The Dr. Strangelove of the 1970's

The Kissinger Doctrine and Cambodia......

Henry Kissinger sure gets around. He also has a reputation as a man of peace who has put his own life and newly acquired wife into second place in the quest for international security. If only ol' Henry had just once ever brought peace to anyone at all then perhaps you could believe it all. But Henry hasn't brought peace. Instead he has masterminded attack after attack on the developing third world countries. He has directed US interventions, continually threatened war and seems to live solely to see the growing movement of the third world peoples divided and broken down.

Henry has become famous (once again) recently for his threat to send in US troops to takeover Middle East oil fields. But that remains only a threat. On June 27 1970 Henry said about Chile to the Forty Committee, a secret operations group he heads, 'I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.' - this time Henry's remark did not remain just a threat.

But a lot of Henry's concern to bring about peace never reaches the public until too late. When things weren't going Henry's way in negotiations on the Peace Agreement for Vietnam it was he who suggested the infamous Christmas 1973 bombings on Hanoi and Haiphong except Henry wanted them a lot sooner and a lot bigger. It was the moderating influence of Richard M Nixon that resulted in the bombings being a 'short' as they were! The result of the bombings was, of course, that the Vietnamese still refused to change their position and that the US was forced to sign a Peace Agreement which to all intents and purposes was a surrender document.

Kissinger is a man alone in the handling of US foreign affairs. The debacle of US involvement in Cambodia stems from the same doctrine that Kissinger has applied in all his work for 'peace' and 'security'. The following excerpt from the New York Herald-Tribune January 28 1975, demonstrates how the Kissinger doctrine has worked in Cambodia:

Lon Nol overthrew the Sihanouk government in March 1970. Whatever its role in that coup, the United States intervened quickly thereafter. In April President Nixon sent in American troops. He said the purpose was only to hunt Vietnamese Communists, not to 'expand' the war into Cambodia.' But has raged ever since in that once so peaceful country, with the United States playing a dominant part.

The Ford administration is now putting extreme pressure on Congress for more aid to Lon Nol. What is the rationalisation? President Ford explains that American policy is to help 'where the government and the people of a country want to protect their country from foriegn aggression or foriegn invasion.'

That a man as decent as Gerald Ford should accept such stuff from his advisers, and repeat it, is disheartening. For his premise of Cambodia resisting 'foreign' attack is the opposite of the truth.

Americans in Phnom Penh concede that the war is a genuine civil war - Cambodians against Cambodians. Nor do they pretend that Lon Nol has much popular support. His corrupt, ineffectual government is totally dependent on the United States.

The United States has given $1.8 billion to Lon Nol so far. Americans still direct much of his war effort, and supply it entirely. From March 1970 to August 1973 when Congress called a halt, American planes dropped 442,735 tons of bombs on Cambodia. No Chinese or Vietnamese planes have dropped bombs - or been given as aid to the Khmer Rouge.

As a new excuse for more American aid to fuel this hopeless war, administration spokesmen say there might be negotiations if Lon Nol survives long enough. That is a desperate argument, and disingenuous. When the Khmer Rouge leader, Khieu Samphan, toured Eastern Europe in 1974, the US ambassador in Phnom Penh, John Gunther Dean, urged that contact be made with him. Kissinger rejected the idea.

No, Kissinger's concern is not for the Cambodians, who want no more war. It is for American credibility, and especially his own, which he thinks would suffer if we 'lost' Cambodia. Because the only conceivable settlement now would mean Lon Nol's departure, the war must go on. Kissinger is prepared to fight to the last Cambodian.

In the New York Times the other day, next to the story about the latest Ford-Kissinger appeal for more arms to Lon Nol, there was a report from the Times' correspondent in Phnom Penh, Sydney H. Schanberg. It told about what had happened to Cambodia in these five years.

'Cambodia before the war,' he wrote, was 'so rich in its food produce that even the very poor were never hungry. . . Now it is a country of landless nomads with empty stomachs - human flotsam living amidst damp and filth. . . The countryside is charred wasteland....

That is the result of the Kissinger doctrine of an obsession with order and power at the expense of humanity. Whatever else he accomplishes in office, Henry Kissinger will be associated forever with the destruction of Cambodia.