Bush's "Killing Fields" and the Real Lesson of Vietnam
George Bush's invocation of the "killing fields" in Cambodia to try to bolster his failing argument for an indefinite continuation of the Iraq occupation was a reference to the extreme right's decades-old rant that U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam caused the bloodbath in Pol Pot's Cambodia.
That argument makes a hash of the history of the Vietnam era, but maybe it's a good thing that he has brought it up now. The media and the blogosphere need to go back over how the killing fields actually came about. The fact is, more than three decades after the end of the U.S. military involvement in Indochina, there has still not been a real debate about the relationship between U.S. policy in Vietnam and the human consequences for Cambodia.
The heavy-breathing right-wing crowd has long blamed the anti-war movement, Congress and anyone else who supported the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam for the unnumbered dead in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime. That argument has been used as an ideological cudgel to keep intellectuals and the media in line, so the next time the United States goes to war and it turns sour, they would be afraid to demand an end to it. Now it's time to drive a stake through it once and for all.
What Bush and his extreme right-wing allies don't want Americans to remember is that it was the American war in Vietnam that made the Khmer Rouge such an irresistible power in Cambodia. Before the U.S. ground troops poured into Vietnam in 1965, there was no armed struggle by the Cambodian Communist movement. It was only because of the spillover of the U.S. war between 1965 and 1969 that they were given the opportunity to contest for power.
U.S. B-52 attacks and ground operations against the Viet Cong base areas in South Vietnam pushed the Viet Cong troops across the border into the jungles of Eastern Cambodia. That, in turn, destabilized Cambodia's economy, as the Viet Cong troops purchased an estimated 40 Cambodia's rice exports on the black market. That in turn led the Cambodian military to use force to get rice from peasants at artificially low prices. The Communists in Cambodia quickly took advantage of that situation to launch an armed uprising.
Even after four years of war in Vietnam, however, the Khmer Rouge were far from being able to contest for national power in Cambodia. In 1970, they had an estimated 2,400 to 4,000 guerrillas, few of whom had modern weapons.
This is where the story is full of bitter irony. Had Richard Nixon chosen to negotiate a quick end to the war, the Vietnamese troops would have left Cambodia, Sihanouk probably would have remained in power and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge would probably have remained a footnote to history. Instead, however, Nixon opted for four more years of war, and in order to gain time politically, he invoked the threat of a "bloodbath" in Vietnam if the United States were to withdraw prematurely.
That was a completely phony issue for which Nixon and Kissinger did not have a shred of evidence. But Nixon's decision against peace in Vietnam set in motion another new dynamic that made the postwar massacre in Cambodia inevitable.
When Sihanouk's right-wing opponents ousted him from power in March 1970, it may or may not have been with the explicit encouragement of the Nixon administration. The full story has yet to be written on that question. But Nixon did nothing to try to reverse a process that could only result in Cambodia being completely engulfed in war.
After just two years of extremely heavy bombing by the United States of the vast Khmer Rouge zone of Cambodia, that movement had exploded to some 50,000 troops and was able to go on the offensive. By then, nothing except a massive number of U.S. ground troops in Cambodia indefinitely could have stopped the Khmer Rouge victory.
It was the Nixon's geographical escalation of the Vietnam War itself -- not of the success of the antiwar movement or Congressional fatigue with war - that produced that outcome.
So the real lesson of the Vietnam-Cambodia war is that U.S. elective war is profoundly destabilizing, and that destabilization has a terrible human cost, which may spread beyond the country where the war began.
But there is a further lesson from that war. When Nixon began crying "bloodbath" in 1969 the Vietnam War was already four years old. It was his fateful decision to continue and escalate that war that brought about the Cambodian catastrophe. The longer American wars of occupation are continued, the worse the human and political consequences.
Now history appears to be repeating itself. Once again, after four years of war, a president is crying "bloodbath" even as he appears to be headed toward the geographical escalation of the war. Only this time the escalation will be far more dangerous than was the escalation into Cambodia in 1970.
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It is time for the current administration to offer another reason for us to stay in Iraq. President Bush can be counted on to find yet another excuse on a monthly basis. This month’s reason is that Iraq and Vietnam have somehow morphed into the same war. Mr. Bush gave a speech saying that our mistake was not that we got into Vietnam in the first place or that we stayed there too long. No, our mistake was that we left too soon.
