Some surprising attitudes to legacy of Khmer Rouge cruelty

The Irish Times - Friday, August 24, 2012
PADDY WOODWORTH

LETTER FROM CAMBODIA: I WAS sitting quietly on a bench, well off the main path out of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Tuol Sleng is a 1960s high school, converted into the notorious S21 torture centre by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s.

You need a bit of quiet after visiting Tuol Sleng, or at least I did.

The silent rooms in its three-storey blockhouses are heartbreakingly eloquent about the miseries endured by thousands of alleged “traitors” under Pol Pot’s notorious regime.

Almost everyone who survived the interrogations here was then transported to Choueng Ek, an orchard transformed into a killing field.

I had dreaded coming to this place, yet it felt wrong to enjoy the splendid Khmer temples around Angkor Wat and the abundant wildlife of Tonle Sap’s flooded forests without making some small pilgrimage to acknowledge Cambodia’s nightmarish recent past.

Mapping the U.S. bombing of Cambodia

Wednesday, March 21, 2012
By Joshua Keating
Foreign Policy

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to see a presentation by Taylor Owen of the University of British Columbia's Liu Institute for Global Issues as part of a conference on data and conflict. Owen has recently been looking into a remarkable database detailing the previously classified U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Bill Clinton declassified the data, which includes geospatial coordinates for thousands of bombing runs, in 2000, as a humanitarian gesture during his first trip to Vietnam -- the information would make it easier to find and dismantle unexploded ordinance.

The data allows for a remarkable visiual depiction of the secret bombing campaign known as Operation Menu:

This graph shows the intensity of the bombing campaign over time: 

Owen sums up the significance of the data. :

In particular, I show that: the total tonnage dropped on Cambodia was five times greater than previously known; the bombing inside Cambodia began nearly 4 years prior to the supposed start of the Menu Campaign, under the Johnson Administration; that, in contradiction to Henry Kissinger’s claims, and over the warning of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Base Areas 704, 354 and 707 were all heavily bombed; the bombing intensity increased throughout the summer of 1973, after Congress barred any such increase; and, that despite claims by both Kissinger and Nixon to the contrary, there was substantial bombing within 1km of inhabited villages.

For more on the history of the database an the implications of these findings, check out this article by Taylor from the Canadian magazine Walrus.

Nixon's Darkest Secrets: an expose rife with personal resentment

Feb 17, 2012
Steve Donoghue
The National (Arab Emirate)

On August 22, 1973, an embattled President Richard Nixon held a rare press conference in San Clemente, California. The main subject was the exploding Watergate scandal in which burglars in the pay of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (widely known as Creep) had broken into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, but other subjects came up too, including one a reporter raised towards the end of the session: "Mr President, in your Cambodian invasion speech of April 1970, you reported to the American people that the United States had been strictly observing the neutrality of Cambodia," the reporter began. "I am wondering [in the] light of what we now know - that there were 15 months of bombing of Cambodia previous to your statement - whether you owe an apology to the American people?"

Nixon promptly shot back: "Certainly not, and not to the Cambodian people, because as far as this area is concerned, the area of approximately 10 miles which was bombed during this period, no Cambodians had been in it for years."

Don Fulsom was that reporter, and even while he was congratulating himself on putting a thorny question to a notoriously evasive president, one of Nixon's deputy press secretaries came over and shook Fulsom's hand, smiling with pride at the job his boss had done with fielding this question. It was a smug little gesture, and it stuck with Fulsom, prompting him to put a rejoinder in his latest book, Nixon's Darkest Secrets, even though his opponent is long dead ("How did so many Cambodians die from bombings in areas 'totally occupied' by North Vietnamese troops, Mr President?") As Fulsom himself tells us, "I covered the White House during the Johnson and Nixon presidencies, and although I went on to continue covering the White House during the Ford, Reagan and Clinton administrations, I never quite got over Richard Nixon."

Genocide suspect faults US

29 November 2011
Seth Mydans (Flashback)

A Khmer Rouge leader told last week that a secret campaign of US bombing during the Vietnam War had contributed to the rise of the radical Communist movement that ravaged Cambodia three decades ago in one of the bloodiest episodes of mass killing in the last century.

The leader, Khieu Samphan, 80, the regime’s head of state, also challenged the court to put former King Norodom Sihanouk on trial with him because the former king had previously held what Khieu Samphan called the same powerless titular position with the Khmer Rouge.

Khieu Samphan is one of three Khmer Rouge leaders charged in a UN-backed tribunal with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity that resulted in the deaths of 1.7 million people when they held power between 1975 and 1979.

“You seem to forget that between January 1970 and August 1973 – that is, the period of two and a half years – the United States carpeted the small Kampuchean territory with bombs” in a campaign aimed at cutting off North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam. Kampuchea is the name used by the Khmer Rouge for Cambodia.

"A class action civil lawsuit against the US government" - Op-Ed by Khmer Guardian

030 - KG - Khmer People vs the US Government
http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/61336959?access_key=key-ak0hfafvh68keiaqour

Theary Seng's Response to Khmer Guradian

My brief response to Khmer Guardian’s posting of 2 June 2011:

The history of the world is the world's court of justice.

- Friedrich Schiller

I appreciate this quote posted by KI-Media for its summary of what we, the larger public, are trying to do in using the Khmer Rouge Tribunal as a vehicle to produce a fuller and more accurate historical record.  It also serves as a reminder that the legal process is necessary but not sufficient (as Khmer Guardian rightly pointed out) and moreover, it’s deficient. 

