Some Cambodia / America History

[stevenjm]

by Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, october 2006

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 hel_l 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.•

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.

[pete_r]

Links to the article (May 2007 and October 2006 versions):

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12814

http://migs.concordia.ca/links/documents/B...dia_Kiernan.pdf

[Jingthing]

Isn't Laos the most bombed?

[sabaijai]

Isn't Laos the most bombed?

It may depend on whether you're looking at per-capita or raw figures. By the war's end the bombing in Laos amounted to approximately 1.9 million metric tonnes in all, equalling 10 tonnes per sq km, or over a half-tonne for every man, woman and child living in Laos. This makes Laos the most heavily bombed nation, on a per capita basis, in the history of warfare.

Laos also contended with a longer bombing timeline, the near-constant bombardment of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the fact that northern Laos lay in the flight path for bombing sorties to north Vietnam operating from northeastern Thailand. Because may of the bombardiers in Laos were Thai or Lao nationals. they also had the opportunity to ignore virtually all the `rules of engagement' (aka ROEs, nicknamed `Romeos') that had to be observed in Vietnam and Cambodia. In Vietnam, for example, the ROEs prohibited bombing within 500m of a temple or hospital, while in Cambodia there was a 1km limit. In Laos, bombardiers were free to decimate any building that came into their sights.

Thus I think it's likely that Laos 'wins' in both the raw and per capita arenas.

[stevenjm]

Isn't Laos the most bombed?

It may depend on whether you're looking at per-capita or raw figures.

Thus I think it's likely that Laos 'wins' in both the raw and per capita arenas.

In the "raw" figures how does Laos 1.9 million tons beat cambodias 2.76 million tons?

[technocracy]

Isn't Laos the most bombed?

It may depend on whether you're looking at per-capita or raw figures.

Thus I think it's likely that Laos 'wins' in both the raw and per capita arenas.

In the "raw" figures how does Laos 1.9 million tons beat cambodias 2.76 million tons?

The actual figures of the tonnage dropped on Lao varies greatly from 2 mil to 3 mil depending on which figures you read.

Being the CIA 'secret war' I don't think it'll ever be 100% clear how much was really dropped on Laos.

As reading that report it seems to contradict itself first saying:

"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."

Then it says:

"From 1965 to 1968, 2,565 sorties took place over Cambodia, with 214 tons of bombs dropped."

So what is it - 214 tons or 475,515 tons!

It's a very confused article and with quotes such as:

"The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came."

It seems rather poorly written and then it comes up with the cherry for the top of the cake:

"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."

I don't think there is a comparison to what was happening in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to what is happening in Iraq. Sure the US will eventually pull out most likely being chased out the country BUT communism ain't anywhere to be seen. An which ever Arab race gains control I very much doubt they will embark on Ethnic cleansing programme of all other arabs!

[stevenjm]

The way I read id its saying 214 tons until 1968 and 475,515 tons by 1970.

Also the comparison to Iraq and Afghanistan is that heavy bombing and civilian deaths feed insurgents and make them larger and stronger by pissing off the locals so much that they turn to the insurgents. To me its a very valid comparison.

Personally I don't see any confusion in the article at all.

Your just picking on this article because my adopted country of Cambodia has had more bombs than your adopted country of Laos

[technocracy]

The way I read id its saying 214 tons until 1968 and 475,515 tons by 1970.

Also the comparison to Iraq and Afghanistan is that heavy bombing and civilian deaths feed insurgents and make them larger and stronger by pissing off the locals so much that they turn to the insurgents. To me its a very valid comparison.

Personally I don't see any confusion in the article at all.

Your just picking on this article because my adopted country of Cambodia has had more bombs than your adopted country of Laos

Naaa - it's a patchy article regardless of the the adopted country it's also the only article or document that states any such information about Cambodia, not disputing it but it's seem odd that no other places have picked up on it.

Also your raw figure of 1.9mil is below the normal average estimate for Lao which is regular quoted as in excess of 2mil and some say 3mil . .. . also I read somewhere that the IBM data doesn't included Cluster bombs . . . which were tipped on Lao by the B52 load!

But either way it's not much of thing to boast about is it . .. . been the most bombed country in the world!

