The Little War

A LOT OF PEOPLE--including members of both parties--have praised President Ford's decision last week to recover the Mayaguez and its crew by force. The entire affair attests not to the swiftness of U.S. action or the diplomatic benefits accrued as "a by-product, a bonus," as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger '50 called them, but the loss of American and Cambodian lives.

At least five Americans died in the action, 16 are missing and 70 to 80 wounded: these men deserve our sympathy for their sacrifice, but Ford and his advisers deserve no praise. They precipitated an unnecessary international incident.

The military operation and its aftermath leave several questions unanswered. For instance, the fact that the Defense Department had reason to believe that the crew members had been taken off Koh Tang--as in fact, they were--suggests that Ford sent Marines on to Koh Tank island not to retrieve crew members, but with no other purpose than to reassert American strength by killing Cambodian soldiers. All of the official postmortems emphasize the fact that the crew members were saved, without saying why Marines attacked Koh Tang when there was a reasonable doubt that crew members were still there.

Even though Congress should start immediately with an investigation into the Mayaguez's activities to determine whether or not it was violating Cambodia's waters or whether it was a spy ship, such an investigation won't turn up anything until long after this small war has garnered Ford a great deal of political mileage. That Ford is concerned about the political implications of the Mayaguez incident can be seen in the slow way the Defense Department is revealing its information. It was not until reporters specifically asked about a discrepancy in Pentagon reports that it revealed there was a second air attack on Sihanoukville 37 minutes after the crew of the Mayaguez was recovered. Kissinger explained this second air attack on unused oil refineries as an effort to "absorb their [Cambodian forces'] energies in other things than attempting to intervene with our disengagement efforts." Kissinger was probably concerned about protecting the lives of Marines he and Ford had already committed on the island of Koh Tang, but the second bombing seemed only a useless attack on Cambodian resources to emphasize this point to the American people, and to emphasize to the world that the United States will continue to recklessly bomb other cities in other lands--just as it did in North Vietnam--to protect its interests.

It is sad that the United States, always ready to swiftly commit troops around the world, did not have better diplomatic ties to Cambodia and that China was not openly willing to help with negotiations. The lives that were lost, however, make the Mayaguez incident not a success, but a failure in diplomatic relations and a failure on the part of both countries' leaders to consider the lives of their people.