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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 de-mining 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 Bombing Database
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. Even if the latter may arguably be
oversights, the former suggest explicit
knowledge of indiscretion. 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 Afghanistan and 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.
Tags : secret bombing Cambodia Khmer betrayal CIA Pol Pot Henry Kissinger |
