# Cambodia Burns Total evil and total stupidity **URL:** **By** Bill Birmingham **Published:** February 1, 1980 --- “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob.” Sideshow: _Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia_, by William Shawcross. Simon \& Schuster, 467 pp. $13.95. Paperback edition: Pocket Books, $2.50. On July 30, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee took up Article IV of the bill of impeachment against Richard Nixon. It charged that Nixon, “on and subsequent to March 17, 1969, authorized, ordered, and ratified the concealment from the Congress of the facts and misleading statements concerning the existence, scope and nature of American bombing operations in Cambodia in derogation of the power of Congress to declare war, to make appropriations, and to raise and support armies, and by such conduct warrants impeachment and trial and removal from office.” The bombing operations were called Operation Menu. For fourteen months from 1969 to 1970 American B-52 bombers made 3630 sorties over Cambodia, dropping 100,000 tons of bombs. The records of the bombing were falsified; each raid was listed as having taken place in Vietnam. Congress was not told, except for a few trustworthy hacks, and almost no reports appeared in the press. (New York Times Pentagon correspondent William Beecher filed one story on May 9, 1969, saying that “according to Nixon Administration sources” B-52s were hitting Cambodia, but no one followed it up. And the administration embarked on a series of wiretaps to uncover the “leak,” the first of the “White House Horrors” known as Watergate.) Menu remained secret until 1973, whereupon Congressman Robert Drinan of Massachusetts introduced the first motion to impeach Nixon, later taken up by Congressman John Conyers, a senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. The Judiciary Committee voted Article IV down, 12 to 26. This was in large part due to the opposition of Chairman Peter Rodino, who feared it would provoke claims that “Nixon’s the guy who saved the world, brought peace and all that crap.... It’s going to damage the credibility of the Committee to the extent of jeopardizing our efforts.... The primary charge is abuse of office and we have already proved that.” Watergate was the chief exhibit; Cambodia was merely a sideshow. This was not inappropriate. “During the early seventies,” writes William Shawcross, “Cambodia was often referred to as a ‘sideshow.’ Journalists who covered the war there used the term with irony; in Washington some officials employed it almost as a matter of policy.” That policy made Cambodia what it is today. _Sideshow_ tells how it happened. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, ruler of Cambodia until 1970, kept his country neutral by not objecting too loudly when its neutrality was violated. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army maintained semipermanent base camps near the Vietnamese border: the fabled “sanctuaries,” which the U.S. blamed for its lack of success in Vietnam. Since the Cambodian army was too weak to move against the sanctuaries, Sihanouk suffered them to remain. For similar reasons he allowed North Vietnam to move supplies through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. Members of the royal family and some senior army officers, such as the rabidly anti-Communist General Lon Nol, transported the supplies to the border, assuaging their anti-Vietnamese sentiments with a fat rakeoff. (Cambodia behaved much as Sweden and Switzerland did in World War II, when those countries preserved their neutrality by trading with Germany and even allowing German troops to pass through their territory.) The U.S., in addition to making desultory artillery and air strikes across the border, also made secret, small-scale raids (code-named “Salem House;” later, “Daniel Boone”) to plant “sanitized self-destruct anti-personnel” land mines and gather intelligence. In short, the Prince let the combatants do pretty much what they liked in Cambodia, as long as they left his people alone. Until 1969 both parties generally honored this restriction. On his first day in office, President Nixon, who was widely deemed to have a “secret plan” to end the war, asked the Pentagon how the United States could “quarantine” Cambodia. General Creighton Abrams, the American commander in Vietnam, offered a proposal for a “surgical strike” by B-52 bombers against Base Area 353, reputed home of COSVN—the legendary “Central Office for South Vietnam,” supposedly the central command center for the Communist war effort. After deliberation Nixon and Kissinger agreed, provided the attack was mounted in utter secrecy. So it was that on March 17, 1969, the Joint Chiefs of Staff authorized Abrams to launch 60 B-52s against “legitimate targets of your choice” in South Vietnam—and secretly divert 48 of them to Base Area 353. The attack was made early the next morning. This was the first part of Operation Menu: Operation Breakfast, to be