing Communist arms through Sihanoukville, or denying US and

ARVN forces use of Cambodia.

In none of this, did Sihanouk seek a Communist Vietnam. While still in power as head

of state, Sihanouk explained in a speech, “I am not suggesting a permanent division [of

14 ibid.15 The Fog of War. Sony Pictures: Culver City, CA, 2003.16 In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. Vintage Books: New York, 1995.


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Vietnam], but it helps the cause of Cambodia, and I hope it will last for some time.” Before that,

Sihanouk would have rather seen a Vietnam directed by Washington, for an American-backed

regime would force China to contest any Vietnamese aggression, whereas a Red Vietnam would

force China onto the sidelines for fear of provoking the Soviet Union. Naturally, Sihanouk could

not opine his attitude toward Vietnam too loudly, for a unified Vietnam would have a far more

capable industrial base and natural resources in addition to its significant advantage in

population.

Sihanouk’s aim in all this was not to forge a close relationship with Hanoi so much as it

was to coax China into guaranteeing Cambodian independence. In pursuing such a strategy,

Sihanouk was banking on traditional Chinese-Vietnamese hostility and latent enmity between the

Marxist-Leninist and Maoist wings of international Communism. Ironically, it was Dulles’

insistence on membership in SEATO as a precondition for security guarantees that drove

Sihanouk towards the Chinese.

That the break in diplomatic relations between the United States and Cambodia only

came in 1963 is a testament to Sihanouk’s good faith effort as well as the exigencies of the

situation. To his credit, Sihanouk anticipated the collapse of South Vietnam early on. By this

point in the war, Sihanouk knew that Hanoi would win, even if American ground forces were

committed.

As South Vietnam spiraled further downward—Diem was assassinated at the end of the

year—Sihanouk moved squarely into the Chinese camp, first, extending recognition to the PRC,

and, later, accepting aid from it, the first non-Communist country to ever do so. Centrists in

Washington were perhaps even less charitable than the Right. The majority of them cynically

concluded that Sihanouk was playing Beijing against Washington to benefit Cambodia. Prima


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facie, this may seem to be, yet if it had been the case, Sihanouk would have never terminated

agreements with the Americans for aid, as the amount they gave far surpassed anything the

Chinese could give. In actuality, Sihanouk followed a policy of sabotaging the concessions he

made to the North Vietnamese by offering countervailing ones to the Americans. While Abrams

made much of the Chinese use of Sihanoukville before Congress, he was oddly quiet about the

fact that Americans had been, with Sihanouk’s acquiescence, bombing Vietcong convoys in

Cambodia since 1965, a year before Chinese shipments of arms started on a large scale. This was

a time when the US and Cambodia had no diplomatic relations, suggesting that Sihanouk never

really considered his break with the Americans more than window dressing for the Chinese.

The removal of Sihanouk was as unnecessary as it was imprudent. If Sihanouk posed a

threat to American objectives in Vietnam, it was only in that he wanted to prolong the war, and

American involvement in it. If Sihanouk ever foiled American plans, it was because he was anti-

Vietnamese, not anti-American. While Sihanouk could not stop the Communist victory he

portended, he could at least render the unified Vietnamese state too bloodied to menace

Cambodia. Short of a divided Vietnam, Sihanouk shared American interests in an anti-

Communist government to his East, even as he realized that it would never come to pass.

The American Bombing Campaign

Those who gained the most, in fact, from the removal of Sihanouk were the North

Vietnamese. The inept leadership replacing Sihanouk thrust Cambodia into war with North

Vietnam. Surely, the Lon Nol and his advisers were counting on substantial American assistance

in weapons and aid, but that an untested force of 30,000 and a nation with a population of 7


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million could successfully fight a force with experience dating back to WWII and led by a

military genius in Giap was preposterous. Nol, a competent military man himself, must have

grossly underestimated the political pressures in Washington that would prevent Nixon from

making a full-scale and indefinite commitment to his regime.17 In fact, Nol’s naïveté of politics

has been remarked on by Sihanouk, Kissinger, and scholars alike. A peasant who gained

promotion in the Cambodian Army through the charm of his personality and skill, Nol, in fact,

was grossly ignorant of the nuances of political dealing and power-brokering. His regime’s fatal

mistake was launching a war expecting Americans to commit ground forces as they had in South

Vietnam. Even a political novice could have understood that Vietnamization meant more troops

for Cambodia but a very short window on the troops, if any, and air support Cambodia would

receive. The core of the Nixon Doctrine, after all, was “let Asian boys fight Asian wars.”

