Vindication and Absolution

Critics who welcomed the move had a variety of motives.  Many genuinely feared our policy was playing into Khmer Rouge hands.  Others had a different agenda.  Washington Post columnist Stephen Rosenfeld wrote at the time: "The expressed relief, or much of it, may have had less to do with new prospects in Cambodia than with the feeling that it is past time to set matters straight with Vietnam."  The administration's shunning of Hanoi's puppets in Phnom Penh was said by critics to reflect a "hang-up" about losing the Vietnam War; Hanoi was said to be ready for peace and economic development, yet we were pursuing a vendetta.  For some of these critics, veterans of the old antiwar movement, Cambodia was--dare I say it?--a sideshow to their larger goal of a grand reconciliation between Washington and Hanoi, symbolizing a kind of vindication if not absolution for their ancient cause.

This cannot be the basis for a sensible or defensible Cambodia policy.  The United States is indeed still paying the price for losing the war--after which it can hardly expect to have a strong say in the country's future no matter how noble its present intentions.  Or rather, the noncommunist remnant is again paying the price, having barely escaped annihilation in the mid-1970s only to fear abandonment by us yet again in the 1980s and 1990s.  Vietnam's invasion in 1978 did the Cambodians a great service by ending the Khmer Rouge genocide, but they have the right to be free of Vietnamese Communist hegemony as much as to be free of Khmer Rouge terror.  (It was Hanoi's riding roughshod over neutral Cambodia in the mid-1960s that threw Cambodia into the spiral toward hell in the first place.)  Conceding Cambodia to the Vietnamese is no solution; it would represent yet another betrayal of the noncommunist majority.  Nor would the Chinese permit it.

Today, on the surface, the Supreme National Council unites all the warring Cambodian factions in a continuing dialogue.  The subject of that dialogue remains, ostensibly, the UN plan endorsed by the Perm 5.  But beneath the surface the undertow of events may be pulling toward a "red solution"--a deal struck between Hanoi and Beijing, forcing an accommodation between Phnom Penh and the Khmer Rouge.  Hanoi and Phnom Penh are gaining ground internationally: France is tilting toward Phnom Penh under the influence of Mitterrand's ideological adviser--Madame Mitterrand; Japan is tempted by business prospects in Vietnam.  Now, Sihanouk and even the Chinese feel under pressure to bow to Hanoi's refusal of a serious UN role in administering the country.  Both Phnom Penh and the Khmer Rouge seem quite content to put off the UN plan's provisions for demobilization of opposing armies.

Emasculation of the UN plan would mean the erosion of the Cambodian people's only real hope for a genuinely free election, a democratic outcome, and security from terror.  Ironies abound.  The Phnom Penh regime of which administration critics are so enamored will have made the deal with the Khmer Rouge that Sihanouk and the NCR were wrongly accused of (and penalized for).  The UN solution that attracted such international support will have been undercut by our failure to sustain the independent, democratic forces in Cambodia that had the most stake in it.

Congressional opponents compound the problem by continuing to squeeze out the noncommunist resistance.  Their latest effort would constrict even economic aid to them and force the lion's share of U.S. aid to go elsewhere, especially to areas controlled by Phnom Penh.

In Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Angola it is now self evident that support for anticommunist resistance movements was not an obstacle to a fair political outcome; it was the precondition for it.  The same is true of Cambodia.  Our present anxiety in the face of one of the most precarious political settlements imaginable--and the continuing danger that the decent people of Cambodia will be ground up once again between the two gangs of Communist thugs--are the direct result of our failure to bolster our friends.  America has denied itself leverage, and not only the administration's objectives but even those of its critics have been undercut.

The hopeful compromise of the summer of 1991 may or may not stick.  It may or may not turn into a democratic outcome.  The United States has a strategic and moral responsibility to see these regional conflicts through to a stable and defensible result.  But the Bush administration will continue to find American influence weakened, not strengthened, if it is overwhelmed by domestic pressures that offer no realistic alternative policy.  Aid for the noncommunists--albeit non-lethal--is even more needed now if the Cambodians are truly headed into a political contest.  The decent people of Cambodia deserve, finally, a chance for independence, security, and freedom.  If we don't give them tangible help now, they will never have that chance.

Peter W. Rodman, a former National Security Council official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, is writing a book on Soviet and American diplomacy in Third World conflicts.

Essay Types: Essay