Senate Move Over Action In Cambodia

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32302, 21 May 1970, Page 7

Senate Move Over Action In Cambodia

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) KEY BISCAYNE (Florida).

President Nixon has prepared to lead an allout fight this week to defeat a Senate move to curb his powers and action in Cambodia.

The Senate Democratic leader, Senator Mike Mansfield, said at the week-end that despite intense White House opposition, he believes there are enough votes to pass legislation preventing another Cambodian operation. The Senate vote, on a motion which would cut off all funds for military operations ; in Cambodia beyond June 30, i$ expected tomorrow.

President Nixon opposes the move on the ground that it infringes his constitutional right to take necessary steps to safeguard American troops. White House officials have, said that all United States forces will be withdrawn from Cambodia by the June 30 deadline Mr Nixon set, and that United States ground troops will not enter Cambodia again. But although Mr Nixon has pledged to end all American military operations in Cambodia by then, in step with the proposed legislation, he does not wish to see the pledge laid down in law.

His aides have said that the present Cambodian operation will cripple the enemy’s

ability to launch a major offensive in Vietnam for up to 10 months, and that it could in the long run contribute to an easing of world tension.

But they denied that one reason for the Cambodian initiative was to display a hard line at a time when the Soviet Union is increasing its involvement on the Arab side in the Middle East conflict. The officials said it would be foolhappy for the enemy to rebuild its Cambodian sanctuaries, since this would invite the South Vietnamese to go in again to destroy them. But they repeated that the United States does not plan to enter Cambodia again. In Washington, the Pentagon has said that armed forces’ day celebrations were at 25 of the 5104 military bases in the United States because of counter-demonstra-tions by anti-war activists. The biggest anti-war rally this week was at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where some 3000 demonstrators among them Jerry Rubin, one of the Chicago conspiracy trial defendants were prevented from entering the camp by state police and troops. Police used pepper gas and clubbed a few of the young demonstrators, but no serious injuries were reported.

The actress Jane Fonda addressed a rally of about 1200 near the Fort Bragg military base outside Fayetteville, North Carolina.

About 3000 students from mid-western universities converged on the tiny community

of Nekoma, North Dakota, at the week-end for a “festival of love and life” at the site of an anti-ballistic missile installation.

In Washington, Senator Mansfield and Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, repeated in separate television interviews their hostility to the Cambodian exercise and their support for the amendment before the Senate.

Both argued that the operation would extend and enlarge the war, that it would not necessarily lead to a success-fully-negotiated peace settlement, and that the United States should clear out of South-East Asia militarily,

and let the people of the region decide their own future. Senator Mansfield, on the C.B.S. programme “Face the Nation? said the Cambodian venture “will not be a success. It will be a failure because it will have extended and enlarged the war, and created situations which will make it more difficult to bring the war to an end.” He said it was up to the countries to defend themselves, not rely on United States assistance and support, even if the Communists did reoccupy the Cambodian sanctuaries.

“We have given them (Laos, Thailand, and South Vietnam) plenty of help,” Senator Mansfield said. “I do

not know what more we can do. We have spent more than $lOO,OOO million in that area. We have shed the blood of 325,000 Americans. Are we going to keep on going op, and going on, and going on?” Senator Fulbright, on the A.B.C. programme • “Issues and Answers,” said that if the operation was to jolt’ the Communists into meaningful negotiations “it will have the opposite effect.” “It will stiffen the backs of both the Chinese and the Russians (in their support for Hanoi). It will make it more difficult. It makes much more difficult a negotiated settlement.” He said the President’s actions seemed to be contrary

to his own announced policy of negotiation instead of confrontation, and that they posed a danger to the arrnslimitation talks in Vienna. He dismissed White House suggestions that the amendment was an infringement of the President’s role as com-mander-in-chief of the United States forces, and said it was irrelevant whether the move implied disbelief of Mr Nixon’s pledge to get American forces out of Cambodia by the end of June. “The resolution takes him at his word and puts it into law,” he said. “It is irrelevant whether you believe him Or not . . . we should not expand the war. We ought to end the war.”