followed in due course by Operations Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, and Supper. Each was concealed in the same manner as Breakfast. Nixon and Kissinger were later to claim the cover-up was necessary to avoid embarrassing Prince Sihanouk, who they claimed had “authorized” the bombings. “The evidence,” says Shawcross, “indicates that ‘the Sihanouk excuse’ was merely that; the secrecy, the wiretaps, the burning and falsification of reports, were principally intended to conceal the administration’s widening of the war from the American people. Even after 1970, when Menu had ended and Sihanouk, exiled, no longer needed protection, Nixon, Kissinger, Rogers, Laird, Elliot L. Richardson and other officials all continued to assure Congress, press and public, without equivocation, that the United States had scrupulously declined to attack Communist positions in Cambodia before spring 1970. Official, highly classified Pentagon computer printouts of the bombing of Indochina continued to show ‘Nil’ for Cambodia in 1969.” Menu did not destroy COSVN or the sanctuaries, nor did it hamper the war effort in the South. But in Cambodia, it made the Communists “disperse over a greater area than before,” the Joint Chiefs reported in a secret memo. “The raids spread the fighting out from the border areas, where it had been contained, and diminished the main claim that Sihanouk still had to legitimacy—that he had kept his country out of Vietnam’s conflict.” Indeed, by the time Menu ended, Lon Nol had overthrown the Prince, in a coup that was supported, if not instigated, by the United States and helped along by a CIA “misinformation” campaign. The U.S. certainly had reason to support a coup. By the fall of 1969, the Joint Chiefs had admitted Menu was a failure. But the lure of destroying COSVN remained. General Abrams proposed an invasion of Cambodia, specifically Base Areas 353 and 352, the targets of Breakfast and Dinner. “Since the bombing had begun, the two locations had been plastered with about 29,000 tons of bombs, but even so, Abrams claimed that COSVN was still in place, and some United States officers continued to conjure visions of a Communist Pentagon East, telling the gullible that COSVN was a reinforced concrete bunker, 29 feet underground, that housed about 5,000 officials and technicians. _Newsweek_, among others, believed and reported it. So did Nixon.” Defense Secretary Melvin Laird authorized secret South Vietnamese ground attacks across the border in February 1970, but “a full-scale invasion was still ruled out, because of the certain opposition of Sihanouk.” Lon Nol ousted Sihanouk on March 18 (the first anniversary of Breakfast); 41 days later Nixon, fortified by several showings of _“Patton,”_ authorized the U.S. invasion. “Elliot Richardson told Congressmen privately that it was only Sihanouk’s overthrow that allowed the invasion even to be ‘considered.’” The Americans and South Vietnamese followed a scorched-earth strategy in Cambodia, “firing and burning whatever might be of use to a returning enemy ... driving the residents, Vietnamese and Cambodian, before them. The Americans found it almost impossible to separate friend from foe, and the South Vietnamese made no effort to do so. They plunged into Cambodia raping, looting and burning in retaliation for the murder of Vietnamese in Cambodia the month before.” (Lon Nol, in an effort to counter his lack of support among the peasantry, had launched a pogrom against the country’s large ethnic Vietnamese population, denouncing them as Viet Cong. Hundreds were massacred.) Scores of towns and villages were annihilated, such as Snuol, a town of two thousand people which was bombarded for twenty-four hours, then pillaged by American soldiers. “Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Grail Brook-shire, . . . later recalled the event, laughingly describing himself as ‘The Butcher of Snuol.’ But he admonished a reporter, ‘You guys said my men systematically looted the town. My God, my men couldn’t do anything that was systematic.’” COSVN was never found. Nor did the invasion cripple the NVA as hoped. The Defense Department summarized the CIA’s analysis: “Although U.S. and ARVN \[South Vietnamese\] cross-border operations have disrupted NVA operations in Cambodia to some extent, these operations have not substantially reduced NVA capabilities in Cambodia. Approximately 25 percent of the Vietnamese Communists’ reserve stocks have been lost. Captured supplies can be reconstituted in about 75 days. . .” Hanoi simply shifted its supply lines to the west away from the border. But now, for the first time, Hanoi had an incentive to encourage the growth of the Khmer Rouge —which until then was ineffectual, numbering less than 4000 guerillas—so that they “could later relieve Vietnamese divisions from the defense of these lines and the sanctuaries against attack by Lon Nol forces.” This they proceeded to do. The fall of Sihanouk also boosted the Khmer Rouge. Before, their propaganda