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6

The Indochina Wars (II):

Laos and Cambodia

The Geneva Accords of 1954 provided for a political settlement in Laos and Cambodia. Both countries, however, were drawn into the U.S. attack on Indochina, with devastating consequences. In both cases, the media made a noteworthy contribution to this outcome.

6.1. LAOS

In Laos, as in Vietnam, the United States undertook to prevent a political settlement, as described frankly in congressional hearings by Ambassador Graham Parsons, who stated that “I struggled for 16 months to prevent a coalition.” A U.S. military mission was established under civilian cover in violation of the Geneva Accords, headed by a general in civilian guise, and U.S. aid flowed in an effort to establish U.S. control. A measure of its scale and purposes is given by the fact that Laos was “the only country in the world where the United States supports the military budget 100 percent.”1

Nevertheless, a coalition government was established in 1958 after the only elections worthy of the name in the history of Laos. Despite extensive U.S. efforts, they were won handily by the left. Nine of the thirteen candidates of the Pathet Lao guerrillas won seats in the national assembly, along with four candidates of the left-leaning neutralists (“fellow travelers,” as they were called by Ambassador Parsons). Thus “Communists or fellow travelers” won thirteen of the twenty-one seats contested. The largest vote went to the leader of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanouvong, who was elected chairman of the national assembly.

U.S. pressures—including, crucially, the withdrawal of aid—quickly led to the overthrow of the government in a coup by a “pro-Western neutralist” who pledged his allegiance to “the free world” and declared his intention to disband the political party of the Pathet Lao (Neo Lao Hak Sat, or NLHS), scrapping the agreements that had successfully established the coalition. He was overthrown in turn by the CIA favorite, the ultra-right-wing General Phoumi Nosavan. After U.S. clients won the 1960 elections, rigged so crudely that even the most pro-U.S. observers were appalled, civil war broke out, with the USSR and China backing a coalition extending over virtually the entire political spectrum apart from the extreme right, which was backed by the United States. The U.S. government assessment was that “By the spring of 1961 the NLHS appeared to be in a position to take over the entire country,” primarily because of its control of the countryside, where it had “diligently built up an organization covering most of the country’s ten thousand villages,” as noted ruefully by the bitterly anti-Communist Australian journalist Denis Warner.2 The problem was the familiar one: the United States and its clients were militarily strong but politically weak.

Recognizing that its policies were in a shambles, the United States agreed to take part in a new Geneva conference, which proposed a new settlement in 1962. This too quickly broke down, and the civil war resumed with a different line-up and with increasing intervention by the United States and its allies, and by North Vietnam, in the context of the expanding war in Vietnam. U.S. clandestine military operations began in 1961, and the regular U.S. bombing began in early 1964: Operation Barrel Roll, directed against northern Laos, was initiated in December 1964, several months before the regular bombing of North Vietnam. The bombing of northern Laos was intensified in 1966, reaching extraordinary levels from 1968 with the “bombing halt” in North Vietnam—in reality, a bombing redistribution, the planes being shifted to the destruction of Laos.3

Media coverage of Laos during the earlier period was sometimes extensive—over three times as great as of Vietnam in the New York Times in 1961, the Pentagon Papers analyst observes. But its contents were often absurd. For example, the aid cut-off that was the essential factor in the U.S. subversion of the elected government of Laos in 1958 “was never even reported