This itself raises the question of why Nixon allowed Nol to embark on such a reckless

course of action. Surely, Nixon was not under the same illusions as Nol about the amount of

American aid he would receive. Nixon, perhaps more than even Kissinger, keenly perceived the

losing battle he was fighting with Congress and with the American people over Vietnam. In

order to win the election, Nixon felt compelled to announced his secret plan to end the war in

Vietnam. He understood that popular war fatigue was setting in, and who could have missed it

after the public reaction to the Tet Offensive. Despite only targeting enemy bases adjacent to the

border in uninhabited areas of Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger held Operation MENU in the

strictest secrecy—the Secretary of the Air Force, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Secretary of

State and most of the administration were completely in the dark about it. While it is

conceivable that Nixon had relied on Congress extending the deployment of the ARVN and the

token US forces in Cambodia beyond the June 20, 1970 deadline it had established, that was

17 Gilk, op. cit., pp. 52-3


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quite a gamble to take in that political atmosphere. Most likely, Nixon believed that the

Cambodian Campaign would strike so quickly as to completely clear the Vietcong out of

Cambodia within the sixty day that Congress had allotted him. Either a result of poor

intelligence or poor judgment, Nixon and Kissinger were tragically wrong on this. Upon seizing

power, Nol gave the North Vietnamese a 48 hour ultimatum to withdraw all of its 40,000 troops

on Cambodian territory. As could be expected, Hanoi braced for war with Cambodia and the

United States in Cambodia rather than remove its forces:

[I]mmediately following the deposition of Sihanouk, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces began to expand their base areas in Kampuchea by launching a long series of attacks throughout the eastern part of the country. By the end of April, these base areas were already becoming a solid band of self-sustaining territory stretching from Laos to the sea . . .18

In addition to expanding their positions, Vietcong battalions solidified the twenty percent of

Cambodia over which they already had de facto control.19 These positions, in the North and

East, would gradually been handed over to the Khmer Rouge, as the VC began its own policy of

“Cambodianization.”

In the destruction to the Cambodian central provinces that followed the North

Vietnamese and South Vietnamese incursions as well American bombing there, the Khmer

Rouge gained a hearing with peasantry who turned to the combatants who promised to end the

destruction.

While Kissinger remains adamant that the United States slowed a Khmer Rouge victory,

most disinterested observers maintain that the United States made it possible, first by not

restoring Sihanouk to power, and then by waging all out war to save the Lon Nol regime from

collapse. Geng Biao, a member of the Khmer Rouge at the time, stated after the fall of the

18 Chang, p. 2719 Gilk, op. cit., p. 53


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Khmer Rouge, “If the United States did not instigate Lon Nol . . . to take advantage of

Sihanouk’s trip abroad to stage a coup and overthrow the monarchical government, the situation

would not have been like this today.” Former prime minister of the Vietnam-backed Hun Sen

made the same assessment. Not just Cambodians, but scholars make the same assertion. Kate

Frieson explains why: “What the Red Khmer required to make political inroads into the

countryside was a combination of economic catastrophe and political opportunity.”20 Frieson

goes on to arguing that the Khmer Rouge may have been the one Communist regime to seize

power without broad support, even as Lenin maintains that such support is necessary for a

revolution to succeed; however, even in Frieson’s narrative, the Khmer Rouge did have popular,

if only for a short time. Statistics provided by Bob Kiernan bear this out: the Khmer Rouge had

grown from 4,000 at the time of the coup in 1970 to 200,000 by the time of the Paris Peace

