Henry Kissinger's miscalculation may have kept Mao Zedong in power

June 25, 2011
Rowan Callick, Asia-Pacific editor
From: The Australian

RICHARD Nixon's visit to China in 1972 is an event that has assumed epic significance.

But might it have been extraordinarily mistimed and misconceived, crucially helping the monstrous Mao Zedong and his party stay in power?

It is more usually seen as helping decide the outcome of the Cold War by aligning China with the US against the Soviet Union, and also paving the way for the US retreat from Vietnam. It is viewed as the epitome of the way in which people from opposite sides of the political fence can achieve breakthroughs that often frustrate fellow travellers.

It inspired an opera, 25 years later, by John Adams, which has just received its Metropolitan Opera premiere in New York.

Bombs away! Remember Cambodia

Jul 9, 2010
By Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen
Asia Times Online

The United States war in Afghanistan is "going badly", according to the New York Times. Nine years after American forces invaded to oust the repressive Taliban regime and its al-Qaeda ally, "the deteriorating situation demands a serious assessment now of the military and civilian strategies".

Aerial bombardment, a centerpiece of the US military effort in Afghanistan, has had a devastating impact on civilians there. Along with Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents and suicide bombers, who have recently escalated their slaughter of the Afghan population, US and North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) aircraft have for years inflicted a horrific toll on innocent villagers.

When US bombs hit a civilian warehouse in Afghanistan in late 2001, then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld responded, "We're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is." There was laughter in the press gallery.

But the bombing continued and spread to Iraq in 2003, with the United States determined to use "the force necessary to prevail, plus some", and asserting that no promises would be made to avoid "collateral damage".

Afghan and Iraqi civilian casualties, in other words, were predictable if not inevitable. The show of strength aside, didn't the US underestimate the strategic cost of collateral damage? If "shock and awe" appeared to work at least in 2001 against the Taliban regular army, the continued use of aerial bombardment has also nourished civilian support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda anti-US insurgency.

In March 2010, the New York Times reported that "civilian deaths caused by American troops and American bombs have outraged the local population and made the case for the insurgency." Beyond the moral meaning of inflicting predictable civilian casualties, and contravention of international laws of war, it is also clear that the political repercussions of air strikes outweigh their military benefits.

This is not news. The extension of the Vietnam War to Cambodia, which the US Air Force bombed from 1965 to 1973, was a troubling precedent. First, Cambodia became in 1969-1973 one of the most heavily-bombarded countries in history (along with North Korea, South Vietnam, and Laos). Then, in 1975-79, it suffered genocide at the hands of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge communists, who had been military targets of the US bombing but also became its political beneficiaries.

Despite key differences, an important similarity links the current conflict in Afghanistan to the 1970-1975 Cambodian war: increasing US reliance on air power against a heterogeneous insurgency. Moreover, in the past few years, as fighting has continued in Afghanistan supported by US air power, Taliban forces have benefited politically, recruiting among an anti-US Afghan constituency that appears to have grown even as the insurgents suffer military casualties.

In Cambodia, it was precisely the harshest, most extreme elements of the insurgency who survived the US bombing, expanded in numbers, and then won the war. The Khmer Rouge grew from a small force of fewer than 10,000 in 1969 to over 200,000 troops and militia in 1973.

During that period, their recruitment propaganda successfully highlighted the casualties and damage caused by US bombing. Within a broader Cambodian insurgency, the radical Khmer Rouge leaders eclipsed their royalist, reformist, and pro-Hanoi allies as well as defeating their enemy, the pro-US Cambodian government of Lon Nol, in 1975.

The Nixon Doctrine had proposed that the United States could supply an allied Asian regime with the materiel to withstand internal or external challenge while the US withdrew its own ground troops or remained at arm's length.

"Vietnamization" built up the air and ground fighting capability of South Vietnamese government forces while American units slowly disengaged. In Cambodia from 1970, Washington gave military aid to General Lon Nol's new regime, tolerating its rampant corruption, while the US Air Force (and the large South Vietnamese Air Force) conducted massive aerial bombardment of its Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge communist opponents and their heterogeneous united front, across rural Cambodia.

United States policy in Afghanistan has shown a similar reliance on air strikes in fighting the motley insurgency there. These strikes, while far more precisely targeted than the earlier bombing campaigns in Indochina, inflicted substantial civilian casualties in the first year of the Afghan war in 2001-02.

The Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that in a three-month period between October 7, 2001 and January 1, 2002, between 1,000 and 1,300 civilians were killed by aerial bombing, and The Los Angeles Times found that in a five-month period from October 7, 2001 to February 28, 2002, between 1,067 and 1,201 civilian deaths were reported in the media.

Deaths reported in newspapers should be treated with caution, but not all are reported, and the total was undoubtedly high. And the toll has continued long after the initial US invasion. According to Human Rights Watch, air strikes by the US Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and its NATO-led coalition, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), killed 116 Afghan civilians in 2006, and 321 civilians in 2007.

And the number rose again in 2008: according to a United Nations study on the humanitarian costs of the conflict, air strikes accounted for 530 of the 828 civilians killed that year by US or Afghan government forces. The same study found that between January and June 2009, 200 of the 310 recorded civilian deaths were caused by air strikes. Overall in 2009, the UN reported that 2,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan, though the number killed by foreign and Afghan troops was down 25%.

While their large-scale killing of civilians presented a moral challenge to the US-led coalition forces, there has also been increasing acknowledgment of strategic costs accompanying these casualties.

In mid-2007, the London Guardian reported that "a senior UK military officer said he had asked the US to withdraw its special forces from a volatile area that was crucial in the battle against the Taliban" after the US forces were "criticized for relying on air strikes for cover when they believed they were confronted by large groups of Taliban fighters".