Does our hollow president have any sense of history? Is he aware of the fact that only four countries are Communist now and that about half the world was under such control in 1975, the year we left Vietnam? This is just the reverse of the famous “domino theory” that postulated a world of Communism if we failed in Vietnam. Vietnam is now an economic success and is Communist in name only. Vietnam wants nothing more than to trade now with the United States. In what way did we leave before we should have?
If we had remained there for another decade, we might have lost another fifty thousand of our best and brightest. We would have stayed those extra ten years in the hope that Vietnam would turn into just the nation it is today.
The Bush administration has said for some time that only a political solution is possible in Iraq. No military victory will turn that nation into a Jeffersonian democracy. We now see Mr. Bush starting to publicly waver in his support for Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister we have propped up with our money and troops.
We have provided a gathering place and a training ground for untold numbers of terrorists while causing two million residents of Iraq to flee the country and another two million to leave their former neighborhoods to save their lives.
President Bush is now just limping through the last months of his barren and bankrupt presidency.
Does the VFW have credibility with the average vet? Why does the official organization for veterans allow Mr. Bush to speak to them about their own experiences and then not officially correct the record? Do most of them agree with whatever the White House says? Who runs the VFW?
Lets assume that all the facts in your post is correct. I fail to understand why do you blame US, rather than VietCon for Combodia. You yourself write that VietCon has invaded Combodia well before US did anyhting there. Is it just blame US for everything syndrome?
Mr. Porter
You wrote
"But Nixon did nothing to try to reverse a process that could only result in Cambodia being completely engulfed in war."
You are being too kind to Nixon,so as to be misleading.
Cambodia was bombed by the US from 1969 to 1973, creating millions of refugees, widespread anti-Americanism, and recruits for Pol Pot. Sihanouk was despised by US officials for not being sufficiently helpful in their war against the supposed "communist" peasants. Sihanouk's overthrow in March 1970 had been encouraged and aided by the US, and was immediately followed in April 1970 by an overt US ground invasion of Cambodia.
Far from "doing nothing", Nixon's unnecessary expansion (surge) of an unnecessary war further destabilised SE Asia with tragic consequences.
Funny no one is writing about the Vietnam-Paris Peace Treaty of 1970 that was purposely sabotaged and killed by Nixon and Kissinger which led to the Vietnam War dragging on for another 5 murderous years!
The radical left used the antiwar movement during the Vietnam war to take over the Democractic Party. They came very close to destroying it. They are using the Iraq mission with the same goals in mind. This time I believe that they will be successful and thus doom the Democractic Party to only being a minor voice in the landscape of American political thought and action for decades to come.
Killing Fields George W Bush Stype:
3,723 Plus Dead American Soldiers
27,506 Plus Maimed/Wounded American Soldiers
Mr. Porter aptly points out that both the VC/NVA and US turned Cambodia into a war zone. The terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the eastern border regions of Cambodia. Continued
maintenance of this region as a logistics base was vital for the VC/NVA while the destruction of same was vital to US objectives. To achieve the latter the US engineered a military takeover of Cambodia. The subsequent abandonment of that regime in 1975 by the US resulted in the Khmer Rouge takeover. The incomprehensible tragedy in all this is why the Khmer Rouge would kill approximately one million of its' own people in some sort of demented reaction to the former US presence. Once the killing starts ( Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur ) it will reach levels of feverish frenzy.
George Bush et al have been 100% wrong about everything in Iraq. From WMDs to the cost of the war, to who would pay for reconstruction, to dancing in the streets (unless you count celebratory dancing in front of a burning HumVee) to in their final throes...all wrong.
Why on earth would anyone in their right mind believe anything he says now.
I recently read an editorial decrying blogs and wikipedia as being driven by people with 'agendas' and how you can only trust 'professional journalists'. However, I have not seen any analysis of what happened in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by those same 'professionals', not even on NPR. Not everyone in America was personally affected by the Vietnam war (particularly people under 50) and some people want to know what happened there.
Also, the whole 'stay the course' rhetoric ignores what happens when we run out of 'volunteers'. Porter, you're worth a week of CNN.
What a terrific article. Articulates perfectly what I was trying to say for two days. Bush and the neocons are clueless about what happened in SE Asia, and are trying to re-write history today. Maybe we should re-examine the atrocity of Cambodia again. We especially need to re-examine the relationship of Reagan supporting the Pol Pot regime to get back at the Vietnamese.
