Word: lon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...time of the allied assault, the Communists were involved in a conflict with the six-week-old Phnom-Penh government of Premier Lon Nol, which had overthrown Prince Norodom Sihanouk on March 18 and had ordered all North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops to give up their Cambodian sanctuaries and leave the country. Moving westward so as to put pressure on Lon Nol not to interfere with their refuges and their supply lines, the Communists started seizing territory on the way to the Mekong River. In effect, they turned their backs on South Viet Nam; as Secretary of Defense Melvin...
...precipitate permanent warfare on Cambodian soil? North Vietnamese and Viet Cong plans in Cambodia, beyond their aim of regaining use of the sanctuaries, are still far from clear. The U.S. raids obviously weakened the 40,000 Communist troops in Cambodia, but not enough to keep them from placing the Lon Nol government "in a very difficult position," as the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Phnom-Penh, Lloyd M. Rives, puts it mildly. The Communist rampages through Cambodia's towns that began before the U.S. moved against the sanctuaries constituted open aggression against a neutral state. Unfortunately...
...then, it appears that President Nixon acted in Cambodia on the advice of his generals that here was a relatively cheap and opportune way to hurt the enemy and thus secure if not hasten U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam. An ancillary benefit might be the propping up of the Lon Nol government. The short-run military objectives have been achieved, at considerably less cost in U.S. lives than military planners anticipated. In the long run, the fate of the Lon Nol government hangs largely on the whim of Hanoi-which is why, in all his justifications of the border crossing...
...government of Premier Lon Nol, under increasing pressure from the harder-lining elements in the National Assembly to strengthen the war effort, declared national mobilization. A decree ordered every Cambodian man and woman between the ages of 18 and 60 to aid the national defense and made all property subject to confiscation. It will probably be many months before Cambodia's swollen army of some 120,000 men-only half of whom have even been issued weapons -can absorb new recruits. Moreover, the nation needs its citizens for productive labor almost as desperately as it needs them for fighting...
...that the Red Khmers and the Cambodian resistance is not yet as strong as the Laotians and the Vietnamese, and that his policy of intimidation-by-genocide may work there. In any case, it is clear that the attacks in Cambodia were directed against the rural opposition to the Lon Nol government...