From: "John Foster" <borealis-AT-mercuryspeed.com>
Subject: US aggression in Cambodia, was Noam Chomsky
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2003 09:39:47 -0800



> The US made Pol Pot do it, you see. Never mind that most of the Cambodian
> deaths occurred during the forced evacuations that the Paris-educated
> Communist leaders had ordered in their unremitting assault on the cities
as
> centers of bourgeois culture for three years prior to taking Phnom Penh.
> Never mind that Khmer Rouge policies were clearly dictated by their
Marxist
> political framework, requiring the elimination of traditional institutions
> like family and religion, as well as requiring forced collectivization,
> liquidation of the parasitic classes, and police terror - all of which had
> been part of the standard Marxist-Leninist procedure since 1917. Little
> facts like that don't bother Noam Chomsky, because it MUST have been the
> fault of the US.

The US was indeed the antecedent cause of the wrongs and injustices of the
Pol Pot regime. The US conducted a large series of bombing raids into the
country side of Cambodia in an attempt to prevent the North Vietnamese from
carrying out their military actions there. The US bombings killed many
civilians. The combination of the US attacks which included the destruction
of 500,000 acres of rubber plantations with agent organe, forced a large
majority of citizens into the cities. This massive dislocation was also part
of the Khmer Rouge attempt to indoctrinate and modernize the Cambodians. The
US was supportive of the Khmer Rouge initially because they were a
'counter-insurgency' organization fighting the Vietnamese. However as
history demonstrated the US also removed it's armed forces from Cambodia at
a time when it should have been present there to prevent the attrocities of
the Pol Pot regime.

For instance,

"On August 8, 1970, Tom Marlowe of Dispatch News Service International filed
a story from Saigon titled: "US Uses Nerve Gas in Cambodia."...according to
his account agent VX was used against a North Vietnames troop concentration
inside Cambodia in 1969 in an operation "Redcap", which was part of an
experimental project known as "Waterfall"."

Arthur Westing has written a detailed account of the US using chemical
warfare in Cambodia.

The opening paragraph states:

"It was one of the consequences of Cambodia's unfortunate geographical
location that afforded us the opportunity to obtain a brief, first-hand
indication of the impact that the massive, widespread, and indiscriminate
application of herbicides has on land and people in a rural, tropical
setting."

"The herbicidal damage to Kompong Cham Province occurred between mid-april
and mid-may of 1969 and covered 173,000 acres, of which about 24,700 were
severely affected....The event received remarkably little coverage in the
United States."

"As already mentioned above, the first official United States government
reaction to the Cambodian disclosure of the event was a categorical
protestation of innocence; but during House committee testimony an US
official declared that "the greatest part of the damage was caused by
deliberate and direct over-flight of the rubber plantation."

"the above information makes it possible to advance the theory that the CIA
was responsible for the herbicidal attack. Our conversations with highly
placed Cambodian government officials disclosed that they were convinced of
continuing clandestine United States operations in Cambodia aimed at the
harrassment, disruption, and eventual overthrow of the Sihanouk regime. Such
a supposition is not far-fetched because CIA activities within Cambodia have
since been made public.  There is even reason to believe that CIA agents had
infiltrated the Cambodian Army which did, indeed, overthrow the Sihanouk
government. Moreover, the area in question has in the past been the scene of
at least clandestine US Special Forces missions, possibly in the belief that
it contained the main Viet Cong Army Headquarters as once claimed by our
president but since disclaimed by our commanding general in South Vietnam.
Furthermore, it appears that the CIA has a spray capacity."

The economic damage to Cambodia by the US spraying of rubber plantations was
estimated by several investigators. Westing has estimated that

"rubber occupies only 2 per cent of Cambodias' total agricultural lands, 1
per cent of it's work force, and 6 per cent of its internal production
values. On the other hand, rubber represents more than one-third of
Cambodia's export values, vying only with rice as the nations number one
export commodiy. Thus with a minimum of land and labour, rubber has been,
before the most recent rape of this resource, a major hard currency earner,
carrying a lions's share of Cambodia's means for attaining a favourable
balance of trade."

"the area affected by herbicides covers about 38,300 acres of rubber. Thus
about, 32 per cent of the nations rubber and a somewhat higher proportion of
the nations trees actually in production are affected."

" the IRCC has conservatively determined" a total reduction in economic
value of rubber in plantations to be 69% of the total annual value, and 25%
of young plantations.

Then there is the damage to food crops, other vegetation, livestock and
effects on human health caused by US chemical spraying.

