June 4, 1970
Page 18291
CAMBODIAN SUCCESSES?
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in his television address to the Nation last evening, President Nixon made far-reaching claims as to the military success of the Cambodian invasion. I question those claims and their relevance to our long-term interests and objectives in Southeast Asia.
As I said in my reaction to the President's speech last night, captured weapons and supplies may give the appearance of military victory, but that cannot obscure the fact that we have widened the war and added to the uncertainty as to our prospects in Southeast Asia. The President's action has, in addition, made a negotiated settlement much more difficult.
By supporting expanded South Vietnamese military action in Cambodia, we have helped to spread their forces thinner. By increasing military pressure on the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese in Cambodia, we have driven them farther into the arms of the Communist Chinese.
Most important, we have complicated our political problems in Southeast Asia and in Europe by raising new obstacles to a political settlement in Indochina. In South Vietnam we have tied ourselves more closely to the fortunes of the Saigon regime. In Cambodia we have injected ourselves into a more complex political situation, where we do not even have a bargaining partner.
I am not alone in this pessimistic view of the consequences of the Cambodian invasion.
Distinguished reporters who have examined the situation in Southeast Asia have raised serious doubts about the value of the President's moves and the basis for his optimism. I ask unanimous consent that three articles on this question – one by Robert Kaiser, from the May 31, 1970, Washington Post; one by Terence Smith, from the June 3, 1970, New York Times; and one by Joseph Kraft, from the June 4, 1970, Washington Post – be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE VIEW FROM SAIGON: NO END IN SIGHT
(By Robert G. Kaiser)
"O mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O mouse!" – Alice in Wonderland.
Saigon. – If the mouse knows, he isn't saying. After a month of foraging in Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, after a year of Vietnamization and 16 months after Richard Nixon took office promising to end the war, the United States is still swimming about in Indochina. The end may be in sight in presidential speeches, but it isn't in sight from here.
The Cambodian adventure has reopened the breach between the image of the war one gets by looking at it in Vietnam, and the image conveyed by the speeches of high officials in Washington. While President Nixon and Secretary of Defense Laird imply that the Cambodian incursions will accelerate the American withdrawal and ensure the success of Vietnamization, the men most directly responsible for conducting the war in Vietnam refuse adamantly to make any such predictions.
Many American officials here are still shaking their heads at the terms of President Nixon's April 30 speech announcing the Cambodian offensive. "A move that was taken for small tactical reasons got swept up in the big strategic picture," as one senior official put it in a somewhat helpless tone of voice.
To an outsider with no claim to expertise beyond 14 months experience chasing his sense of curiosity around Vietnam and Cambodia, the qualms of these officials seem thoroughly justified. Neither the situation before April 30 nor the situation since then much resembles the descriptions coming from Washington.
From here, the fall of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia seems to have changed the Indochina situation radically. Though spokesmen for the administration aren't saying so, the United States’ ability to control events on this peninsula – which has never been great – seems less now than ever before.
On April 30, the President said attacks against the sanctuaries were necessary to guarantee the continued success of our withdrawal and Vietnamization programs. He added that the enemy is "concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries . . . where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam."
As it has turned out, that concentration of enemy troops in the sanctuaries did not exist. Thus U.S. and South Vietnamese troops met almost no opposition when they entered them early this month.
This is one of those small errors of fact that have recurred throughout the war in Vietnam, disturbing but not crucial. Much more important was the President's basic contention that the sanctuaries had to be attacked to allow withdrawal and Vietnamization to continue successfully.
On that question, like all the big questions in the history of the Vietnam war, there can be no certain answer. There is only one way to try to predict events in Vietnam: One assembles a portion of the information available (there is too much ever to consider it all), judges it on the basis of experience and intuition and ends up with a guess, more or less educated. For most who have tried it, this system has proven woefully imperfect. But it is all that exists, so we continue to use it.