Accords ending American involvement in 1973. In fact, the Khmer Rouge at that point held

80% of Cambodia and were so powerful that the Vietnamese were powerless to disband the

group, as the Americans wanted. Vietnam shared this interest too, as a power vacuum in

Cambodia would give them a free hand there. This was an important consideration for the

Vietnamese. Anne Gilk argues that the Khmer Rouge were seen as pawns into whom they could

insert their own people:

[B]oth geographical proximity and recent political experience have apparently convinced Vietnam that a Kampuchea closely allied with, if not also subservient to Vietnam, constitutes one of the essential conditions of regional order and Vietnam’s own security.

From 1970 to 1972, in fact, Vietnam had on several occasions entertained the idea of launching a

full-scale invasion of Cambodia to install a puppet regime there as they would do at the end of

20 “Revolution and Rural Response in Cambodia,” p. 34. Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia. Ed. Ben Kiernan. Yale University Southeast Asia Studies: New Haven, CT, 1993. Breakdown of the Sino-Vietnamese Alliance, 1970 – 1979. Institute of East Asian Studies: Berkeley, CA, 1992.


20

the decade.21 Hanoi thought better of it, though, of each occasion, believing that Hanoi-trained

leaders of the Khmer Rouge would be able to gain dominance within the party. These hopes

would be dashed when Pol Pot, realizing from the beginning that Hanoi was using the Khmer

Rouge for its own ends, liquidated members tied to Hanoi. By the Paris Peace Accords of 1973,

the Khmer Rouge was so powerful that Pol Pot discarded any chimera of unity between Hanoi

and his forces.

Thus, it is significant to note that, while the Khmer Rouge had not formally toppled the

government in Phnom Penh, it had consolidated power in Battambang, the second largest city of

Cambodia, as well as the majority of the country. Even without the capital, the Khmer Rouge

controlled other essential features of Khmer state including its only port, Sihanoukville; its

waterways, including the Mekong; and the bulk of its arable land. These were in addition to the

overwhelming military superiority the Khmer Rouge possessed by 1972.

Because of centralized democracy, the curtailment of civil liberties, and the social

stratification, few Communist states retain mass appeal for long. Pace Frieson, Lenin intends his

remarks to refer to only the initial phase of social revolution. Once the vanguard has seized

power, power can and should be maintained through force; the support of the masses is no longer

necessary, and widespread opposition might form as reactionary individuals and institutions are

eliminated from the society.

The Khmer Rouge, after the Vietcong ceded control of eastern and northern Cambodia it,

them, was as secure in its power in 1971 as the Bolsheviks were in 1919 and the People’s

Liberation Army in 1945. Support for the Khmer Rouge was overwhelming in the countryside,

as it posited itself not as Communist but as pro-Sihanouk, who enjoyed 80 to 90 percent support

in the hamlets, villages, and towns. Sihanouk’s Sangkum party had never lost a seat they

21 Ibid.


21

contested, not to mention an actual election. As the incursions into and bombing of the

countryside continued, the peasantry, some 85% of the population, further grew disenchanted

with Lon Nol’s government.

The Bombing Campaign

While most scholars agree the coup as well as the military action were important, the

importance of each to the rise of the Khmer Rouge is debatable. Shawcross, for one, has stressed

the role of the USAF bombings:

The Cambodian bombing campaign had two unintended side effects that ultimately combined to produce the very domino effect that the Vietnam War was supposed to prevent. First, the bombing forced the Vietnamese Communists deeper and deeper into Cambodia, bringing them into greater contact with Khmer Rouge insurgents. Second, the bombs drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a group that seemed initially to have slim prospects of revolutionary success.

While Kissinger feigns indignation at this bold assertation, other scholars support Shawcross’s

view that the bombings were the most destabilizing element of the Cambodian Civil War.

