Word: lon
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...Indochina last week continued to look rather ominously like war anywhere else. Fighting continued sporadically in South Viet Nam. Meanwhile, Communist forces in Cambodia continued to tighten the noose around the capital of Phnom-Penh, raising again the question of how long the bumbling government of ailing President Lon Nol could effectively survive. Amidst these signs that the cease-fire agreement has all but collapsed, the White House announced that Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger would return to Paris in mid-May for another round of talks with the silver-haired chief North Vietnamese negotiator...
Bowing to U.S. demands that he broaden the base of his government, Cambodia's ailing, half-paralyzed Lon Nol last week called for the resignation of his Cabinet. He then moved to invite three former allies-onetime Deputy Premier Sisowath Sirik Matak, ex-Interior Minister In Tam and ex-Head of State Cheng Heng-to join a superior council, consisting of eleven high-ranking representatives of the nation's political parties, that would act as an advisory body. In fact, most foreign observers thought that Lon Nol's moves were little more than a cosmetic change...
...almost as soon as government troops open one road, another is closed. Diplomats, however, ruled out a Communist attempt to overrun the capital. "They don't want to capture it," one observer said. "They want to create such economic chaos that there will be riots-and then the Lon Nol government will fall like an overripe fruit." In the city itself last week, prices continued to rise. The arrival of a few fuel convoys had almost no effect on the chronic shortage of kerosene, gasoline and diesel...
...this year, Thieu said that in Cambodia "there are now three to eight thousand Khmer-Rouge, and the 50,000 North Vietnamese." Because the situation in Cambodia may endanger Thieu's own position, he insisted that the United States should continue to give air support to the Lon Nol regime. The same line of argument had been advanced by Defense Secretary Richardson a few days earlier when he admitted that the collapse of the Cambodian government would have a "significant" effect on the viability of the Thieu regime in South Vietnam...
...this kind of round-about logic, the United States is now bombing Cambodia to protect the viability of the Thieu regime in South Vietnam. It is now bombing Laos and threatening to bomb North Vietnam to protect the viability of the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. And one wonders what this will lead the United States to next when it claims that it will have to protect the viability of the Phouma regime in Laos...