By JAMES ALDRIDGE

Zt HE American invasion of Cambodia was obviously

prepared in detail for many months, and if one

knows a little about military strategy, and United States

political strategy, it is clear that no aspect of the opera-

tion was left unorganized and unthought-out. In fact, the”
computerization of U.S. politico-military action is part

of the American method, which means that all factors

of the problem had to be fed into the Pentagon’s plan-

ning computers before any important results could be

decided on.

It was therefore not merely an invasion of expedi-
ency. And obviously the final decision was a human one.
Either it was the soldiers who decided it, or it was the
President. Or it was both. President Nixon has, in fact,
taken full responsibility on himself. But it doesn’t matter
who made the decision. What matters is the sort of think-
ing that these human or inhuman planners brought to
the problem.

Perhaps it is because I am a novelist, and have
written of this sort of problem on other levels, but it
doesn’t require much imagination to realize how many
conferences and sub-conferences were held in those
Washington committee rooms, or in the war room under
the White House. How many conversations were held
over lunch, and in the darkness of the night among the
men planning the operation. How many organizations
had to be consulted, how many logistic problems worked
out, how many men had to be flown back and forth,
to and from Vietnam, to inform and consult and report
to the men on the spot.

And when the plan had finally been decided and put
down on paper, like all military plans it was certainly
given a brief outline of objectives, which probably read
on that blue United States military paper something
like this:

1) Remove the neutralist government of Prince
Sihanouk.

2) With the help of the CIA, create as much hostil-
ity as possible between Cambodians and the Vietnamese
minority living in Cambodia.

3) Invade the Mekong Delta with maximum effort.

4) Destroy as large an area of countryside and
township as possible, in order to create confusion and
fear in the population.

5) Having penetrated as deep as possible into.Cam-
bodian territory with all arms, United States forces may
go through the motions of withdrawal. This to be de-
cided later.

6) The United States will leave behind in Cambodia
the South Vietnamese army as the occupiers, even the
conquerors of the Mekong Delta areas.

7) Continue to exploit the hostility between the
Vietnamese minority and the Cambodians, and to sug-
gest national hatred and rivalries in the area. Create,
in fact, as great a physical mess as possible out of this
hostility.

8) On the basis of the success or failure of this ven-
ture, and taking into some account the world response to
it, begin to plan a similar operation in Laos. .. .

Word by word this may seem like an exaggerated
version of what the United States planners used as an
outline for the operation. But in fact, if you read the
reports already published of conversations with U.S.
soldiers and politicians and generals, and if you follow
the character of the entire operation, and also read re-
ports in newspapers like the London Times and the Guard-
ian, even the language is not exaggerated. In reality the
invasion of Cambodia was more horribly explicit and
cynical and Machiavellian than I have made it here.

In fact one has to meaSure this operation by what
has already happened ‘in Vietnam. Almost every re-
straint that civilized nations have tried to put on war has
been broken by the United States forces in Vietnam.
United States forces have used gases, chemicals, ex-
plosive bullets, and a volume of civilian bombing with
napalm which has had no parallel in history. United
States soldiers have shot down and murdered, on their
own admission, helpless women and children with hand
weapons and even with bayonets.

MR. ALDRIDGE, a former correspondent for the London
Times, is the author of “THE DIPLOMAT” and “HEROES OF
THE EMPTY VIEW,” among other works.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1970—PAGE 8

The only justification the U.S. and Saigon have
offered for invading Cambodia is the same one that Hit-
ler used. The country had to be saved from communism.

What the United States government also tried
to invent for its aggression was the notion that there
was a huge and mysterious ‘‘Vietcong headquarters’
somewhere in the Mekong Delta. President Nixon said
that when this vital ‘“‘Vietcong complex” was captured
and destroyed, the operation would be over and the
United States troops would be removed. Every day, as
the Americans advanced into Cambodia, we read in our
press that there was no sign of any ‘‘Vietcong”’ base.
As late as May 16, Michael Hornsby, the Times corres-
pondent in Saigon, wrote: ‘The headquarters of the leg-
endary Communist Central Office for South Vietnam (in
Cambodia) still remains to be located. The notion that
there is a single Communist command center is now
being quietly dropped.”

eS

There has been no real evidence of any large body ot
‘‘Vietcong”’ in the area at all. Nonetheless, this was the
excuse for the destruction of the town of Snoul which
was bombed to ashes on the pretext that it was full of
Vietnamese guerrillas. When the Western reporters
entered the burned out city immediately after the bomb-
ing, they found several dead women and a horribly
wounded child, and no sign of any kind of Vietnamese
liberation forces.

The Times reporter on the spot, Murray Sayle, also
reported another example of this myth of the “Vietcong”’
strongholds. He stood with an American lieutenant in
the typical Cambodian village of Phom Tasuos “‘with its
tall Buddhist Temple, houses on stilts among the trees,
and a neat little mud-plasted schoolhouse.’’ It was empty
when the Americans arrived. Sayle asked the American
lieutenant: ‘‘What have we got here?”’

The lieutenant pointed to ‘‘Vietcong barracks and

HE PLOT
AGAINST
AMBODIA

installations.” But Sayle suggested that it was only
where the monks of the temple lived. The lieutenant
pointed to a ‘‘Vietcong indoctrination center.’’ ‘‘More
likely the schoolhouse,” Sayle says. (The day’s lessons
were still on the blackboard.) A long muddy pond could
be a “‘Vietcong obstacle course for commando training,”
the lieutenant said. ‘It could also have been the village
pig wallow,” Sayle adds. Finally, the lieutenant in exas-
peration said: ‘‘What about these enemy rice caches?”
And Sayle had to point out that the bin full of rice they
had found in a. prosperous Cambodian house was not
unusual, because after all ‘“Cambodians also eat rice,

_ In fact nobody in his right senses ever believed the
myth of the huge “‘Vietcong”’ base in Cambodia. Nobody
was ever supposed to believe it. It was one of those

peculiar lies, similar to the ones that Goebbels invented,

which everybody knew was a lie but which you were
supposed to uphold as the truth, otherwise you were
not partiotic. ;

Even so, the most sinsiter aspect of this U.S. in-
vasion is not so much the deceptions, as the reality it-
self. In a dispatch from Saigon published in the London
Times of May 12, Michael Hornsby wrote: ‘‘Events in
south-west Cambodia have suddenly taken a dramatic
and somewhat sinister turn. The new factor is the
emergence of the South Vietnamese Army as an effec-
tive and terrirotially acquisitive fighting force.” .

Hornsby points out that the advance of the South
Vietnamese forces was ostensibly to ensure the safety of
Vietnamese living in Cambodia — ‘‘many hundreds of
whom are believed to have been massacred by Cambod-
ian troops. However,’’ he goes on, “‘it is now clear that
the relief of the refugees is merely part of a much more
extensive military operation. The South Vietnamese are
not committed to the American withdrawal date of June
30.’ He suggests that in fact the Saigon army will re-
main in Cambodia with American help. In other words,

part of the United States plan has been to encourage .

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