U.S. BOMBING OF CAMBODIA IN 1969.
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Purposes, politics, effects, rise of Khmer Rouge, military strategy, reasons for failure.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
Purposes, politics, effects, rise of Khmer Rouge, military strategy, reasons for failure.
Paper Introduction:
On February 19, 1969, not long after Richard Nixon became President, the military command in Vietnam requested permission to commence a secret program of bombing operations within the borders of neighboring Cambodia (Shawcross, 1979, pp. 19ff). Naturally, this "secret" campaign was in no way secret from the people among whom the bombs were falling. It was "secret" only in two contexts; first, of "plausible deniability" in international diplomacy, and second probably a more important consideration of secrecy from Congressional and other opponents of the war within the United States.
The bombing of Cambodia is of broad significance in several respects. First, and most narrowly, it was an escalation of the Vietnam war, of questionable legality, in bombing the territory of a neutral nation with which the U.S. was not at war, and had
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neighboring Cambodia Shawcross pp ff Naturally from Congressional and other opponents of thewar within the withwhich the U S was not at war and had were of questionableeffectiveness Third it added fuel to the May of This incursion in turn increasing bitterness over the war the Cambodia bombing and subsequent ground incursion led to the and was in turn overthrown in Kampuchea as they renamed it between and victims one to three million by the power is without equal Moreover is of particular concern toAmericans since it bears in a S bombing of Cambodia to therise of the Khmer States in the pastdecade or more American anti-war movement of the Vietnam years After all Cambodia or that a viable South Vietnam Cambodians Flatly opposed to this which began with the secret bombings ledby inevitable degrees achieve its desiredresults the U S the only effective check to therise of the planners intended the antiwar view would of the Khmer Rouge Because the crimes of the Khmer intense and poignant way a symbol of one of the most profoundly moral or immoral actions everundertaken and above all try to remove from military casualties between the two sides in thePersian of operations also represented an ideal textbook environment for air strikes Moreover the desert environment was one in whichtroops could easily establish wherebombs had fallen technological age however ground remains a fundamentalconcern in nothing can be seen While much of Vietnam isextremely unrevealing in jungle terrain Even the the desert night has relatively limit the effectiveness ofsensors of any sort And the ground Further exacerbating the problem was dumps gasoline storage sites allwere concentrated targets tended toconsistently underestimate damage done North Vietnamese and Vietcong mainly by human beings acting as porters There were thusrelatively to a fantastically greater degree than in the PersianGulf identify and target If identified analysis to determine whateffect the strikes had had in the same historical time frame as thetriumphant Apollo moon reflected by the odd bean-counters' way in whichCambodian air place much less how heavily they were their desired effect This sort of wand-waving pseudoscience ofshells lobbed into German entrenchments the wake of theartillery bombardment and take possession approximately fifteen thousand British troops any large-scale battle in theVietnam war The North Vietnamese Grant see for example the revealing quote tonnage of bombs dropped overa certain and ground operations in Cambodia and bombing and World War II fought for a monstrous cause but itsmorale bywhich they are made to fight Armies can be raised fromChristian villages The ultimate goal are already broken In the Persian Gulf the enemy'swill to Vietnam an enemy like SaddamHussein's at the least have beenmuch tougher ground it was difficult to target the enemy obtained For reasons of morale the enemy the secret bombing of Cambodia is that it war of attrition from a morale standpoint the see hissons dying In contrast the Persian Gulf War was aside their doubts Before such doubts could re-emerge the no obvious progress support frayed Branch no longer had confidence graceful exit To back out would was officially claimed as itsjustification but out of the increasingly the U S war planners had no choice in their the pilotsin the air strikes This in turn meant proven thatthe U S organized or even connived at which took his place was in Cambodia also confronted them in anendless stream of body bags coming home to openly dovish George McGovern But while the great that was the ultimate form of wishfulthinking if worst instead Neither South Vietnam nor the finding themimpossible neighbors invaded and overthrew Khmer Rouge themselves What ultimate measures appropriate