Word: laotians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Proxy. Though the 23-page document focuses on the clandestine nature of U.S. operations in Laos, the fact is that quite a few nations are involved in the same way. The reason for the secrecy is that none of the nations want to be accused of violating Laotian neutrality, which is guaranteed by the Geneva accords...
Heavy Cost. The main argument for this costly effort, as Symington pointed out last week, is that it "will buy more time for Vietnamization" by pinning down North Vietnamese troops in Laos. Without this effort, the North Vietnamese would have unrestricted use of Laotian supply lines to support their effort in South Viet Nam. "But what about Laos?" asked Symington. "The United States is using the people of Laos for its own purposes, at a startlingly heavy increased cost to our taxpayers in money, and to the Lao people in terms of destroyed hopes, destroyed territory, and destroyed lives...
Four years later, South Viet Nam's northern borders are still about as leakproof as Saigon customs. Since mid-March, when the Laotian incursion ended in muffled ignominy, 30,000 North Vietnamese troops have slipped into South Viet Nam's Military Region I, raising NVA troop strength in the five northern provinces to 52,000 troops (plus 24,000 Viet Cong guerrillas). Despite the presence of 180,000 South Vietnamese troops and the ready availability of U.S. airpower, the Communists seem capable of inflicting embarrassing losses in Quang Tri and Thua Thien, the two provinces just south...
...euphemism for operations in which pilots are allowed to attack any target they find rather than limited to assigned targets] in Laos unless a plane were lost. In such an event the Government should continue to insist that we were merely escorting reconnaissance flights as requested by the Laotian Government...
ORDERING ALLIES AROUND. Throughout the papers, U.S. officials indicate that the various Saigon governments, the non-Communist Laotian Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, other U.S. allies and even the U.S. Congress were too often regarded as entities to be manipulated in order to accomplish U.S. foreign policy aims. Administration officials framed a Tonkin Gulf-style resolution long before the PT-boat attacks but failed to ask Congress for concurrence on what they were doing in Viet Nam. The State Department's Bundy writes of how Canada's J. Blair Seaborn, a member of the International Control Commission in Viet Nam, could...