Overland literary journal

OVERLAND 190
autumn 2008
ISBN 978-0-9775171-7-6
published 19 March 2008

IRAQ: MORE CAMBODIA THAN VIETNAM

Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen examine an important similarity between the war in Iraq and the 1965−75 Cambodian Conflict: the increasing US reliance on airpower

ON 9 December 1970, President Richard Nixon telephoned his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, to discuss the ongoing bombing of Cambodia. Sporadic US tactical air strikes had begun there six years earlier under the Johnson administration but B-52s, long deployed over Vietnam, had been targeting Cambodia for only a year. In a sideshow to the war in Vietnam, 36 000 American sorties had already dropped 475 000 tons of munitions on Cambodia, a neutral kingdom until the US-backed General Lon Nol had seized power from Prince Norodom Sihanouk in a March 1970 coup. The 1969–70 ‘Menu’ bombings of Cambodia’s border areas, which American commanders grotesquely labelled ‘Breakfast’, ‘Lunch’, ‘Supper’, ‘Dinner’, ‘Dessert’ and ‘Snack’, aimed to destroy the mobile headquarters of the ‘Viet Cong’ and North Vietnamese Army (VC/NVA) in the Cambodian jungle.

Nixon faced growing congressional opposition to his Indochina policy after the US ground invasion of Cambodia in May–June 1970 which failed to root out the Vietnamese communists in that country. The president now wanted a secret escalation of air attacks further into Cambodia’s populous areas, despite a September 1970 US intelligence report which had warned Washington that “many of the sixty-six ‘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 9 December of his frustration that the 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 prior assurances to Congress that US planes would remain within thirty miles of the Vietnamese border, and would not bomb close to any village. He also knew that the military had assessed the air strikes as like “poking a beehive 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.”

Five minutes after his phone 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?” On tape, the response from Haig is barely audible but sounds like laughter.

In late 2000, 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 assists in the search for unexploded US ordnance, still a major threat in much of the region. It can be analysed in map and time series formats, revealing an astounding wealth of historical information on the air war.

We now know, for instance, that from 1965 to 1969, even before the ‘secret’ bombing was supposed to have started, the Air Force had dropped bombs on, among other places in Cambodia, eighty-three sites at which the Pentagon database describes the intended target as ‘unknown’ or ‘unidentified’. The detailed record shows that, for these eighty-three cases, the US Air Force dropped a total of 1039 tons of munition on sites which it could not identify, in a neutral country with which it was not at war.

This practice escalated after the ground war began. For the year 1970 alone, the number of US air strikes on targets recorded as ‘unknown’ or ‘un-identified’ increased to 573 bombing sites. American planes also bombed another 5602 Cambodian sites where the Pentagon record identifies no target – 15 per cent of the 37 426 air strikes 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, to 182 bombings of ‘unknown’ targets and 1390 attacks on unidentified ones (among the 25 052 Cambodian sites bombed that year). Nonetheless, the long-term trend favoured 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 2632 ‘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 6553 sites, dropping 250 329 tons of munitions. These sorties included hits on 641 ‘unknown’ and 158 unidentified targets, at a rate of over twenty-five such strikes per day for that month.

Overall, during the US bombardment of Cambodia from 1970 to 1973, American warplanes hit a total of 3580 ‘unknown’ targets and bombed another 8238 sites with no target identified. Such sites accounted for 10.8 per cent of the US air strikes, which hit a total of 113 716 Cambodian sites in less than four years.

We do not know the human toll from these specific air strikes on ‘unknown’, ‘unidentified’ or non-identified targets, or from the additional 1023 US strikes on targets identified only as a ‘sampan’. Casualties from the former, at least, are properly considered US war crimes (not genocide), though they remain unprosecuted.

It is, however, 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 1979–81.5 The new data transforms our understanding of the scale of what happened to Cambodia. First, it revises dramatically upwards the heretofore accepted bombing total of 539 129 tons dropped on the country. The Pentagon’s records indicate that from 1965 to 1975 Cambodia was actually the target of a chilling 2 756 941 tons of US bombs, dropped during no fewer than 230 516 sorties, a tonnage nearly five times greater than previously believed. It is now apparent that in 1969–73 alone Cambodia suffered nearly half of all the US bombing of Indochina (six million tons over nine years), making it even today the most heavily bombed country in history.

Not only was the total payload dropped on Cambodia much greater than the US government or media had previously revealed, the bombardment also began much earlier. While the ‘secret’ 1969–70 Menu campaign, when first uncovered, caused congressional uproar and provoked calls for Nixon’s impeachment, we now know that US bombing actually started over four years before then, in 1965 – as Cambodian leaders had claimed at the time. Prince Sihanouk’s Foreign Minister, for instance, maintained as early as January 1966 that “hundreds of our people have already died in these attacks”. During the mid-1960s, the Studies and Operations Group – US Special Forces teams in tandem with the Khmer Serei, US-trained ethnic Cambodian rebels operating from South Vietnam – were collecting intelligence inside Cambodia. Perhaps the US tactical air strikes supported or followed up on these secret pre-1969 CIA ground incursions.

