From Nixon to Pol Pot
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia.
by William Shawcross.
Simon & Schuster. 467 pp. $13.95.
With the collapse in 1975 of the American effort to preserve non-Communist regimes in Indochina, it became certain that subsequent developments there would come to be measured against previous American attitudes, presumptions, and predictions. Among opponents of the war, there had been two principal arguments. The first was “geopolitical.” It held that the war was ill-advised, and represented a misunderstanding both of the strategic issues and the local conditions. It challenged the idea that the Vietnamese Communists were an extension of Chinese imperialism. It contended that Communist confederation in Indochina would prove inherently unstable, unable in the long run to undermine the larger strategic position of the United States in that area of the world.
Those who advanced these propositions may claim vindication if they like. For the American defeat in Vietnam—whatever its adverse psychological and emotional consequences—has not yet had the larger strategic implications some had feared. China and Vietnam have been at war; Vietnam and Cambodia have been at war. The Sino-Soviet conflict has been superimposed on Indochina. The task the United States once took upon itself—“containing” Vietnamese expansion—has now been assumed by China.
The current situation in Indochina does indeed provide “stability” of a sort without direct American involvement, but there is still a cost and a problem. These are symbolized by the “geopolitical” necessity of favoring China/ Pol Pot-Cambodia over Soviet Union/Vietnam. It is a moral dilemma of Realpolitik. For the Pol Pot regime is more than an embarrassment; it is the most disgusting of this generation. And as the Pol Pot loyalists wage a struggle against an invading Vietnamese army, it is distasteful to offer even tacit support to the “resistance” merely because its own interests happen to coincide with a strategic interest of our own in preserving a “balance in the region.”
And yet, within the “realist” case, there was, and is, something more than this. For behind the notion that the effort to create stable non-Communist regimes was doomed lay a more sober, even ruthless, judgment: the American effort at “nation-building” had overestimated the potential for civilization in that part of the world. Communist expansionism would more likely dissolve in the resurgence of local barbarism than it would be smothered in “socialist”—or even capitalist—construction. So it seems for the moment. There is no “hegemony” in Indochina, but there is brutality, chaos, and suffering.
There was a second and different “anti-war” argument, this one based on the proposition that the government of Nguyen Van Thieu had no right to exist. Here, another paradigm was imposed on Indochina. The Communist forces were seen as rebels against a corrupt and repressive political and social order. Their cause was just, their victory—because of their popular following—inevitable. To resist such a legitimate cause was not merely futile but immoral.
Yet even if one chooses to interpret the Communist success in these terms, one comes up against the same cost and the same problem—Cambodia. The “forces of liberation” have treated their Western admirers with contempt. In Vietnam itself, they have institutionalized the practices of Communist totalitarianism. In the worst days of the Thieu repression there were not tens of thousands who risked their lives to flee, even though flight was much easier then. For all his disregard of Western norms, Thieu never even contemplated wholesale expulsion of “undesirables,” now the official policy of the “Socialist Republic” of Vietnam. And in Camboda it has been worse, much worse, in every respect. Indeed, the behavior of Cambodian and Vietnamese Communists makes any moral claim ever put forward for them absurd, a humiliation to all those who sustained such a claim over the long years of the Vietnam struggle. Their current appeals to Hanoi to mend its ways are pathetic.
And so for all those who opposed the Vietnam war—for whatever reason and with whatever intensity—Cambodia is a large problem. How did it happen and why? Could it have been anticipated and, if so, averted? And it is no less a problem for the war’s supporters, for if they can be shown to bear a major responsibility, does this not make them even more deserving of discredit, even more unfit for a continuing role in the political and cultural life of the country?
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Sideshow, by the British journalist William Shawcross, has made a conspicuous entry into this discussion. Widely noticed, and well-received, it tells two stories and propounds a theory. The first story is the conduct of United States policy in Cambodia. Here, Shawcross assembles a mass of material—personal interviews, U.S. government documents released to him under the Freedom of Information Act—to recount that policy in action. For Shawcross, Cambodia is “the foreign-policy side of Watergate,” and the two are indeed related. In order to keep secret the extent of U.S. military activity in Cambodia, especially the large-scale bombing of its territory that began in 1969, the Nixon administration came to corrupt the ordinary institutions and practices of the government. At first, this involved keeping the Cambodian operations “off the books”; then, to maintain the secrecy in the face of press leaks, wiretapping was begun. This in turn fed into, was a kind of genesis of, the various extra-institutional and illegal practices which became part of the larger Watergate crisis.
Much of Shawcross’s account of this first story turns on details of chronology and individual knowledge. Presumably, Henry Kissinger’s memoirs will give him an opportunity to respond to the accusations Shawcross and others have made against him. But however history renders its judgment on individual culpability in these episodes, we already know enough to say that the American effort in Cambodia strained our constitutional system at least to its limit.
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What of Shawcross’s second story? It has to do with his account of the rise of the Khmer Rouge, whose victory in Cambodia was to produce such stark misery. It is not the main focus of his book at all, but it does enter into it, and certainly hovers over it. Shawcross is no apologist for the Pol Pot regime. He has written of its brutalities in this volume and elsewhere, and he has been criticized for so doing. But as much as he condemns the Khmer Rouge, the real moral intensity of his writing is directed against Americans; if Nixon and Kissinger had not done what they did, Pol Pot and his associates would not have been able to do what they did. For, in Shawcross’s view, the carrying of the war into Cambodia—even if, presumably, the Nixon administration had done it in scrupulous observance of American law and tradition—served only to spread the fighting, to deprive Cambodia of a genuinely unifying and popular force in Prince Sihanouk, to install in his stead a decrepit Lon Nol, to destroy the rural order, to flood the cities with refugees, in short to create the conditions for the rise of Pol Pot.