The paper added: "British and NATO officials have consistently expressed concern about US tactics, notably air strikes, which kill civilians, sabotaging the battle for ‘hearts and minds'."

NATO's secretary general added that NATO commanders "had changed the rules of engagement, ordering their troops to hold their fire in situations where civilians appeared to be at risk". More recently Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall, the senior NATO soldier in Afghanistan, has argued that many of the insurgents being held at Bagram air base had joined the insurgency due to deaths of people they knew.

He told the troops, "There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents. Every time there is an escalation of force we are finding that innocents are being killed." The same report cited a village elder from Hodkail corroborating this argument: "The people are tired of all these cruel actions by the foreigners, and we can't suffer it anymore. The people do not have any other choice, they will rise against the government and fight them and the foreigners. There are a lot of cases of killing of innocent people."

Yet the bombings have continued and the civilian death toll has mounted. In 2008, after US aircraft killed more than 30 Afghan civilians in each of two bombardments of rural wedding parties, the top US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, "ordered a tightening of procedures for launching air strikes" and proclaimed that "minimizing civilian casualties is crucial". In December 2008, McKiernan issued another directive, ordering that "all responses must be proportionate".

Again new procedures failed to stop the slaughter from the air. Following an investigation into a 2009 air strike in Farah province that killed at least 26 civilians (the Afghan government reported a much higher toll of 140 dead), McKiernan's replacement, General Stanley McChrystal, issued new guidelines meant to minimize civilian casualties.

In earlier testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, McChrystal had stressed the strategic importance of civilian protection. "A willingness to operate in ways minimizing causalities or damage ... is critical," he argued. "Although I expect stiff fighting ahead, the measure of success will not be enemy killed. It will be shielding the Afghan population from violence." So far the cost of failure, for instance by inflicting more civilian casualties, has included a political windfall for Taliban insurgents, who by 2009 posed a much stronger threat than they had in 2005.

Since the issuing of McChrystal's 2009 directive, however, air strikes have continued to kill civilians, the toll increasing with the escalation of the US ground war in response to the greater Taliban threat.

In February 2010 alone, 46 Afghan civilians were killed in just three strikes. An errant rocket attack on February 14 killed 12 civilians. Four days later, a NATO air strike mistakenly killed seven Afghan police officers. Another NATO strike on February 20 killed 27 civilians.

In comparison to the previous year, the three-month period from March to June 2010 saw a 44% drop in civilian casualties caused by the coalition. Yet, nine years after the US went to war in Afghanistan, bombing remains part of US strategy and the death toll in aerial strikes continues. In a March incident, a US air strike killed 13 civilians and in June, 10 more civilians, including at least five women and children, were killed in a NATO air strike.

One reaction to the McChrystal directive has been an increased US use of unmanned aerial drones to deliver air strikes. While proponents of targeted drone strikes argue that they offer greater precision, and therefore minimize civilian casualties, it is also possible that the greater ease with which they can be deployed could instead increase the number of raids and thus the civilian casualty rates.

For example, a Human Rights Watch report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan argued that most civilian casualties do not occur in planned air strikes on Taliban targets, but rather in the more fluid rapid-response strikes mostly carried out in support of "troops in contact".

A recent US military report on a drone strike that killed 23 civilians in February found that "inaccurate and unprofessional" reporting by the drone operators was responsible for the casualties.

In response, McChrystal repeated what he had said many times, "inadvertently killing or injuring civilians is heartbreaking and undermines their trust and confidence in our mission". In late June, in the second change of Afghanistan commander in 18 months, US President Barack Obama fired McChrystal and replaced him with General David Petraeus.

The resort to drones, while potentially useful for well-planned long-term surveillance-based strikes, could also enable the execution of more frequent troop support strikes. More generally, any shift to increased air power, even in conjunction with ground troops, will likely inflict greater civilian casualties.

The resulting local outrage could benefit an insurgency seeking civilian support and recruitment. While air strikes today can be much more accurate than they were in Indochina in the 1970s, it would be perilous to ignore a disastrous precedent: the political blowback of the US air war against Cambodian insurgents.

Raining bombs on Cambodia

On December 9, 1970, president Richard Nixon telephoned his national security adviser Henry Kissinger to discuss the ongoing bombing of Cambodia. B-52s, long deployed over Vietnam, had been targeting Cambodia for only a year.

In a "sideshow" to the war in Vietnam, American aircraft had already dropped 36,000 payloads on Cambodia, a neutral kingdom until the US-backed General Lon Nol seized power from Prince Norodom Sihanouk in a March 1970 coup.

The 1969-70 "Menu" B-52 bombings of Cambodia's border areas, which American commanders labelled Breakfast, Lunch, Supper, Dinner, Desert and Snack, aimed to destroy the mobile headquarters of the South Vietnamese "Vietcong" and the North Vietnamese Army (VC/NVA) in the Cambodian jungle. However, these and later bombardments forced the Vietnamese communists further west and deeper into Cambodia, and ultimately radicalized Cambodian local people against Lon Nol's regime.

After the US ground invasion of Cambodia in May-June 1970, which also failed to root out the Vietnamese communists there, Nixon faced growing congressional opposition to his Indochina policy. The president now wanted a secret escalation of air attacks, further into Cambodia's populous areas.

This was despite a September 1970 US intelligence report that had warned Washington that "many of the 66 ‘training camps' on which [Lon Nol's army] had requested air strikes by early September were in fact merely political indoctrination sessions held in village halls and pagodas".

Telling Kissinger on December 9, 1970, of his frustration that the US Air Force was being "unimaginative", Nixon demanded more bombing, deeper into Cambodia: "They have got to go in there and I mean really go in ... I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them. There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget. Is that clear?"

