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Henry Kissinger

2016-09-24T01:22:34Z

JakeRMurrin: Removed surely the most disgraceful of the claims I added to this article. There is no evidence that the opening to China had ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING to do with China's later adoption of free-market reforms.

[[Image:Kissinger Henry.jpg|frame|right]]
'''Henry Kissinger''' (born 1923), American statesman and exponent of a [[liberal]] policy of "realism" in foreign policy; he dominated foreign policy in the administrations of presidents [[Richard Nixon]] and [[Gerald Ford]], as [[Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs|National Security Advisor]] and [[United States Secretary of State|Secretary of State]], holding both positions for a time. He won the much-criticized 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for reaching a peace that ended the [[Vietnam War]]. In close collaboration with Nixon, he created a '''[[détente]] policy''' that called for an end to the [[Cold War]] and for friendly relations with both the [[Soviet Union]] and [[China]]. His position on détente was rejected by [[Ronald Reagan]] in the 1976 campaign for the presidential nomination. Although Reagan narrowly lost that primary to Ford, due to the immense advantage of incumbency for Ford, Reagan won a landslide victory four years later on a platform that repudiated Kissinger's polices. Kissinger was then left out of any prominent role in the [[Reagan Administration]].
==Life==
Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923 to a middle class Jewish family. They fled Nazi persecution, and arrived in New York in 1938, where he changed his first name from Heinz to Henry but never overcame his thick foreign accent. He attended public schools and City University before being drafted at age 19. He returned to Europe during World War II fighting with the U.S. Army; he was in the infantry at first, but his heroism, courage, and daring got him promoted to intelligence. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1946. He spent a year as a civilian instructor in ''de-Nazification'' at an Army school in Germany; charged with de-Nazifying a German town, he did so with remarkable ease. He had power and responsibility far beyond his years because of his intelligence, his energy, and his commitment to opposing the Nazis.

In the army, Kissinger was informally tutored by Fritz Kraemer, a fellow refugee with two PhD's. In 1950 Kissinger earned his B.A. ''summa cum laude'' at Harvard with a 377-page essay on "The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant."<ref>William Y. Elliott was his director but only read half of it; the Government Department thereupon ruled that future senior theses could not exceed 40,000 words.</ref> He finished his Ph.D. in 1956 at Harvard, with a dissertation on "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars.

He married Ann Fleischer in 1949 and was divorced in 1964. There were two children, Elizabeth and David. In 1974 he married Nancy Maginnes.

==Harvard professor==
Kissinger became a full professor in Harvard's Department of Government in 1962. As the director of Harvard's University Summer International Seminar, 1952–69, he brought in nearly 700 young European and Asian scholars, many of whom became high officials in their own country. Kissinger met practically every intellectual in international relations at home and abroad.

Kissinger was eager to serve on national commissions. He served as Study Director, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, for the Council of Foreign Relations from 1955 to 1956; Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 to 1958; and Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program from 1958 to 1971. He resigned from Harvard in January 1971 when his two-year leave of absence expired.

In 1957 Kissinger published ''Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,'' which proposed a flexible defense posture, including provision for "limited warfare" and the strategic employment of nuclear weapons as an alternative to the doctrine of "massive retaliation" against direct foreign aggression, which dominated military thinking during the mid-1950s. The book brought Kissinger to national attention, and he became an mid-level advisor on security questions under presidents [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], [[John F. Kennedy]], and [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]; he was foreign policy advisor in [[Nelson Rockefeller]]'s 1968 quest for the Republican party nomination, but Nixon won the nomination and Kissinger switched to the winner.

Kissinger was consultant to the Department of State (1965–68), United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1961–68), Rand Corporation (1961–68), [[National Security Council]] (1961–62), Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1959–60), Operations Coordinating Board (1955), Director of the Psychological Strategy Board (1952), Operations Research Office (1951), and Chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1983–84). In 2001 he was not appointed to head the commission studying the [[9-11 Attack]] because he was too controversial.

