Kissinger’s Shadow (22 page)

In Cambodia, however, the relationship of cause and effect is much more direct—if only because it was the United States, and not a US-armed proxy, that executed the cause, or at least one of the causes (the four-year air assault), that led to the effect (Pol Pot's genocide). And one can't justify the bombing by reason of state for it was driven by motives that were the opposite of Machiavellian realism: it was executed to try to bring about a world Nixon and Kissinger believed they
ought
to live in—one in which they could, by the force of their material power, bend peasant-poor countries like Cambodia (and Laos and North Vietnam) to their will—rather than reflect the real world they did live in, one in which, try as they might, they had been unable to terrorize weaker nations into submission.
6

*   *   *

That Kissinger, along with Nixon, presided over the bombing of Cambodia, and had done so since March of 1969, is now well known. Less so is that the worst of his bombing started in February 1973, a month
after
Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon signed the Paris Peace Accords. In 1972, the United States dropped, in total, 53,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia. Between February 8 and August 15, 1973, that number increased nearly fivefold and targeted not just Vietnamese “sanctuaries” in the country's east but most of the entire country.

In other words, Washington dropped almost the same amount of explosives on Cambodia in these six months as it had in the entire previous four years. Think of it as an accelerando climax to Nixon and Kissinger's epic bombing opera. “We would rather err on the side of doing too much,” Kissinger said to his envoy in Cambodia the day after the escalation began, referring to the bombing, than too little.
7
“I see no reason not to really whack the hell out of them in Cambodia,” Nixon said to Kissinger a few days later.
8

The nominal reason for this intensified bombing was the same as it ever was: to save face. The initial secret bombing—Operation Menu—helped create an untenable situation in Cambodia, which led to a 1970 coup that broadened the social base of the insurgency to include not just Khmer Rouge but royalist “Sihanoukists” (supporters of deposed Prince Sihanouk) and other non-Communists. Nixon's and Kissinger's solution to this crisis aggravated by their bombing was more bombing, including phosphorous explosives and cluster bombs that each released thousands of either ball bearings or darts. The redoubled carpet bombing of 1973 was meant to force the Khmer Rouge insurgency to the bargaining table, or at least force North Vietnam (which was withdrawing from Cambodia) or China (which had no presence there) to force the Cambodian insurgents to the table. And, as always, there were domestic calculations: bombing Cambodia might distract from the Watergate scandal (the escalation started a week after the Watergate burglary trial ended in the convictions of Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord).

It didn't. Congress mandated that the assault end on August 15. Enough, it said. The war in Southeast Asia was over.

*   *   *

The historian Ben Kiernan calls this intensified phase of the bombing a “watershed” in Cambodian history.
9
Kiernan is now a professor of history at Yale University and founding director of its Genocide Studies Program. In the 1970s, he learned the Khmer language and interviewed hundreds of Cambodian refugees, including victims and former members of the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan believes, as he told me, that the “cause of the genocide was the decision of Pol Pot's leadership to conduct it.” As an historian, though, he places that decision within a broader context, a set of necessary conditions that made possible the execution of the decision. The U.S. bombing of Cambodia was a major cause (among others) of, if not the genocide directly, then the massive growth of the Khmer Rouge movement, which when in power conducted the genocide. In the period of the Nixon-Kissinger bombardment, the Khmer Rouge forces increased from about 5,000 in 1969 to more than 200,000 troops and militia in 1973. There were certainly other reasons for this rapid recruitment, including the support received from Sihanouk (itself a result of the U.S.-backed coup against him) and the Vietnamese Communists. But it is hard to deny that one major political effect of the 1969–73 bombing was the rapid spread of the Khmer Rouge insurgency and the increased control of that insurgency by its most radical, paranoid, and murderous faction.

Based on his interviews, as well as extensive documentary research, including declassified CIA reports and air force bombing data, Kiernan drew the following three conclusions.

First: The bombing caused “enormous losses” of Cambodian “life and property” on an almost unimaginable scale, across the country. The campaign was indiscriminate, with rural civilians the primary victims. Besides the more than 100,000 Cambodians killed, as many as two million people were forced out of their homes during the war, one-quarter of the country's population. It's impossible to read the testimonies taken by Kiernan and others and not be stunned: twenty people killed in one raid, thirty in another, entire families obliterated, hundreds of acres of crops scorched, whole villages destroyed. “They hit houses in Samrong,” one survivor recalls, “and thirty people were killed.” Another said that the “bombing was massive and devastating, and they just kept bombing more and more massively, so massively you couldn't believe it, so that it engulfed the forests, engulfed the forests with bombs, with devastation.”
10

Second: The bombing was an effective recruitment tool for the Khmer Rouge. Propaganda doesn't seem like quite the right word, since it implies some form of deception or manipulation. Object lesson might be a better description of the service Kissinger provided to Pol Pot. Here's a former Khmer Rouge cadre describing the effect of the bombing:

The ordinary people … sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came.… Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told.… It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them.… Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.

Another told a journalist that his village had been destroyed by US bombs, as Kiernan reports, “killing 200 of its 350 inhabitants and propelling him into a career of violence and absolute loyalty” to the Khmer Rouge. One elderly woman said she had never met a Khmer Rouge until her village was destroyed. The propaganda was strategic but the fury and confusion real: “The people were angry with the US, and that is why so many of them joined the Khmer communists,” reported one witness. Another said that after the bombs destroyed a number of monasteries, “people in our village were furious with the Americans; they did not know why the Americans had bombed them.”
11

Third: The bombing that took place between February and August 1973 had two consequences, delaying a Communist victory while at the same time radically transforming the nature of that victory when it did come two years later. Had Lon Nol fallen in early or mid-1973, the insurgent victors would have been comprised of diverse factions, including moderates and Sihanouk loyalists. By the time Lon Nol did fall in early 1975, not only had the Khmer Rouge come to dominate the insurgency but the most radical faction had come to dominate the Khmer Rouge.