This order ignored prior limits restricting US attacks to within 30 miles (48 kilometers) of the Vietnamese border and prohibiting B-52 bombing within a kilometer of any village, and military assessments likening the air strikes to "taking a beehive the size of a basketball and poking it with a stick".

Kissinger responded hesitantly, "The problem is Mr President, the air force is designed to fight an air battle against the Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war ... in fact, they are not designed for any war we are likely to have to fight."

The US insistence even today on using air power against insurgencies raises this same dilemma: perhaps even more than the civilian casualties of ground operations, the "collateral damage" from US aerial bombing still appears to enrage and radicalize enough of the survivors for insurgencies to find the recruits and supporters they require.

Five minutes after his telephone conversation with Nixon, Kissinger called General Alexander Haig to relay the new orders. "He [Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything. It's an order, it's to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?" The response from Haig, recorded as barely audible, sounded like laughing.

As in Vietnam, the US now deployed massive air power over Cambodia to fight an insurgency that enjoyed significant local support. One result was more growth in the insurgency. In recent years the impact of the US bombing on Cambodia has become much better known.

An apparently near-complete Pentagon spatial database, declassified in 2000 and detailing no fewer than 230,488 US aircraft sorties over Cambodia from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, reveals that much of that bombing was indiscriminate and that it had begun years earlier than ever officially disclosed to the US Congress or the American people.

A decade ago, the US government released to the governments of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam extensive classified air force data on all American bombings of those countries. This data assist those countries in the search for unexploded US ordnance, still a major threat in much of the region, and it can also be analyzed in map and time series formats, revealing an astounding wealth of historical information on the air war there.

We now know, for instance, that from 1965 to 1969, before Nixon's "secret" Menu bombing even started, the US Air Force had dropped bombs on, among other places in Cambodia, 83 sites at which the Pentagon database described the intended target as "Unknown" or "Unidentified". The detailed record reveals that for these 83 cases, the US Air Force stated in its confidential reporting that it was unaware of what it was bombing. It nevertheless dropped munitions on those sites which it could not identify, in a neutral country at peace.

This practice escalated after the ground war began in Cambodia in 1970. For that year alone, the number of US air strikes on targets recorded as "Unknown" or "Unidentified" increased to as many as 573 bombing sites. American planes also bombed another 5,602 Cambodian sites where the Pentagon record neither identifies nor cites any target - 15% percent of the 37,426 air strikes made on the country that year.

Interestingly, after Nixon's December 1970 order for wider bombing of Cambodia, the number of such attacks fell in 1971, but that year still saw as many as 182 bombing raids on "Unknown" targets, and 1,390 attacks on unidentified ones (among the 25,052 Cambodian sites bombed that year).

The long-term trend favored more indiscriminate bombardment. In 1972, the US Air Force bombed 17,293 Cambodian sites, including 766 whose targets it explicitly recorded as "Unknown", plus another 767 sites with no target identified in the military database. These figures dramatically increased the next year. In the period January-August 1973 alone, the air force bombed 33,945 sites in Cambodia, hitting as many as 2,632 "Unknown" targets, and 465 other sites where the Pentagon record identified no target.

May 1973 saw the height of the Cambodia bombing. During that month, US planes bombed 6,553 sites there. These sorties included hits on 641 "Unknown" and 158 unidentified targets, at a rate of over 25 such strikes per day for that month.

Overall, during the US bombardment of Cambodia from 1970 to 1973, American warplanes hit a total of 3,580 "Unknown" targets and bombed another 8,238 sites with no target identified. Such sites accounted for 10.4% of the air strikes, which hit a total of 113,716 Cambodian sites in less than four years.

Also unknown is the human toll that these specific air strikes inflicted on "Unknown", "Unidentified" or non-identified targets, and the toll from the additional 1,023 strikes on targets identified only as a "sampan". Civilian casualties from the former, at least, are properly considered US war crimes (not genocide), though they remain unprosecuted.

However, it is possible to cross-check other information in the Pentagon bombing database with details that Cambodian survivors provided to Ben Kiernan in interviews he conducted in 1979-1981. We can also begin to answer important further questions concerning the strategic efficacy and political consequences of aerial bombing: Can insurgencies be beaten with bombs? What are the human and also the strategic costs of "collateral damage"? For a strategy of replacing or reinforcing ground troops with air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cambodia at least shows how strategic bombing can go disastrously wrong.

The new data transforms our understanding of what happened to Cambodia, even today one of the most heavily bombed countries in history. The total tonnage of US bombs dropped on Cambodia, at least in the range of 500,000 tons, possibly far more, either equaled or far exceeded the tonnages that the US dropped in the entire Pacific Theater during World War II (500,000 tons) and in the Korean War (454,000). In per capita terms, the bombing of Cambodia exceeded the Allied bombing of Germany and Japan, and the US bombing of North Vietnam (but not that of South Vietnam or possibly, Laos).

Not only was the total payload dropped on Cambodia significant, and much of it indiscriminate, but also, the bombardment began much earlier than previously disclosed. The "secret" 1969-70 Menu campaign, when later uncovered, caused congressional uproar and provoked calls for Nixon's impeachment, but we now know that US bombing had actually started over four years earlier, in 1965, as Cambodian leaders had claimed at the time.

These early tactical strikes may have supported secret US Army and Central Intelligence Agency ground incursions from across the Vietnamese border. During the mid-1960s, the Studies and Operations Group, US Special Forces teams in tandem with the Khmer Serei (US-trained ethnic Cambodian rebels from South Vietnam), were collecting intelligence inside Cambodia. Perhaps the US tactical air strikes supported or followed up on these secret pre-1969 operations.

This revelation has several implications. First, US bombing of neutral Cambodia significantly predated the Nixon administration. Early individual bombardments of Cambodia were known and protested by the Cambodian government. Prince Sihanouk's foreign minister, for instance, claimed as early as January 1966 that "hundreds of our people have already died in these attacks".

