Word: shawcross
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Thus does grim irony follow upon gruesome tragedy in The Quality of Mercy (Simon & Schuster; 464 pages) by British Journalist William Shawcross. In his 1979 work, Sideshow, the author argued that through secret bombings the Nixon Administration had almost casually devastated Kampuchea (then called Cambodia), thereby facilitating the murderous rise of the Communist guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge. Here Shawcross investigates the horrors that came after the bloodbath. Drawing extensively from official reports, international-relief-organization memos, firsthand experiences and interviews with protagonists from all sides, he has put together an assiduously detailed account of how, as one senior...
Throughout the years of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, claims Shawcross, most Westerners remained either ignorant or downright skeptical of refugee reports of mass slaughter, but as soon as Viet Nam invaded and permitted a few foreigners to inspect the ghostly nation, the West responded vigorously. The press reported a "holocaust"; Washington increased aid to Kampuchean refugees by a factor of ten (to $69 million); five international relief agencies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Children's Fund, 60 private volunteer bodies and the interests of 60 governments converged upon the broken land...
...international relief agencies were, much of the time, rendered powerless both by their apolitical status and by the recalcitrance of the regime that Viet Nam had installed. Even their successes, says Shawcross, sometimes proved tragically double-edged. Within two years of the Kampuchean government's 1979 announcement that a famine had pushed more than 2 million people to the brink of starvation, the West poured in more than $600 million worth of supplies. Up to four-fifths of the shipments never reached the hollow-eyed, malarial civilians who needed them most. Some of the rice remained stockpiled in warehouses...
...Shawcross maintains, the entire issue had been eclipsed in the world's short memory by newer and more fashionable tragedies. Though the author takes scrupulous pains to acknowledge the genuine accomplishments of the international agencies, he concludes that throughout one of the largest relief efforts in history nearly all the governments involved "used humanitarianism as a fig leaf for either the poverty or the ruthlessness of their politics." Founded on a basis of meticulous research, his book is, in the end, an elegy to good intentions ill directed and a cry of conscience on behalf...
...next secretary of state--if Reagan makes it to the Oval Office again--is Kissinger, another refugee from the Nixon White House. He has been called the greatest diplomat in the world, but he earned that title at a terrible human and ethical cost, as journalists like William Shawcross and Seymour Hersh have shown in recent years. Kissinger is everything Shultz and Weinberger are not. Where the later are bureaucratically clumsy, the former is manipulative. Where Winberger and Shultz have their integrity intact, Kissinger is called unscrupulous...