It is not particularly surprising that Mr. Kissinger has not added anything truly significant to our knowledge of the war in Vietnam, its extension to Cambodia and the Washington-Hanoi negotiations. After all, these developments and related issues have been discussed threadbare again and again for years. Mr. Kissinger has made one “revelation”. He has disclosed for the first time that on April 4, 1970, in Paris he proposed to Mr. Le Duc Tho that they “should discuss immediately concrete and specific measures to guarantee the neutrality of Cambodia (either) bilaterally or in an international framework” and that Mr. Tho rejected the suggestion, emphasizing that “it was his people’s destiny not merely to take over South Vietnam but to dominate the whole of Indochina.” But, as Mr. Kissinger himself notes, while “the boasts were made in secret, the military moves that expressed these ambitions were plain to see”. In other words, Hanoi’s ambitions or compulsions (depending on one’s predilection), too, have been well known.
Mr. Kissinger has naturally been keen to defend Mr. Nixon’s and his own record in Indochina and from his point of view he has not done a bad job. If his basic assumptions are accepted, it may not be all that easy to controvert him. The assumptions are that South Vietnam was entitled to survive as a separate independent country, that the United States was within its rights to assist the regime in Saigon, and that Hanoi had no business to try to reunite the two Vietnams by force of arms. But these were wholly untenable propositions as far as the other side was concerned. So it was bound to behave in what Mr. Kissinger regards as an intractable and intransigent manner. For it, only the manner and the timing of US withdrawal could be the subject of talks. Surely the practitioners of power politics in Washington could not have been surprised that Hanoi was determined to have its way, especially after the upsurge of opposition in the United States convinced it that it had only to hold on in order to prevail. This is, however, not to suggest that the opposition to the war in America led to the US defeat or that Hanoi would otherwise have yielded. Similarly, while Mr. Kissinger’s critics cannot ignore the challenge he has flung at them in respect of Kampuchea – he has sought to prove that the conflict there was expanded by the North Vietnamese and their local communist allies and not the Americans – the pertinent point seems to be that, given the US military involvement, Hanoi’s determination to take over South Vietnam and Phnom Penh’s military weakness, Kampuchea’s neutrality could not have been preserved. As the saying goes in that country, when elephants fight, the grass gets crushed.
Mr. Kissinger’s purpose is limited. He does not feel called upon to justify the original US decision to intervene directly in the war in Vietnam. This decision had been taken by the previous Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He has to defend only the manner in which America finally pulled out. This is indefensible. Not only did the so-called Vietnamisation policy finally collapse, its failure could have been easily predicted. Indeed, it was predicted by any number of individuals. But America is not the only great power either to have made such a grave miscalculation or to have allowed considerations of face to prevail over cool assessments of the reality on the ground. Its fears turned out to be exaggerated or even wholly misplaced. Defeat in Vietnam did not undermine its credibility with its West European and Japanese allies and Mr. Kissinger was successfully arranging a truce between Israel and Egypt even as South Vietnam was collapsing in 1973-74. US power vis-à-vis the Soviet Union has declined. But that has little to do with the Vietnam war.
An unprecedented tragedy has overwhelmed the hapless people of Kampuchea. The great criminals in this sordid affair have been Pol Pot and his mad communist colleagues whose policies have led to the death and decimation of half of the country’s population. The Americans cannot escape their share of the blame for the triumph of these lunatics. But nor can the Vietnamese, the Chinese and Kampucheans like Lon Nol and Sirik Matak who staged the coup against Prince Sihanouk who alone could have managed to avoid the subsequent disaster. Apportioning blame is, however, not a particularly useful exercise, especially amidst so much human suffering. It would be more to the point to try to save the Kampuchean people from extinction as a result of the famine sweeping the land. Unfortunately, both Washington and Hanoi are once again being guided by cynical political considerations.
The Times of India, 17 October 1979