Supping with Devils
Mini Teaser: The Cambodian ceasefire accord, reached in June at a meeting of the warring Cambodian parties at the Thai beach resort of Pattaya, was a promising step toward settlement of the country's long and bloody conflict.
The Cambodian ceasefire accord, reached in June at a meeting of the warring Cambodian parties at the Thai beach resort of Pattaya, was a promising step toward settlement of the country's long and bloody conflict. The Communist regime in Phnom Penh and the three resistance groups arrayed against it (Sihanouk's National Army, the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, and the Communist Khmer Rouge) agreed to make a functioning reality of the Supreme National Council--representing all of them--that was called for in a United Nations peace plan last year. The Council convened in Beijing in July under the chairmanship of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In principle, foreign arms supply to all sides is to stop and the UN is to play an important role in managing a transition to free elections. Many issues remain to be settled, however.
The news from Cambodia seemed to fit a global pattern of encouraging developments in regions of tension. It was as if the world were tying up all the loose ends of the Cold War conflicts left over from the 1970s. So far in 1991 we have seen completion of Cuban and South African troop withdrawals from Angola, a political accord among the Angolans, Soviet abandonment of the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia, and now progress toward a Cambodian settlement. This follows upon the 1990 democratic election in Nicaragua and the 1989 deadline for both the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan and the Vietnamese troop withdrawal from Cambodia.
The removal of foreign forces reduced the strategic danger that these conflicts posed. But reconciliation among the internal parties is bound to be much harder. Henry Kissinger once observed that no civil war in history ever ended in a coalition government. Civil wars are usually for keeps. Diplomacy in Cambodia, moreover, has been a challenge qualitatively different from the others--a Sisyphean struggle to reconcile the irreconcilable, to find a basis for compromise that will include a group that is dreaded by all the others as the embodiment of absolute evil.
The United States has had a weak hand from the beginning, and our lack of leverage is the most salient fact of the whole process. Since Vietnam's invasion in 1978, we have rightly rejected the Phnom Penh regime as the bastard child of Hanoi. We maintained economic sanctions against both Hanoi and Phnom Penh, and we rejected the Khmer Rouge, whose terror against their own people before they were ousted by Vietnam's invasion reached genocidal proportions (at least one million dead out of a population of seven million).
The Soviets armed Hanoi and Phnom Penh; China armed the Khmer Rouge against them. But as resistance to the Vietnamese invaders spread, the United States could not bring itself to give substantial assistance to the noncommunist elements in the resistance--the decent people trapped in the middle, Sihanouk's National Army and the KPNLF, the remnant of Cambodian civil society that survived the Khmer Rouge genocide and who we can only assume represent the vast majority of the population. In their struggle against the Phnom Penh regime, the noncommunists found themselves involuntarily in the frightening position of being the weaker party in an uneasy alignment with the Khmer Rouge. They did receive some aid from the Chinese.
The military weakness of the noncommunist resistance (NCR) has assured the political dominance of the communist antagonists, and our corresponding lack of leverage over the course of events. All the communist powers--the USSR, China, Vietnam, and their Cambodian clients--acted according to their own strategic necessities. The war turned into a bloody stalemate. Progress toward a settlement was glacial. Diplomatically, the United States deferred to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which gave political backing to the NCR and indeed preferred that we stay in the background (given the limits of what we were prepared to do). Australia also played a diplomatic role.
Policy and Politics
Why this absence of direct U.S. support? Even the Reagan administration, champion of "freedom fighters" around the globe, shied away. It feared a congressional outcry over the very idea of U.S. re-intervention in Indochina; its operational experts disparaged the fighting ability of the NCR (a reasonable judgment, but also self-fulfilling); it did not share the Nixon-Kissinger-Brzezinski sense of geopolitical partnership with China, which might have led it to see a larger stake in frustrating Soviet/Vietnamese hegemony. Ironically, the pressure to do something came from Congress--more precisely, from Democratic Representative Stephen Solarz of New York.