[stevenjm]

Naaa - it's a patchy article regardless of the the adopted country it's also the only article or document that states any such information about Cambodia, not disputing it but it's seem odd that no other places have picked up on it.

statistics from yale with interactive map: http://www.yale.edu/cgp/

[crewcut]

"Your just picking on this article because my adopted country of Cambodia has had more bombs than your adopted country of Laos"

Sorry Steven, but that's a bit pathetic.

"But either way it's not much of thing to boast about is it . .. . been the most bombed country in the world! "

I would have to agree with you technocracy.

PS. I like your posts about living in Cambodia and advice on visa's etc Steven.

CC.

[stevenjm]

Ok, bad humour. (didn't you notice the smiley?)

[crewcut]

Missed it, but no probs, I keep meaning to get back to PP one day, my time there seems just a distant memory.

[sabaijai]

Isn't Laos the most bombed?

It may depend on whether you're looking at per-capita or raw figures.

Thus I think it's likely that Laos 'wins' in both the raw and per capita arenas.

In the "raw" figures how does Laos 1.9 million tons beat cambodias 2.76 million tons?

Good point, but I realise now the 1.9 fig is out of date. As someone else pointed out it's now thought to be more in the 2-3 mil range.

However even with the earlier fig, per capita is still higher than in Cambodia, no?

[stevenjm]

Isn't Laos the most bombed?

It may depend on whether you're looking at per-capita or raw figures.

Thus I think it's likely that Laos 'wins' in both the raw and per capita arenas.

In the "raw" figures how does Laos 1.9 million tons beat cambodias 2.76 million tons?

Good point, but I realise now the 1.9 fig is out of date. As someone else pointed out it's now thought to be more in the 2-3 mil range.

However even with the earlier fig, per capita is still higher than in Cambodia, no?

Well lets assume 6.2 million for 1970 (half way) at 2.76 million tonnes (rounded off to 2.8) thats .452 of a ton per person.

But then lets not forget Vietnamese invasion/ liberation which lasted ten years with air support and bombing to add to the figure. And add to that land mines which are classed as bombs. And add to that cluster bombs that were used that Technocracy points out were not in the data (but were used on Cambodia also).

Have not got the figures but I'm sure that gets its past Laos in the per capita also.

[A_Traveller]

The gesture by Clinton was to allow the release {or more correctly access to} the data sets called 218's. These Records of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff provide considerable raw data, but there was, at least when Clinton released them, no coordinated analysis. In the analogue I was asked to review this at the time. Presently academic research is on-going, but without a more accessible format these things are slow. One of the best reviews, though Vietnam only, was organised by a group of economists looking a long term affects of bombing.

The National Archives. Sorties over SE Asia

Scope and Content

This series consists of files with records on air combat missions flown in Southeast Asia by the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, South Vietnam Air Force, Royal Laotian Air Force, South Korean Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force during the Vietnamese Conflict. The records include information about both fixed-wing airplanes and helicopters. The data includes unit designation, mission call sign, aircraft type, model, and series, mission flying time, time on target, ordnance, ordnance expended, and bomb damage assessment. Every mission record had from three to six types of data, referred to as "sets". The first type is the Control Set with data on mission date and number. The second type is the Fragged Set with information about the initial order for the mission. The term "fragged" refers to "fragmentary orders" or those that were derived from the authority of standing general orders of the U.S. Seventh Air Force. The Fragged Set contains the military branch or service, launch base, number and type of military airplanes, function, and type of target. The third type of data is the Flown Set, and it provides information on the mission as flown. It identifies the number and type of aircraft flown, flying hours, time over target, and type of target in the air warfare. Every record has these three sets of data. As appropriate, a mission record may also contain one or more additional types of data called "Periodic Sets." The first was the Deviation Set with data on missions that deviated from the fragged orders including the number of aircraft deviated and the type and reason for the deviation. The second possible periodic set was the Target/Load Set with data about bombing missions including the type and quantity of ordnance, description of the target, and the results of the mission. The last periodic set is Loss/Damage data for those missions that sustained loss or damage during the mission including the cause of the loss or damage, the location and activities of the aircraft at the time of loss or damage, and the status of the flight crew.

Regards