A look back at another instance in which the U.S. undertook a secretive and widespread bombing campaign.
A Cambodian man prays at a Buddhist ceremony as around 300 skulls that
formed a giant map of Cambodia are dismantled at a genocide museum in
Phnom Penh on March 10, 2002(Chor Sokunthea/Reuters)
Halfway through the Justice Department white paper [PDF]
defending
the lawfulness of government-ordered assassinations of U.S.
citizens, there is a curious reference to a dark chapter of American
history.
The memo, making the legal case for covertly expanding military
operations across international borders, directs readers to an address
by State Department
legal adviser John R. Stevenson, "United States Military Action in Cambodia: Questions of International Law," delivered to the New York Bar
Association in
1970.
The comparison is fitting in ways the Justice Department surely did not intend.
Like the current conflict, the military action in neutral Cambodia
was so secretive that information about the first four years of bombing,
from 1965 to
1969, was not made public until 2000. And like the current conflict,
the operation in Cambodia stood on questionable legal ground. The
revelation of its
existence, beginning in 1969, was entangled with enough illegal
activity in this country -- wiretaps, perjury, falsification of records
and a general
determination to deceive -- to throw significant doubt on its use as
a precedent in court.
The most important parallel, though, isn't legal or moral: it's
strategic. As critics wonder what kind of backlash might ensue from
drone attacks that kill
civilians and terrorize communities, Cambodia provides a telling
historical precedent.
Between 1965 and 1973, the U.S. dropped 2.7 million tons of explosives
-- more than the Allies dropped in the entirety of World War II -- on Cambodia, whose population was then smaller than New York City's. Estimates
of the number of people killed begin in the low hundreds of thousands and range up from there, but the truth is
that no one has any idea.
The bombing had two primary effects on survivors. First, hundreds of
thousands of villagers fled towards the safety of the capital Phnom
Penh,
de-stabilizing Cambodia's urban-rural balance. By the end of the
war, the country's delicate food supply system was upended, and the
capital was so
overcrowded that residents were eating bark off of trees.
Secondly, the attacks radicalized a population that had previously
been neutral in the country's politics. The severity of the advanced air
campaign -- "I
want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out
of them," then-U.S. President Richard Nixon told National Security
Adviser Henry
Kissinger -- fomented immense anger in the Cambodian countryside.
Charles Meyer, an aide to the deposed Prince Sihanouk, said that it was
"difficult to
imagine the intensity of [the peasants'] hatred towards those who
are destroying their villages and property." Journalist Richard Dudman
was more precise.
"The bombing and the shooting," he wrote after a period in captivity
in the Cambodian jungle, "was radicalizing the people of rural Cambodia
and was
turning the country into a massive, dedicated, and effective rural
base."
Nevertheless, many historians continued to deny the causal link
between the violence and the political upheavals in the country.
Cambodia's embrace of
radicalism instead fit neatly into the Cold War-era "domino theory"
paradigm, de-emphasizing the role of local conditions in driving the
country's history.
William Shawcross, in 1979's
Sideshow: Kissenger. Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia
, was the first to advance the theory that the meteoric rise of the
Khmer Rouge was not in spite of the U.S. bombing campaign but because of
it. Taylor
Owen, the research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism
at Columbia, and Ben Kiernan, director of the Genocide Studies Program
at Yale, have
concluded that the full war archives, released by President Clinton
in 2000, confirm this version of history.
"The impact of this bombing... is clearer than ever," they write.
"Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the
arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until
the bombing
began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper
into Cambodia, a coup d'etat in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and
ultimately the Cambodian genocide."
In tactical terms, contemporary drone attacks are far more precise
than the pell-mell Cambodia-era bombs. One comparison, though, remains
apt: in both
cases, the American government has been less than forthcoming about
the effect of these weapons on local populations. The Bureau of
Investigative
Journalism reports that between 2,500 and 3,500 people have been killed by
drone strikes, including -- contrary to the recent statements
of CIA nominee John Brennan -- between 473 and
893 civilians, and 176 children. (The classification of civilians has
been called into question as well. The Obama administration reportedly "counts all military-age males in
a strike zone as combatants," unless posthumously proved innocent.)
Owen and Kiernan saw the parallel to current anti-terror operations
before the Department of Justice did. In 2010, they published a paper in The Asia-Pacific Journal called " Roots of U.S. Troubles in Afghanistan: Civilian Bombing Casualties and the Cambodian Precedent,"
in which they argue that incidents like the predator drone strike on a Pakistani village in 2006 created direct blowback.
This point of view is echoed by Pakistani journalist Mohammed Hanif, who recently argued
that the strikes are not only
radicalizing the population but are "creating a whole new generation
of people who will grow up thinking that this is what happened to us
and now, now we
want revenge." In Pakistan and Yemen, Jo Becker and Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times,
"drones have become the recruiting tool of choice for militants."
In this respect, the DOJ could not have found a more fitting
precedent than the carpet-bombing of Cambodia. The purpose of the
sustained bombardment from
1972 to 1973 was to prevent the Khmer Rouge from consolidating
power. The result was the opposite.
The thousands of people killed so far by drone strikes represent a
fraction of the several hundred thousand who died beneath the B-52s
between 1969 and
1975. But the level of fear and anger -- and the opportunity for
insurgent groups to harness those emotions -- cannot be so easily
calculated.
In the words of retired General Stanley McChrystal, the former
commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, one can't help but hear an echo
of Charles Meyer,
Richard Dudman, and other observers of the Cambodia campaign. "What
scares me about the drone strikes is how they are perceived around the
world,"
McChrystal said
last month. "The resentment
created by American use of unmanned strikes...is much greater than
the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level,
even by people
who've never seen one or seen the effects of one."
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