Solarz was the author of an important article in the New York Times in June 1985 urging his fellow Democrats to be more "tough-minded" in the geopolitical arena. Solarz became an enthusiastic supporter of the Afghan mujaheddin, for example. He disparaged the Nicaraguan and Angolan insurgents, but, to his everlasting credit, he adopted the Cambodians. The administration went along with Solarz, providing the NCR with overt economic aid of about $5 million a year beginning in 1985, on top of a modest covert program (also non-lethal) that reached a reported $20 million a year. It was not enough to be of decisive help.
The Bush administration continued the main lines of Reagan's regional policy, but with even less emotional commitment to the "freedom fighters." With the withdrawals of external forces, these conflicts were seen to have lost much of their strategic significance. The new administration saw the central strategic relationship with the Soviets--especially in Europe, where a dramatic upheaval was brewing--as more important than the declining competition on the periphery.
The first breakthrough in Cambodia--the Vietnamese troop withdrawal (a significant partial pullout in 1988 and then a complete withdrawal of combat troops by September 1989)--was therefore the product of forces at work in which the United States played no major part. Certainly, Hanoi was feeling the continuing pain of its international isolation and the U.S. economic embargo. But the new factor that broke the impasse was Gorbachev's drive for rapprochement with China. If he removed what China called the "three obstacles" to Sino-Soviet relations--Afghanistan, Cambodia, and the border threat--he could gain a strategic coup with the Chinese. So Gorbachev undoubtedly used his influence with the Vietnamese to push for a commitment to withdraw from Cambodia, and after it came he was invited for his historic May 1989 visit to Beijing. Just as Brezhnev had subordinated Hanoi to U.S.-Soviet relations at the time of Nixon's Moscow summit in 1972 (when Nixon had just ordered the mining and bombing of North Vietnam), so Gorbachev subordinated Hanoi to the needs of Sino-Soviet relations in 1988-89.
Various diplomatic efforts have been undertaken on behalf of Cambodia. There was the idea of an informal "cocktail party" in 1987-88, first among the four groups of Cambodians, then with Vietnam present. There were the "Jakarta Informal Meetings" in 1988 and 1989 (all the Indochinese parties plus ASEAN). The Chinese and Vietnamese began talking on the subject in January 1989. The issues in the negotiations did not change much: Hanoi, Phnom Penh, and their supporters sought to trade the Vietnamese troop withdrawal for a cutoff of external aid to the NCR; the Bush administration and ASEAN correctly insisted that a settlement had to be "comprehensive," resolving the internal political conflict (as well as controlling the military capability of the Khmer Rouge). The resistance insisted on a real turnover of power to some new body in Phnom Penh in advance of any new elections; Phnom Penh refused any diminution of its control in the interim before elections.
Some form of compromise among the four Cambodian parties seemed essential for any settlement. It was an uncomfortable conclusion for U.S. diplomacy because it meant, among other things, treating the Khmer Rouge as a party without whom a settlement was not possible. This policy was soon under attack: the Bush administration found itself bitterly (and unfairly) accused of wanting to bring the Khmer Rouge into a coalition government. Perversely, the small amounts of non-lethal aid we gave to the NCR were challenged as objectively helping the Khmer Rouge, since the NCR remained essentially weak and any erosion of Phnom Penh's control would arguably benefit mainly the Khmer Rouge. Accusations were made (never substantiated) that significant U.S. material help provided to the NCR found its way into Khmer Rouge hands. NCR forces in the field were said to be coordinating military moves with the Khmer Rouge and increasingly relying on them--which was probably true, but was obviously a function of their lack of independent support from us.
The administration's diplomatic position and policy on the ground were thus both under assault. It was urged to abandon the war against Phnom Penh and Hanoi, indeed to join with them in blocking the hated Khmer Rouge.
Gambling on Sihanouk
The policy of backing the noncommunist resistance was not without serious drawbacks and dangers. The NCR never showed promise as an independent fighting force; it suffered from failures of leadership and discipline. Our trying to ride two horses--opposing both Phnom Penh and the Khmer Rouge--was a risky gamble. How could we possibly overthrow the one without removing the main barrier to the dominance of the other? But the administration's true calculation was never well articulated, and the alternative proposed by its domestic critics was no real alternative at all.