The Pentagon database reveals escalating bombardments. From 1965 to 1968, the Lyndon B Johnson administration conducted 2,565 sorties over Cambodia. Most of these strikes occurred under the Vietnam War policy of then-secretary of defense Robert S McNamara, which he subsequently publicly regretted.

Second, these early strikes were tactical, directed at military targets, not carpet bombings. The Johnson administration made a strategic decision not to use B-52s in Cambodia, whether out of concern for Cambodian lives, or for the country's neutrality, or because of perceived strategic limits of carpet bombing. However, Nixon decided differently, and from late 1969 the air force began to deploy B-52s over Cambodia.

Why did the United States bombard a small agrarian country that attempted to stay out of a major war, and what were the consequences?

In the first stage of the bombing (1965-1969) the US goal was to pursue the Vietnamese communists retreating from South Vietnam into Cambodia, then to destroy their Cambodian sanctuaries, and cut off their supply routes from North to South Vietnam, through both Laos to the north and later, the southern Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. These early US attacks failed to find, let alone hit, a mobile Vietnamese headquarters, or to stop the flow of weapons and supplies.

The second phase of the bombing (1969-1872) aimed to support the slow pullout of US troops from Vietnam, ironically by expanding the war to Cambodia in the hope of winning it faster by attacking the Vietnamese communists from behind. Lon Nol's 1970 coup facilitated much more extensive US action in Cambodia, including the short ground invasion and the prolonged carpet bombing, until 1973.

In 1969, Nixon first introduced B-52s into the still secret US air war in Cambodia to buy time for the US withdrawal from Vietnam. Later, as Emory Swank, US ambassador to Lon Nol's Cambodia, recalled, "Time was bought for the success of the program in Vietnam ... to this extent I think some measure of gratitude is owed to the Khmers."

Former US General Theodore Mataxis called it "a holding action. You know, one of those things like a rear guard you drop off. The troika's going down the road and the wolves are closing in, and so you throw them something off and let them chew it." Thus Cambodians became a decoy to protect American lives. In its attempt to deny South Vietnam to the Vietnamese communists, the US drove them further into Cambodia, producing the domino effect that its Indochinese intervention had been intended to prevent. Phnom Penh would fall two weeks before Saigon.

The final phase of the US bombing, January-August 1973, aimed to stop the now rapid Khmer Rouge advance on the Cambodian capital. US fear of this first Southeast Asian domino falling translated into a massive escalation of the air war that spring and summer - an unprecedented B-52 bombardment, focussed on the heavily populated areas around Phnom Penh, but also sparing few other regions of the country. As well as inflaming rural rage against the pro-US Lon Nol government, the rain of bombs on non-combatants also reduced the relative risk of their joining the insurgency.

The impact of the resultant increased civilian casualties may not have been a primary strategic concern for the Nixon administration. It should have been. Civilian casualties helped drive people into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until Sihanouk was overthrown in 1970, the Vietnam War spread to Cambodia, and extensive US bombing of its rural areas began.

Even before that, the initial US bombardments of border areas had set in motion a highly precarious series of events leading to the extension deeper into Cambodia of the impact of the Vietnam War, contributing to Lon Nol's 1970 coup, which also helped fuel the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge.

The final phase of the story is better known. In 1973, the US Congress, angered at the destruction and the deception of the Nixon administration, legislated a halt to the Cambodia bombing. The great damage was already done. Having grown under the rain of bombs from a few thousand to over 200,000 regular and militia forces by 1973, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh two years later. They then subjected Cambodia to a genocidal Maoist agrarian revolution. Is there a lesson here on combating insurgencies?

Apart from the large human toll, perhaps the most powerful and direct impact of the bombing was the political backlash it caused. Because Lon Nol was supporting the US air war, the bombing of Cambodian villages and its significant civilian casualties provided ideal recruitment rhetoric for the insurgent Khmer Rouge.

The Nixon administration knew that the Khmer Rouge were explicitly recruiting peasants by highlighting the damage done by US air strikes. The Central Intelligence Agency's directorate of operations, after investigations south of Phnom Penh, reported in May 1973 that the communists there were successfully "using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda"

Years later, journalist Bruce Palling asked a former Khmer Rouge officer from northern Cambodia if local Khmer Rouge forces had made use of the bombing for anti-US propaganda:

Chhit Do: Oh yes, they did. Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched

The ordinary people ... sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told ... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over ... It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them.

Bruce Palling: So the American bombing was a kind of help to the Khmer Rouge?

Chhit Do: Yes, that's right ... sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.

The Nixon administration, aware of this consequence of its Cambodia bombing, kept the air war secret for so long that debate over its toll and political impact came far too late.

Along with support from the Vietnamese communists and from Lon Nol's deposed rival, Prince Sihanouk, the US carpet bombing of Cambodia was partly responsible for the rise of what had been a small-scale Khmer Rouge insurgency, which now grew capable of overthrowing the Lon Nol government, and once it had done so in 1975, perpetrated genocide in the country.

The parallels to current dilemmas in Iraq and Afghanistan, where genocidal al-Qaeda factions lurk among the insurgent forces, are poignant and telling.

Today, the technology of US bombing has become more sophisticated. "Unknown" targets are bombed less frequently and collateral damage is now lower than it was. Yet it remains high, and perhaps these days, information travels faster.

What are the strategic consequences of the continuing civilian death tolls that US forces inflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the outrage they spawn among rural communities there? Are they worth the risk, let alone the moral consequences, to say nothing of the implications under international criminal law?

The January 13, 2006, aerial strike by a US predator drone on a village in Pakistan, killing women and children and inflaming local anti-US political passions, seems a pertinent example of what continues to occur in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Collateral damage" in this case, even undermined the positive sentiments previously created by billions of dollars of US post-earthquake aid to that part of Pakistan. Aside from the killing of innocent civilians, how many new enemies does US bombing create?

