Word: cambodia
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...that Cambodia made any sense from a military point of view. In fact, each of the major reasons which the Administration cited as provoking the invasion was a greater falsehood than the next. Nixon claimed in his speech that South Vietnam was threatened by the sudden appearance of the North Vietnamese on its Cambodian flank; yet subsequent reports have shown that the North Vietnamese had in fact been drifting westward and waiting cautiously to see what action the rightist military junta of Lon Nol-who had overthrown neutralist Prince Norodom Sihanouk the month before-would take against them...
...TRUE that the White House received vastly conflicting reports on the military and political situation inside Cambodia. But the certainty with which Nixon presented the invasion to the American public was in itself a bold-faced lie. And the political motivations for Cambodia clearly originated with Nixon and Kissinger. On an international level, America's great nemesis and North Vietnam's principal supporter-the Soviet Union-had moved now, powerful missiles into the Middle East. The North Vietnamese were posing an implicit threat to the regime of America's ally, Lon Nol. At home, Congressional liberals had repudiated the White...
Because Kissinger's conversations with Nixon are secret, it is unclear precisely what role he played in the decision to invade Cambodia. It seems evident, however, that he recommended some form of escalation-such as the bombing of North Vietnam-and it is well-known that he supported the decision that Nixon finally made. And it is certain that the action was perfectly consonant withKissinger's notions of the use and threat of force...
...INVASION of Cambodia was an incontestable expression of a policy that the Administration had been following all along: escalation and graduated threat. As a result of the action, allied forces are now fighting in Cambodia, and the United States has been committed to a defense of Lon Nol as well as Thieu-Ky. And the invasion was a jumping-off point for other aggressive actions by which the United States has simultaneously attempted to demonstrate its strength and unpredictability: a brutal bombing raid on North Vietnam last November and the ground invasion of Laos by the South Vietnamese last February...
...wholesale slaughter does not stray far from describing current U. S. policy in Indochina. For years American bombers have pounded the land and people of three countries in Southeast Asia. They have murdered hundreds of thousands, created millions of refugees in South Vietnam and Cambodia, and forced much of the population of Laos to live in underground caves. And the bombing policy is not something which Nixon and Kissinger merely inherited from their predecessors. They have broadened and intensified it. And it is not so much that the bombing has been a successful military tactic as part of the policy...