The U.S. strategy was really a gamble on Sihanouk, who was widely believed to retain a significant base of popularity in the country as well as a unique international acceptance among all the interested powers. The United States sought a political deal because in ceasefire conditions the NCR's military weakness would be less decisive and Sihanouk's international and domestic prestige would turn into greater political leverage against both Hanoi and the Khmer Rouge. The flow of outside weapons--from the Soviets to Phnom Penh and from the Chinese to the Khmer Rouge--would be halted only in conditions of a political deal. Neither Moscow nor Beijing would cut off its client unless the other did the same; each was apparently willing to do so (or to reduce aid substantially) if the other did, because in their pursuit of rapprochement they were willing to put the Cambodian issue on ice on some fair basis. The key diplomatically was to get the Phnom Penh regime to turn over a substantial share of power--not to the Khmer Rouge, but in effect to Sihanouk (who all agreed would preside over whatever compromise structure emerged).
A U.S. tilt toward Hanoi before a political deal would not stop the Khmer Rouge; on the contrary, it would guarantee continuation of the war and of Chinese aid to the Khmer Rouge (as well as Soviet aid to Phnom Penh). After a political deal, it was highly likely that Sihanouk, a master political balancer, would tilt toward Hanoi sufficiently to outmaneuver the Khmer Rouge (and in the opposite direction, if he needed to keep Hanoi at bay). Sihanouk had lost several members of his family to the Khmer Rouge genocide; he needed no instruction in what they represented. Yet he (and we) understood that the best hope for the survival of the noncommunists was to stop the war and turn the military contest into a political one in which the noncommunists could compete on the basis of their maximum strength. Aid to the noncommunist resistance would never turn it into a military tiger, but it would strengthen its political clout--as well as assure its survival while the war continued.
What the administration's critics proposed--siding with Phnom Penh against the Khmer Rouge--was a formula for torpedoing the diplomacy and prolonging the war, with no assurance of a decent outcome. The Phnom Penh regime was a weak reed, lacking legitimacy (many of its leaders being former Khmer Rouge themselves). The critics' idea may have been well intended, but it was not an effective formula either for a political solution or for stopping the Khmer Rouge.
The Bush administration stuck to its guns on the diplomatic track, which took some courage, and it went even further: in 1989 it made an unprecedented bid for congressional support for lethal military aid to the NCR, and nearly got it.
Because of the courage and persistence of Solarz (and Republican Representative Bill McCollum of Florida), the House passed a bill authorizing lethal aid. But the Senate was a hotbed of active opposition. Liberals like Senators Byrd, Cranston, Kerry, and Pell were urging less, not more, support for the NCR. Yet in July 1989, Senator Robb of Virginia submitted an amendment that would put the Senate too on record as supporting lethal aid.
The prospects were not good. The administration hesitated to spend political capital. Yet the bill passed--by the remarkable margin of 59-39--after an impassioned late-night debate on July 20. Much of the credit goes to Vice President Quayle, the principal repository in the administration of ideological commitment to anticommunist resistance movements, who encouraged Robb and spent much of the night of the Senate vote in intense floor lobbying of his former colleagues.
With both houses of Congress now on record, that should have been sufficient for the Intelligence Committees to give a green light to a program along these lines. But not so. There was a further congressional hurdle: where reprogramming of funds is needed, permission of the appropriations committees is required. The chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee was Robert Byrd--a passionate opponent of aid for the Cambodians. There it sat.
Disappointment in Paris
With the Vietnamese scheduled to be out of Cambodia by September 1989, French President Mitterrand proposed a peace conference in Paris for the end of July. On the surface it seemed an appropriate moment for an initiative. In reality, the French had no plan. The moment when diplomatic movement was likely would be after the Vietnamese withdrawal was completed--when the parties had had a chance to test the new balance of forces on the ground. Before then, none of the parties could be expected to take big steps or risks. The conference was thus more a product of French vanity than of any strategy.
The Paris Conference of July-August 1989 produced no significant result, which was no surprise to the American delegation. In fact, the Americans were satisfied that they had kept the need for a "comprehensive" settlement high on the agenda, that is, insisting on a political change in Phnom Penh as well as on Vietnamese troop withdrawal. Secretary Baker made a forceful speech in Paris and the point was reflected in the communique.
