Hillary Clinton Celebrates Kissinger While White House Repeats His Mistakes

By Fred Branfman, AlterNet

In Laos, where I interviewed more than 1,000 refugees from the Plain of Jars, every single one said their villages had been destroyed by U.S. bombing which escalated tremendously in 1969, and that the main victims were civilians because the soldiers could move through the thick forests largely undetected, while old people, mothers and children were forced to stay near their villages.

In Cambodia, Kissinger told Alexander Haig to undertake "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies or anything that moves," the clearest possible violation of international law requiring the protection of civilians. Two million people in Khmer Rouge zones, as estimated by the U.S. Embassy, were driven underground by massive U.S. bombing that featured regular B52 carpet-bombing of undefended villages.

In North Vietnam, Kissinger conducted the most savage B52 bombing of urban targets in history, as the New York Times reported in 1972: “United States military leaders are being permitted to wage the air war as they want in Indochina. There appears to be less concern with the civilians this time in view of the freedom given the air commanders and the attempt to cut off food, clothing and medical supplies." Kissinger boasted to Richard Nixon, "It’s wave after wave of planes. You see, they can’t see the B52 and they dropped a million pounds of bombs ... I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month ... each plane can carry about 10 times the load a World War II plane could carry."

Kissinger orchestrated the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, a disastrous miscalculation that led directly to the Khmer Rouge takeover five years later. I visited Cambodia in April 1970, shortly after the U.S. supported Lon Nol in overthrowing Prince Sihanouk. U.S. Embassy officials then estimated there were no more than 100 Khmer Rouge, and were not even sure that Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan or Ieng Sary were alive. As William Shawcross wrote in “Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia,” it was Kissinger’s overthrowing Sihanouk, supporting the corrupt and unpopular Lon Nol regime and massive bombing that created the Khmer Rouge and brought it to power. Kissinger then compounded his brutality by supporting the genocidal Khmer Rouge, telling the Thai foreign minister on Nov. 26, 1975, that "you should also tell the Cambodians [i.e. Khmer Rouge government] that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don’t tell them what I said before."

Kissinger diverted billions of dollars in Food for Peace, meant to feed the starving, to the Thieu and Lon Nol armies. He violated the U.S. Constitution by secretly bombing Cambodia and Laos without congressional authorization. And his representatives regularly perjured themselves before Congress, as when the U.S. ambassador to Laos testified to the Kennedy Subcommittee on Refugees on April 22, 1971, that the U.S. bombed only military targets in Laos.

Who Lost Indochina: Kissinger or Congress?

"Had I thought it possible that Congress would, in effect, cut off aid to a beleaguered ally, I would not have pressed for an agreement as I did in the final negotiations in 1972."—Henry Kissinger, “Ending the Vietnam War”

"The Defense Department said today that despite congressional reductions in military aid, South Vietnamese forces were not critically short of either ammunition or fuel."—"U.S. Says Arms Situation in Vietnam Is Not Critical," New York Times, March 27, 1975

 

Kissinger began to try to blame Congress for the fall of Saigon even before April 30, 1975. Sorley’s book contends that the failure of the North Vietnamese spring 1972 offensive in South Vietnam proves that Thieu forces could have prevailed in April 1975. Newsweek, interviewing Sorley, reported that "in 1974, breaking Nixon’s promises of continued support to Saigon, the U.S. Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam. Without logistical support or air cover, the South Vietnamese army collapsed in 1975 and the communists swept into South Vietnam."

Former Defense Secretaries Melvin Laird and James Schlesinger, along with Kissinger, have consistently maintained the North Vietnamese were receiving more aid from the Soviet Union and Chinese than were the South Vietnamese from the United States.

None of this is even remotely true:

Congress did not "cut off all aid to South Vietnam," as Kissinger falsely claims. On the contrary. Congress in August 1974 only reduced military aid to Thieu from $1.2 billion to $700 million.

The $700 million in military aid voted by Congress "is apparently running at twice that of Chinese and Soviet military aid to North Vietnam," according to the New York Times on March 27, 1975. The CIA estimated that U.S. military aid of $1.7 billion to Thieu in 1974 was four times the $400 million it estimated the North Vietnamese received from the Soviet Union and China. All told, official figures show the U.S. spent $141 billion in Vietnam from 1961-‘75, compared with $7.5-$8 billion in Soviet and Chinese aid to North Vietnam during the same period (Congressional Record, May 14, 1975).

Sorley’s contention that the failure of the North Vietnamese 1972 offensive proved the Thieu army could stand on its own is particularly absurd. Sorley himself quotes General Creighton Abrams, the head of U.S. forces in South Vietnam, as saying "on this question of the B-52s and the tac air it’s very clear to me that this (the Thieu) government would now have fallen, and this country would now be gone, and we wouldn’t be meeting here today, if it hadn’t been for the (U.S.) B-52s and the tac air. There’s absolutely no question about it."

During the 1972 offensive, the Times reported on May 3, 1972, that "the growing consensus among Americans here is that the South Vietnamese forces have proven unequal to the task of defending it." And on May 19, 1972, that "despite four years of Vietnamization, American and South Vietnamese military commanders here have relied less on the government’s ground troops to stem the current North Vietnamese offensive than on an instrument of massive bombing that only the Americans have — the B-52"; from Anloc on June 24, 1972, that "American advisers here say that the South Vietnamese helicopters are not flying because the crews have panicked under fire and suffer from low morale”; and on Oct. 7, 1972, that "both American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam say that the B-52s played a major role in halting the North Vietnamese offensive last spring as government units were disintegrating."

Neil Sheehan reported in his biography of U.S. adviser John Paul Vann, who directed U.S. and Vietnamese military forces in Region III in the spring of 1972 that "Vann did not see the fallacy in his victory. He did not see that in having to assume total control at the moment of crisis, he had proved the Saigon regime had no will of its own to survive."

Conclusion: Repeating History

We all have a natural tendency to want to forget an unpleasant past. Even many of us whose lives were deeply affected by the Indochina war often prefer to put those years of anguish, divisiveness and anger behind us.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Those who cannot remember the past are indeed condemned to repeat it.

Future historians will marvel at how U.S. leaders so thoroughly failed to learn from their horrific mistakes and crimes in Indochina, and have instead repeated many of them today in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is clear to all but the most blind or brainwashed that the basic lesson of Indochina is that the United States cannot create democratic and stable governments out of corrupt, brutal, autocratic and unpopular warlords who can neither direct nor motivate their own people.

Secretary Clinton is not only insulting history and betraying her own past by giving a platform to Henry Kissinger to continue distorting history; she is betraying America today, foolishly perpetuating policies toward the Muslim world that can only end in even greater losses for the U.S.