Word: cambodia
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NEWS REPORTS FROM Cambodia last week indicate that the Lon Nol regime, after five years of military attempts to assert its rule, is on the verge of collapse. Hundreds of thousands of refugees face the prospect of starvation in the coming weeks; troops still loyal to Lon Nol are disorganized and demoralized. The regime now rests on a single pillar; the daily American airlift of rice and ammunition into Phnom Penh. American experts and policy-makers are unanimous in their opinion that Phnom Penh would fall almost immediately to the Khmer Rouge without the airlift...
...airlift is running out, and as Congress debates whether or not the United States should continue the bloody stalemate in Phnom Penh. President Ford--echoing Johnson and Nixon--has been telling Americans that Congress must approve his requested $250 million supplemental aid to "honor our commitments" so that Cambodia will not "fall" and to avoid the "bloodbath" he envisions if the Khmer Rouge enter the city. The Ford policy aims to preserve American credibility on the world treaty market and to place Ford in a position to castigate Congress whatever the outcome in Cambodia. The missing element in Ford...
Since the 1970 coup which sent Prince Norodam Sihanouk into exile, Lon Nol has failed to win popular support and has conducted an administration almost universally recognized as openly corrupt. After more than four years of civil war, Cambodia is deeply scarred. The countryside, once a source of glowing reports from visitors, has been laid waste; Phnom Penh is under daily shelling; and civilians have become the victims of guns and poverty...
...also. The Secretary went on to argue that "we cannot escape this problem by assuming the responsibility of condemning those who have dealt with us to a certain destruction." The Administration is concerned not only with dominoes falling in Southeast Asia but also with the ripple effect that abandoning Cambodia would have on American credibility...
...point, are not totally convincing. For one thing, some Administration officials privately concede that the present government will probably fall sooner or later; to avoid any appearance of abandoning an ally, they would prefer to give it the extra aid anyway. U.S. policymakers, however, want to separate Cambodia from Viet Nam, where, the Administration feels, greater stakes are involved. It thus wants to convince the legislators that the extra $300 million of military aid to comparatively strong and well-equipped South Viet Nam would be of real help to Saigon in resisting its enemies...