A NEW DEPARTURE
President Nixon's prognostication came as a surprise in Vietnam. What he said, in effect, was that all the boasts about Vietnamization in the past were hollow: the program couldn't work because of the enemy's sanctuaries in Cambodia. Those sanctuaries existed before Sihanouk was deposed March 18. Nothing that happened after March 18 made them any more dangerous, according to Mr. Nixon's own commanders in Vietnam.
It is difficult to begrudge Mr. Nixon his decision to change his mind about the allegedly rosy future of Vietnamization. The theory that a relatively constant number of Vietnamese soldiers could grow in stature – but not in numbers – to replace half a million Americans has always been questionable. Many of the President's critics had accused him of dreaming on this score, or of deliberately misleading the public.
And yet in Vietnam, Vietnamization has looked like a reasonable bet – not a sure thing, not even a clear favorite, but by Vietnamese standards, a wager with a fair chance of success.
To be sure, it was a risky idea, not least because the North Vietnamese did have large forces in the Cambodian sanctuaries. But one could travel all around this country, asking Americans and Vietnamese and outsiders, too, if they thought it would work, and the answer has been a conditional but widespread "yes" for many months.
The question had to be posed carefully: Could the United States withdraw its forces without the last men having to shoot their way to their airplanes? Could the South Vietnamese army and government hold up the tent until the Americans got out from under it? As the geopoliticians sometimes put it, could the Americans withdraw and leave behind a decent interval before fate took its course in South Vietnam?
The question had to be put in those terms because any broader assertion could not be justified.
The long-term future of South Vietnam depends on so many variables, so few of them dependent on the outcome of the current shooting war, that any grander prediction would be foolhardy. Americans and Vietnamese here tend to agree about that.
When you asked those who answered a cautious "yes" if they could think of another way to get the United States out of Vietnam in an orderly fashion, you heard two answers. The first, and much the more popular, was "no", the other was that America might negotiate a settlement with the North Vietnamese that would allow a complete and quick withdrawal.
This idea, so popular among war critics in Washington, is not very popular here. Among Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam, there is widespread doubt that the North Vietnamese will negotiate a settlement unless they can be sure it is to their advantage. From here, where the Communists appear to be weak on the ground, negotiation does not look like an appealing alternative for Hanoi. A negotiated settlement that accurately reflected the current balance of power in South Vietnam would, in effect, force Hanoi to give up most of its stated objectives.
And it is hard to imagine the South Vietnamese or the United States agreeing to a settlement that did not accurately reflect the current balance of power.
BASIS FOR OPTIMISM
The limited optimism that has existed here was due to a few apparent facts about the state of the war that have gained wide acceptance in the last year or so. Briefly stated, these are the principal ones:
The government has established a dominant physical presence in all of the urban areas and in most of the countryside, including the crucial Mekong Delta, the area around Saigon and heavily populated coastal regions in the north. U.S., ARVN and local militia forces have obliterated most of the old Vietcong army, pushing its remnants out of the populated areas. The Communists now must rely on North Vietnamese to do most of their fighting.
Most of the remaining enemy force units, primarily northern, have been forced to stay close to their sanctuaries.
Without its local military forces, the Vietcong's political organization has been weakened, at least ostensibly. People in the countryside are therefore less conscious of the Vietcong's presence while more active government programs have made them more conscious of the Saigon regime.
Apparent rural prosperity has also helped the government. Economists say the prosperity is false, based entirely on props provided by American dollars, but it is real to the farmer who can buy a radio, a motorbike or a tractor.
And President Thieu, with the army, has established an unprecedented degree of political stability in wartime Vietnam. The chaos of the 1963-6 period has been superseded by a remarkable calm, relatively speaking.
If those generally optimistic assertions were widely accepted here, so were a number of doubts and questions that put any optimistic conclusions in jeopardy. The fundamental reservation must be that none of these factors can be counted on in the long term. The Vietcong have demonstrated an ability to revive their organization, and all the Saigon government's apparent strengths seem to be based on slender reeds. All could be reversed in one way or another.