(As I have stated elsewhere, any legal process is limited, even more so when involving mass crimes.  May I refer Khmer Guardian to my presentations for TEDxPhnomPenh and MLK, Jr. Anniversary celebration earlier this year?)

http://www.thearyseng.com/columnist/32-theary-sengs-blog/268-reconciling-peace-with-justice-legacy-of-mlk-jr-in-cambodia-michigan-13-jan-2011

http://www.thearyseng.com/columnist/104-campaign-for-eccc-inventory-provincial-learning-centers/242-campaign-for-eccc-inventory-24-provincial-learning-centers-memorials

Related, we need to also keep in mind that there are more than one form of punishment or judgment which is the legal process and prison terms.  Legal justice is very narrow and limiting, especially as it relates to power politics (and all international and internationalized courts are political products).  Unless Cambodia becomes a country of political and economic significance with bargaining power vis-à-vis the United States or any other powerful country soon, then we can only dream in frustration our ability to demand high quality justice; realpolitik will continue to dictate the terms.

Regarding the wealth of the ten individuals in Cases 001, 002, 003 and 004, let me give you an example of DK military commander’s Meas Muth’s financial health: Meas Muth who is believed to a 2-star general in RCAF and “advisor” to the Ministry of Defense since his defection in 1999 owns a house, at least 6 hectares of farmland, a villa in Tuol Kork, and an SUV.  He contributed most of $100,000 toward the building of Ta Saing Chas pagoda near his house.

Vandy Rattana's Bomb Ponds Exposes Cambodia's Secret Scars

04/15/11
Lauren Quinn
The Huffington Post

A note is scribbled over the pile of highlighted topographical maps: "A silence made from a mighty sound is still a sound."

Rattana Vandy knows silence well. He grew up during the era of Cambodia's silence, the deafening echo of that followed the Khmer Rouge regime.

Vandy's exhibition Bomb Ponds examines the remains of America's secret 2,756,941-ton bombing campaign in Cambodia during the Vietnam War: craters left in the countryside that, during the rainy season, fill with still-toxic water. In nine landscape photographs and a one-channel documentary, Vandy documents this unspoken history and challenges the culture of silence--both America's too-quiet recognition of the bombing and Cambodia's reluctance to educate its youth about their history.

Like most of the so-called "new generation," Vandy (b. 1980) grew up with little knowledge of his country's recent war history. Formal curricula about the Khmer Rouge was absent from Cambodian schools for some 30 years, leaving Vandy to piece together what he overheard from his parents and the facts read in the English- and French-language histories he personally sought out.

In 2008, a photographic assignment covering the country's rubber plantations took Vandy to an eastern province, abutting the border of Vietnam. As he photographed the landscape, he noticed a crater in the earth.

It struck him as strange: perfectly circular, meters wide, brimming with murky rainwater.

"What is that?" he asked a nearby villager.

Peace with Honor? Lessons from Ending the Vietnam War

President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (Bettmann/CORBIS)

November 3, 2010
By Franz-Stefan Gady
Foreign Policy Journal

Despite many critical voices of the overuse of the Vietnam War metaphor when talking about the war in Afghanistan, there are many striking similarities between the last years of the Vietnam War and the Obama administration’s attempt to extract most US combat forces from Afghanistan within the next twelve months.

Recent news from Afghanistan that the Taliban and the Afghan government have started negotiations should be treated with caution. Initial talks may only be the beginning of a long drawn-out negotiation process towards peace, as an examination of the Nixon administration’s effort to win the Vietnam War on the negotiation table and its determination to have, in Nixon’s words, “Peace with Honor” illustrates. The United States will not play as important a role in direct Afghan to Afghan talks that may involve other regional stakeholders (Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan etc.), but ultimately the United States and NATO will cast the decisive vote on Afghanistan’s future by deciding when to withdraw its combat forces and what amounts of foreign aid the Karzai regime will receive in the years to come.

Given the upcoming NATO Summit in Lisbon in November and the already looming withdrawal of most NATO combat forces from the region within the next eighteen months, looking at Nixon’s and Kissinger’s attempt to end the war in Vietnam may be worthwhile.

As a historical precedent to President Obama in 2009, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon came into the White House in 1969 to end the War that had become a “bone to the nation’s throat”, to quote a former White House speech writer. Talks with the North Vietnamese, begun under the Johnson administration in Paris, were stalled. The main objectives of the United States on the negotiation table were the territorial integrity and independence of South Vietnam, a withdrawal of all US combat troops from South East Asia, and a cessation to communist insurgent activity in the South.

Similar to the dilemma of supporting a controversial head of state in Afghanistan today, the Nixon administration reluctantly propped up a largely unpopular leader, Nguyen Van Thie, who was reelected in 1969 after winning a fraudulent election, and whose regime was infamous for its corruption. North Vietnam’s strategy, in a nutshell, was to outlast the Americans, oust the Thieu regime, and take possession of the country once the United States withdrew.

Comparable to President Obama’s surge strategy, Nixon decided to increase military pressure on Vietnam. Henry Kissinger insisted that, “A fourth rate power like North Vietnam must have a breaking point.” Upon taking office in 1969, Nixon secretly conveyed to the North Vietnamese that he was seeking peace and willing to negotiate, but that the United States was willing to escalate the conflict should its demands not be met. Nixon’s first attempt to gain concessions from the Vietnamese on the negotiating table failed. Over a period of fifteen months, the United States Air Force dropped more than 100,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. The major stumbling blocks, the integrity of South Vietnam and the preservation of the Thieu regime, obstructed negotiations for the next three years.

The ratchet up strategy of current proponents of escalating US engagement in Afghanistan may be unwise. North Vietnam in 1969 shifted from an offensive to a defensive strategy, limiting offensive operations in the South and even withdrawing troops across the demilitarized zone, not due to military setbacks, but to wait Nixon out until public opinion at home would force a US withdrawal of combat troops — something, as sources in Kabul claim, is precisely the Taliban’s strategy.

