Deaths that will haunt Kissinger

Press, 28 November 1979, Page 21

Deaths that will haunt Kissinger

Kissinger claims he had no choice . . .

‘The statesman’s test is jot only the exaltation |sic) of his goals, but the tatastrophe he averts.” So writes Henry Kissinger in the first volume of his tiemoirs. Kissinger certainly “exalts” his goals. He insists that he’s a moralist. not a cold prince of expediency. His supreme tnoral aim i. the defence of American values (as he sees them) and “the fore-closing of Soviet opportunities.” For this end, many means are justified. And in the end, there’s only one “catastrophe”: that the United States should lose its “credibility.” Everyone in the West is obsessed with the Cambodian catastrophe. We have seen the pictures and understoood — inexcusably late — the suffering. A fat. peaceful little country, full of rice, water-buffaloes, and lively children, was drawn into the Indo-Chinese conflict 10 years ago. Now we see a place of skulls, where leaf-light people crawl through the grass like tortoises, where onlv armed men have food. Who did this? The Khmer Rouge, it seems. Who made them possible? Many people want to say that it was Kissinger, and his master Nixon.

Patiently and impatiently, Kissinger has argued that he is not to blame. Behind this harping on America’s role in Cambodia, he plainly feels, there must hide a deliberate “get Kissinger” operation. This isn’t really so. but there’s a thread of truth in it. In America. some

people are — as he savagely says — trying to exorcise their own moral confusion.

Those who opposed the American war in IndoChina have to live with what has followed American withdrawal: the harsh Stalinism of the new Vietnam, the Pol Pot horrors, the Vietnamese hegemony extended by force of arms over Laos and Cambodia. For a few (not all), there opens the escape-hatch of saying: If America had not intervened, these things wouldnot have happened. But a pre-emptive strike on his critics’ motive cannot destroy the case which Kissinger must answer. He fought back on the David Frost (television) Show (after attempting to secure a timelimit on the questions about Cambodia). He trimmed this first volume of memoisr to deal with William Shawcross’s recent book “Sideshow.” The “New York Times,” deftly extracting his corrected galleys from the publisher, was able to demonstrate that Kissinger had made surprising lastminute changes. In particular, he cut out the text of his memorandum, dated April 26. 1970, in which he stated that the Ameri-can-South Vietnamese invasion of the Cambodian “sanctuaries” had been in preparation for “several weeks” — replacing it with the assertion that “there had been no consideration of attacking the sanctuaries before Arpil 21.”

Kissinger, then, has already conceded that a case against him exists. He

lumps all his enemies together, as he fatally lumped the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese together as a single “Communist” enemy. In fact, he has moderate accusers as well as extreme ones. In a furious letter to the “Economist,” Kissinger accused Shawcross of saying that the 1969 bombing of the sanctuaries and the limited American incursion of 1970 “explain or justify the Khmer Rouge massacres. . . I find this obscene.” Shawcross never said this, but others certainly have.

The indictment against Kissinger can be boiled down to six charges, all of which apply in varying degrees to the Nixon Administration collectively. A seventh could be laid: that by his contribution to the deception of Congress and public over the secret war and his assent (if no more) to the use of the security services against his critics, Kissinger helped to make Watergate possible. But that is better left to the Americans. It is his impact on Cambodia which concerns us.

Charge 1. That American military’ intervention destroyed Cambodian neutrality unnecessarily; that the intervention was legally and militarily unjustifiable. We are dealing here

with the two earlier episodes of United States action against Cambodia. These are the secret B-52 bombings of North Vietnamese “sanctuary” bases just within the Cambodian border, which began on March 18, 1969, and the joint United States-South

Vietnamese ground invasion of the Border areas in April-May, 1970. Kissinger’s first argument is that Cambodian neutrality had already been violated. Large North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces had been in the sanctuaries for years. The Cambodian ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, resented their presence but could not by himself remove them. All this is true. Violated, however, does not mean nullified. A vital part of neutrality is the choice to keep “hostilities,” not just foreign soldiers, off neutral soil. Nor is neutrality nullified by the inability of the State concerned to resist military violation; this was the weakness of the German argument for invading Belgium in 1914 and of Churchill’s argument for intervening in Norway unilaterally before the Germans got there. In this sense, the United States’ intervention was a crime against the international order.

