Word: cambodia
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...most civil wars, the war in Cambodia has been particularly brutal for civilians. Businesses in Phnom Penh have shut down for want of customers and for fear of rocket attacks in parts of the city. The city's hospitals are over-crowded with civilians suffering from shelling, disease, and starvation. As of this week, there are not even any ambulances available to transport wounded and dying civilians to the hospitals. Children scour the city's streets and dumps looking for enough food to stay alive; merchants are selling off what remains of their inventories. A fear has taken hold...
...Cambodia, as in South Vietnam, the regime is now completely dependent on American aid. Its resources have run out--either ferretted away down the well-greased tubes of official corruption, or expropriated by the Khmer--and Lon Nol has become a pathetic junkie for American dollars. The Cambodian army is disorganized, inefficient and apathetic it has almost no popular support. Almost immediately after the coup that brought Lon Nol to power in 1970, the Khmer Rouge began to expand rapidly, and since then they have been slowly winning support in the countryside and steadily regaining the ground Lon Nol took...
...general confusion exists about the Khmer leadership. Before the 1970 coup, Sihanouk actively expressed the Communists Party of Cambodia. Since his exile in Peking began, though, he has become sympathetic to the Khmer and they, in turn, have given him at least tacit support. In a series of pronouncements from Peking during the last few years, Sihanouk has indicated, in phrases reminiscent of Nixon, that he would like to return to Cambodia after Lon Nol's ouster as a kind of self-styled elder statesman. The Khmer have given little indication of what role they expect Sihanouk to play...
...outcome of a civil war to suit its own interests. But even more striking parallels to Vietnam exist within the past two weeks, the President of the United States, his Secretary of State, and his Secretary of Defense have told the American people that we must not "lose" Cambodia; that if we do, the rest of Southeast Asia will "fall"; and that our allies will all panic if we cut off the aid. In yet another throwback to the 1960s, a group of six U.S. Representatives recently flew to Vietnam and Cambodia to check on our progress...
...peace" candidates, the policy is still the same. And after fifteen years in which the American government spent $150 billion and in which 50,000 American men died in combat, the policy still does not fit the facts. Built into this policy, of course, is the assumption that Cambodia is "ours" to "lose." Moreover, the president said last week. "The policy of this country is to help those nations with military hardware--not U.S. military personnel--where the government and the people of a country want to protect their country from foreign aggression." Two more fallacies: the war in Cambodia...