The future of Vietnamization has long seemed to depend on the answers to these questions: Could the lamentable ARVN officer corps become effective? Could the local militia, now extremely erratic, assure local security without U.S. and ARVN assistance? Could the army survive without the American props that now support them at every level?
Could official corruption in Vietnam be controlled or regularized? Could the woefully weak civil administration be improved? Could economic collapse and chaos in South Vietnam be avoided? Could the non-Communists ever compete with the political organizing skill of the Vietcong? And finally, could South Vietnam ever cope with enemy forces in the northern half of the country, where the Communists have much more secure sanctuaries and a much better tactical position than in the south?
These were the long-term problems. Despite them, it seemed possible that over a short term of, say, five years, the South Vietnamese might be able to hold their own – not because of their strengths so much as because of the Communists grave, if temporary weaknesses.
The offensive into Cambodia seems unlikely to help provide any satisfactory answer to the questions about the long-term prospects for Vietnamization. But by further weakening the Communists' tactical position, the new offensive should make the situation on the ground in South Vietnam even more hopeful.
In sum, if the Nixon's administration was pursuing a short-term strategy of getting out of Vietnam as quickly as possible without the tent collapsing in the process, the Cambodian operation might have been very helpful. Might have been, had others remained equal. But, of course they have not. For reasons over which the Nixon administration had only slight control, the entire Indochina situation changed dramatically during the past several months.
THE HOPES FADED
Before this change, the United States had what seemed a fair chance of escaping more or less honorably from Indochina if it could cope with the situation in South Vietnam. The war in Laos seemed stalemated, albeit precariously. Cambodia's neutrality under Sihanouk, though benevolent to the Vietnamese Communists, seemed to assure stability in that country for the foreseeable future (in this part of the world, no more than a few years). So in those good old days, the United States just might have escaped from the region, leaving Indochina intact, at least for a reasonable period of time.
The good old days are gone. The situation in Laos looks more precarious than ever. The Communists are in a stronger position, especially after their recent offensive in Southern Laos. Souvanna Phouma's neutralist government faces a gloomy future.
More important, the pretense of Cambodian stability is gone. Cambodia has become an active battlefield of the war, a third front for the North Vietnamese. In the first days after the March 18 coup, there might have been a chance for Lon Nol to negotiate a modus vivendi with the North Vietnamese. But instead, he threw down the gauntlet, and the North Vietnamese responded in kind.
The new government in Cambodia is weak, uncertain and apparently ineffectual. The same adjectives would flatter the Cambodian army. The Cambodian economy is in shambles, and will almost certainly get very much worse. The rubber industry, which provides almost all of Cambodia's exports, has already been severely disrupted by the new war.
U.S. intelligence now expects the Lon Nol regime to be challenged by a Cambodian liberation movement, led at least in name by Prince Sihanouk, whose personal popularity is said to remain high in the Cambodian countryside. The new regime's ability to cope with this challenge is, at the very best, problematical. If any prediction in Indochina is justifiable, it is that Cambodia will be in turmoil (or in Communist hands) for a long time to come.
Despite these baleful prospects, the United States seems to be tied to the new Cambodian regime almost willy-nilly. President Nixon said it was necessary to attack the Cambodian sanctuaries to assure the success of U.S. policy in Vietnam. If Sihanouk returns to power, all of Cambodia will probably become a sanctuary for the Communists. Must the whole country then be invaded?
Moreover, regardless of presidential rhetoric it seems impossible not to interpret the offensive into Cambodia as a signal to Hanoi that the United States would not allow Cambodia to fall. Such a signal must have seemed unavoidable in Washington, if 50,000 dead in Vietnam were not to be written off as a bad go.