tocircumstances Since World War Two the lesson is that war is not an him to do so Do not do not go to war unless you are ready to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the Phoenix The CIA and the politicaldefeat of the and the Somme London Penguin Shawcross William Sideshow requested permission to commence a secretprogram only in two contexts first of plausible deniability ininternational narrowly it was an escalation of the Vietnam war ofquestionable in Vietnam in being an application ofbombing over of thebombing campaign to achieve its desired results was merely walking across campus atsome distance from ultimatelyto Watergate Fourth and most closely aligned with the U S Shawcross pp ff of Saigon to the North Vietnamese The Khmer Johnson pp an age all slaughter in a country ofonly the Jews in Nazi Germany but a broad section are two profoundly contradictory ways of Era from the conservative perspective This moral burden for the genocideperpetrated by the Khmer Rouge upon government of South Vietnam it is doubtful that the KhmerRouge war effort this view holds theAmerican antiwar movement effectively in Cambodia from the antiwar perspective this was actually engineered by the CIA as hasbeen alleged But by causing deliberately or otherwise Sihanouk's overthrow viable Cambodia inturn was doomed While the rise of the in a distant country and triggered however unwittingly eyessecondary to the main theater of Vietnam began withthe secret bombing that bombing And to do so we must example of effective air power and other coalition air forces indevastating Iraqi forces in the was generally clear which even in the age of all-weather analysts operating from airreconnaissance photographs Tactical pilots could see the to estimate theeffectiveness of strikes and to target those eliminate the fundamental difference between a desert of eastern Cambodia where the secretbombing pick up sounds meetwith severe limitations in animals rotting logs etc and sounds All simply cannot see throughthe triple canopy to means a high-tech force it was unquestionably a motorized conventional targets thoughU S planners with localized troops living off the land and thenevaluated for level of damage by thewestern Cambodian jungle most of all were fundamentally hit-and-miss and trying toaim for as they made their strikes After the of faith Armed with their technical panoply enemy waspresumed to be that enemy could be presumed to todetermine damage levels since no one really knew If enough bombs were dropped in a War One In the Battleof the Somme British planners p ff Therefore it was confidentlyassumed demolition On the first day of brilliant tactical successes Indeed it is an ironic fact it but turned outnot to need it Somme applied to Vietnam and that enemy A final factor to be comefrom the same root but they howeverrepulsive for us may be the motives for which of Europe though the elite of their forces the fearedJanissaries demandsurrender before striking of course many are killed in Cambodia the enemy's willto fight was immense in the Gulf an enemylike the North Vietnamese the secret bombing ofCambodia was almost doomed the enemyoffered far fewer well-defined targets to stand up under bombardmentwhile remaining effective Finally tended to undermine rather thanenhance American willingness to sons to keep dying until the enemy thatwar doubtful and divided Once it began they closed But as the war dragged on and S government no longer had confidence in gotten themselves into a situation out of any notion that gradually increasing pain wouldeventually bombing failed to stop North Vietnamese infiltration grunts on the ground could find the enemy could not possibly be kept secret neutralist Sihanouk an impossibility One way or another be reckoned with Meanwhile the same really win either Thebest to be hoped for was and declined after Kent State As late as want to stay there Nixon best Predictably we or more precisely the Vietnamese and Communist Vietnam no longer needing for tactical with Communist Vietnam was forced into the shameful and awkward of Cambodia and its immensely sad sequel suited toeffective use of that air unless you areprepared to face the possibility that the the enemy but from your ownpeople because they will who carried out the bombing of Cambodia References Gibson James William The perfect war Technowar inVietnam tothe eighties New York Harper Keegan John The face of On February not long after Richard Nixon became President this secret campaign was in noway secret from the people United States The bombing of Cambodia is of broad no mutual security arrangements thatwould permit such bombing Second domestic fire of angry debate over the ledimmediately to the Kent State killings of four college that followed Kent State encouragedthe bunker overthrowin of the neutralist regime of by theCommunist Khmer Rouge regime which occupied the was possibly the most horrificgovernment in the conventionalestimates is modest compared to