The Pentagon database reveals escalating bombardments on neutral Cambodia. From 1965 to 1968, the Johnson administration conducted 2565 sorties over Cambodia and dropped 214 tons of bombs there. Most of these strikes occurred under the Vietnam War policy of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, a policy which he has since publicly regretted.

These early strikes were tactical rather than 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. Nixon, however, decided differently, and from late 1969 the US Air Force began to deploy B-52s over Cambodia.

In the first stage of the bombing (1965–69), the US goal was to destroy the Vietnamese communists’ Cambodian sanctuaries and to cut their supply routes from North to South Vietnam, through both Laos to the north and, later, the southern Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. But these early US attacks neither found, let alone hit, the mobile Vietnamese headquarters, nor stopped the flow of weapons and supplies.

The second phase of the bombing (1969–72) aimed to support the pullout of US troops from Vietnam, ironically by expanding the war in the hope of winning faster. Lon Nol’s 1970 coup facilitated much more extensive US action in Cambodia, including the short ground invasion and the prolonged carpet bombing. Later, as Emory Swank, a 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 added that it was “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. The irony was that, in its attempt to deny 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 fell two weeks before Saigon.

The final phase of the US bombing, January–August 1973, aimed to stop the Khmer Rouge advance on the Cambodian capital. US fear of this first South-East Asian domino falling translated into a massive escalation of the air war that spring and summer – an unprecedented B-52 bombardment, focused 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 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.

The initial US bombardments of border areas had set in motion a highly precarious series of events with the Vietnam War impacting deeper into Cambodia and contributing to the 1970 coup, which also helped fuel the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge.

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 fighters 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 about 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 supported the US air war, the insurgent Khmer Rouge could use the civilian casualties caused by the bombing of Cambodian villages for its recruitment. This direct relationship can be demonstrated by cross-checking the 1979–81 interviews with survivors against an analysis of the Pentagon bombing data.

In fact, the Nixon administration knew that the Khmer Rouge was explicitly recruiting peasants by highlighting the damage done by US air strikes. 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”. Years later, journalist Bruce Palling asked a former Khmer Rouge officer from northern Cambodia if Khmer Rouge forces there 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 these consequences, kept the air war secret for so long that debate over its toll and political impact came too late. Along with support provided by 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 into something capable of overthrowing the Lon Nol government in 1975 and perpetrating genocide. The parallels to current dilemmas in Iraq and Afghanistan, where genocidal al-Qaeda factions lurk among the insurgent forces, are poignant and telling.

US policy in Iraq involves a similar shift from ground forces to air strikes in fighting the motley insurgency there. Seymour Hersh reported in December 2005 that a key element of any planned US drawdown of troops is their replacement with airpower. “We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting – Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower”, explained Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Indeed in 2007, US air strikes in Iraq more than quadrupled: from 229 in 2006, to 1140 in the first nine months of 2007 alone. In Afghanistan, air strikes doubled from 2006 to 2007.

Today the technology of US bombing has become more sophisticated, ‘unknown’ targets are bombed less frequently, and collateral damage is lower. Yet perhaps these days information also 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 there?

The 13 January 2006 aerial strike by a US Predator drone on a village in Pakistan, which killed women and children and inflamed local anti-US political passions, seems a pertinent example of what continues to occur in 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. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, neither the US media nor the Bush administration seriously included the impact of civilian casualties in public discussion of the overall war strategy. Even with official assurances that civilian casualties will be limited, when it comes to a decision to bomb a village containing a suspected terrorist, the benefit of killing the target trumps the toll on innocents. This misguided calculus is quite possibly a fundamental threat to long-term American security.

If the Cambodians’ tragic experience teaches us anything, it is that official disregard of the immorality and the consequences of inflicting predictable civilian casualties stems 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 one-dimensional. 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.

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 1969–73 by an 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 too predictable that an insurgency in need of recruits would exploit potential supporters’ hatred for those killing their family members or neighbours. That Washington has yet to learn from its past crimes and mistakes is a failure of strategic as well as moral calculation.

Ben Kiernan is the Whitney Griswold Professor of History and founding Director of the Cambodian Genocide Program and the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He is the author of, most recently, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Melbourne University Press, 2008).
Taylor Owen is a Doctoral Candidate and Trudeau Scholar at the University of Oxford. He has worked at the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO) and the International Development Research Centre and has written widely on the concept and operationalisation of human security, the causes and consequences of conflict, and EU, Canadian and US foreign policy.
© Ben Kiernan and Taylor Own
Overland 190 – autumn 2008, p.51−55

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