Westing relates that

"It is thus a tragedy that our President did not share Senator Mansfield's
insight into Cambodia, which indicated Mansfield's confidence in the
policies of that nation under Prince Sihanouk, policies that according to
Mansfield could have maintained this former oasis of peace in a war-torn
southeast Asia to our benefit as well as to the benefit of the peoples of
Cambodia."

Arthur Westing. In Harvest of Death




>
> Want another example of his pathological blaming of the US, that's
probably
> also in those archives at George Washington University that you apparently
> haven't checked? Remember Nicaragua and the Sandanistas from the 80s? Well
> from what he said about the Cambodian genocide above, you can guess what
> Noam Chomsky said about any atrocities committed by the Sandanistas:
>
> "Any such development, whether libertarian or authoritarian in tendency,
...
> would lead to unremitting hostility on the part of the great powers  in
the
> domains of our influence, to an attack by the United States. The primary
> goal would be to prevent any infringement on private privilege linked to
> U.S. power, to abort these efforts by subversion or direct attack or
> economic pressures that no weak and underdeveloped country can withstand.
> Or, second best, to drive the perpetrators of this iniquity into the hands
> of the Soviet Union; then further attacks can be justified in terms of
> "defense" and the revolutionary leadership will be compelled to institute
> harsh and authoritarian measures under duress, so that popular discontent
> will mount and the endeavor will fail for that reason. Nicaragua today is
a
> case in point."
>
> Chomsky goes so far as say that any "harsh and authoritarian measures" by
> the Sandanistas were done "under duress" due to US pressure against it,
> which would "DRIVE" them "into the hands of the Soviet Union"! Never mind
> that Daniel Ortega and his comrades were devotees of the Eastern block
long
> before they came to power in Nicaragua. Forget that Ortega, rather than
> looking to the USSR as a last resort, wooed the Soviets from the
beginning.
> Proof?:
>
> Former Sandinista official Arturo Cruz, Jr.: "From 1979 to 1981 I was the
> Sandinistas' man in Washington in charge of handling Congress. It was my
> task to negotiate the $75 million assistance package the Carter
> Administration was arranging for the Sandinista regime. It provided
crucial
> balance of payments support on very generous terms. The money came from
the
> Special Support Funds which were reserved only for very close allies of
the
> United States like Israel or Egypt. Not only was the U.S. government
giving
> us economic aid, but quality aid. And not only Special Support funds, but
> also PL 480  food for peace funds  and loans for development projects from
> AID. The U.S. government was also supporting us in our requests to
> renegotiate our national debts with the private New York banks. Finally,
the
> Carter Administration was using its good offices with the World Bank, the
> Inter-American Development Bank and other multinational organizations to
be
> very generous with the revolutionary regime. With enemies like this, one
> doesn't need friends. The line I took as the Sandinista representative in
> Washington was that if the U.S. was generous with us we would not go to
the
> Soviets for aid. But in reality, even while the U.S. was providing us this
> generous financial support, we were signing every possible agreement under
> the table with the U.S.S.R. and the other Communist governments for
military
> support and to establish Party to Party relations. What we Sandinistas
> wanted was to establish a division of labor: the west would provide the
> money for socialist economic development, while the Communist states would
> provide us with the weapons and technical support in setting up the
> institutions of power  the army, the police, the 'block committees'
charged
> with spying on the population. So while America and the other western
> democracies supplied advisers to our economic ministers, the internal and
> external security ministers and the ministries responsible for the new
> ideological apparatus  communications, education  were reserved for
> foreign advisors from the Soviet Union, Cuba, East Germany, Bulgaria,
North
> Vietnam and North Korea." In Peter Collier and David Horowitz, eds.,
Second
> Thoughts (Madison Books, 1989).
>
> So much for Chomsky's expertise in historical analysis. And for the grand
> finale, just LOOK at Chomsky's statement on September 12, 2001 (yes, the
DAY
> after Sept. 11):
>
> "The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach
> the level of many others, for example, Clintons bombing of the Sudan WITH
> NO CREDIBLE PRETEXT, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and
killing
> unknown numbers of people"
>
> Never mind that the missile launch was in reaction to the blowing up of
two
> US African embassies, the murder of hundreds of innocent people and the
> injury to thousands, mostly African civilians, in Sudan. Only someone
> exhibiting the most extreme form of willed blindness could describe that
as
> "no credible pretext"! Of course it couldn't possibly be the case the best
> information available at the time was that the target was not a
> pharmaceutical factory, but a factory producing biological weapons. But
> besides that, Chomskys use of this incident THE DAY AFTER SEPTEMBER 11 to
> diminish the monstrosity of the terrorist attack is precisely the kind of
> maneuver used by Chomsky that you could have discovered, John, had you
done
> some research in those archives in George Washington University.
>
> Anthony Crifasi
>
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