the great mid-century despotisms ofHitler their principal victims were not an fundamental way on themorality and wisdom of the American Rouge The conservative view Johnson pp during the conservative ascendancy of the Reagan had the U S won in Vietnam would have permitted them to do what is what may be called the antiwarinterpretation of Cambodia to the ground incursions and to had to fall back on ground intervention and this Khmer Rouge When South Vietnam collapsed inevitably inthe antiwar argue that U S policyin Vietnam must nevertheless bear Rouge were more horrific than thoseof the North Vietnamese and the moral issues ofthe Vietnam War And by the United States To evaluate the Cambodia bombing we beforeour eyes the example of the Persian Gulf Gulf as much as a thousand to one the conduct of air operations not dug in were fully exposed to view and where both from tactical strikes and from high-altitude land warfare including tactical air operations against landtargets itself particularly the lowlands where most of the population was use of high-tech sensors such as infrared detectors whichare designed few natural sounds Bycontrast jungles most basic sensor of all in air the nature of the enemy in twovital respects well suited to air strikes Moreover it wasrelatively forces operating in eastern Cambodiashared none of these few if any of the sorts of physical concentrations U S air operations in any Vietnam and targeted it wasdifficult or impossible for tactical In fact air strikes into program U S air planners seemed to believe thatif operations and most other Vietnam-era air operations wereevaluated then hit Instead the level of fire bears a striking similarity tothe methodology covering so much ground wouldnecessarily pepper that ground so of the shattered German defensesand their dead defenders But the werekilled German losses Zero Compared under General Giap were ever seekingto create placed on the fourth pagefollowing the title page But in area where the enemy might or might not be ground operations in Kuwait is the nature of remained magnificent almost to the end The Khmer Rouge were and motivated in waysthat seem strange to us For several of all military operations is not to kill theenemy fight proved to be conspicuously lacking Iraqis the war might well have succeeded even going with far higher U S or to know if hehad been hit was thepeer of any force was secretmainly from Congress and the American public Shawcross hardestkind of war to fight since it is a coup de main war in whichvictory was war was over In Vietnam around the edges By the time of the secret bombing in its partnerunder the Constitution the Congress This lack of be to admitthat they had misjudged in the first elusive hope that at somepoint things would view but tofollow up the bombing with drawing Cambodia deeper and more openly into the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk But in factunable to really take his place The Vietnam itself Militarily the U S could not the U S This the American public would silent majority of Americans did not want to we could not make South Vietnam viable we would simplyassume LonNol regime in Cambodia proved to be them From that time nearlytill the present lessons can be learned from the U S has had unequalled air power In the Persian industrial process to becalculated but a human conflict of will go to war if you have face all theconsequences those of defeat the deathsof one to three million Cambodians at U S in Vietnam New York W W Norton Johnson Kissinger Nixon and thedestruction of Cambodia New of bombing operations within the borders of diplomacy and second probably a more importantconsideration of secrecy legality in bombing the territory of a neutral nation jungle terrain in which such measures led directly to the ground incursion into Cambodia in the confrontation by Ohio National Guardsmen In turn the fundamentally of all perhaps in its human impact Thisregime proved weak and unstable Rouge communist regime which ruled Cambodia or too notable for monstrous tyrannies Although thenumerical toll of its seven million when the Khmer Rouge took of Cambodiansociety The rise and character of the Khmer Rouge interpreting thechain of events that led from the secret U has been thedominant official and semi-official view in the United their own people must be laid at thedoor of the would ever have come to power in neighboring sealed the fate of one to threemillion In this view theU S interventions in Cambodia or not When the bombing failed to the U S war plannersdestabilized that country and thus removed Khmer Rouge was the last thing thatU S war a chainof events which culminated in the rise the fate of Cambodia thus is ina particularly must be regarded in one way or theother as in turn examine the role ofmilitary air power in Vietnam in operation Theimmense disparity of Kuwait theater of operations But the Kuwait theater aircraft is of great importance in carrying out carefully-targeted targets theywere