If one defends the Vietnam war for its stated purpose – to assure self-determination in South Vietnam – or for its cold war purpose – to stop the advance of communism in Asia – the reaction to events in Cambodia must be the same: Cambodia must be saved. But in the long run, barring a re-creation of the American presence in Vietnam, there appears to be no way Americans can prevent Communists (or pro-Communists under Sihanouk) from taking over Cambodia. As a result of the coup against Sihanouk and events since, Indochina is now a maelstrom of conflicting vital interests: The North and South Vietnamese, the Laotians, the Cambodians and now even the Thais, all see their vital interests in jeopardy.
President Nixon apparently sees America's vital interests at stake here too. But these vital interests are not compatible – in several combinations, they are mutually exclusive. And there is no foreseeable way that the maelstrom can be calmed, unless North Vietnam abandons its Indochina campaign. That, of course, has always been the dream of America officials, in both the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Someday, the United States always believed or hoped, the men in Hanoi would have to cry uncle. One can hear that talk again: They've overextended themselves, according to the new version of the old line; they can't fight on three fronts in the rainy season after losing their supplies, with hostile forces on all sides.
Perhaps this time it is true, but the small bits of evidence available suggest the contrary. Skeptical Westerners very recently in Hanoi were impressed by the apparent high morale and resiliency of the leadership. According to one of these recent travelers, the morale of the masses has apparently risen lately, because the government has cut prices and ended rationing of many consumer goods.
LONG FIGHT AHEAD
In the field, the Communists show every sign of having the patience to carry on the war. In Cambodia, according to U.S. intelligence and captured documents, they are beginning the long difficult task of building an indigenous revolutionary movement from the hamlets up.
Surely the North Vietnamese have grave supply problems, but they have already secured a new infiltration route via the Sekong and Mekong rivers into southeast Cambodia, which conceivably could be extended to their forces in southern South Vietnam.
And if it is true, as Presidents Johnson and Nixon have both said, that North Vietnam is counting on the American opponents of the war to win their victories, then the men in Hanoi must now be dancing the North Vietnamese version of a jig. Perhaps something resembling the gloomy picture that now seems to face the United States was inevitable even before Sihanouk's fall. Some old Indochina hands have long criticized American policy as shortsighted and self-deluding, because it failed to face up to the entire Indochina problem.
The United States has devoted its attention to South Vietnam, these critics have said, hoping that the Communists would do the same, thus localizing the problem. The criticism is harsh but difficult to dispute, if one assumes the United States has had long-term objectives in this region.
Almost certainly there would have been serious instability in Indochina's future even if Vietnamization in the old context had been a smashing success.
Even in the new context, Vietnamization seems certain to continue. In Vietnam it is assumed that the end of the Cambodian operation on June 30 will be quickly followed by a substantial further withdrawal of U.S. troops. These withdrawals should be possible without serious repercussions in South Vietnam. Three months ago, that alone would have been very good news. It is still, on balance, good news; but now one must wonder if the orderly withdrawal of Americans from South Vietnam will be seen, a year or two from now, as a very significant achievement.
U.S. AIDES IN SAIGON QUESTION POLICY
(By Terence Smith)
SAIGON, South Vietnam, June 1.– There is widespread doubt among the most experienced American observers in South Vietnam that current United States policies will bring lasting peace.
Although 110,000 American troops have been withdrawn from Vietnam and enormous strides have been made in pacification in the last 18 months, the United States still faces vast problems in extricating itself.
At the root of the pessimistic outlook are serious and widely held doubts about the following:
The efficacy of the Vietnamization program, which has yet to face major challenges.
The wisdom of the extension of the war into Cambodia, which, despite the immediate military gains it may achieve, seems likely to complicate American efforts to disengage and may eventually involve the United States – step by painful step – in the defense of yet another weak and uncertain government.
The effectiveness of the Saigon Government in dealing with increasingly serious economic and political problems in South Vietnam.