Frustrated by North Vietnam’s unwillingness to make any substantial concessions at the secret negotiations in Paris, Nixon ordered the formation of a secret National Security Council Study Group to come up with “savage punishing blows” for the North Vietnamese. Yet the conclusion of the Study Group, chaired by Henry Kissinger, showed that increased military pressure would not yield additional concessions from Hanoi.

The insurgents in Afghanistan, despite being battle weary, will certainly also not be willing to make any major concessions with US troop withdrawal a few months away, despite an increase in drone strikes and special forces operations activities throughout the country. Indeed, we know from the recently instated High Peace Council led by former President Burhanuddin Rabbani that the withdrawal of NATO combat forces is the major Taliban/insurgent condition for any Afghan led peace process.

The North Vietnamese, cleverly manipulating US negotiators, essentially bought time by making vague proposals that amounted to little substance, and complaining about procedural matters such as the size and set up of tables at the negotiations in Paris. Their real goal until 1972 was to buy time for North Vietnam to resupply and strengthen their forces for the final military blow against the Thieu regime. The insurgents in Afghanistan, although in no way comparable in size, equipment, and capabilities to the Vietcong and the regular North Vietnamese Army, will probably employ similar delaying tactics until the withdrawal of US led coalition forces. Any initial “willingness” by Taliban and other insurgent leaders to talk has to be seen in this critical light.

The famous Vietnamization policy was a direct consequence of the United States’ failed attempt to break the deadlock at the negotiating table with military force and domestic pressure to start withdrawing US combat troops. Without consulting his South Vietnamese ally, Nixon unilaterally announced this policy, frustrated by the lack of military progress and mounting US casualties. Within months, the South Vietnamese Military became one of the largest and best equipped armies in the World (by 1974 South Vietnam’s Air Force was the fourth largest in the world). At the same time the United States stepped up its Phoenix program, headed by the CIA, and — just as its modern successor, the Drone strike campaign, targets insurgent leaders — aimed at decapitating the leadership of the Vietcong and destroying Vietcong strongholds in the South. The United States claimed substantive gains and the elimination of over 20,000 Vietcong cadres in South Vietnam. However, the Vietcong’s command structure and ability to conduct operations remained intact. So far, despite successful hits, the same is largely true for Taliban personnel in Pakistan who have been targets of drone strikes.

Indeed, there are also striking similarities between Obama’s decision to step up the drone strikes into Pakistan and Nixon’s controversial decision to invade and bomb Cambodia to buy time for Vietnamization, and destroy North Vietnamese safe havens. At the end, despite having claimed to have killed 2,000 insurgents and substantially disrupted North Vietnamese supply bases and “treasure troves” of intelligence (according to Henry Kissinger), it did not alter the outcome of the conflict, but led to the massive destabilization of Cambodia. Events in Pakistan today illustrate the danger of undermining a government’s authority in their own territory. The strategic military impact of recent drone strikes remains to be seen, but so far have not influenced the Taliban’s offensive capabilities substantially.

In October of 1970, Nixon launched a “major new initiative for peace” which was promptly rejected by Hanoi. More US troops were withdrawn and the process of Vietnamization accelerated. Nixon also expanded the war into Laos in 1971 to disrupt enemy supply lines and to force a military decision. Talks failed over the same fundamental issue: the future of the South Vietnamese government under Thieu.

Later in 1971, Kissinger made yet another secret proposal to the North Vietnamese: Complete US withdrawal in exchange for US POWs held in Hanoi. Again North Vietnam rejected the offer, reluctant to concede one of the few bargaining chips for negotiating with the United States. North Vietnam again insisted on the removal of the Thieu regime, which the US dismissed. North Vietnam proposed open elections in September 1971, on the condition that the United States withdraw support for Thieu. Kissinger and Nixon refused.

In March 1972, North Vietnam launched a large-scale invasion of South Vietnam with conventional forces, having carefully prepared its offensive capabilities the previous two years and having stalled negotiations in Paris. Despite some initial progress, North Vietnam was repelled by massive US air raids in the demilitarized zone, Hanoi, and Haiphong. Kissinger for the first time made secret concessions to North Vietnam that would allow for North Vietnamese Forces in South Vietnam after a cease fire, undermining the sovereignty of South Vietnam, but still insisting on the future existence of the Thieu regime. North Vietnam rejected the deal, and Nixon even further escalated the air war over North Vietnam, and mined Haiphong harbor. In June 1972 alone the US dropped 112,000 tons of bombs.

North Vietnam estimated that it would need three years to recover from the losses incurred during the Easter Offensive (which proved correct) and agreed to shift their war strategy to a “strategy of peace” to buy time and to guarantee the withdrawal of US troops from South Vietnam. A Tripartite electoral commission comprising the Thieu regime, the Vietcong Provisionary Revolutionary Government, and neutralists such as the Buddhists was tasked with formulating a political solution to the conflict after the US withdrawal. Nixon ordered additional bombing raids over North Vietnam over Christmas 1972 to force the Vietnamese to agree to a settlement and to save face vis-à-vis Thieu and the American people. Despite massive air raids, it did not, however, set back North Vietnam’s capacity to conduct war in the South. When the United States and North Vietnam finally came to an agreement in Paris in January and February 1973, Thieu, who had the least interest in an agreement and withdrawal of US troops, did not sign the treaty. The Paris agreement was a compromise agreement securing the return of the majority of US POWs, guaranteeing US troop withdrawal from South Vietnam, and leaving the Thieu regime in power. North Vietnam still had forces in the South, and the large question of the political future of Vietnam was unresolved.