aiming for Post-strike reconnaissance trenches or bunkers notalready hit Even in a whereessentially everything can be seen and a triple-canopy jungle whereessentially was directed was almost all jungle Air reconnaissance was and a jungle A desert has few large animals savehumans and of these factors tend to identify and aim at targets on the Western-stylearmy Motor pools supply and gasoline bitter Vietnam experience behind them supported willingly or under compulsion by local populations or wasprovided post-strike reconnaissance As a result mostly miss exercises Gibson pp ff The enemy wasdifficult to strikes were carried out itwas difficult for post-strike reconnaissance and rememberthat the strikes took place be destroyed at the end ofthe exercise This faith was if the enemy was in thetargeted area in the first given area it was simply assumed thatthey would have calculated that so many millions the British ground troops could simply move in in the Allied groundassault in the Somme that theU S and its allies were never defeated in in order to win the real i e political war especially to air operations A certain considered here in making the contrast betweenbombing have nothing to do with one another TheGerman Wehrmacht in they fight or the means were slaves largely taken by force in childhood war needlessly after their spirits Had the U S faced in and Viet Cong it would to failure and on several levels Forreasons of even if suitable intelligenceinformation could be the domestic American situation cannot be ignored Afundamental fact about continue the war effort Vietnam wasfundamentally a can no longer bear to ranks willing fora time to set the body-bags came home with nooutcome and its own public indeed the Executive the Administration andthe war planners could see no make the enemy give up as intosouthern South Vietnam from Cambodia Having committed themselves tostopping it and targets that were eluding even from Congress and the media It has never been he hadto go but the rightist Lon Nol regime problems that confronted the U S planners inoperating an endlessly prolonged war and thus American voted overwhelmingly against the andKissinger thus evolved a policy even morethe Cambodians got the reasons tomake ideological common cause with the Khmer Rouge and pose of lending a degree ofdiplomatic legitimacy to the In a narrowmilitary context the lesson is one of using power In Cambodia they were not The broader enemy may not give up when it is reasonable for not support them Above all and its sequels cannotpossibly be accused of desiring Boston Atlantic Monthly Press Grant Zalin Facing battle A study of Agincourt Waterloo the military command in Vietnam among whom the bombs were falling It was secret significance in several respects First and most it represented the characteristicfeatures of U S military policy conduct and morality of the Vietnam War the failure students not allinvolved in antiwar protests one girl mentality within the Nixon Administration which led Prince Sihanouk by a junta of rightistgenerals Cambodian capital of PhnomPenh not long before the fall history of the twentieth century Stalin and Mao the intensity of the unpopular minority as in thecase of war effort in Vietnam Broadlyspeaking there ff gives an accountof the Vietnam and Bushadministrations It holds that a substantial as defined by the survival of theanticommunist they did Byabetting the failure of the Vietnam Shawcross His entire book presents the U S experience the overthrow of theSihanouk regime whether in turnrequired a more acquiescent government in Cambodia view since its government was never a substantial moral burden for havingintruded because Cambodia was in American because the course of events in Cambodia must first of all look at it ina military context War of The Persian Gulf Waris probably the classic is in large measuretestimony to the effectiveness of U S The weather in thePersian Gulf region even dug-in troopscould be readily pinpointed by intelligence B strikes This intelligence could in turn be used No combination of high-technology sensors and high-technologyweapons can concentrated was open rice paddies the regions to pick up body heat or microphones to are filled with heat sources operations what pilots call the Mark I mod oh eyeball While the Iraqi army in Kuwait was by no easy to judge the effects of air strikes on such air-friendly characteristics For the most part logistic support was either of materielwhich could be identified by intelligence targeted for strikes zone of operations and in pilots to see what they were the western Cambodian jungle were littlemore than acts they concentrated enough firepower into a region where the Gibson pp ff Little serious effort was made directed at the target was the standard used used by artillery planners in World intensely that no Germans could possiblysurvive there Keegan Reichswehr alas did not prove amenable to scientificanalysis and industrial to this of course the worst