But the Paris Conference turned out nonetheless to be a disaster. It demoralized the American government, doomed any chance of lethal aid for the NCR, and revived with new vigor opponents' charges that U.S. policy was objectively supporting the Khmer Rouge.
At the Paris Conference, American officials had to suffer Sihanouk at his worst. They came away suffering from "Snooky Shock." He publicly flaunted his tactical alliance with the Khmer Rouge, blocking, for example, Phnom Penh's efforts to insert a condemnation of "genocide" into the conference documents. It was a public relations disaster, to put it mildly. U.S. officials came home depressed and disillusioned with the temperamental prince on whom our diplomatic strategy had rested.
It was easier for those of us sitting in Washington a few thousand miles away, not having to witness Sihanouk's performance at close hand, to see the method in his madness. In his eyes, the tactical necessity was to continue to squeeze Hanoi and Phnom Penh; he (and we) had to resist rising to the bait of an untimely battle with the Khmer Rouge, letting Hanoi off the hook. In Sihanouk's calculation, the confrontation with the Khmer Rouge was bound to come in due time--but preferably after a political settlement in which the two communist forces were cut off from arms supplies and the noncommunists were put in a more pivotal position.
Nevertheless, the failure of the Paris Conference was trumpeted in the media. It was unfairly seen as a failure of our policy (when in fact its convening had no part in our strategy) and it was seen to discredit Sihanouk, on whom our policy did indeed depend. Congressional and media pressures mounted on the administration to change its policy. The administration did not yet bend, but it lost heart. It made no further effort to salvage lethal aid for the NCR.
In January 1990, diplomacy took a more positive turn. The Australian foreign minister, Gareth Evans, proposed that the United Nations organize elections in Cambodia and oversee the country's administration in the interim. Opposing military forces would be regrouped, then disarmed and demobilized. This proposal was accepted by all five permanent members of the Security Council (the "Perm 5").
It was a much more attractive concept than sharing power with the Khmer Rouge. It calmed the congressional pressures for a time. The Soviet and Chinese endorsement of such a scheme seemed an especially hopeful sign. Yet the difference between this and our earlier negotiating position was not as great as it seemed. No such interim arrangement could possibly come into effect until the four Cambodian parties reached some understanding and modus vivendi among themselves, including an acceptance of the balance of forces among them. Thus it would require a quadripartite deal--including the Khmer Rouge--just as the administration's previous policy had. (This is more or less what was to happen in the summer of 1991.)
The obstacles remained the same: continuing fear of the Khmer Rouge and Phnom Penh's unwillingness to cede real power to anybody--even the United Nations. But pressures for a settlement were also growing. The bankrupt Soviets clearly signaled to Vietnam their inability to afford subsidizing a war that was going nowhere. Vietnam and China, both now pariahs in the international community (Vietnam because of its Cambodia aggression, China because of Tiananmen), had an increasing incentive to cut a deal to reduce the international pressures on them.
The good news was that these developments among the Communist powers were pushing Cambodia closer to a political solution. The bad news was that the noncommunists' voice in all this was feeble. What kind of an outcome was such a "red solution" likely to be, with all the Communists cutting a deal among themselves?
U.S. policy risked weakening the noncommunists even further. In the spring and summer of 1990, Khmer Rouge forces seemed to be making headway on the ground (which turned out, as usual, to be exaggerated). Congressional fears and pressures grew again. A tendentious ABC News documentary railed against alleged American collusion with the Khmer Rouge. In July 1990, yielding to these pressures, the State Department tilted in the direction of Phnom Penh--agreeing for the first time to talk directly to it and to withdraw support for the coalition's UN seat (which had been thought to legitimize the status of the Khmer Rouge). Secretary Baker confirmed the policy shift while in a joint news conference with Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze. Our ASEAN allies, who learned of the shift from press reports, were upset at what they saw as an untimely tilt toward Phnom Penh when it was still firmly resisting power-sharing. administration officials privately expressed the hope that the move--including the (unintended) appearance of U.S.-Soviet collusion--would scare the Chinese into reining in the Khmer Rouge, which would in turn reassure everyone else. In any case, congressional funding for the NCR might well have been cut off if the administration had not made some such shift.
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