against corruption and landlords (who weren’t espe- 40 cially oppressive in Cambodia anyway) was neutralized by the enormous popularity of the Prince. After the coup, Sihanouk, believing that he could never return to Phnom Penh (a belief which, says ex-agent Frank Snepp, the CIA deliberately encouraged with more “misinformation”), made common cause with his former enemies to overthrow Lon Nol. The Khmer Rouge used this “to win precisely that mass support which the rhetoric of revolution had failed to engender. In Sihanouk the Khmer Rouge at last had a national and international identity and appeal.” Washington, for its part, had in Sihanouk a potential weapon against the Khmer Rouge. Had it so wished, the United States could have ousted Lon Nol—who became completely dependent on American support—and invited the Prince to return and declare a ceasefire as head of the Royal Government of National Union. The Khmer Rouge leadership, Pol Pot and the rest, would have had to go along, Shawcross argues persuasively (an opinion shared by Etienne Manac’h, the French Ambassador to Peking and Sihanouk’s personal friend). “Thousands of their troops would undoubtedly defect, were they ordered to continue to fight.” But this option became riskier the longer the war lasted, as the Khmer Rouge gathered strength and the Prince lost influence—a process the U.S. exacerbated by ignoring Sihanouk and insisting on a military solution. The “brilliant” Kissinger finally decided to ask Sihanouk to return to the capital on April 11, 1975, six days before the Khmer Rouge overran it. Needless to say, by then it was far too late. The American invasion came as a surprise to Lon Nol. “He told an Asian diplomat, who told the U.S. embassy, that he greatly regretted that the United States had not consulted Cambodia first. He wished that the Americans had blocked the Communists’ westward escape route before attacking, instead of spreading them across Cambodia. . . . He did not seem to realize,” observes Shawcross, “that Nixon was more interested in avoiding American casualties than in finding the North Vietnamese or that the invasion was actually intended to push the Communists away from South Vietnam’s border.” When Alexander Haig came to Phnom Penh, Lon Nol asked for American troops to deal with the NVA. Instead he got aid, intended to build his army into a force of 220,000 men. Cambodia was to be neutral no longer; it would be a client of the United States, and fight North Vietnam on its behalf. In this manner Cambodia became an example of “the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form”; the policy that “Asian forces would be required to fill the gap between Washington’s ambitions and the willingness of American citizens to die on behalf of those ambitions in foreign fields. . . . \[Never\] did Nixon ever seem to consider what effect the introduction of American assistance might have upon a client country or what might happen if, after Washington had committed its prestige, that client proved unable, in a Nixon phrase, ‘to hack it.’” As had been predicted by the Pentagon’s Systems Analysis Office, Lon Nol never could “hack it.” But Nixon and Kissinger made the commitment anyway, and the result was perhaps the most incompetent and corrupt army that ever existed. Shawcross provides the grisly details. “Artillery officers worked only to a very strict schedule: from 0630 to 1300 or 1400 hours five days a week. On Saturdays and Sundays they invariably rested.” Pilots “of- ten demanded bribes from ground units before providing air support. The T-28 fighter-bomber pilots would not descend below 3,000 feet; bombs and napalm dropped at sharp angles from that height were usually inaccurate. They undoubtedly killed a lot of people but not necessarily those who were targeted.” The officer corps was, as the Pentagon observed, the army’s “greatest short-coming.” In 1974 one brigade was placed under the command of a deserter. Others stayed in their Phnom Penh villas and rarely saw the troops they commanded. The troops squandered ammunition, and “hundreds of thousands of rounds were sold every month to the Khmer Rouge. One of the worst offenders was the military commander of Battambang province, who supplied the Communists with weapons on the understanding that they be used against any government positions save his own.” Many commanders would not pay their men, who “often resorted to pillaging villages, alienating the peasants.” More lucrative was the practice of pocketing the salaries of non-existent “phantom soldiers.” “In its Termination Report, the Agency for International Development concluded that 20 to 40 percent of all military salaries were lost in this way.” This proved disastrous during the final Khmer Rouge offensive in 1975. “One battalion commander paled when told to deploy his full unit strength to Phnom Penh; for years he had carried four hundred phantoms on his payroll and in fact had only forty soldiers ready for combat. . . . The phantom soldiers marched their comrades