The nature of the progress achieved in the pacification program, which remains fragile and subject to the enemy's will.
Finally, there is a conviction that United States policies fail to come to grips with the central element in the Vietnam puzzle; the need for a negotiated political settlement that reflects the true balance of power among the Vietnamese people.
"We won't solve this war by cleaning out the base areas in Cambodia, or even by replacing American troops with South Vietnamese," an American who has spent five years in Vietnam said the other day.
"We have to go to the heart of the matter and find an acceptable way of distributing political power among the Vietnamese. That's what the fighting is all about, and it won't stop until we solve it."
The skepticism about American policy is shared in many quarters in Vietnam – by young, dedicated Americans working at the province and district level, and by independent observers, including journalists and foreign diplomats. It is greatest among those whose jobs permit them to travel around Vietnam.
The attitude is also evident among educated, independent South Vietnamese, people outside the Government who are deeply concerned about the future of their country after the American disengagement.
A TRACE OF BITTERNESS
Through the remarks of all those people runs a common theme: No lasting peace is possible without a political solution.
"Vietnamization, by itself, won't produce any kind of peace in this country, just or otherwise," a 31-year-old major who works as a district adviser in the pacification program said recently with more than a trace of bitterness.
"Unless it is matched by some sort of political settlement, Vietnamization just means the fighting will go on and on. But instead of Americans killing Vietnamese, you'll have Vietnamese killing Vietnamese."
Many people here, like the major, acknowledge that Vietnamization will eventually get American soldiers off the battlefield – though not necessarily out of the country – but they insist that it will not end the war or produce a just peace.
Behind that belief is the conviction that the enemy continues to have the necessary strength, spirit, manpower and determination to continue the struggle in South Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia for the foreseeable future. Few military men here dispute that assessment of the Communists' capability.
LOST IN THE FUROR
President Nixon's offer, in his address April 20, to discuss at the Paris peace talks "a fair political solution (reflecting) the existing relationship of political forces in South Vietnam" had barely begun to sink in when it was lost in the furor caused by the invasion of Cambodia 10 days later. It may have been, as one American here described it, "the first casualty of Nixon's decision to go into Cambodia."
The senior members of the American military command are visibly defensive about the Cambodian operation and the controversy it has caused. They insist that it was a militarily justifiable tactical operation that got caught up in larger strategic and political questions.
Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, commander of United States forces in Vietnam, has indicated to friends that he feels that President Nixon drastically oversold the operation and enlarged its goals beyond realizable dimensions:
The general has said that the real purpose was to put a dent in the enemy's supply system and not, as Mr. Nixon suggested, to overrun and clean out the Communist headquarters.
The greatest peril in the Cambodian venture seems to lie in the period after June 30, when the Americans have withdrawn and the South Vietnamese are likely to continue their operations. The consensus here is that the President is going to find it far harder to get Americans out of Cambodia than it was to send them in.
CHOICE FOR AMERICANS
In the short run the Americans may be faced with the choice of either going to the aid of the South Vietnamese or watching them flounder if they come under heavy pressure. In the long run the United States could find itself committed by proxy, as a result of South Vietnamese pledges and actions, to the defense of the shaky Government headed by Premier Lon Nol, which displaced Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
If the South Vietnamese become overextended in Cambodia, the Americans are going to find it correspondingly difficult to carry out their withdrawals from Vietnam on schedule.
Apart from the complications of the Cambodian venture, Vietnamization faces other serious problems. So far a total of 110,000 Americans have been pulled out of Vietnam, leaving 429,000 behind. The real test will come in the next year, during which 150,000 more will have been withdrawn and the South Vietnamese are to take on the heavy fighting.
The first and most obvious danger is military. For the last four years the large American combat divisions have effectively manned the front lines. They have pursued the main North Vietnamese and Vietcong units relentlessly, gradually driving them from populated areas into the jungles and mountains along the Laotian and Cambodian borders.