Nixon and Kissinger's intensification of the bombing killed or scattered much of the anti–Lon Nol opposition, driving the insurgency into siege mode and giving the upper hand to a hardened corps of extremists circling around Pol Pot. The bombing sanctioned their extremism: when political-education cadres pointed to charred corpses and limbless children and said this was a “manifestation of simple American barbarism,” who could disagree? And the bombing provoked even greater extremism: in the villages, “people were made angry by the bombing and went to join the revolution,” and so it followed that those who didn't join the revolution were accused of being “CIA agents” and targeted for reprisal. The destruction of the countryside also prompted a “revival of national chauvinism,” which included anger toward the Vietnamese for abandoning the struggle even as Cambodia was being devastated. Sihanouk supporters, Vietnamese-trained Communists, and other moderates were purged from the opposition forces.

At the same time, the strain of living under constant bombardment forced those areas under Khmer Rouge rule into suffering the Khmer Rouge imposition of an accelerated program of peasant collectivization, justified by the demands of having to survive during wartime. Emerging from the carnage was fury directed not just at United States imperialism but at the capital, Phnom Penh, the city as a symbol of decadent, urban, and industrial modernity.

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.”
*
Pol Pot's victorious cadre immediately began to empty out the capital and other cities, deporting millions of urban dwellers mostly to the country's northwest. Cambodia's new rulers targeted for persecution Buddhist monks, ethnic minorities, former government loyalists, intellectuals, moderate Communists, and anyone who would stand in the way of establishing their agrarian utopia. Nearly the entire population of Cambodia was forced into rural labor camps. By the time a now unified Vietnam invaded the country in 1979, overthrew the Khmer Rouge, and put an end to the genocidal madness, as many as two million people had been murdered or had died—of starvation, exhaustion, disease, and denial of medical care.

*   *   *

Kissinger doesn't believe that the British, by bombing Hamburg, were responsible for the Holocaust. But implied in his comparison of the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge are three assumptions worth considering.

The first is that genocidal intent was inherent in the ideology of the Khmer Rouge since its inception, much as eliminationist anti-Semitism was inherent in the Nazi movement since it was founded. Over the years, Kissinger has offered variations of this position, including in a 1994 book titled
Diplomacy
: “All evidence shows that the Khmer Rouge had been fanatical ideologues as early as their student days in Paris in the 1950s. They were determined to uproot and destroy the existing Cambodian society and to impose a sort of mad utopia by exterminating everybody with the slightest ‘bourgeois' education. To allege that they had been turned into killers by American actions has the same moral stature as would be the argument that the Holocaust had been caused by American strategic bombing of Germany.”
12

I asked Ben Kiernan about this argument, and his response was succinct and convincing: “This is irrelevant. The impact of the US bombing of rural Cambodia was not to create a genocidal ideology or political faction but to facilitate its mass recruitment and rise to power over the alternatives.” Kiernan continues: “A similar outcome didn't happen in Vietnam despite the very intensive bombing there because no comparable extremist or genocidal faction existed in Vietnam. It did in Cambodia but would not have come to power without the US bombing.”

Kissinger's second assumption is that the Khmer Rouge would have come to power even without US bombing. To make this argument, Kissinger usually blames North Vietnam for intervening in Cambodian affairs and for providing aid to the Khmer Rouge. He writes in his memoir
The White House Years
: “It was Hanoi—animated by an insatiable drive to dominate Indochina—that organized the Khmer Rouge long before
any
American bombs fell on Cambodian soil; it was North Vietnamese troops who were trying to strangle Cambodia in the months before our limited attack.… Had we not invaded the sanctuaries Cambodia would have been engulfed in 1970 instead of 1975.” Then he neatly shifts blame from Hanoi to “doves” in the United States: “If anything doomed the free Cambodians, it was war weariness in the United States,” which prevented Kissinger from continuing the bombing beyond August 1973.
13
“The effect of congressional restrictions was to impose an unbearable, almost vindictive constraint,” he wrote in yet another book, on “the scale of American assistance to impoverished Cambodia.” His hands tied by Congress, there was “nothing left” for Kissinger “to do other than to watch in anguish” as Cambodia eventually fell to the Khmer Rouge.
14

There are a number of problems with these statements. To begin with, Kissinger knew the Khmer Rouge were not controlled by Hanoi (nor by Peking for that matter). In fact, declassified documents reveal that Kissinger had spent the months of the bombing escalation looking to find a way to take advantage of the tensions and animosity that existed between China, North Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge to press a deal, to, in the words of his ambassador to Cambodia, “drive a wedge” between Washington's adversaries.
15

Likewise, Kissinger in mid-1973 wasn't waging a heroic Churchillian war to keep the Nazi-like Khmer Rouge from taking power and implementing their genocide. Quite the opposite. His goal with the intensified bombing was not specifically to keep the Khmer Rouge
out
, but rather help bring them
into
power—as part of an acceptable coalition government. “We would be prepared,” Kissinger told the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, on May 8 “for a solution analogous to Laos.”
16
By this, Kissinger was referring to the Laotian government that included the Laotian Communist insurgency, Pathet Lao (which, before the 1975–79 Cambodian genocide, was seen as roughly equivalent to the Khmer Rouge). Kissinger said that if a ceasefire could be reached, he would be willing to accept “some coalition structure in Phnom Penh in which all factions are included,” including the Khmer Rouge.
*