to defeat.” Lon Nol lasted as long as he did only because of American bombing. (After the bombing halt in August of 1973, Lon Nol’s army substituted artillery. By mid- 1974, 87 percent of all American military aid was being spent on ammunition, which meant that if Congress balked at continued aid, or the Khmer Rouge could restrict the flow of supplies, then the army would be crippled. “Both these things did happen and each contributed toward making the fall of the regime inevitable.”) The B-52s dropped 539,129 tons of bombs from Operation Breakfast to the bombing halt. (For comparison, only 160,000 tons fell on Japan during all of World War II.) “Almost half of these bombs, 257,465 tons, \[fell\] in the last six months . . . many . . . on the most heavily populated areas of Cambodia.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted that it was impossible to assess the number of civilian—or for that matter, military— casualties from Operation Menu. And during the last days of unrestricted bombing in 1973, William Har-ben, chief of the American embassy’s Political Section, “did what others might have done”: He cut out, to scale, the “box” made by a B-52 strike and placed it on his own map. He found that virtually nowhere in central Cambodia could it be placed without “boxing” a village. “I began to get reports of wholesale carnage,” he says. “One night a mass of peasants from a village near Saang went out on a funeral procession. They walked straight into a ‘box.’ Hundreds were slaughtered.” ## The Madman Theory Such atrocities are customarily explained away as being justified by dire military necessity. But Shawcross reveals that the level of bombing was completely unrelated to military needs, real or imagined. One senior Pentagon analyst compared the use of air power in Southeast Asia to a fire hose “running under full pressure most of the time and pointed with the same intensity at whichever area is allowed, regardless of its relative importance in the scheme of things.” The reason that the bombs fell so thickly on Cambodia in 1973 was simply that, with the ceasefire in Vietnam, the Seventh Air Force could give Cambodia its undivided attention. The policy was set years earlier: > Just before the invasion, Laird’s representative, Warren Nutter, suggested at a meeting of the Senior Review Group that enemy activity did not justify the current \[bomber\] sortie rates and that these could be made more flexible in future. Kissinger refused to hear of it and demanded that the number of tactical airstrikes and B-52 sorties that had already been approved for the next financial year be flown regardless of the military situation. Laird was furious. “Anyone that addresses the problem starting with a set number of sorties doesn’t understand the problem and isn’t qualified to discuss it,” he said the next day. For Nixon and Kissinger, that such a policy was insane was, if anything, a point in its favor: > . . . Each believed in the value of unpredictability, of appearing “irrational” to one’s enemy. Nixon publicly declared that “the real possibility of irrational U.S. action is essential to the U.S.–Soviet relationship.” Privately he was more explicit. H. R. Haldeman records that in 1969 Nixon explained to him that “the threat was the key . . . Nixon coined a phrase for his theory which I’m sure will bring smiles of delight to Nixon haters everywhere. . . . He said, ‘I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button”—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.’” “A problem with this theory,” Shawcross observes, “is that reputations for irrationality have to be established, and that can be done only by irrational actions.” In Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger found it no problem at all. “We had tried,” said author Robert Anton Wilson of his paranoia trilogy _Illuminatus_, “to imagine Total Evil combined with Total Stupidity, but Nixon had actually lived out our fantasies.” As the reader is no doubt aware, _Sideshow_, appearing as it did in the teeth of a massive right-wing revival in foreign policy, has excited no end of controversy. Most of the critics, besides engaging in endless hairsplitting about whether or not Nixon had Sihanouk’s permission to murder Cambodians, charge that Shawcross is an “apologist” for the Pol Pot regime, or even, as the _Wall Street Journal_ put it, that he claims “that the Khmer Rouge turned into fanatic murderers mainly because we tried to stop them.” As usual when it comments on foreign affairs, the _Journal_ vulgarizes the issue. Shawcross, who minces no words in condemning the government of “Democratic Kampuchea,” set himself the task of determining what part American policy played in there was no food for the urban population and they would starve _en masse_ unless they went to the countryside where there was at least some rice and land to grow more. Other reasons given were to foil extensive CIA spy rings in the towns, and the possibility that the United States was going to bomb