Word: lon
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NEWS REPORTS FROM Cambodia last week indicate that the Lon Nol regime, after five years of military attempts to assert its rule, is on the verge of collapse. Hundreds of thousands of refugees face the prospect of starvation in the coming weeks; troops still loyal to Lon Nol are disorganized and demoralized. The regime now rests on a single pillar; the daily American airlift of rice and ammunition into Phnom Penh. American experts and policy-makers are unanimous in their opinion that Phnom Penh would fall almost immediately to the Khmer Rouge without the airlift...
Since the 1970 coup which sent Prince Norodam Sihanouk into exile, Lon Nol has failed to win popular support and has conducted an administration almost universally recognized as openly corrupt. After more than four years of civil war, Cambodia is deeply scarred. The countryside, once a source of glowing reports from visitors, has been laid waste; Phnom Penh is under daily shelling; and civilians have become the victims of guns and poverty...
...Lon Nol's prospects, in short, are bleaker than they have been at any time since he overthrew Sihanouk in 1970. Regardless of whether he receives more emergency U.S. aid, there is little he can do except try to hold out long enough to work out some sort of settlement with his enemies. "Time is running out," U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean fairly shouts to Western newsmen in Phnom-Penh these days, referring to prospects for U.S. aid. It is also running out for Phnom-Penh...
...pleaded with a reluctant Congress to vote $222 million in extra military aid for the Phnom-Penh government. In defense of their request, White House officials and Cabinet members trotted out several arguments. Most compelling was the warning that without an emergency infusion of ammunition, the government of President Lon Nol is in imminent danger of falling to the Communist-led Khmer Rouge insurgents. "An independent Cambodia cannot survive unless the Congress acts very soon to provide supplemental military and economic assistance," President Ford wrote to House Speaker Carl Albert, adding that "if additional military assistance is withheld or delayed...
...collapse of the Cambodian domino, as Kissinger implied, might well enhance the prospects for an eventual Communist victory in South Viet Nam. Still, Vietnamese Communists have been able to put enormous pressure on Saigon even with Phnom-Penh in Lon Nol's hands, and the fall of his government is not likely to make a crucial difference. Beyond that, there remain obstacles to the spread of Communist influence in Southeast Asia. Neighboring Thailand, presumably the next endangered domino, is well equipped to resist Vietnamese influence. Communist insurgents in the northeast have achieved little so far, and Thailand has sufficient...