Chandler argues that the Khmer Rouge won because Pol Pot and other Party leaders were highly

skilled at transmuting anger among peasants into political power in the provinces. Chandler

maintains that this result of the bombings was the decisive factor in the Khmer Rouge’s rise to

power. Administration officials, notably Kissinger, question the effect limited casualties could

have, but Chandler puts the number of fatalities alone somewhere in the tens of thousands; the

number of displaced Cambodians easily reached two million in the first three years of the war,

and Phnom Penh swelled from a city of 600,000 to between two and three million.22

US military documents declassified after Chandler and Shawcross’s studies would seem

to support their views. While the documents are silent on the number of casualties, they do

22 Chandler, David P. The Tragedy of Cambodian History. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 22


22

reveal that the United States practiced widespread indiscriminate bombing. Roughly ten percent

of sorties in Cambodia had no target specified.23 It should be noted that much of this carpet

bombing occurred in 1973, as the United States ratcheted up pressure on the Khmer Rouge to get

them to agree to a power-sharing agreement with the Khmer Republic. Nonetheless, enough

casualties occurred in 1970 and 1971— whether in carpet or surgical strikes—to swell the ranks

of the Khmer Rouge.

Shawcross’s (and Chandler’s) link between bombing and Khmer Rouge rule is

compelling, though one or two points he makes about it are unconvincing. Shawcross and

Kiernan alike place culpability for the Cambodian Genocide on the MENU strikes of 1969.

Kiernan’s analysis is particularly misguided. Kiernan, maybe the foremost scholar on this period

of Cambodian history, argues that:

Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide [italics mine].

Kiernan puts the cart before the horse. His conclusion that bombings spurred the growth of the

Khmer Rouge accords with Shawcross, Chandler, and the majority of scholars. His chronology,

however, is confused. He erroneously ascribes the coup d’etat of 1970 to the American bombing

campaign. This is just flatly wrong. Operation MENU, while not concluded until May of 1970,

had taken part mostly in 1969. Highly populated targets, of which MENU did not have any, did

not beg until after Sihanouk’s deposition. Confusing the narrative like this implies that Khmer

Rouge came to prominence in 1969. This is also just flatly wrong. If Kissinger is correct on one

point, it is that the MENU operation had no effect on Sihanouk’s fall or Pol Pot’s rise.

23 Kiernan, Bob and Owen Taylor. “Bombs over Cambodia.” http://migs.concordia.ca/links/documents/Bombs_over_Cambodia_Kiernan.pdf,accessed 23 March 2010.


http://migs.concordia.ca/links/documents/Bombs_over_Cambodia_Kiernan.pdf,accessed

23

Still wrong, but less so, Shawcross also imputes importance to MENU where none exists.

As Shawcross shows in great detail in Sideshow, MENU was a tactical failure. Because of faulty

intelligence, Abrams fixated on COSVN. To this day, historians disagree on whether a

centralized Vietcong base of operations existed; Shawcross clearly believes it did not. Abrams

and other members of the high command certainly did. Using DIA intelligence, Abrams placed

COSVN at one of seven locations. While each was an unimportant VC sanctuary, none of the

MENU raids—Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Desert, Supper—destroyed the elusive

compound for which Abrams was looking. The CIA, for its part, denied the existence of

COSVN all together.

While not the brilliant tactical success that the Cambodian campaign was, neither was

MENU a strategic loss. Kissinger, wrong about so many things, is correct in arguing against the

importance of MENU in the Cambodian Civil War. With Sihanouk still in power, Nixon ordered

a detailed study of the effect MENU would have on US-Cambodian relations, which were

undergoing a thaw. Pentagon statistics put the number of civilians in the immediate vicinity at

small numbers, estimates that are accepted as accurate. Yet Chomsky, citing no evidence, asserts

that thousands of Cambodians were killed in MENU. The fact of the matter remains that—and

we can say this with certainty now that all details of the Cambodian air campaign from 1965 to