As Vietnamization advances, the South Vietnamese divisions will take on the task while the remaining American units fall back into something approaching garrison duty. Their safety and that of an additional 250,000 or more Americans providing combat and logistical support will depend on the South Vietnamese.
HIGHER TOLL FORESEEN
Even conceding substantial improvement in the quality of the South Vietnamese armed forces, it is hard to imagine them coping with divisions of North Vietnamese regulars as effectively as the Americans did. The result may be significantly increased casualties – American as well as South Vietnamese – in the later stages of the withdrawal process.
Another consequence may be strikingly reduced security in certain areas of the countryside, most notably in the northern half of the country.
In the northernmost area, I Corps, the enemy has more than 20 battalions of fresh well-equipped regulars in the vicinity of the demilitarized zone, and it has the capacity to reinforce them with up to three divisions at any time.
When the three divisions of Americans that are stationed there are withdrawn, the South Vietnamese will have to take on the job of patrolling along the demilitarized zone,.and protecting the coastal cities of Quangtri, Hue and Danang. At the very least, they will require reinforcements, and it is not clear from where additional troops would come.
There is a parallel situation in II Corps, the area south of the border region, where mountainous terrain and bad communications are a tangible asset for the enemy.
As a result of years of intensive allied operations, the Communists have been pushed from the heavily populated coastal plain into the mountains. Once the Americans are gone the South Vietnamese may be hard-pressed to keep them there.
IMPACT ON SHAKY ECONOMY
Vietnamization will also have a drastic impact on South Vietnam's already shaky economic structure. The country earns more than 90 per cent of its foreign currency from Defense Department outlays and private spending by American soldiers. As the withdrawal proceeds, the supply of dollars will be cut back just when they are most needed to bolster a sorely weakened economy.
In addition, the approximately 145,000 Vietnamese who are directly employed by United States agencies and companies will have to find jobs.
Those bleak prospects are considered by knowledgeable people here to be a principal threat to the stability of the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu.
The domestic political and economic situation has deteriorated dramatically in recent months. While the attention of the world has been riveted on Cambodia, Mr. Thieu has been coping with just about the noisiest political crises since his election.
Rather than working to rally his non-Communist political opposition behind him, as the United States Embassy has been urging him to do lately, President Thieu has come down hard on any group that has challenged his authority or criticized his regime. Individuals with the temerity to speak out have been prosecuted and jailed. Groups that have expressed their complaints in public demonstrations have been tear-gassed and beaten by riot policemen.
Now there is a rising tide of criticism of the Government in newspapers and the National Assembly that can only be expected to increase during the Senate election this fall and the presidential contest next year.
In addition, Mr. Thieu has failed to create anything approximating a national party that might be capable of mobilizing the country in preparation for a political battle with the Communists.
Instead, his basic distrust of politicians – he was a general – and his reluctance to share power remain as great as ever.
As for the pacification program, there can be no question that enormous strides have been made during the last 18 months in the effort to extend the Government's control into the countryside.
There is general agreement that the current program, which is the result of years of experimentation, mistakes and disappointment, is functioning better than any of its hapless forerunners.
But the progress in certain provinces has been counterbalanced by setbacks in others. A proper pacification map of Vietnam would resemble a patchwork quilt, a mixture of bright and dark patches that produce a mottled impression over all.
The combination of problems – military, economic and political – guarantees that the American disengagement, particularly during the next year, will be a painful and troubled process.
LAOS, CAMBODIA LIKELY SCENES OF MOST FIGHTING UP TO 2 YEARS
SAIGON.– "For the next year or two most of the fighting will probably be in Cambodia and Laos," Deputy Ambassador Sam Berger said the other day. And that offhand comment by one of the beakiest of the hawks here in Saigon explains why most of the Washington justifications for the Cambodian operations carry so little weight.
