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By Root 2839 0

complained to the United Nations that on February 24, 1967, “a large number of armed forces elements consisting of Americans, South Vietnamese and South Koreans entered Cambodian territory and fired heavily on the Khmer village of Chrak Kranh . . . [which] was then invaded and burnt by the United States–South Vietnamese troops” who occupied the village until March 3. By April 1969, rubber plantations were subjected to defoliation by air attack. In January 1970, an official Cambodian government White Paper reported thousands of such incidents with many deaths, giving pictures, dates, and other details, and also noting that not a single Viet Cong body had ever been found after U.S.-Saigon bombardments or ground attacks.

Virtually none of this was ever reported in the United States—even the official White Paper—although the information was readily available in official documents and reputable foreign sources, and in easily ignored peace-movement literature.44 The agency of violence was once again the wrong one.

The occasional media reaction to these incursions was instructive. On March 25, 1964, New York Times correspondent Max Frankel, now executive editor, reported a Saigon army (ARVN) attack on the Cambodian village of Chantrea with armored cars and bombers, leaving many villagers killed and wounded. The ARVN forces were accompanied by U.S. advisers, including a U.S. army pilot “dragged from the wreckage” of an observer plane “shot down in the action.” Diplomats on the scene confirmed that “at least one troop-carrying helicopter had landed at Chantrea with three Americans on board.” Frankel was outraged—at Cambodia, which had the gall to demand reparations, leaving Washington “alarmed and saddened, but confused.” The headline reads: “Stomping on U.S. Toes: Cambodia Typical of Many Small Nations Putting Strain on a Policy of Patience.” Cambodia has “borrowed a leaf from Fidel Castro’s book,” Frankel stormed, by requesting compensation for this U.S. atrocity: “It is open season again for the weaker nations to stomp on the toes of big ones . . . Leading the pack in big-power baiting these days is one of the smallest of nations, the Southeast Asian kingdom of Cambodia” with its “clever, headstrong, erratic leader,” whom Washington finds “lacking some of the talent and temperament for the job,” although “the Administration’s instinct has been to try to save a wayward young nation’s independence in spite of itself and, at times, despite its own leaders.” Washington is also alarmed by “Cambodia’s current effort to force the United States into a major conference that would embarrass its Thai and Vietnamese friends,” Frankel continues, an effort that will “be resisted”—referring to a conference that would settle border questions and guarantee Cambodia’s neutrality at a time when the United States was desperately seeking to undermine international efforts to neutralize South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia so as to avert the major war toward which the United States was driving because of its political weakness in Indochina.

This classic of colonialist paternalism reflects quite accurately the general mood of the day—as does the refusal to report such trivial matters as the regular U.S.-ARVN attacks on Cambodia, which have largely passed from history in the United States, apart from the dissident literature.

6.2.4. PHASE I: THE U.S. DESTRUCTION OF CAMBODIA

On March 18, 1969, the notorious “secret bombings” began. One week later, on March 26, the Cambodian government publicly condemned the bombing and strafing of “the Cambodian population living in the border regions . . . almost daily by U.S. aircraft,” with increasing killing and destruction, alleging that these attacks were directed against “peaceful Cambodian farmers” and demanding that “these criminal attacks must immediately and definitively stop . . .” Prince Sihanouk called a press conference on March 28 in which he emphatically denied reports circulating in the United States that he “would not oppose U.S. bombings of communist targets within my frontiers.” “Unarmed and innocent