Word: sihanouk
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...bizarre argument has indeed been made, with a glaring lack of substantiation, that the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge in victory was the product of five years of American and Cambodian efforts to resist them. No one can accept this as an adequate explanation for the murderous Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk does not believe this; they were men he had kicked out of Cambodia in 1967 as a menace to his country. He told me in April 1979 that the Khmer Rouge leaders were "always killers...
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...
...were to conduct a retreat that did not become a rout. Hanoi's insatiable quest for hegemony-not America's hesitant and ambivalent response-is the root cause of Cambodia's ordeal. The persistence of the image of American officials plotting the overthrow of neutralist Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia and plunging deeper into war in Laos as well as Cambodia illustrates the prevalence of emotion over reality. By the middle of April, before we had undertaken any significant action, Sihanouk had irrevocably joined forces with the Communists, the North Vietnamese
...record leaves no doubt that the North Vietnamese, also caught by surprise by the March coup, bear the heaviest responsibility for events in Cambodia. Their illegal and arrogant occupation of Cambodian territory had torn apart Sihanouk's neutralist country; they created the Khmer Rouge as a force against Sihanouk well before his overthrow. It was they, not we, who had decided on a fight to the finish on the bleeding body of a people that wanted only to be left alone...
...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 of] Sihanoukville and the sanctuaries...