In the lead-up to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, neither the US media nor the George W Bush administration seriously included the impact of civilian casualties in public discussion of the overall war strategy. Even with official assurances that civilian casualties would be limited, when it came to a decision to bomb a village containing a suspected terrorist, the benefit of killing the target trumped the toll on innocents. This misguided calculus is quite possibly a fundamental threat to long-term Afghan and American security.

If the Cambodians' tragic experience teaches us anything, it is that official disregard of the immorality and miscalculation of the consequences of inflicting predictable civilian casualties stem partly from failure to understand the social contexts of insurgencies.

The reasons local people help such movements do not fit into Kissingerian rationales. Nor is their support absolute or unidimensional. Those whose lives have been ruined may not look to the geopolitical rationale of the attacks; rather, understandably and often explicitly, many will blame the attackers.

Dangerous forces can reap a windfall. The strategic and moral failure of the US Cambodia air campaign lay not only in the toll of possibly 150,000 civilians killed there in 1969-1973 by an almost unprecedented level of carpet, cluster and incendiary bombing, but also indirectly, in its aftermath, when the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime rose from the bomb craters to cause the deaths of another 1.7 million Cambodians in 1975-79.

These successive tragedies are not unrelated. It is only predictable that an insurgency in need of recruits may effectively exploit potential supporters' hatred for those killing their family members or neighbors. That Washington has yet to learn from its past crimes and mistakes is a failure of strategic as well as moral calculation. Until it does, America's hopes for Afghanistan and for its own improved security may be misplaced.

Ben Kiernan is the Whitney Griswold professor of history, chair of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies, and director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University (www.yale.edu/gsp). He is the author of How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985), The Pol Pot Regime (1996), Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (2007), and Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007). Taylor Owen is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. They wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.

Alexander Haig's Dark Side

Alexander Haig, right, with Henry Kissinger in 2006. (Photo: Reuters)

February 21, 2010
Tom Shachtman
The Huffington Post (USA)

Dispatched to Phnom Penh, Haig exceeded Nixon's instructions and told Lon Nol that the U.S. would continue to fight in Cambodia even after Congress had expressly forbidden further American incursions there and Nixon had agreed to that restriction. Visiting Vietnam to bring back honest reports of the war's progress, Haig returned with rosy ones that belied what soldiers in the field said to him. Jumped over hundreds of generals so that Nixon could appoint him Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army, Haig was in that job only a few months before being brought back to the White House in May 1973 as chief of staff. Thus began what Colodny and I call "The Haig Administration."

Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig is now posthumously being recast as the quintessential soldier-patriot. The truth is, he had a dark side: wiretapping for Richard Nixon, facilitating the operations of a military spy ring that stole classified documents from the White House, sabotaging peace negotiations over Vietnam and détente with the USSR, and unduly hastening Nixon's exit from office. Haig is most lauded as the man who, according to conventional wisdom, held the presidency together during the depths of Watergate. But that evaluation obscures Haig's true role in the Nixon White House.

He began to come to prominence in 1968 when Fritz Kraemer, who had helped Haig rise within the Pentagon, recommended him to another protégé, Henry Kissinger, as Kissinger's military advisor on the Nixon National Security Council. Haig shared Kraemer's militarist, simplistic, anti-Communist, anti-diplomacy view of the world and of America's place in it.

At the NSC, even before Haig finished elbowing rivals out of the way to become Kissinger's deputy, he was up to his eyeballs in questionable activities, submitting the names of targets for the wiretapping of newsmen and NSC and Pentagon staffers, and reading the resulting wiretap logs, though he later denied involvement or said he had done everything at Nixon's request. Nixon had no reason to think of tapping Secretary of Defense aide Robert Pursley, but Haig had been butting heads with Pursley.

Haig quickly learned how to curry favor with Nixon: by feeding the president's need to be bellicose. The White House tapes reveal Haig as the ultimate sycophant, urging Nixon to smite the enemy in Vietnam, unleash the bombs, stand tough against the Soviets, and, not incidentally, to keep Kissinger in his place -- all in the violent, pusillanimous language that philosopher Lionel Rubinoff so aptly labeled "the pornography of power." Nixon rewarded Haig with one star, two stars, four stars.

What has not been generally understood until the recent publication of The Forty Years War, by Len Colodny and me, is that despite Nixon's attention and assistance, Haig consistently undermined the president, primarily because of his antagonism toward what he saw as Nixon's radical foreign policies. Haig channeled Kraemer's views that diplomacy was useless and détente a farce, that the Russians could never be trusted, that the Chinese were playing us, and that the war in Vietnam could be won on the battlefield if only Nixon would stop withdrawing 10,000 troops a month.

Furthering the militarist agenda, Haig facilitated the operations of a military spy ring that stole classified national security documents from Kissinger and from the National Security Council, and therefore from the president, and conveyed them to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the purpose of slowing the détente express. The JCS leaked some classified information to the press, embarrassing Nixon and coming close to capsizing U.S. policy toward the India and Pakistan, then at war with each other. On December 21, 1971, when the stunned Nixon learned of the existence of the spy ring, he labeled it "a federal offense of the highest order." For political reasons, he decided not to prosecute anyone for it; and, oblivious to Haig's involvement because of a bureaucratic slip-up, gave him more and more responsibilities.

Haig, for his part, fought successfully through the remaining years of the Nixon Administration to keep secret his involvement in that espionage.