==National Security Advisor and Secretary of State==
In 1969, Nixon appointed him his top advisor on foreign affairs as "Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs," (or "National Security Advisor") in charge of the [[National Security Council]] staff, which he made his base of power. He and Nixon largely ignored the State Department in setting the main lines of foreign policy. In 1973, Kissinger gained the additional role as secretary of state. He was the only person ever to hold the two top national security roles at the same time, and in 1975 he was replaced as head of the NSC.

Kissinger's approach to foreign policy was shaped by his vision of world peace achieved through a global balance of power; and accordingly Kissinger believed that effective U.S. diplomacy needed to be backed by force and guided by the pragmatism of Realpolitik rather than by high ideals and abstract causes. In practice his diplomacy, which mixed a highly visible, personal style with secret, behind-the-scenes maneuverings, was marked by bold, often controversial, initiatives and by frequent travel between world capitals in what came to be known as "shuttle diplomacy".
===Nuclear strategy===
On taling office Nixon and Kissinger were briefed on the US nuclear war plan, the [[Single Integrated Operational Plan]] (SIOP). Appalled by the catastrophic scale of the SIOP, Nixon and Kissinger sought military options that were more credible than massive nuclear strikes. Participants in the Air Force Nuclear Options project also supported more flexible nuclear war plans. Although Kissinger repeatedly asked Defense Department officials to construct limited options, they were skeptical that it would be possible to control nuclear escalation or to introduce greater flexibility without weakening the SIOP. Interagency studies presented a mixed verdict about the desirability of limited options; nevertheless, continued White House pressure encouraged Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to sponsor a major review of nuclear targeting. In 1972 the John Foster panel developed concepts of limited, selective, and regional nuclear options that were responsive to Kissinger's interest in credible nuclear threats. The Foster panel's report led to the controversial "Schlesinger Doctrine" and further efforts to revise the SIOP, but serious questions endured about the whole concept of controlled nuclear warfare.<ref>William Burr, "The Nixon Administration, the 'Horror Strategy,' and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969-1972: Prelude to the Schlesinger Doctrine." ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' 2005 7(3): 34-78. Issn: 1520-3972 Fulltext: [[Project Muse]]; Aaron L. Friedberg, "A History of U.S. Strategic 'Doctrine'—1945 to 1980," ''Journal of Strategic Studies,'' Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1980), pp. 37-71; Scott Sagan, ''Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security'' (1989).</ref>
===Détente with Soviet Union and China===
Kissinger's first priority in office was the achievement of détente with the Soviet Union and China, and playing them off against each other . Recognizing and accepting the Soviet Union as a superpower, Kissinger sought both to maintain U.S. military strength and to inaugurate peaceful economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges to engage the Soviet Union in the international system. This policy flourished under Kissinger's direction and led in 1972 to the signing of the first [[Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty]] (SALT I). At the same time Kissinger successfully engineered a rapprochement with Communist China, leading to the astonishing news in 1971 that Nixon would visit China, which he and Kissinger did in 1972.<ref>Margaret Macmillan, ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)</ref>

Aware that China and the Soviet Union were at sword's point, with rival claims to be the true Communists, Kissinger used the "Soviet card" to win over China by playing up the Soviet threat to the Chinese as a way of promoting closer relations with China. He even hinted at a US-China alliance to oppose the Soviets, and, with Nixon's trips to Moscow, hinted that China had better come to terms lest the US form an alliance with Moscow. The tactics worked, resulting in a friendly relationship with both Beijing and Moscow. As part of the détente, both powers reduced or ended their aid to North Vietnam, thus allowing a settlement of the [[Vietnam War]].<ref>Evelyn Goh, "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502.</ref>

===Vietnam===
Kissinger worked to achieve a disengagement of U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam. He promoted Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization," aimed at turning the burden of actual combat over to the South Vietnamese, with repeated shows of U.S. air strength, notably in the bombings of Cambodia and North Vietnam. Kissinger met secretly with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris from 1969 on, finally concluding a cease-fire in January 1973, for which he and chief North Vietnamese negotiator [[Le Duc Tho]] were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Later rumors to the effect that Kissinger knew the South Vietnamese government was too weak to survive long were wrong; Kissinger and Nixon had built South Vietnam into one of the strongest militaries in Asia—much stronger than the North Vietnamese—and they had stripped away much of Hanoi's support from Moscow and Beijing. The problem was that Saigon put all its future on the continuation of Nixon in office and his promises to intervene militarily if necessary. Nixon collapsed unexpectedly (because of Watergate) and his personal promises were gone. Saigon despaired and desperately fought back when Hanoi did invade in 1975, after Nixon was gone and Congress forbad further American intervention.

Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city. Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April–May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos. The Ford administration's prediction that the Khmer Rouge would murder at least one million people<ref>Washington Post, June 4, 23, 1975</ref> was laughed off by liberal reporters. Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "''She Was Poor But She Was Honest''": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2 From an important study by genocide survivor Sophal Ear. Note that the source is, of all people, William Shawcross.</ref>

In one of [[Vietnam War#Aftermath|the largest mass killings since the Nazi Holocaust]], the victorious Communists murdered 3-4 million people throughout Indochina, including over 2 million killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia alone.

===Middle East===
One challenge to détente under Kissinger came with the outbreak of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Faced with a threat of Soviet intervention, Kissinger successfully urged that U.S. forces be placed on worldwide alert. With Israel facing possible defeat at the hands of the Arab aggressors, President Nixon launched the largest airlift in military history to replenish Israel's stocks (the left would condemn his actions no matter how big or how small, Nixon said, so "''let's make it big''"). Kissinger had urged Nixon to delay the airlift so as to let Israel "bleed a little", in the hopes that a badly bruised Israel would be more pliable to concessions in post-war negotiations, but Nixon refused.

When the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army at the end of the war, Kissinger believed that the United States had a tremendous opportunity. Egypt was now dependent on solely the United States for the survival of its Third Army, and Kissinger hoped that the United States could mediate the dispute and wean Egypt from Soviet influence. As a result, he exerted intense pressure on Israel not to destroy the Third Army and to allow it to receive non-military supplies. Among other things, he threatened that the United States would resupply the Third Army by helicopter, support a UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal to positions held before the Third Army's encirclement, and falsely told the Israelis that the Soviet Union had threatened to intervene over the Third Army.

Kissinger then employed shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and the Arab states and to restore U.S.-Egyptian diplomatic ties, broken since 1967. Kissinger's goal was to drive the Soviets out of Egypt by showing the Egyptians that only the United States could persuade Israel to make concessions. The US assisted in a vast rescue operation conducted by Israeli forces to save Egyptian troops stranded in the Sinai.<ref>The Times, UK, June 15, 1967.</ref> US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt continued past Nixon's term. Though negotiations were tough, with both sides sometimes intransigent, President Ford ended up securing the first peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, which would be finalized under President Carter. In turn, [[Jordan]] felt compelled to reach a separate peace, which resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994.

Kissinger and Nixon approved a covert [[CIA]] campaign of subversion and sabotage designed to weaken the Socialist government of [[Iraq]] in 1973. Done in collaboration with the [[Shah]] of neighboring [[Iran]], it involved Soviet arms captured from Egypt and [[Syria]] in the 1973 war being dispatched to Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. The Shah cynically used the Kurds to pressure the Ba'athist government to back down on a number of serious territorial disputes between the two nations. The US brokered a peace treaty between Iraq and Iran in 1975, and aid to the Kurds was subsequently cut off. The Kurds were then viciously slaughtered. "''Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,''" Kissinger famously declared.<ref>http://www.slate.com/id/2156400/</ref>

Kissinger helped to diffuse sectarian conflicts in [[Lebanon]] in order to prevent a possible regional war, and opposed the Soviet-backed attempt by Communist forces to conquer North [[Yemen]] (which was the recipient of much US aid).