A comparative review of the Nixon administration’s year long struggle to extract the United States from Vietnam holds some valuable lessons for the Obama Administration. First and foremost, it shows that there can be no solution to the conflict if the underlying fundamentals causing the insurgency are not addressed. North Vietnam could not accept the Thieu regime. The Taliban will not accept the Karzai regime, which in their view is illegitimate, corrupt, and foreign imposed. Especially given the looming withdrawal of the majority of NATO led forces and the debility of the Afghan National Army and police force, major political concessions cannot be expected in the near future. The only answer will be unconditional Afghan-led talks between the warring factions with peripheral US participation should any agreement ever be reached.

Second, Afghans have to make peace with Afghans. A chief dissonance in the Vietnam War was that North Vietnam considered the United States to be its prime interlocutor in negotiations, sidestepping South Vietnam’s representatives on many occasions. It is critical that the United States play a role in any peace talks (along with regional players), but in a muted and discreet manner. Afghans have to be able to decide for themselves about their country’s future, a something that was never allowed for the South Vietnamese. However, make no mistake: Despite not playing as prominent of a role as in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States will be the determining factor in any talks.

Third, military escalation of the conflict will not fundamentally influence the negotiation process; it will only prolong the fighting. Temporary military setbacks by either side may delay talks, but the essential issues will remain unchanged: How can the United States extract itself without jeopardizing its core security interests and how can Afghanistan be stabilized?

Fourth, Thieu proved a very difficult partner in negotiations because Nixon and Kissinger never consulted with him on major changes in US foreign policy such as Vietnamization. President Karzai was also presented a fait accompli with the July 2011 withdrawal deadline, and voiced his deep concern that it would empower the Taliban in the long term. A perception of the White House as becoming increasingly insular is gaining a foothold in Kabul and among NATO allies. Whether true or untrue, when it comes to making peace, allies and partners need to be informed of every aspect of US strategy since any reconciliation of warring factions has to be based on consensus. At the end of the day, the United States will be the deciding factor of Afghanistan’s political future.

Fifth, the United States, in any negotiation, should stick to its core national security interests in Afghanistan. The United States made the critical mistake of equating the preservation of the Thieu regime with rolling back communism in Southeast Asia because it lacked a clear perception of its central purpose in the region. Supporting Karzai may or may not guarantee the dismantling of all Al Qaeda elements in Afghanistan (and will most certainly not influence the shifting Al Qaeda activity in Pakistan), but the United States must insist that a future government, which may include insurgent-Taliban representation, disassociate itself completely from Al Qaeda and terrorism. Destroying Al Qaeda is the core national security interest of the United States in Afghanistan and Southwest Asia. Reconciliation, on the other hand, as already pointed out, should be entirely left to the Afghans.

Last, and most important: Afghans, on all sides, know that Western forces will eventually leave. This alone undermines any military credibility sought for the purpose of having a strong negotiating position with the Taliban. Any discussions implying that the current troop surge can influence the Taliban and force them to the negotiation table is wishful thinking. Nixon’s bombing campaigns, as illustrated above, did little to influence North Vietnamese decision making. Vietnamization too had it limits as the United States painfully learned with the fall of Saigon and the defeat of the South Vietnamese Army in 1975. The current capabilities of the Afghan National Army leave little doubt how the tide will turn once US forces have left Afghanistan. Betting on military successes in the next twelve months to obtain concessions on the negotiation table will only lead to increased casualties on both sides without tackling the underlying problems of Afghanistan.

Franz-Stefan Gady is an associate at the EastWest Institute and just recently returned from Afghanistan. The views views expressed in this article reflect those of Franz-Stefan Gady and not those of the EastWest Institute.

Read about the US secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia ... courtesy of Uncle Sam

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume VII, Vietnam, July 1970–January 1972

Click here to download the document (PDF)

Editors: David Goldman, Erin Mahan
General Editor: Edward C. Keefer
United States Government Printing Office
Washington

Office of the Historian
Bureau of Public Affairs
Press Release

Overview
During the period covered by this volume, July 1970–January 1972, the Nixon administration expanded the Vietnam war into Cambodia and Laos as part of its strategy. This volume covers South Vietnam in the context of this larger war in Southeast Asia; therefore, the volume begins in July 1970 in the aftermath of the Cambodian incursion. At the time, a variety of topics dominated the policy discussions of President Nixon and his principal advisers. Among these topics were U.S. troop withdrawals, Vietnamization, negotiations in Paris (both the public plenary sessions and the secret talks between Kissinger and North Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho), and possible South Vietnamese operations in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. Throughout the rest of 1970 these themes moved forward on separate paths that occasionally intersected with one another. South Vietnamese operations, first in Cambodia and then in Laos, were seen in policy terms as providing South Vietnam additional time to develop a more effective military, to generate economic growth, and to achieve some degree of political stability. The operations were also to demonstrate the success of Vietnamization and justify the continuing withdrawal of U.S. troops.

In late 1970 and early 1971, the focus shifted to decision making regarding plans to implement a major South Vietnamese out-of-country operation called Lam Son 719, launched in early February 1971. The strategic purpose of the operation was to halt or slow the flow of military supplies to Communist forces in South Vietnam via the panhandle of Laos. At the same time, it would demonstrate the growing military prowess of the South Vietnamese Army. On the negotiating front, Kissinger continued in 1970 and throughout1971 to meet periodically in Paris with Le Duc Tho and other senior Vietnamese Communist functionaries, but made no progress. At the same time, representatives of both sides also met publicly in the plenary meetings. Each side used the public Paris meetings to exchange carefully calibrated propaganda, making the meetings, if possible, less productive than the secret talks. The volume focuses on the Kissinger–Le Duc Tho talks with only occasional documentary coverage of the public talks.