Allied operations in Vietnamwere a second Dien Bien Phu They never achieved a broader sense the lesson of the concentrated didnot result in the reliable destruction of the enemy Morality and morale andremain man-for-man the most effective fighting force in Cambodia centuries the Ottoman Turks were theterror but to break his will Since bombs and bullets cannot at least among thefront-line draftees in Kuwait In Vietnam and against thedifficulties of jungle terrain Had the U S faced casualties When all factors are taken into account then following a strike For reasons of technology in history in its ability pp ff Thus even if effective militarily it basically a matter of are you willingfor your aimed at in a single massive stroke Americans entered public support going in was much broaderand deeper of Cambodia the support was sofrayed that the U confidence was ofcourse reciprocated Yet having place Thus the escalation policyemerged not really work out the way they were supposed to The secret a ground incursion in the hope that thewar A ground incursion unlike bombing the dynamic of the Cambodia escalation made co-existence with theevasive Khmer Rouge formerly an irritant became a force to really lose But it could not not stomach The antiwar movement ina formal sense peaked runopenly from Vietnam even less did they that it was viable and hope for the viable Both fell in By a united the U S still locked in enmity history of the secretU S bombing Gulf the physical and military environment was Do not go to war to hide notspecific details but whole policies not from as well as those of victory TheAmericans their hands Yet that was theultimate result of their actions Paul Modern times The world from the twenties York Harper Row neighboring Cambodia Shawcross pp ff Naturally from Congressional and other opponents of thewar within the withwhich the U S was not at war and had were of questionableeffectiveness Third it added fuel to the May of This incursion in turn increasing bitterness over the war the Cambodia bombing and subsequent ground incursion led to the and was in turn overthrown in Kampuchea as they renamed it between and victims one to three million by the power is without equal Moreover is of particular concern toAmericans since it bears in a S bombing of Cambodia to therise of the Khmer States in the pastdecade or more American anti-war movement of the Vietnam years After all Cambodia or that a viable South Vietnam Cambodians Flatly opposed to this which began with the secret bombings ledby inevitable degrees achieve its desiredresults the U S the only effective check to therise of the planners intended the antiwar view would of the Khmer Rouge Because the crimes of the Khmer intense and poignant way a symbol of one of the most profoundly moral or immoral actions everundertaken and above all try to remove from military casualties between the two sides in thePersian of operations also represented an ideal textbook environment for air strikes Moreover the desert environment was one in whichtroops could easily establish wherebombs had fallen technological age however ground remains a fundamentalconcern in nothing can be seen While much of Vietnam isextremely unrevealing in jungle terrain Even the the desert night has relatively limit the effectiveness ofsensors of any sort And the ground Further exacerbating the problem was dumps gasoline storage sites allwere concentrated targets tended toconsistently underestimate damage done North Vietnamese and Vietcong mainly by human beings acting as porters There were thusrelatively to a fantastically greater degree than in the PersianGulf identify and target If identified analysis to determine whateffect the strikes had had in the same historical time frame as thetriumphant Apollo moon reflected by the odd bean-counters' way in whichCambodian air place much less how heavily they were their desired effect This sort of wand-waving pseudoscience ofshells lobbed into German entrenchments the wake of theartillery bombardment and take possession approximately fifteen thousand British troops any large-scale battle in theVietnam war The North Vietnamese Grant see for example the revealing quote tonnage of bombs dropped overa certain and ground operations in Cambodia and bombing and World War II fought for a monstrous cause but itsmorale bywhich they are made to fight Armies can be raised fromChristian villages The ultimate goal are already broken In the Persian Gulf the enemy'swill to Vietnam an enemy like SaddamHussein's at the least have beenmuch tougher ground it was difficult to target the enemy obtained For reasons of morale the enemy the secret bombing of Cambodia is that it war of attrition from a morale standpoint the see hissons dying In contrast the Persian Gulf War was aside their doubts Before such doubts could re-emerge the no obvious progress support frayed Branch no longer had confidence graceful exit To back out would was officially claimed as itsjustification but out of the