1973 have been disclosed—only two of the MENU missions, Breakfast and Supper, the first and

last, targeted sites with populations of 1,000 or more in the vicinity. Yet Breakfast, which

occurred in March of 1969 was far too removed in time from the coup d’etat of March, 1970 to

have contributed to it. Supper, the final MENU mission, happened in May of 1970, two months

after the fact. In between those two missions, Lunch, Snack, Dinner, and Desert targeted sites

with aggregate populations in the area not much more than that of Breakfast alone.24 Before

24 Shawcross, op. cit., pp. 28-29


24

Sihanouk’s fall, no more than 2,000 Cambodian peasants could have been affected. That

peasants flocked to the Khmer Rouge in 1969 because of these bombings is simply not true. If

MENU had any adverse affect, it was driving the North Vietnamese soldiers more deeply into

Cambodian territory, a point Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Wheeler conceded in his

testimony before the Senate.25 Yet it is doubtful whether this caused contact—and more

importantly, attacks on the peasantry—to increase significantly between the Vietnamese and

Cambodians. The Vietcong soldiers were trying to evade contact with Cambodian, not initiate,

as they were violating Cambodia’s neutrality. Under strict order from Hanoi, VC troops were

under not circumstances to murder or rape civilians, as any atrocities would have jeopardized

continued use of eastern Cambodia by forcing Sihanouk to demand their withdraw and

galvanizing support for that from the international community, which up to then had reached a

silent consensus to close their eyes to what all parties knew. Certainly had such atrocities been

committed by the Vietcong soldiers in Cambodia, it is hard to see how that would have driven

Cambodians to the Khmer Rouge rather than Sihanouk, who had throughout his life had openly

loathed all Vietnamese, whether pro-Saigon or pro-Hanoi.

In fact, the number of Cambodians killed or maimed in 1969 by either US or VC forces is

irrelevant. Regardless of vast numbers of causalities, the fact is that few peasants were joining

the Khmer Rouge. Independent assessments put to number at little above 4,000 Khmer Rouge

fighters; more generously, Pol Pot rounds the number up to just under 5,000 members. The latter

figure one that Kiernan directly quotes, which makes it surprising to see him exaggerate the

importance of the Operation MENU, especially when elsewhere he so astutely argues for the role

of indiscriminate bombing in the Khmer Rouge revolution.

25 Op. cit., p. 404


25

Yet Kiernan’s thesis about effects of indiscriminate bombing, which he unnecessarily

dilutes by giving undeserved prominence role to MENU, is meritorious. With the fighting in

eastern Cambodia between Cambodian, ARVN, Khmer Rouge, and VC forces and

indiscriminate bombing of VC troop movements in Cambodia’s most heavily populated areas,

including west of the Mekong and around Phnom Penh, which VC forces were quickly closing

in on by April of 1970, Cambodia was thrust into chaos.

The Cambodian Campaign

Tactical air strikes, carried out by fighter aircraft rather than bombers, were done to

support ARVN troops penetrating the interior of Cambodia. There were also used to slow the

advance of VC battalions. This, perhaps more than the even the B-52 carpet bombing, drove

Cambodians into the Khmer Rouge because the presence of population centers was ignored. Not

only that, but population centers were target. Shawcross reports that:

. . . Cambodia was open house for the South Vietnamese Air Force. They . . . were free, for the first time in decades, to give expression to their historical contempt for the Khmers . . . Every Cambodian was a VC and a target.26

Showcross continues that Abrams sent a cable to this effect to Washington to highlight his

concern about South Vietnamese pilots flying missions. Abrams remarks that before it had been

near impossible to get Vietnamese pilots to fly on Sundays. Now they were willing to bribe even

on Sundays to fly missions over Cambodia.27 Perhaps to maximize the damage they inflicted on

Cambodians, South Vietnamese pilots disregarded the operating zone of Operation Freedom

Deal, which was to extend no further than 30 kilometers into Cambodia in order to avoid large

scale civilian casualties. As USAF personnel also began flying beyond the operational zone in

26 Op. cit., p. 17427 Op. loc.


26

order to rescue downed South Vietnamese pilots, civilian casualties escalated.28 By 1971, 44%

of ordinance was falling outside of the authorized area, blanketing Cambodia in death and

destruction as far west as 75 kilometers beyond the Mekong.