This volume also documents President Nixon’s penchant for secret operations and covert warfare: his continued support for secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos and his approval of the November 1971 Son Tay raid into North Vietnam to rescue American prisoners of war. Nixon also signed off on new and continuing information gathering initiatives and propaganda that supported intelligence operations against Communist forces, organizations, and governments in South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Additionally, he approved clandestine support for South Vietnamese political entities friendly to the United States. These operations are documented in some detail to demonstrate the role of covert actions in support of overt political and military operations.

In the waning months of the period covered by this volume, deadlock had set in. Neither side appeared able to win militarily, or even to weaken his adversary sufficiently to make him negotiate in good faith. There were signs, however, that Hanoi might be preparing to mount a major military effort in 1972. Its purpose would be to break through this impasse without having to travel a diplomatic path. The volume concludes at this point.

A small measure of justice in Cambodia

B-52 bombing

The punishment given the ex-chief of the Khmer Rouge's most notorious prison appears to be too lenient. And culpability for the reign of terror extends far beyond him.

August 1, 2010
By James Pringle
Los Angeles Times (California, USA)

To many survivors of the Khmer Rouge era, last week's sentence seemed far too light for a man who was "addicted to the sight of blood," as one of them described Duch in trial testimony. After taking into account the time he's already served and other considerations, he is likely to serve 19 more years, which leaves the distinct possibility that the 67-year-old will live to see freedom again.

Is that too lenient a sentence? Probably. But it's hard not to also think about how the culpability for Cambodia's horror extends far beyond one prison commander.

The first time I saw Cambodia was during the American "incursion" in the spring of 1970. Flying over the country in a rickety Vietnamese helicopter, I beheld a landscape pocked with craters, the result of the secret bombing that had been ordered by President Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, in 1969.

Some commentators have wondered since just how much the American bombings, which killed tens of thousands of Cambodians before being stopped by Congress in 1973, had to do with the ferocity of the Khmer Rouge, under whose rule an estimated 1.7 million people were put to death or died of hunger or overwork.

In 1979, I went to Phnom Penh as part of a press tour for half a dozen Western journalists who had been brought to see the "new" Cambodia. But everywhere we looked were signs of the despot Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

In the countryside, skinny oxen pulled wooden carts along mine-laden and bomb-blasted roads. In the city, mountains of wrecked automobiles stood alongside hillocks of rusting refrigerators, unacceptable bourgeois toys in Pol Pot's "glorious" Democratic Kampuchea.

At one point, having evaded our minders, we came across a handful of ordinary Cambodians who had crept past government barriers into Phnom Penh. They were kneeling in tattered clothes on the ground picking up individual grains of rice. The pathetic cavalcade of skeletons smiled shyly at a couple of foreigners before hauling themselves to their feet and tottering off, as if they felt their suffering was an eyesore to us.

Among the places we visited on that trip was Tuol Sleng, also known as the S-21 prison, where Duch had ordered the killing of thousands of Cambodians. Blood was still congealed on the prison floor when we visited, and it felt as if the last desperate scream still hung in the air. The whole awful place stank of death, fear and neglect.

Today, of course, Phnom Penh is a very different place, a busy city full of bars and restaurants. For decades, Cambodians have wanted to forget the past and move on with life, and it remains to be seen whether the government will muster the will to aggressively prosecute other war criminals. Only recently have young people even been taught much about the Khmer Rouge regime.

But as I watched Duch's sentencing last week, I found the past hard to forget. I remembered speaking to a mother and her 11-year-old son in 1979, soon after Pol Pot's ouster. The boy had lost both his legs in a mine blast while watching their cow. And he wasn't alone.

"The children of Cambodia have no legs," his mother, half-demented with grief, told me.

James Pringle covered the war in Vietnam and Cambodia as a correspondent for Reuters and Newsweek.

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.

Year Zero

Brother No. 1 Pot Pot: The father of Year Zero

April 17, 2010
By Peter Wilson American Thinker

The Khmer Rouge declared revolutionary Year Zero thirty-five years ago today, on April 17, 1975, the day Communist guerrillas in black pajamas and truck-tire sandals marched victoriously through the streets of Phnom Penh. An indication of the regime's brutality came within 24 hours, when the Khmer Rouge ordered the two million residents of Phnom Penh, including hospital patients, to evacuate the city.

Their reign of three years, eight months left Cambodia devastated, with the better part of an entire generation -- approximately 1.7 million Cambodians out of a population of 7.9 million -- annihilated by bullet, axe, shovel blow to the back of the head, plastic bag suffocation, unspeakable torture, or by starvation caused by ruinous economic policies.

The Pol Pot clique set out to create history's most pure form of Communism in a single bound, striving to surpass even Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward. Their success was Cambodia's failure. Despite the legacy of another horror-filled Marxist experiment, the lessons of the Khmer Rouge remain shrouded in equivocation and myth.

Myth #1: Despite the example of the Khmer Rouge, Marxism remains a valid political philosophy.

Marxist sympathizers like columnist James Carroll still argue in polite society "Marxism has yet to be really tried." It's just that by strange happenstance Communist governments have always been subverted by corrupt brutal men.

Corruption and brutality however are not incidental to Communism; they are part of its essence.

In order to redistribute wealth, the State must assign power to fallible humans. Our democracy has checks and balances that constrain (we hope) those who hold power. The Khmer Rouge leaders wielded absolute power, which corrupted absolutely, with predictable tragic consequences.