On the bombing, Kissinger claims that Sihanouk privately approved, that the targets were “largely uninhabited” except by North Vietnamese troops, and that the bombing pro-

gramme — code-named MENU — relieved pressure on Saigon. Sihanouk is an unreliable witness for either side. It is true that in May, 1969, he said that any bombing did not concern him unless Cam-

bodians w r ere killed. In March, howegver, he had told a press conference that he would oppose bombing of Cambodia “under whatever pretext.”

The Cambodians never protested about casualties in this phase. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington warned in April that several thousand peasants lived in the B-52 target boxes, and some civilian casualties were inevitable. What really happened is unknown.

The Defence Secretary, Laird, reported that pressure on Saigon did slacken. But American casualties in Tay Ninh province, adjoining the sanctuaries, rose from 4.8 per cent in 1968 to 9 per cent in January-August, 1969. The bombing was originally thought up as a response'to the February offensive in Vietnam, in the first month of the new Nixon Administration. The military wanted bombing of North Vietnam. Kissinger preferred Cambodia, in order to keep open the chances of real negotiation with Hanoi. The selection of the Cambodian target, in short, was a measure convenience, not necessity. A year later, American

and South Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia. Here, Kissinger is at his least penitent. In essence, his case is this: after the coup which replaced Sihanouk by Lon Nol, the North Vietnamese spread out into central Cambodia

and tried to cut off Phnom Penh, the capital. Their intention was to turn Cambodia into a satellite Communist State. The whole country would then have become a base for operations against South Vietnam. The American withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, and the gaining of time for the Thieu regime by “Vietnamising” the war and arming him more effective-

ly, would have been rendered impossible. Kissinger claims he, therefore, had no choice: America had to prevent a North Vietnamese takeover of Cambodia. Anj’way the incursion was limited to a few months’ occupa-

tion of the border areas, and — once again — it was effective in reducing Communist pressure on Vietnam from that flank. As he puts it, “By April 21 (1970), the basic issue (was . . .) whether Vietnamisation was to. be merely an alibi for an American collapse, or a serious strategy designed to achieve an honourable peace.” This is also bis defence Of the third phase of American involvement: support for Lon Nol in the war within Cambodia which began now and ended in defeat in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. The first objection is that Kissinger did have a choice. Instead of invading and giving full military and air support to Lon Nol, the Administration — as Shawcross puts it —

could have “compelled either the return of Sihanouk or, at least, an attempt by Lon Nol to preserve the country’s flawed neutrality.” Shawcross admits the drawbacks: probable domination of the Government by Hanoi, the sanctuaries remaining as a threat to Vietnam. This would have made the American position ,in Vietnam more difficult, but spared Cambodia five crushing years of war. Kissinger violently rejects .this. Freedom of choice “is precisely what we did not have, for the prospect it describes would have meant a massive shift in the military balance in Indo-China: an overwhelming, insurmountable and decisive menance to the survival of South Vietnam.”

He insists that the North Vietnamese intended to take full power in Cambodia. His critics suggest they did not; more likely, they wanted to restore Sihanouk at the head of a neutral coalition more favourable to their purposes. Kissinger claims that the invasion of the sancturaries bought time for Thieu — perhaps as much as two years. This cannot be proved. Certainly a reduction of American casualties in Vietnam followed. But this can be related to the rate at which American front-line troops were being brought home. To all these "time-buy-ing” arguments, it can be objected that the.y failed. America withdrew, and Thieu and Lon Nol duly collapsed. Kissinger

accepls no blame for this. It was all the fault of Congress and the anti-war opposition. By cutting off military support for both regimes, they left Kissinger without the guns with which to make his peace negotiations credible. This is just a way of saying that, given even more time, more war, Lon No! and Thieu might have survived on their own. Few will believe this. Both regimes were doomed. History will probably say that the American intervention in Indo-China at once made them possible and ensured their doom. TOMORROW: The other five charges. Did Kissinger and President Nixon engineer the coup that toppled Sihanouk and installed Lon Nol?