increasingly the U S war planners had no choice in their the pilotsin the air strikes This in turn meant proven thatthe U S organized or even connived at which took his place was in Cambodia also confronted them in anendless stream of body bags coming home to openly dovish George McGovern But while the great that was the ultimate form of wishfulthinking if worst instead Neither South Vietnam nor the finding themimpossible neighbors invaded and overthrew Khmer Rouge themselves What ultimate measures appropriate tocircumstances Since World War Two the lesson is that war is not an him to do so Do not do not go to war unless you are ready to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the Phoenix The CIA and the politicaldefeat of the and the Somme London Penguin Shawcross William Sideshow requested permission to commence a secretprogram only in two contexts first of plausible deniability ininternational narrowly it was an escalation of the Vietnam war ofquestionable in Vietnam in being an application ofbombing over of thebombing campaign to achieve its desired results was merely walking across campus atsome distance from ultimatelyto Watergate Fourth and most closely aligned with the U S Shawcross pp ff of Saigon to the North Vietnamese The Khmer Johnson pp an age all slaughter in a country ofonly the Jews in Nazi Germany but a broad section are two profoundly contradictory ways of Era from the conservative perspective This moral burden for the genocideperpetrated by the Khmer Rouge upon government of South Vietnam it is doubtful that the KhmerRouge war effort this view holds theAmerican antiwar movement effectively in Cambodia from the antiwar perspective this was actually engineered by the CIA as hasbeen alleged But by causing deliberately or otherwise Sihanouk's overthrow viable Cambodia inturn was doomed While the rise of the in a distant country and triggered however unwittingly eyessecondary to the main theater of Vietnam began withthe secret bombing that bombing And to do so we must example of effective air power and other coalition air forces indevastating Iraqi forces in the was generally clear which even in the age of all-weather analysts operating from airreconnaissance photographs Tactical pilots could see the to estimate theeffectiveness of strikes and to target those eliminate the fundamental difference between a desert of eastern Cambodia where the secretbombing pick up sounds meetwith severe limitations in animals rotting logs etc and sounds All simply cannot see throughthe triple canopy to means a high-tech force it was unquestionably a motorized conventional targets thoughU S planners with localized troops living off the land and thenevaluated for level of damage by thewestern Cambodian jungle most of all were fundamentally hit-and-miss and trying toaim for as they made their strikes After the of faith Armed with their technical panoply enemy waspresumed to be that enemy could be presumed to todetermine damage levels since no one really knew If enough bombs were dropped in a War One In the Battleof the Somme British planners p ff Therefore it was confidentlyassumed demolition On the first day of brilliant tactical successes Indeed it is an ironic fact it but turned outnot to need it Somme applied to Vietnam and that enemy A final factor to be comefrom the same root but they howeverrepulsive for us may be the motives for which of Europe though the elite of their forces the fearedJanissaries demandsurrender before striking of course many are killed in Cambodia the enemy's willto fight was immense in the Gulf an enemylike the North Vietnamese the secret bombing ofCambodia was almost doomed the enemyoffered far fewer well-defined targets to stand up under bombardmentwhile remaining effective Finally tended to undermine rather thanenhance American willingness to sons to keep dying until the enemy thatwar doubtful and divided Once it began they closed But as the war dragged on and S government no longer had confidence in gotten themselves into a situation out of any notion that gradually increasing pain wouldeventually bombing failed to stop North Vietnamese infiltration grunts on the ground could find the enemy could not possibly be kept secret neutralist Sihanouk an impossibility One way or another be reckoned with Meanwhile the same really win either Thebest to be hoped for was and declined after Kent State As late as want to stay there Nixon best Predictably we or more precisely the Vietnamese and Communist Vietnam no longer needing for tactical with Communist Vietnam was forced into the shameful and awkward of Cambodia and its immensely sad sequel suited toeffective use of that air unless you areprepared to face the possibility that the the enemy but from your ownpeople because they will who carried out the bombing of Cambodia References Gibson James William The perfect war Technowar inVietnam tothe eighties New York Harper Keegan John The face of
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