On 20 July 1974, [[Turkey]] invaded northern [[Cyprus]], overthrew its Greek-backed dictatorship (headed by Nikos Sampson), and installed a new regime. This led to the collapse of the Greek military junta, and the restoration of democracy in Greece, three days later—July 23, 1974. Sampson had been brought to power by the Greek Cypriot national guard (acting under the orders of Athens), which ousted the elected president, Makarios; Turkey removed him from power after a mere eight days in office. "Had Turkey not intervened," Sampson told the Greek newspaper Eleftherotipia, "I would not only have proclaimed Enosis [union of Cyprus with Greece] but I would have annihilated the Turks in Cyprus as well."<ref>http://www.britains-smallwars.com/cyprus/Most%20wanted/most%20wanted%20files/EOKA_Members_List_s.html</ref> Turkey took control of one-third of the country. Civilian casualties were remarkably light. Turkey restored democracy to Cyprus, and new elections brought Glafcos Clerides to power. President Makarios, in his speech to the UN Security Council on 19 July 1974, described the coup that replaced him as "an invasion of Cyprus by Greece."

Both the Turks and the Greeks committed indiscriminate ethnic cleansing against the other side.<ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR01.html 1st Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (20 July 1974 - 18 May 1976)</ref><ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR02.html 2nd Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (19 May 1976 to 10 February 1983)</ref> Facts and information on the death and the burial site of 201 out of 500 cases of Turkish Cypriot "missing" persons were provided by the Cyprus government on 12 May 2003. A typical report stated:
<blockquote>
In a Greek raid on a small Turkish village near Limassol, 36 people out of a population of 200 were killed. The Greeks said that they had been given orders to kill the inhabitants of the Turkish villages before the Turkish forces arrived.<ref>Washington Post, 23 July 1974
</ref>
</blockquote>

Numerous studies reported accounts of "anti-Turkish pograms," hostage taking, and mass murder.

Kissinger approved of the Turkish invasion, viewing the Greek junta as a Cold War liability.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/NATO_Joseph_Luns_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger had resolved to find a solution to the Cyprus problem in May 1974.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/Dept_Of_State_Kissinger_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger intervened to prevent a planned British military response to the second phase of the Turkish invasion in order to avoid a war between the two American allies.

Some 70,000 Turkish civilians were displaced by the Greeks. It is estimated by independent sources that 140,000 to 160,000<ref>Borowiec, Andrew (2000), Cyprus: A Troubled Island. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp2</ref> Greek civilians were displaced by the Turkish invaders. Only 20,000 Greeks remained in the north. Five Americans disappeared during the Turkish invasion.

===Latin America===
The Nixon administration sought to protect the economic and commercial interests of the United States during a period of heightened Latin American nationalism and expropriations, 1969-74. Though the administration initially adopted a flexible policy toward Latin American governments that nationalized American corporations' assets, the influence of Nixon's economic ideology, domestic political pressures, and the advice of Secretary of the Treasury [[John Connally]], led to a more confrontational stance toward Latin American countries. As the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and Kissinger had warned, however, Latin American countries took an even more anti-US stance and expropriated even more assets. Nixon's "get tough" stance, therefore, had a negative effect on American credibility and influence in the hemisphere.<ref>Hal Brands, "Richard Nixon and Economic Nationalism in Latin America: the Problem of Expropriations, 1969-1974." ''Diplomacy & Statecraft'' 2007 18(1): 215-235. Issn: 0959-2296 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref>

The ''de facto'' Communist dictatorship in [[Chile]] headed by [[Salvador Allende]] (originally elected in 1970 with a minority of the vote) presented a major obstacle to American interests in the region.

The CIA, as recounted in the Church Committee report, was involved in various plots designed to remove Allende and then let the Chileans vote in a new election where he would not be a candidate: It tried to buy off the Chilean Congress to prevent his appointment, worked to sway public opinion against him to prevent his election, and financed protests designed to bring the country to a stand-still and make him resign.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> Convinced that a conventional military uprising was still not possible in Chile, the CIA, acting with the approval of the 40 Committee—the body charged with overseeing covert actions abroad—devised what in effect was a constitutional coup. The most expeditious way to prevent Allende from assuming office was somehow to convince the Chilean congress to confirm Alessandri as the winner of the election. Once elected by the congress, Alessandri—a party to the plot through intermediaries—was prepared to resign his presidency within a matter of days so that new elections could be held.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> The CIA also learned of a number of plots to establish a military dictatorship. Although it pointedly refused to materially assist any of them, and actually intervened to prevent one of the plots for fear it would fail and strengthen Allende; it also encouraged several of the plots and did nothing to prevent them. It assured the plotters that such an event would be welcomed in Washington and that the US would not cut off aid over potential human rights violations.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> In addition, the CIA provided funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973. Though the CIA maintained contact with a notorious right-wing extremist named Roberto Viaux, Nixon and Kissinger, recognizing that "nothing could be worse than an abortive coup," repeatedly relayed messages to him urging restraint and went to great lengths to deter him from staging a coup.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>

