Word: lonli
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Perhaps the most bitterly disputed episode of a bitterly disputed war is the decline and fall of Cambodia. In March, with Prince Sihanouk traveling in France, anti-Vietnamese riots began to erupt across Cambodia. Prime Minister Lon Nol and Deputy Prime Minister Sirik Matak ousted Sihanouk, who there upon took refuge in Peking and turned against the U.S. Kissinger 's critics argue that the U.S. engineered Sihanouk's downfall and later, by attacking the North Vietnamese sanctuaries, caused the war to engulf all of Cambodia and to ensure victory for the Communist Khmer Rouge. Kissinger maintains with much...
...given no military aid, no intelligence support, and had only formalistic contacts with the new government. The coup itself had come without warning; its consequences threatened not only the freedom of Cambodia but our entire position in Viet Nam. We would, if the Lon Nol government collapsed, confront all of Cambodia as a Communist base, stretching 600 miles along the border of South Viet Nam. Vietnamization and American withdrawal would then come unstuck. So we were being driven toward support of Lon Nol hesitantly, reluctantly, in response to circumstances in Cambodia that we could neither forecast nor control...
...most implacable critics* of our policy in Cambodia presents the same analysis of what our choices were: "Back in March and April the Administration had had freedom of choice in reacting to events in Cambodia. If it had decided not to encourage, let alone to arm Lon Nol, it could have compelled either the return of Sihanouk or, at least, an attempt, by Lon Nol, to preserve the country's flawed neutrality. This would probably have meant a government dominated by Hanoi and at the very least it would have allowed the Communists continued use of [the port...
This passage combines all the misconceptions about events in Cambodia in 1970. We did not encourage Lon Nol or even begin to arm him for weeks after North Vietnamese troops were ravaging a neutral country. The option of Lon Nol's restoring Cambodia's neutrality did not exist; it had been explicitly rejected by Le Duc Tho on April 4, 1970. And by then Sihanouk was no longer in a position to be neutralist. The real prospect before us, therefore, was exactly what the quoted paragraph describes as the most likely outcome: the reopening of Sihanoukville, a government...
...refugees from the countryside sought first to escape the intensive U.S. bombing and later the increasing terrorism of the Khmer Rouge. Where rice had formerly been exported, starvation became commonplace. Inflation soared. Yet through all the suffering, Shawcross notes, Washington continued to support the "bankrupt" and "corrupt" regime of Lon Nol because he was willing, if far from able, to go on fighting the Communists...