Word: thieu
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Only Saigon benefited from the fighting in Cambodia, which diverted North Vietnamese troops and thus gave South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu a chance to consolidate his military and political position. Instead of keeping Cambodia nonCommunist, the American incursion helped catalyze the minuscule pro-Communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas into a movement of na tional scope. It pushed Prince Norodom Sihanouk, a dedicated neutralist who was overthrown as Cambodia's ruler in spring 1970, reluctantly into the hands of Hanoi and Peking...
...Thieu's land-reform program has already given much of the peasantry reason to back him. He has done little to reform Saigon's corrupt bureaucracy and has openly disregarded democratic processes, but he nonetheless might be a match for his Communist adversaries...
...Cambodia could bring peace to those two nations. But no such prospect is in store for Viet Nam. Resolution of the war in Cambodia and Laos would only give Hanoi's forces unchallenged use of the two countries as staging areas for future attacks against South Viet Nam. Thieu has already warned that a Communist-controlled Cambodia would be intolerable, hinting that he might send South Vietnamese forces into the country. Thus the prospects of peace remain elusive indeed...
...American government deeply devoted to American democracy could have refrained from fighting its much weaker opponents by illegal and undemocratic methods; but then an American government deeply devoted to American democracy would not have been supporting the dictatorship of General Thieu. Only a government terrified by radical social change, anywhere--the very sort of government likely to exaggerate the strength and the radicalism of its domestic opposition--could continue to fight for government by tiger cage...
...punish him that it tried to bribe his judge. When antiwar Democrats began denouncing the war, the Democratic Party added VVAW, the Panthers and the Communist Party to the list of organizations against whom it was proper to subvert democracy to defend it. Nixon never went as far as Thieu in making criminals of his opponents; but then the necessity for Nixon's struggle was born in his imagination. When Thieu threw his opponents in jail, as we have seen, he had good reason to believe he was taking a necessary step to delay an NLF takeover--for his opponents...