Dispatched to Phnom Penh, Haig exceeded Nixon's instructions and told Lon Nol that the U.S. would continue to fight in Cambodia even after Congress had expressly forbidden further American incursions there and Nixon had agreed to that restriction. Visiting Vietnam to bring back honest reports of the war's progress, Haig returned with rosy ones that belied what soldiers in the field said to him. Jumped over hundreds of generals so that Nixon could appoint him Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army, Haig was in that job only a few months before being brought back to the White House in May 1973 as chief of staff. Thus began what Colodny and I call "The Haig Administration."

As we document in our book, Haig returned to the White House with a secret to protect and an agenda to pursue. "Al controlled everything, everybody and everything," former White House aide Larry Higby told us about this era. That control was far from benevolent. For instance, during this period he worked closely with another Kraemer friend, Democratic Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, to allow Jackson to effectively block progress on détente. Haig and his long-term friend J. Fred Buzhardt had been brought into the White House primarily to protect the president from the mounting mess of Watergate. But at every turn they worked to hasten Nixon's exit from office.

We reveal for the first time, based on a close reading of White House documents and tapes, that within days of taking the reins at the White House, Haig maneuvered Nixon into not claiming executive privilege to prevent Lt.-General Vernon Walters -- an old friend of the president's -- from testifying to Congress and turning over a crucial "memcon." The memcon contained Walters' account of the June 23, 1972 meeting at the White House of himself, CIA Director Richard Helms, and Nixon aides John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, in which the Nixon aides conveyed the need to have the CIA block the FBI's investigation into Watergate. That memcon, and Walters' testimony, would lead investigators directly to the "smoking gun" tape that eventually sealed Nixon's fate.

A month after the Walters memcon affair, Haig assured that Alexander Butterfield would reveal the White House taping system in testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee by concealing from Nixon the fact that Butterfield was about to testify, thus preventing the president from forbidding that testimony on the grounds of executive privilege, which Nixon later wrote that he would have done.

In October 1973, according to then-attorney general Elliot Richardson, Haig's duplicity exacerbated a bad situation with Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox until it mushroomed into the Saturday Night Massacre -- the resignations of Richardson and his deputy, and the firing of Cox -- which spurred the first calls for Nixon's impeachment.

During this period, Haig frequently usurped the president's power, telling a delegation from a high-level security panel who insisted on seeing Nixon, "I am the president" and sending them away.

Some have said that Haig acted imperially and hastened Nixon's exit to protect the country. But as the evidence we have found makes clear, Haig's aims in the Nixon White House in 1973-74 were always to protect himself and aggrandize his own power.

In 1981, when President Reagan was shot, Haig told the Cabinet and the press, "As of now, I am in control here in the White House," and by this obvious mis-stating of the correct chain of succession forever disqualified himself from further high office. In retrospect he claimed his outburst had been no more than a "poor choice of words;" rather, the statement was symptomatic of Haig's lifelong attitude toward democratically elected public officials and presidential power.

Alexander Haig, 85; soldier-statesman managed Nixon resignation

President Nixon chats with Gen. Alexander Haig, his new chief of Staff, as they leave the Spirit of 76 upon arrival 5/8/1973 at nearby Andrews Air force base, MMD. The Chief Executive is returning from a short stay at the Florida White House where he conferred with John Connally on the possibility of the former treasury Secretary rejoining his administration. (UYPI Photo/tm/Files)

Sunday, February 21, 2010
By James Hohmann
Special to The Washington Post

Retired Army Gen. Alexander Haig, who held influential positions in the U.S. military and government and who as White House chief of staff shepherded Richard M. Nixon toward peacefully resigning the presidency, died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore of complications from an infection. He was 85.

Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter sent the four-star general to Europe as supreme commander of NATO. Ronald Reagan made him secretary of state, a brief and stormy appointment in which he famously tried to assert command after the attempted assassination of the president. And Gen. Haig himself, a tall man with blue eyes who kept his chin-up military bearing long after he left the service, ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988.

In a statement, President Obama said Gen. Haig "exemplified our finest warrior-diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public service."

Gen. Haig's influence peaked in his late 40s, during Nixon's last 16 months in office, when brewing developments in the Watergate scandal damaged and increasingly distracted the president. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger famously told Gen. Haig to keep the country together while he held the world together during one of the greatest constitutional crises in the nation's history. Special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, and many others, called Gen. Haig the "37 1/2 president."

Gen. Haig, untainted by the botched break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, took over as chief of staff in May 1973 from H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, who would spend 18 months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. When the public learned about the secret Oval Office taping system, which would eventually implicate Nixon in the coverup, Gen. Haig, as he acknowledged later, urged the president to destroy the tapes.

When Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, Jaworski's predecessor, pursued his investigation too aggressively for Nixon's comfort, the president dispatched Gen. Haig in October 1973 to instruct the acting attorney general, William D. Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. "Your commander in chief has given you an order," Gen. Haig told him.

Ruckelshaus refused, quitting instead in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

Although Gen. Haig vigorously defended the president, he realized the direness of the mounting evidence and arranged a series of meetings between Nixon, his attorneys and leading members of Congress to make Nixon understand that his position had become untenable in the summer of 1974.

Gen. Haig said he thought Nixon needed to make the final decision, but he "smoothed the way" by presenting resignation as the only serious option, according to the account of this period in journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's 1976 book "The Final Days." After the president broached the possibility of suicide, the authors noted, Gen. Haig ordered doctors to take away Nixon's tranquilizers and deny his requests for pills.

Then, on Aug. 1, 1974, Gen. Haig told Vice President Ford that he should prepare to assume the presidency. Critics said later that he brokered a deal that got Nixon a pardon in exchange for stepping down. Gen. Haig maintained that he never implicitly or explicitly made such an offer.

Gen. Haig stood on the White House lawn eight days later, on Aug. 9, when Nixon left town. The chief of staff had his arms folded, but he discreetly gave a thumbs-up to his disgraced boss.
Powerful mentors

Alexander Meigs Haig Jr. was born on Dec. 2, 1924, in the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd, Pa. He was 10 when his father, a lawyer, died of cancer and left the family $5,000 in life insurance money. Gen. Haig was the second of three children, but he assumed an important role in family matters as the oldest male.