Every time it has been tried, Marxism leads to the charnel house, turning subject countries into giant concentration camps, each a "vast Belsen," as Robert Conquest described Stalin's Soviet Union. Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Che Guevara, Abimael Guzman, Mengistu, Kim Jung Il are among history's most accomplished butchers. To argue that the Communist ideology that motivated them is incidental to their crimes devalues the deaths of the 100 million murdered by Communism in the 20th century.

Myth #2: The Khmer Rouge were not really Communists.

Like the Viet Cong, they were "rice paddy nationalists." Or freedom fighters battling French and American imperialism, gone wrong. Or Asian Nazis. Or some perverted Buddhist agrarian sect.

Evidence to the contrary is not difficult to find. As students in Paris, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary (Brother Number One and Number Two) joined the Cercle Marxiste where they imbibed Marx and Rousseau. To point out the obvious, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary named their army the "Red Khmer," red being the color of Communism. They were funded by Beijing, Moscow and Hanoi. Theirs was closer to a Maoist interpretation of Marxism than to Stalin's urban Communism with its Five Year Plans fetishizing steel mills and cement factories. Khmer Rouge terror techniques were drawn from Stalin and Mao: the brutality, the destruction of the family, the abolition of religion, the terror famines, the internal purging that George Orwell described so accurately three decades earlier in the terrifying scenes of Napoleon forcing confessions in Animal Farm.
Myth #3: Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia was responsible for the Khmer Rouge victory.

Blaming America for the Khmer Rouge began early on in William Shawcross's Sideshow, Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979). Roland Joffe's 1984 movie The Killing Fields disseminated the narrative of American guilt to an entire generation, one that is repeated in many American history textbooks.

According to data released by the Clinton Administration and reported by Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, from 1969 to 1973 American B-52s dropped "2,756,941 tons' worth [of explosives] in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites," more than was dropped by all parties in World War II. Innocent Cambodian villagers were surely killed, although estimates vary wildly, from 5,000 to 600,000.

Nevertheless, despite the rage of the anti-War movement, the tin soldiers and Nixon's coming, four dead in Ohio, the bombing was not entirely unjustified.

The bombing proceeded in two distinct phases, with different objectives. President Nixon's Operation Menu began in March 1969, striking at North Vietnamese sanctuaries where the NVA delivered food and arms to supply depots less than 100 miles from Saigon, protected by Cambodia's neutrality under the Geneva Convention. Although Prince Sihanouk agreed to the passage of NVA supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and through the Port of Sihanoukville, evidence shows that he grew fed up with North Vietnamese intrusions into his country, and gave Nixon a green light to bomb NVA military targets.

In the second phase, as the Vietnam War was winding down, American bombing continued at the request of the Lon Nol government to slow the advance of the Khmer Rouge.

History may judge Nixon and Kissinger harshly for the humanitarian costs of the bombing. It appears that the bombing assisted Khmer Rouge recruitment efforts, but overall it delayed the Khmer Rouge takeover. Keep in mind the simple facts that Communist countries backed the Khmer Rouge with arms, materiel, money and ideology, while the U.S. supported the pro-western Lon Nol government in an attempt to defeat the Khmer Rouge and stop the spread of Communism. As Peter Rodman writes in a 1981 American Spectator article on Sideshow: "By no stretch of moral logic can the crimes of mass murder be ascribed to those who struggled to prevent their coming into power."

Myth #4: "American ruthlessness turned Communists into totalitarian fanatics." [Historian Philip Windsor, quoted by Noam Chomsky and Bernard Herman in Manufacturing Consent (1988).]

In addition to bearing responsibility for bringing Pol Pot to power, the American bombing is also guilty of pushing the Khmer Rouge over the edge into insanity. Nixon and Kissinger are therefore guilty of war crimes, with the blood of 1.7 million Cambodians on their hands.

This myth is an international relations version of the "society made me do it" defense for the brutal criminal, akin to blaming mass murder on police brutality. It transforms the Khmer Rouge from aggressors to helpless victims reacting to aggression.

The theory that violence generates violent retaliation may make sense on a psychological level, but it is implausible that the Khmer Rouge "auto-genocide" -- the systematic campaign of destruction of their own people -- was motivated by desire for revenge against Americans. During the Khmer Rouge reign from 1975-79, Cambodia was isolated from the outside world; the last American bomb fell in August 1973.

Historical examples also contradict this theory: the ruthless Nazi blitzkrieg did not transform Londoners into totalitarian fanatics.

This myth did however alleviate the anti-war Left of any responsibility it might have felt for pressuring Congress to withdraw the financial support for South Vietnam promised in the Paris Peace Talks, which certainly played a role in southeast Asian dominoes falling in 1975: Cambodia on April 17th, South Vietnam on April 30th, and Laos on November 28th.

*

Today the Khmer Rouge has few enthusiastic defenders. In Jean-Francois Revel's wry phrase, "One of the most richly enrolled clubs on the planet is the Enemies of Past Genocides." It is not enough to condemn the Khmer Rouge. We must condemn the Marxist ideology that motivated them.

Peter Wilson has a large extended family of Khmer Rouge survivors and has worked on children's television in Cambodia. His blog is walkingdogcapitalist.

US Bombings Influenced Prison Design: Duch

By Kong Sothanarith, VOA Khmer
Original report from Phnom Penh
21 April 2009

Jailed Khmer Rouge prison chief Duch told tribunal judges Tuesday that detention facilities were set up ahead of the communist takeover of Cambodia in part to avoid American bombardment.

Pits were dug in rural prisons, such as the M-13 facility run by Duch in the forest of Kampong Speu province, to keep prisoners safe from bombing and to prevent their escape, not as an intentional form of torture, he said.