For the Washington apologia are based on the standards of the war as it used to be. But, in fact, there is a whole new war here, featuring new commitments to a new regime in Cambodia. That entails new forces in being, new opportunities for the other side, and a new set of criteria to measure success or failure.
In the war as it used to be, the other side had settled down to a strategy aimed at countering President Nixon's Vietnamization program. The primary objective was to weaken and discredit the South Vietnamese regime by selective strikes against its installations and officials all across the country.
This strategy did not lend itself to counterattack by American and South Vietnamese forces: Even by American estimates, enemy killed-in-action fell in the first quarter of this year by about fifty per cent – from 3,000 to 2,000 per week. And there were corresponding drops in enemy losses of weapons and supplies.
Set against that measure, the Cambodian venture registers a dramatic improvement by our side.
Estimates of enemy killed-in-action soared to nearly 6,000 in the first week of May, and then held about 3,000 weekly. There were well-publicized discoveries of huge stocks of rice, weapons, ammunition and other stuff. The South Vietnamese forces showed a capacity to execute highly coordinated strikes on the ground and by air and sea. The operation looks, in short, like an unqualified success.
But in the process, American objectives in the war have been raised. The United States has acquired, or at least become credited with, a new protege. Rightly or wrongly, the general view here is that the United States intervened in order to save the Cambodian government which replaced the regime of Norodom Sihanouk, the new government of Prime Minister Lon Nol.
Thus, the Cambodian foreign minister, in a speech to the Djakarta conference of Asian nations on May 16, described his government as living in a state of siege, and then added: "We have been relieved by the help brought to us by the Americans and our South Vietnamese neighbors." A South Vietnamese intelligence officer with ministerial rank told Mike Wallace of CBS and this columnist that "the Americans panicked and intervened when it looked like the Lon Nol regime would collapse." President Nguyen Van Thieu told a group of American journalists that if the Lon Nol government lasted, President Nixon would do well in the congressional elections this year, and the election in 1972.
The view here, in short, equates American interest with the Lon Nol government. If not absolutely obliged, the United States is under heavy pressure to keep the Lon Nol government going. If that regime falls, the Cambodian operations will be called a failure.
Nobody knows exactly what it will take to keep the Cambodian regime alive. Not surprisingly there is an internal fight in Saigon as to what is required. One group, centering around Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, favors a considerable forward commitment of South Vietnamese troops to knock out the enemy. Another group, centering around President Thieu, believes it will be enough to station just across the Cambodian border strike forces that can block any threats in the center of that country as they materialize.
Probably the Thieu approach will win – the more so as the President has American backing. Still, the sorting out will not happen overnight. It will be a long time. To use a metaphor employed by a leading American commander here, before the South Vietnamese army gets over its night on the town and goes back to work.
That leaves two new openings for the Communists. In Cambodia, the Communists have the obvious possibility of doing what they refrained from doing under the Sihanouk regime. They can develop a country-wide guerrilla movement based in the rural areas. Given the urban focus of the present regime in Phnom Penh, the organization of a peasant resistance looks like child's play.
In South Vietnam, the massing of government forces on the Cambodian front exposes what one Communist leader calls "holes" behind the line. The other side is in better position than ever to pursue low level attacks on major government installations. The seizure of Dalat – which is a kind of government vacation spot – over last weekend is a perfect case in point.
Perhaps the Communists will miss these opportunities. It may be that they are too weak to get moving in Cambodia, or to step up their actions here in South Vietnam. It may even be that the decisive constraint will be the losses suffered as the result of the joint American and South Vietnamese operation against their former sanctuaries in Cambodia.
But that is not the point. The point is that the Cambodian operation cannot be measured by the standards of the old war. The numbers of enemy killed, the amount of supplies seized, and the improved performance by the Saigon forces are not the kind of factors they used to be. A whole new war is on, and it is far too early to measure success or failure. Indeed, perhaps all that is clear is that anybody who needs a quick success is in bad trouble.