From a young age, he aspired to a career in the military. He graduated in 1947 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and graduated 214th in a class of 310. Nevertheless, he advanced far more rapidly than his academic record might have suggested.

After college, he went to Japan to help with the post-World War II occupation. While playing football, he caught the eye of Patricia Fox, the attractive daughter of a general on Gen. Douglas MacArthur's staff. He married Fox and earned a spot on MacArthur's staff, though not working directly for his father-in-law.

Gen. Haig is survived by his wife and three children, Alexander, Brian and Barbara; and eight grandchildren.

Gen. Haig was working as MacArthur's staff duty officer on Jun. 25, 1950, when the North Koreans surged across the 38th parallel. He later claimed that during the Korean War, he carried MacArthur's sleeping bag ashore during the landing at Inchon. The young officer was in Korea for both the advance to the Yalu River and the withdrawal that followed when the Chinese crossed it.

As his military career progressed, Gen. Haig picked up a master's degree in international relations from Georgetown University in 1962, and he continued to attract a powerful series of mentors. Then-Army Secretary Cyrus Vance chose Gen. Haig as his military assistant. Joseph Califano, a special assistant to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, then tapped Gen. Haig as his deputy.

Staying on the fast track, Gen. Haig took over a brigade in Vietnam as tensions escalated from 1966 to 1967. Shrapnel from an exploding grenade left a scar on his eyebrow, and he received the Purple Heart. Enemy fire downed his helicopter during the battle of Ap Gu, and he survived a successful crash landing. He returned to West Point from 1967 to 1969, where he was a regimental commander before becoming deputy commandant.
Rapid rise under Nixon

Califano was among those who recommended then-Col. Haig to Kissinger, the incoming national security adviser after Nixon won the presidency in 1968. As military assistant, Gen. Haig prepared daily reports for the new president and acted as a liaison between the Defense and State departments. Long hours and his finely honed skill at bureaucratic infighting helped him make influential friends. In October 1969, after only nine months at the White House, he won a promotion to brigadier general.

From 1969 to 1971, Gen. Haig transmitted 17 requests from the White House to the FBI for wiretaps of reporters and government officials. Among those whose phones he had bugged were the military assistant to the defense secretary and a close personal adviser to the secretary of state.

In January 1972, Gen. Haig led the advance team to China for a top-secret four-day trip that laid the groundwork for Nixon's historic visit to the communist country the next month. Gen. Haig's star kept rising in Nixon's eyes, and his relationship with Kissinger became increasingly fraught with tension. Later that year, Gen. Haig went with Kissinger as the president's personal emissary to Paris for peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Gen. Haig persuaded South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu to agree to the January 1973 cease-fire.

Gen. Haig discreetly told the president and Haldeman about Kissinger's designs for peace when he thought military options hadn't been exhausted, even showing the pair transcripts of Kissinger's private telephone conversations, according to historian Robert Dallek.

"Kissinger's distrust of Haig was well deserved," Dallek wrote in "Nixon and Kissinger," his 2007 book. "As ambitious as anyone in the administration, Haig's hard work and effective manipulation of Nixon, Haldeman, and Kissinger himself had brought him rapid advancement."

Months later, Nixon promoted Gen. Haig to four-star general and made him the Army's vice chief of staff. Doing that required the president to bypass 240 generals with more seniority. The promotion sent Gen. Haig back to the Pentagon, but Haldeman's resignation meant the assignment wouldn't last long. To take the chief of staff job, Gen. Haig reluctantly retired from the military.

Gen. Haig stayed on as White House chief of staff for the first six weeks of Ford's presidency. At his request, the new president recalled him to active duty as commander in chief of U.S. forces in Europe. He became supreme allied commander in Europe in December 1974 and worked to strengthen the Atlantic alliance. After Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, he retained Gen. Haig.

In 1979, Gen. Haig retired from the Army and left NATO. The week before he hung up his uniform, a remote-controlled bomb detonated under a bridge in Belgium as his car drove over it. The blast threw Gen. Haig's Mercedes 600 sedan into the air, but he escaped the assassination attempt without injury. Members of the Red Army Faction, a radical leftist group, were convicted in connection with the attack.
Tumult over foreign policy

Gen. Haig was president of United Technologies, one of the county's biggest companies, before being named Ronald Reagan's secretary of state in 1981. He became the most prominent official from the Nixon administration to return to government, partly as a result of aggressive lobbying by Nixon. Polls showed that important blocs of voters remained nervous that the new president would be a saber-rattling militarist, and Gen. Haig supported seeking a stable balance of power through detente with the Soviet Union.

The ties to Nixon dogged Gen. Haig. Democratic critics forced him to answer tough questions during five strenuous days of confirmation hearings, and liberal columnists opined against his selection.

Gen. Haig got into a testy exchange with then-Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.), who pressed him for a "value judgment" about Nixon.

"Nobody has a monopoly on virtue, not even you, Senator," Gen. Haig retorted.

He acknowledged to the senators that "improper, illegal and immoral" actions had been taken during the Watergate coverup, but he refused to criticize Nixon.

"I cannot bring myself to render judgment on Richard Nixon or, for that matter, Henry Kissinger," he said. "It is not for me, it is not in me, to render moral judgment on them. I leave that to history, to others and to God."

The full Senate voted 93 to 6 to confirm him as the 59th secretary of state on the day after Reagan's inauguration.

Gen. Haig's 18-month tenure as secretary proved tumultuous, marked by continuing efforts to claim power over foreign policymaking that Reagan and his aides didn't want to give him. A characteristic first news conference created a maelstrom of bad publicity. Gen. Haig declared himself the "vicar" of foreign policy.