“I had two intentions. The first was to prevent prisoners from escaping, because we didn’t have cement walls,” he said.

The pits were 2 meters deep, and prisoners were shackled, ate little and were very weak, he said. “How can they escape?”

“Secondly, holes were dug to protect them from bombings, because there were many bombings from B-52s,” he said.

Duch, 66, whose real name is Kaing Kek Iev, has been on trial since March 30, facing charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and murder, for his role as the chief of security for two Phnom Penh prisons and an execution site outside the capital.

The M-13 prison, which Duch administered ahead of the Khmer Rogue takeover of Cambodia, in April 1975, is not under the mandate of the UN-backed court. However, the jungle prison is being used by judges to shed light on Duch’s future role at Tuol Sleng and Prey Sar prisons.

A lawyer for civil parties, Hong Kim Suon, argued before judges Tuesday that the M-13 prison was designed mostly to detain prisoners, not to protect them from bombardment.

Duch said he recognized that the conditions at M-13 were inhumane.

“It wasn’t a school,” he said. “It was a Khmer Rouge prison.”

Sacrava's Political Cartoon: Cambodia, the US Products' Dumping Site

Click on the cartoon to zoom in

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)
For additional info: http://samphy.blogspot.com

Bombs Over Cambodia

Map created by Taylor Owen with Antonio De Luca and Sigrun Wister of The Walrus magazine

New information reveals that Cambodia was bombed far more heavily than previously believed

By Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan
Mapping by Taylor Owen
Posted at The Walrus (Monday 12 Nov 2007)
Published in the October 2006 issue

In the fall of 2000, twenty-five years after the end of the war in Indochina, Bill Clinton became the first US president since Richard Nixon to visit Vietnam. While media coverage of the trip was dominated by talk of some two thousand US soldiers still classified as missing in action, a small act of great historical importance went almost unnoticed. As a humanitarian gesture, Clinton released extensive Air Force data on all American bombings of Indochina between 1964 and 1975. Recorded using a groundbreaking ibm-designed system, the database provided extensive information on sorties conducted over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Clinton’s gift was intended to assist in the search for unexploded ordnance left behind during the carpet bombing of the region. Littering the countryside, often submerged under farmland, this ordnance remains a significant humanitarian concern. It has maimed and killed farmers, and rendered valuable land all but unusable. Development and demining organizations have put the Air Force data to good use over the past six years, but have done so without noting its full implications, which turn out to be staggering.

The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed—not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson. The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide. The data demonstrates that the way a country chooses to exit a conflict can have disastrous consequences. It therefore speaks to contempor­ary warfare as well, including US operations in Iraq. Despite many differences, a critical similarity links the war in Iraq with the Cambodian conflict: an increasing reliance on air power to battle a heterogeneous, volatile insurgency.

We heard a terrifying noise which shook the ground; it was as if the earth trembled, rose up and opened beneath our feet. Enormous explosions lit up the sky like huge bolts of lightning; it was the American B-52s.
— Cambodian bombing survivor

On December 9, 1970, US President Richard Nixon telephoned his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to discuss the ongoing bombing of Cambodia. This sideshow to the war in Vietnam, begun in 1965 under the Johnson administration, had already seen 475,515 tons of ordnance dropped on Cambodia, which had been a neutral kingdom until nine months before the phone call, when pro-US General Lon Nol seized power. The first intense series of bombings, the Menu campaign on targets in Cambodia’s border areas — labelled Breakfast, Lunch, Supper, Dinner, Dessert, and Snack by American commanders — had concluded in May, shortly after the coup.

Nixon was facing growing congressional opposition to his Indochina policy. A joint US–South Vietnam ground invasion of Cambodia in May and June of 1970 had failed to root out Vietnamese Communists, and Nixon now wanted to covertly escalate the air attacks, which were aimed at destroying the mobile headquarters of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army (vc/nva) in the Cambodian jungle. After telling Kissinger that the US Air Force was being unimaginative, Nixon demanded more bombing, deeper into the country: “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?”

Kissinger knew that this order ignored Nixon’s promise to Congress that US planes would remain within thirty kilometres of the Vietnamese border, his own assurances to the public that bombing would not take place within a kilometre of any village, and military assessments stating that air strikes were like poking a beehive with a stick. He 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.”

Five minutes after his conversation with Nixon ended, Kissinger called General Alexander Haig to relay the new orders from the president: “He 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, barely audible on tape, sounds like laughter.

The US bombing of Cambodia remains a divisive and iconic topic. It was a mobilizing issue for the antiwar movement and is still cited regularly as an example of American war crimes. Writers such as Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens, and William Shawcross emerged as influential political voices after condemning the bombing and the foreign policy it symbolized.

In the years since the Vietnam War,something of a consensus has emerged on the extent of US involvement in Cambodia. The details are controversial, but the narrative begins on March 18, 1969, when the United States launched the Menu campaign. The joint US–South Vietnam ground offensive followed. For the next three years, the United States continued with air strikes under Nixon’s orders, hitting deep inside Cambodia’s borders, first to root out the vc/nva and later to protect the Lon Nol regime from growing numbers of Cambodian Communist forces. Congress cut funding for the war and imposed an end to the bombing on August 15, 1973, amid calls for Nixon’s impeachment for his deceit in escalating the campaign.

