The Indochina War: Bombing the Dominoes

THE MASSIVE air assault on Cambodia has entered its second month. Western sources, cited in the April 15, 1973 issue of the New York Times say that:

American fighter-bomber pilots based in Thailand are flying an average of 250 strikes a day--almost as many in South Vietnam, which is much larger, during the heavy fighting there last year.

In addition, the sources say, Cambodia is being pounded by an average of 60 B-52s a day, each carrying up to 20 tons of bombs. One day recently, they say, the United States mounted an attack by 120 of the huge bombers.

To understand the effect of all these bombings on the land and the people of Cambodia, it is enough to consider the destructiveness of the B-52s alone. A B-52 flies at an altitude of 30,000 feet and drops bombs which cover a rectangle a mile and a half long and a half mile wide with flames and flying steel fragments. If there is no overlap, 60 B-52s can thus destroy an area of about 25 square miles in a single mission. The pilots have no idea of what is in their assigned target areas when they bomb them, nor do the people on the ground hear or see the planes coming after them.

As reported by most American newspapers, in recent days B-52s have been used in the areas immediately surrounding Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia itself. The number of refugees generated by the bombing has now reached 700,000 in Phnom Penh alone. Senator Edward M. Kennedy has said that some 3 million people have become refugees in Cambodia since the American-sponsored -invasion three years ago. This in a country of slightly over 6 million persons! The number of civilians killed in the last month is not yet known. According to the April 1, 1973 issue of the Washington Post:

Refugees swarming into the capital from target areas report dozens of villages, both east and southeast of Phnom Pehn, have been destroyed and as much as half their populations killed or maimed in the current bombing raids by B-52s and F-111 tactical fighter-bombers.

But there is no sign of any let-up. Arthur W. Hummel Jr., deputy assistant Secretary of State told the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees on April 16 that the Nixon administration would continue to bomb until it achieves an effective cease-fire. Such a tactic, Hummel added, was "vindicated" in Laos. But according to Defense and State Department officials, the situation in Cambodia has greatly complicated the problem of working out a cease-fire because "the Khmer insurgent groups" are divided into factions: for and against Sihanouk and pro-Hanoi, pro-Moscow and pro-Peking.

The same assertion was repeated three days later by Kissinger, when he said that since the "Cambodian insurgents" comprised three factions--one oriented toward and supported by the Soviet Union, another with ties to North Vietnam, and the third linked with the Chinese--the big obstacle to peace negotiations is finding someone to talk with!

But this is only a blatant lie to justify the continuation of the bombing in Cambodia. First of all, it is obvious that all the so-called factions are so united that Defense and State Department officials as well as American officials inside Cambodia itself have admitted consistently that had it not been for American air-power, "Government forces" would have collapsed.

Secondly, ever since 1970, the various armed forces as well as the people of Cambodia have been fighting under the one and only banner of the National United Front of Kampuchia (FUNK). FUNK has helped liberate about 90 per cent of the country, and the areas liberated have been under the sole administration of the Royal Government of National Union of Cambodia (GRUNC). GRUNC has been led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk and is recognized by 33 governments around the world and last summer it was admitted to the conference of over 60 non-aligned nations in the world--convened at Georgetown, Guyana--as the sole legitimate government of Cambodia.

Moreover, as reported in the April 11, 13 and 14 issues of the Christian Science Monitor, Prince Sihanouk has recently emerged from a long extended tour of his country and has said that all the Khmer forces are united behind him. North Vietnam and China have also given Sihanouk full support. For these reasons the Prince has said many times that he is ready to talk with American representatives in Peking or at any other mutually agreeable location.

But so far the Nixon administration does not want to talk from a position of weakness and therefore it has chosen to continue the bombing of the country with the slight hope that it could weaken the revolutionary Khmer forces.

What if the situation continues to deteriorate, however, and there is nothing Nixon can do to weaken the revolutionary Khmer forces? One cannot rule out the possibility of the rebombardment of North Vietnam. One can see this in the fact that although Western sources and American officials in Cambodia have consistently admitted that the Cambodian forces are dling all their fighting and that at most there are several thousand Vietnamese providing nothing more than advice and heavy weapons support (Christian Science Monitor, April 9, 1973; New York Times, March 28 and April 11, 1973; and so on), the Nixon administration and the Thieu regime have insisted that the deteriorating situation in Cambodia is mostly due to the presence of "North Vietnamese."

In a a taped interview with "Face the Nation" on April 8 of this year, Thieu said that in Cambodia "there are now three to eight thousand Khmer-Rouge, and the 50,000 North Vietnamese." Because the situation in Cambodia may endanger Thieu's own position, he insisted that the United States should continue to give air support to the Lon Nol regime. The same line of argument had been advanced by Defense Secretary Richardson a few days earlier when he admitted that the collapse of the Cambodian government would have a "significant" effect on the viability of the Thieu regime in South Vietnam.

By this kind of round-about logic, the United States is now bombing Cambodia to protect the viability of the Thieu regime in South Vietnam. It is now bombing Laos and threatening to bomb North Vietnam to protect the viability of the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. And one wonders what this will lead the United States to next when it claims that it will have to protect the viability of the Phouma regime in Laos.

The next 30 days or so may turn out to be a crucial period in the sordid history of American intervention in Indochina. The criminality of it all is that while the United States cannot realistically continue to support any of the above-mentioned regimes with even the slightest real prospects of "success," such support may continue nevertheless. It augurs only to bring death and misery to still thousands more Indochinese. Americans who want to have this immoral war end once for all should not let Nixon intimidate them through the use of the returning POWs but should force Nixon to end all support for the Thieu, the Long Nol and the Phouma regimes and let the Indochinese peoples solve their own problems.

Ngo Vinh Long '68 is Director of the Vietnam Resource Center in Cambridge and author of Before the Revolution: The Vietnamese Peasants under the French [MIT Press, forthcoming].