Word: cambodians
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During the 1970 Cambodian operation, Brian McDonnell, a young pacifist, pledged to fast until the operation was called off or he had been able to put his case to the President. Early in June 1970, on a mutual friend's suggestion, I called on McDonnell, without White House permission, at the simple residence in Georgetown where he was staying. I was moved by his sincerity even while I disagreed with his conclusions...
...idea of going for broke: Perhaps we should combine an attack on the Cambodian sanctuaries with resumption of the bombing of North Viet Nam as well as mining Haiphong? The opposition would be equally hysterical either way. I replied that we had enough on our plate; we would not be able to sustain such a gamble...
Without our incursion, the Communists would have taken over Cambodia years earlier. The bizarre argument has indeed been made, with a glaring lack of substantiation, that the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge in victory was the product of five years of American and Cambodian efforts to resist them. No one can accept this as an adequate explanation for the murderous Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk does not believe this; they were men he had kicked out of Cambodia in 1967 as a menace to his country. He told me in April 1979 that the Khmer Rouge leaders were "always killers...
Nixon set a June 30 cutoff date for the Cambodian incursion. Eventually, 32,000 U.S. ground troops were involved. But, Kissinger says, casualties "never reached more than a quarter of the 800 a week that Laird had feared," and dropped sharply after that. At the time, Kissinger estimated that the action would delay Hanoi's next major offensive by six to eight months; Sir Robert Thompson, the British expert on guerrilla warfare, figured that it would set the North Vietnamese back by as much as two years. Thompson proved to be right. But that did not help to defuse...
...course it has to be seen in that context. But under the practical conditions at the time, the signing of that treaty had the perfectly foreseeable consequence of throwing a lighted match into a powder keg. That treaty came about when the Vietnamese army was substantially concentrated on the Cambodian frontier, so the treaty gave the Vietnamese reassurance against a Chinese reaction to their aggression in Cambodia. Now I happen to believe that the Cambodian government [of Pol Pot] was a group of genocidal murderers. But that was not why the Vietnamese went into Cambodia; they went in because...