Word: shawcross
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, Shawcross does not minimize the difficulties that confronted the Nixon and Ford Administrations in Indochina. But he sharply criticizes the U.S. view that Cambodia was a minor adjunct to the Viet Nam War and that the strategy of the larger war justified spreading the fighting into a neutral land. President Nixon expressed that view when he said in December of 1970: "The Cambodians . . . are tying down 40,000 North Vietnamese regulars. If those North Vietnamese weren't in Cambodia, they'd be over [in Viet Nam] killing Americans...
Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued that the Vietnamese had already involved Cambodia in the war by establishing bases there. Shawcross cites previously classified U.S. documents to demonstrate that the ground fighting in Cambodia began only after the U.S. launched the secret B-52 raids in 1969. Those raids drove many Hanoi troops out of the border areas and into central Cambodia, where they inevitably tangled with the ill-equipped Cambodian army. As the fighting progressed, the Vietnamese forces inside Cambodia were steadily supplanted by the indigenous Khmer Rouge guerrillas...
Kissinger and other U.S. officials declared that Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk had "acquiesced" in the U.S. bombing raids and in fact "encouraged" U.S. intervention.* Shawcross calls that "questionable." Sihanouk himself, who was overthrown by General Lon Nol just two weeks before the U.S. invasion in 1970, told Shawcross that there was nothing he could have done about either the Vietnamese bases or the U.S bombing. But Sihanouk's doomed effort to keep Cambodia neutral, Shawcross believes, was the right policy in terms of Cambodia's own interests...
That was clearly shown, Shawcross writes, by the five years of destruction that followed Sihanouk's ouster, a destruction that Shawcross condemns as an excessive attempt to display U.S. strength in the area...
...Phnom-Penh, swelled from 600,000 to more than 2 million, as 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...