Thanks to the database, we now know that the US bombardment started three-and-a-half years earlier, in 1965, under the Johnson administration. What happened in 1969 was not the start of bombings in Cambodia but the escalation into carpet bombing. From 1965 to 1968, 2,565 sorties took place over Cambodia, with 214 tons of bombs dropped. These early strikes were likely tactical, designed to support the nearly two thousand secret ground incursions conducted by the cia and US Special Forces during that period. B-52s—long-range bombers capable of carrying very heavy loads — were not deployed, whether out of concern for Cambodian lives or the country’s neutrality, or because carpet bombing was believed to be of limited strategic value.

Nixon decided on a different course, and beginning in 1969 the Air Force deployed B-52s over Cambodia. The new rationale for the bombings was that they would keep enemy forces at bay long enough to allow the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. Former US General Theodore Mataxis depicted the move as “a holding action.... 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.” The result was that Cambodians essentially became cannon fodder to protect American lives.

The last phase of the bombing, from February to August 1973, was designed to stop the Khmer Rouge’s advance on the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. The United States, fearing that the first Southeast Asian domino was about to fall, began a massive escalation of the air war — an unprecedented B-52 bombardment that focused on the heavily populated area around Phnom Penh but left few regions of the country untouched. The extent of this bombardment has only now come to light.

The data released by Clinton shows the total payload dropped during these years to be nearly five times greater than the generally accepted figure. To put the revised total of 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during allof ?World War II, including the bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons, respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history.

A single B-52d “Big Belly” payload consists of up to 108 225-kilogram or 42 340-kilogram bombs, which are dropped on a target area of approximately 500 by 1,500 metres. In many cases, Cambodian villages were hit with dozens of payloads over the course of several hours. The result was near-total destruction. One US official stated at the time, “We had been told, as had everybody...that those carpet-bombing attacks by B-52s were totally devastating, that nothing could survive.” Previously, it was estimated that between 50,000 and 150,000 Cambodian civilians were killed by the bombing. Given the fivefold increase in tonnage revealed by the database, the number of casualties is surely higher.

The Cambodian bombing campaign had two unintended side effects that ultimately combined to produce the very domino effect that the Vietnam War was supposed to prevent. First, the bombing forced the Vietnamese Communists deeper and deeper into Cambodia, bringing them into greater contact with Khmer Rouge insurgents. Second, the bombs drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a group that seemed initially to have slim prospects of revolutionary success. Pol Pot himself described the Khmer Rouge during that period as “fewer than five thousand poorly armed guerrillas?.?.?.?scattered across the Cambodian landscape, uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty, and leaders.”

Years after the war ended, journalist Bruce Palling asked Chhit Do, a former Khmer Rouge officer, if his forces had used the bombing as anti-American propaganda. Chhit replied:

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. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them.... Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.

The Nixon administration knew that the Khmer Rouge was winning over peasants. The cia’s Directorate of Operations, after investigations south of Phnom Penh, reported in May 1973 that the Communists were “using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda.” But this does not seem to have registered as a primary strategic concern.

The Nixon administration kept theair war secret for so long that debate over its impact came far too late. It wasn’t until 1973 that Congress, angered by the destruction the campaign had caused and the systematic deception that had masked it, legislated a halt to the bombing of Cambodia. By then, the damage was already done. Having grown to more than two hundred thousand troops and militia forces by 1973, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh two years later. They wenton to subject Cambodia to a Maoist agrarian revolution and a genocide in which 1.7 million people perished.

The Nixon Doctrine relied on the notion that the United States could supply an allied regime with the resources needed to withstand internalor external challenges while the US withdrew its ground troops or, in some cases, simply remained at arm’s length. In Vietnam, this meant building up the ground-fighting capability of South Vietnamese forces while American units slowly disengaged. In Cambodia, Washington gave military aid to prop up Lon Nol’s regime from 1970 to 1975 while the US Air Force conducted its massive aerial bombardment.

US policy in Iraq may yet undergo a similar shift. Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker in December 2005 that a key element of any drawdown of American troops will be their replacement with air power. “We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting — Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of air power,” said Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Critics argue that a shift to air power will cause even greater numbers of civilian casualties, which in turn will benefit the insurgency in Iraq. Andrew Brookes, the former director of air-power studies at the Royal Air Force’s advanced staff college, told Hersh, “Don’t believe that air power is a solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground with air power didn’t work in Vietnam, did it?”

It’s true that air strikes are generally more accurate now than they were during the war in Indochina, so in theory,at least, unidentified targets should be hit less frequently and civilian casualties should be lower. Nonetheless, civilian deaths have been the norm during the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, as they were during the bombing of Lebanon by Israeli forces over the summer. As in Cambodia, insurgencies are the likely beneficiaries. To cite one example, on January 13 of this year an aerial strike by a US Predator drone on a village in a border area of Pakistan killed eighteen civilians, including five women and five children. The deaths undermined the positive sentiments created by the billions of dollars in aid that had flowed into that part of Pakistan after the massive earthquake months earlier. The question remains: is bombing worth the strategic risk?

If the Cambodian experience teaches us anything, it is that miscalculation of the consequences of civilian casualties stems partly from a failure to understand how insurgencies thrive. The motives that lead locals to help such movements don’t fit into strategic rationales like the ones set forth by Kissinger and Nixon. Those whose lives have been ruined don’t care about the geopolitics behind bomb attacks; they tend to blame the attackers. The failure of the American campaign in Cambodia lay not only in the civilian death toll during the unprecedented bombing, but also in its aftermath, when the Khmer Rouge regime rose up from the bomb craters, with tragic results. The dynamics in Iraq could be similar.•

- Published October 2006

Taylor Owen is a doctoral candidate and Trudeau Scholar at the University of Oxford. In 2004, he was a visiting fellow in the Yale Genocide Studies Program.

Ben Kiernan is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of How Pol Pot Came to Power and The Pol Pot Regime.