"With the dazzling speed that only words possess, it entered the vocabulary of the press and played its part in creating first the impression, and finally the uncomfortable reality, of a struggle for primacy between the president's close aides and myself," Gen. Haig said later.

That narrative frustrated Gen. Haig, but everything he did seemed to strengthen it. He tangled with Vice President George H.W. Bush over which of them should lead a committee on crisis management. Then, on March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. nearly assassinated Reagan. Gen. Haig quickly arrived in the White House Situation Room. Bush was flying back from Texas when Haig went to address reporters in the briefing room.

"As of now, I am in control here in the White House," Gen. Haig told the nervous country watching on television, "pending return of the vice president and in close touch with him."

The sound bite symbolized to many a disconcerting hunger for power.

Gen. Haig was the ultimate Cold Warrior, seeing virtually every regional conflict as enmeshed with the larger struggle against the Soviet Union. At the State Department, he elevated the importance of Central America -- pushing to support anti-communists in El Salvador to send a message that the Soviets shouldn't think about interfering in the Western Hemisphere.

Reagan himself grew tired of Gen. Haig, who objected to sending a letter the president personally wrote for Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev on the grounds that the State Department staff should draft it.

On June 24, 1982, Gen. Haig visited Reagan in the Oval Office and handed the president a list of complaints about the "cacophony of voices" speaking about the administration's foreign policy. Reagan called him back in the next day and astonished him with a note accepting his resignation.

"The president was accepting a letter of resignation that I had not submitted," Gen. Haig wrote in his 1984 book "Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy."

"Caveat" was a score-settling account aimed at his critics in the White House, which made headlines during Reagan's 1984 campaign for reelection. Gen. Haig, who had been so loyal to Nixon, decried the Reagan foreign policy apparatus as "a ghost ship."

"You heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck," he wrote. "But which of the crew had the helm?"
Bid for presidency

In 1988, as Reagan's second term came to an end, Gen. Haig decided to run for president. He struggled to raise money and build support, deciding to pull out of the Iowa caucuses so he could focus his efforts on the New Hampshire primary. Never having won elected office, observers quickly realized he wasn't cut out for retail campaigning. He scoffed when people didn't seem to know who he was. Those who did questioned his ties to Nixon.

With polls warning of impending humiliation in New Hampshire, Gen. Haig dropped out of the race on the Friday before the critical first primary. He spent much of his campaign attacking Bush, and he quit the race with a final flash of what some viewed as vindictiveness toward the vice president by endorsing Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.).

In interviews, Gen. Haig brushed off all those who criticized his manner and at times his methods.

"If you're a guy who just comes in and occupies a position and keeps his head down, of course, life can be rather pleasant," he once told The Washington Post in an interview. "They come and go in all their adulations. But if you have a firm set of ideas, and you want to make a difference, you've got to be controversial."

Democrat Endorsed Cambodia Invasion

President Richard M. Nixon, shown with then-House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford in 1973, spoke to Sen. John Stennis (D) five days before the incursion. (United Press International)

Nixon Papers Cite 1970 Conversation

Wednesday, June 24, 2009
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer

Five days before U.S. and South Vietnamese troops made their surprise move into Cambodia on April 29, 1970, then-President Richard M. Nixon got the approval of the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee for that action, according for documents released yesterday by the Nixon library.

The unexpected U.S. incursion into Cambodia came as a surprise to the American public, most members of Congress and the new Cambodian government. What followed were a series of public demonstrations in Washington and later Kent State University in Ohio, which, in turn, expanded opposition to the war.

In an April 24, 1970, telephone conversation with Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), who was then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Nixon said the administration was going to provide arms to the Cambodian government to prevent its overthrow by a pro-communist element, and continue secret B-52 bombing raids, "which only you and Senator Russell know about." Richard Russell (D-Ga.) was the former committee chairman.

"We are not going to get involved in a war in Cambodia," Nixon reassured Stennis. "We are going to do what is necessary to help save our men in South Vietnam. They can't have those sanctuaries there" that North Vietnam maintained.

Stennis replied, "I will be with you. . . . I commend you for what you are doing."

Several days earlier, in a memo to then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, CIA Director Richard Helms proposed a plan to covertly deliver thousands of AK-47s and other military equipment to the Cambodian government with help from Indonesia.

Yesterday, about 30,000 pages of documents were opened to the public at the National Archives facility in College Park and the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif., part of a staggered declassification of papers and tapes from the Nixon years.

The memos and tapes shed light on fateful moments of Nixon's second term, the Associated Press reported, among them a peace deal with North Vietnam, sea changes in domestic and foreign policy, and management of the Cold War.

They also give insights into a well-known characteristic of Nixon and his aides -- a hair-trigger sensitivity to political rivals and quick resort to machinations against them.

A 1972 meeting between Nixon and his chief of staff produced an informal directive to "destroy" Democratic vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton, according to scribbled notes among the documents released yesterday that referred to Eagleton as a "pip-squeak."

In a 1969 memo, Nixon's staff assistant describes placing the movements of the Kennedys under observation in Massachusetts after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy drove off a bridge in an accident that drowned his female companion.

The materials show Nixon as sharp-witted, crude, manipulative and sometimes surprisingly liberal in comparison with mainstream Republicans today. In one letter, he solidly endorses the Equal Rights Amendment, saying that for 20 years "I have not altered my belief that equal rights for women warrant a constitutional guarantee." The amendment failed.

The library posted online more than 150 hours of tape recordings. The tapes cover January and February 1973, spanning Nixon's second inauguration, the peace deal with Hanoi, and the trial and conviction of burglars whose break-in at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex precipitated the coverup that wrecked Nixon's presidency. He resigned in August 1974 under threat of being forced out by Congress.