And all this, Shawcross implies, could have been more or less anticipated, based on the prior American experience in South Vietnam, where the application of substantial military force had not broken Communist power.
The argument is not wholly convincing, on several counts. In the first place, it affords a tacit legitimacy to what the North Vietnamese were doing in South Vietnam and in Cambodia, which was—and this seems incontrovertible now—invading both places, while it affords no legitimacy whatsoever to efforts to resist what the North Vietnamese were doing. Secondly, in appearing to ascribe the primary moral responsiblity for recent Cambodian history to Nixon and Kissinger, Shawcross loses a sense of proportion. It is one thing to “create conditions” which give rise to a government of mass murderers, quite another to do the murdering. Shawcross posits a tragic inevitability where none really exists. No one forced Pol Pot to behave the way he did; what he did, he did because he wanted to do it. Even if one chooses to accept every harsh judgment that Shawcross pronounces upon Nixon and Kissinger—that they were arrogant, corrupt, deceitful, even criminal in some sense according to both American and international law—they hardly partake of the absolute degeneracy of Pol Pot.
More disturbing is that in this book the behavior of the United States does not become the basis for attacking the brutalities of Communist power, but rather, in a remarkable tour de force, acts of Communist brutality become the basis for attacking the United States. It is as if Shawcross were seeking to construct the final reductio ad absurdum of efforts to resist the expansion of Communist power in the world: we say we resist such expansion because the Communists are brutal, whereas many of these brutalities, especially in Southeast Asia, derive from our very attempts at resistance. We create Communism by trying to destroy it.
For Shawcross, this is more than a poignant paradox; rather, it seems central to his understanding of the United States as a force in the world. Even the very evils of Communism—as soon as they are adequately verified so that denials of them become futile—can thus enter into a critique of the United States. This is a new and important contribution to the theory and practice of anti-Americanism. The brutalities in Cambodia are to be blamed, in the main, not on the Cambodians, or the Vietnamese, or the Chinese, or the Russians, but on the Americans.
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To appreciate the originality of this description of the American role in Cambodia, it is helpful to recall the 1970 “incursion” itself. It was widely opposed, and it ended shortly as a result of congressional action. Here, too, as with the war itself, there were two kinds of opposition. Those who felt the war was strategically and politically wrong feared its expansion, feared the enlargement of the “quagmire.” But those who felt the war was wrong because we were on the “wrong side of history” opposed the Cambodian operation from a different perspective. They did not argue that it would lead to a brutal Communist regime. Rather, they opposed it precisely because they half-believed, and therefore feared, the claims that were being put forward in its behalf, especially the claim that it might indeed so damage the Communist forces that the Thieu regime would survive. If, in the Cambodian “incursion,” there was even the remotest possibility that years of American effort in Vietnam would be redeemed, then that “incursion” had to be opposed in the strongest terms.
Of course there was no such possibility. If Nixon and Kissinger had thought sufficient support existed in the country at large for military operations in Cambodia, they would not have gone through such great efforts to maintain secrecy. But if they believed that their policy, once openly revealed and subject to de facto congressional veto, could not be sustained, why did they initiate it in the first place? Was it better to have fought and lost than not to have fought at all? Whichever, the shock to the American polity was profound, and political behavior on all sides was affected. But then, that was a time when disputants justified their actions by appeal to a “higher law”—as in the case of civil disobedience—or by reference to bizarre doctrines of “inherent power” to bend the Constitution—as in the case of the administration’s actions. People seemed uninterested in what was legal, interested only in what they thought to be “right.”
Shawcross’s book reveals yet another paradox about our current views of the Vietnam experience. It is the domestic political correlative of what diplomatic history calls a reversal of alliances. For if Sideshow, for its part, quite straightforwardly seizes upon recent Cambodian history as a way of further discrediting the recent history of the United States, one might have thought others would learn something different from present-day Cambodia, something which would offer not defamation, but praise, for the United States. But this has not happened. Vietnam is no longer to be argued about. Everyone now chooses to remember himself in opposition to the war. Even some of whose who helped direct it—including the present Secretaries of State and Defense—survived their involvement with enhanced honor and even higher rank. They are hardly likely, now, to seize upon Cambodia as a kind of absolution for their earlier positions. It is past time; where was the “bloodbath” when they really needed it?
Nor is this the only transposition. Among those who today find Secretary of State Vance too “soft” in the conduct of American foreign policy are some who once found too “hard” the policy he helped implement as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Such critics are today stalwart defenders of America and what it represents; they view Secretary Vance otherwise. But just as Mr. Vance is reluctant to embrace Cambodia to vindicate himself as he was a dozen years ago, so his contemporary critics refuse to embrace Cambodia to rebuke themselves as they were a dozen years ago. It is exquisite; Mr. Vance cannot concede that he was right, his critics cannot concede that they were wrong.
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There are at least two groups who know more about this than any of us. The first are the refugees of Indochina, whose misery beggars description. To them we are doing our humane duty, but we speak to them only in the vocabulary of “refugee assistance,” not of politics, not with real meaning. To the other refugees of the Vietnam war, those wandering in our own midst—the 2,769,000 men who served in Vietnam—we speak in an equally constricted vocabulary, stopping at a discussion of “veterans’ benefits.” No one will say to them that we are proud of what they tried to do, of what they were sent to do. No one will say to them that if they had prevailed, maybe, just maybe, what has happened in Indochina these past four years might not have happened. Until someone says it, their history, when it comes to be written, might just as easily be entitled Sideshow.
Meanwhile, Shawcross will go unchallenged in his passions and pieties. And the courage, honor, and humanity of our soldiers will remain a pretext for slandering them, their dead and wounded comrades, and the values and interests they defended.