Atrocities committed by South Vietnamese on the ground were equally disturbing.

Vietcong fighters were careful to not alienate the peasantry at Hanoi’s direction. The South

Vietnamese, in contrast, showed no such restraint, destroying whatever support Lon Nol had

outside of the Phnom Penh. The inhumanity did entail only looting and rape, but the destruction

of villages without military justification. The town of Snoul was razed. Large population

centers, such as Prey Veng, suffered attack. The residents of Battambang and Krite were

fortunate, for their cities had fallen to the North Vietnamese almost immediately after hostilities

began. Support for Lon Nol could not be built when his government was associated with

barbarian American and South Vietnamese laying waste to Cambodia.

The Cambodian Campaign

The tactical air strikes, carried out by fighter aircraft rather than bombers, were done to

support the ARVN troops penetrating the interior of Cambodia. This, perhaps more than the

bombings, drove Cambodians into the Khmer Rouge. While only anecdotal, stories of atrocities

committed by the South Vietnamese abound; the more disciplined Vietcong fighters were careful

to not alienate the peasants under order from Hanoi. Support for the Lon Nol regime could not

be built when his regime was the one responsible for letting the American and South Vietnamese

lay waste to the countryside.

A final ramification of the ground incursion were pockets left for the Khmer Rouge to

move into. Even when successful at driving the Vietcong from areas, the end result was to

28 Nalty, op. cit., pp. 201-202


27

weaken Nol’s regime. Militarily, the Cambodian Campaign was a resounding success for the

ARVN and American forces. Yet the mandate given to them was limited. They were to clear

Vietcong from Cambodia. With their withdrawal from Cambodia on June 30th, only two months

after the they moved into Cambodia, unoccupied areas, especially those farthest from the

Vietnamese border, came under Khmer Rouge rule. The incursion, while saving Phnom Penh

from the North Vietnamese and driving them into the far north and northeastern reaches of

Cambodia, allowed the Khmer Rouge to control the majority of the control by the end of the

year. The United Congress would not permit the presence of American soldiers beyond June

30th, and the South Vietnamese were too brutal to be allowed to stay. Lon was already pleading

with Kissinger to remove them from the country when a renewed Vietcong insurgency did it for

him. Nixon overestimated the skill of the ARVN and underestimated the time it would take to

transform Cambodian forces into a first-rate military, or at least second-rate. Without a

permanent American presence in Cambodia, primary objective of the various operations—

Operation Shoemaker, Operations Toan Thang 42 – 45, Operation Cuu Long—that comprised

the Cambodian Campaign were destined to fail, no matter how brilliantly they succeeded.

Americans had won the war in Cambodia, but suffered defeat.

Epilogue

The conditions Johnson wrote about in war-torn China materialized in Cambodia.

Peasants with the means to, fled the countryside. With most village leaders absent, the Khmer

Rouge established its own local governments. Collectivization was begun. Propaganda efforts

stressed the affinity between Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge, who told the peasantry that they

were fighting to restore Sihanouk to power. Lon Nol, the South Vietnamese, and the Americans,


28

who dropped fire from the sky, became enemy against which peasants and Khmer Rouge alike

could rally. The Khmer Rouge were able to convince the peasants that theirs was a just crusade

and that an evil adversary threatened them. Significantly, social psychologists point to these two

attitudes—whether in Communist uprisings, the War on Terrorism, or McCarthyism—as the

attitudes necessary for group cohesion. Up to 1973, when the Khmer Rouge unleashed terror

and murder to consolidate power after having come to power—canonical Marxist-Leninist style

—would resistance form. By then, it was too late.


News & Politics

Essay on the Cambodia Campaign by Travis Donselman