them. The last was not unrealistic—within the month, the _Mayaguez_ incident would show that the Madman Theory was alive and well in the White House —and as for the second, we have Frank Snepp’s testimony that the CIA did indeed have spy rings in the towns, which were broken up by the evacuation. And as for the threat of starvation: starvation was already a reality for the more than two million refugees in and around Phnom Penh (who, to a large extent, had fled the American bombing). The situation was little better for the rest of the citydwellers. “There was little or no food to be had by anybody—refugees, civilian or soldier,” said the U.S. Aid Termination Report. “Malnutrition became rampant, especially in Phnom Penh, and spread to all classes of the Khmer society.” The U.S. embassy the rise of the Khmer Rouge to power, and how they conducted themselves when they got it. In both cases, he concludes, it was considerable. The Khmer Rouge claimed that the first act of their rule, the forcible evacuation of Phnom Penh and other towns, was “necessary” for several reasons. First and foremost, that estimated that even under these conditions the government—which fed most of the people of Phnom Penh —had at most a ten-day supply of rice on April 11, six days before the Khmer Rouge entered the city. The reason for this is plain enough. The war had utterly destroyed Cambodian agriculture—it’s rather hard to grow rice in a B-52 box— February 1980 41 and “about 95 percent of all income came from the United States,” whose non-military aid never was very generous, and finally trickled to a stop. Small wonder the Cambodians starved by the thousands—if not the hundreds of thousands—after the war’s end. Not all the victims can be charged to American policy; the brutal, collectivist methods of the Khmer Rouge—to say nothing of the bloody coercion necessary to enforce them—ensured that many would die unnecessarily. But the U.S. AID report, written just before the fall of Phnom Penh, deserves to be quoted: “Without large-scale external food and equipment assistance there will be widespread starvation between now and next February. …Slave labor and starvation rations… will be a cruel necessity for this year, and general deprivation and suffering will stretch over the next two or three years before Cambodia can get back to rice self-sufficiency.” And so it came to pass. The reader of _Sideshow_ may well wonder whether Henry Kissinger, who replied to the critics of his secret bombing that “I fail to see the moral issue involved,” would have behaved any less ruthlessly than Pol Pot. The answer, of course, is that up to April 1975, he didn’t. Shawcross sums up the behavior of the Khmer Rouge as follows: All wars are designed to arouse anger, and almost all soldiers are taught to hate and to dehumanize their enemy. Veterans of the combat zone are often possessed of a mad rage to destroy, and to avenge their fallen comrades. It does not always happen, however, that victorious armies have endured such punishment as was inflicted upon the Khmer Rouge. Nor does it always happen that such an immature and tiny force comes to power after its country’s social order has been obliterated, and the nation faces the danger of takeover by a former ally, its ancient enemy. In Cambodia that did take place. In the last eight years, degree, law, moderation had been forsworn. The war and the causes for which it was fought had brought desolation while nurturing and then giving power to a little group of zealots sustained by Manichean fear. One would think that Mr. Shawcross, if he desired to play the “apologist” for the Khmer Rouge, could do better than this. In any event this reviewer liked his explanation better than that offered by the authors of the _Wall Street Journal’s_ favorite Cambodia book, _Murder of a Gentle Land_ by John Barron and Anthony Paul. According to Jean Lacouture’s review of their book, “the main reason they found for this madness is the reported sexual impotence of the (apparent) head of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, now head of state.” After South Vietnam and Cambodia fell, Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford urged that there be “no recriminations.” The recriminations came later, as the facts of American involvement in Southeast Asia receded from memory. There has been a steady parade of hawks coming forward to claim that the misery of the people of Southeast Asia, which was caused by the policies they supported, proves that they were right all along, and we should follow them once more. William Shawcross has dealt a mighty blow to their hopes (and hopefully, a mortal one to Kissinger’s Senatorial prospects). No wonder Bill Buckley, Norman Podhoretz, Edward Luttwak and the rest are squealing. _Sideshow_ is an indispensable book, come at just the right time to remind us that “Cambodia was not a mistake, it was a crime. The world is diminished by the experience.” Bill Birmingham is an _LR_ staffwriter and research assistant.