Actually I believe it was President Carter that provided diplomatic support to the Pol Pot regime in order to gain a closer association with China in oppostion to the Soviet Union;
i.e. Pol Pot/US vs Viet Nam/Soviet Union. The Pol Pot regime was eventually ousted by a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia followed by a Chinese incursion across the Vietnamese border.
The Chinese, as we did, found the Vietnamese to be a tougher nut to crack than expected.
Porter does a good job of reflecting on the immediate SE Asian neighborhood, but we can't overlook what was also going on in Laos and Burma. The war destablized a large area and the fallout in Cambodia was visited upon other areas as well. This is what makes having Vietnam as a trading partner so ironic.
It's just such a shame that American legislators, particularly Republicants - for the most part - have such a blindered knowledge of world history, and an even more scant knowledge of global relationships and personalities. Perhaps it's because they, themselves, have so few relationships and no personalities. Ouch.
Excellent, thank you. The unfortunate truth is that history is lost on Americans, not just on the morons we have in charge here.
Now that Bush is trying to twist history it's important to review the facts:
1. The Republic of South Vietnam was a repressive dictatorship which engaged in such things as executing prisoners on the spot (who can forget that famous photo) and locking up opponents (both communist and otherwise) in what were called “tiger cages” on remote islands off the coast of southern Vietnam. So while this does not excuse the awful things the government of the Socialistic Republic of Vietnam did in re-education camps you can’t overlook the fact that the South Vietnamese government freely engaged in similar techniques.
2. The government of the Kingdom of Cambodia was neutral and ruled by a royal family (Prince Sihanouk being the most famous). It looked the other way when the forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army crossed its territory enroute to South Vietnam.
3. In 1970, the US government, unhappy that neutral Cambodia would not allow US forces to cross into its territory in pursuit of the Vietnamese communists, engineered a coup in Cambodia which deposed the royal family and replaced them with a dictator by the name of Lon Nol. Up until this time the government of North Vietnam respected the neutrality of Cambodia.
4. The new regime in Cambodia was opposed by the Cambodian communists in the form of the Khmer Rouge. The Kamier Rouge defeated the Long Nol regime in April of 1975 and proceed to massacre more than a million people. By that time the US had left SE Asia.
5. In 1978, after the Khmer Rouge started killing ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia the new Socialist Government of of Vietnam invaded Cambodia and was able to rid most areas of the Khmer Rouge. So ironically it was the Vietnamese who stopped the genocide.
6. The vestiges of the Khmer Rouge (under Pol Pot) continued to hold some outlying areas of Cambodia. They continued to insist they were the legimate government of Cambodia and with support of the US Government (!) continued to hold Cambodia’s UN seat through the early 1980’s.
You managed to contradict yourself in 2 paragraphs:
"The government of the Kingdom of Cambodia was neutral and ruled by a royal family (Prince Sihanouk being the most famous). It looked the other way when the forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army crossed its territory enroute to South Vietnam. "
" Up until this time the government of North Vietnam respected the neutrality of Cambodia. "
1) You can not respect the neutralityof a country while having your army cross it's territory.
"In 1970, the US government, unhappy that neutral Cambodia would not allow US forces to cross into its territory in pursuit of the Vietnamese communists, "
2) If does not seem that Cambodia was neutral if it looked away on Vietnam's army using its territory but did not allow US to do the same...
It's not about disproving the neocons; it's about not buying into their convoluted logic. When you hear their nonsense - whether it's the president, vice-president or whomever - simply say "You're an idiot" and let it go at that. It's kind of like arguing about "God" with a true believer: they think they can always trump you by saying "Prove god doesn't exist!" In just the same way, the neocons think they can always trump you by saying "Prove we couldn't have won if we'd stayed just a little longer!" The point is, you don't have to prove we couldn't have won - they have to prove there was something to "win" in the first place. How can you be accused of "losing" a war when no one alive had any idea what "winning" it would look like? The military-industrial complex grew stronger from almost 10 years of Vietnam; and they got to test a whole raft of new weapon systems - just as they're doing in Iraq. Is that what it was all about? Not a "killing field" but a testing ground? And now we have even newer weapons systems that require Iran for their testing? War is mostly about weapons; soldiers are merely that which gets used to try out the latest weaponry. One great big game of "last tag."
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