The extent of Kissinger's involvement in or support of these plans is a subject of controversy.

Although the US considered economic sanctions against the Allende regime, it never actually implemented them. Although Latin Americans viewed the US as omnipotent, future Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet mocked it as a paper tiger and felt free to launch terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., during his reign. The US ended up giving more aid to Allende's Chile than any of the prior administrations. The US worked to diffuse potential coups that it had once warmly encouraged, fearing that it would be blamed if they failed. Though hesitant and uneasy, the CIA vowed to "continue to put pressure on every Allende weak spot" even after his appointment. The CIA had warned that the odds of either a military or a constitutional coup succeeding were one in twenty; after they both failed to occur in 1970, US policy shifted towards maintaining a democratic opposition to the Allende regime.

US intelligence reports implicated Allende in the assassination of several opponents,<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf Includes discussion of intelligence reports of Allende-backed hit jobs; note that Cuban intelligence reached the same conclusion--hence the infamous "packages" scandal.</ref> while KGB files smuggled out of Russia by Vasily Mitrokhin indicate that Allende received funds from the Soviet Union.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Allende was formally condemned by Chile's parliament for systematically destroying democracy in Chile.<ref>“Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy,” Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies, Chile, August 22, 1973.</ref> The Chilean Chamber of Deputies Resolution of August 22, 1973, accused Allende of support of armed groups, torture, illegal arrests, muzzling the press, confiscating private property, and not allowing people to leave the country. In the infamous "Cuban Packages Scandal" that precipitated the coup, large quantities of weapons were sent from Castro's Cuba to arm pro-Allende terrorists in Chile.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Kissinger privately told Nixon that Allende might declare martial law.<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf</ref> By 1973, as a result of covert US aid to Chilean dissidents and financing of pro-democracy protestors, US intelligence indicated Allende would likely lose the next Chilean election if it was held.<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> According to ''The Wall Street Journal,'' faced with illegal seizures of farms and factories, of defiance of judicial orders, unchecked street violence and death threats against the judges themselves, the Supreme Court warned on May 26, 1973, in a unanimous and unprecedented message, that Chile faced "a peremptory or imminent breakdown of legality."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref> Inflation reached 1,000%. Volodia Teitelboim, the chief ideologue of the Communist Party in Chile, declared that if civil war came, "it probably would signify immense loss of human lives, between half a million and one million."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

On September 11, 1973, Allende committed suicide during a military coup launched by Army Commander-in-Chief [[Augusto Pinochet]], who became President. Allende's policies had turned the country into a dictatorship that would kill thousands.

On September 16, 1973, the following exchange about the coup took place between Kissinger and President Nixon:

: '''Nixon''': Nothing new of any importance or is there?
: '''Kissinger''': Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
: '''Nixon''': Isn't that something. Isn't that something.
: '''Kissinger''': I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
: '''Nixon''': Well we didn't – as you know – our hand doesn't show on this one though.
: '''Kissinger''': We didn't do it. I mean we helped them....created the conditions as great as possible.
: '''Nixon''': That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played.<ref>[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/chile.htm The Kissinger Telcons: Kissinger Telcons on Chile], National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123, edited by Peter Kornbluh, posted May 26, 2004. This particular dialogue can be found at [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/Box%2022,%20File%203,%20Telcon,%209-16-73%2011,50%20Mr.%20Kissinger-The%20Pres%202.pdf TELCON: September 16, 1973, 11:50 a.m. Kissinger Talking to Nixon]. Retrieved November 26, 2006.</ref>

Kissinger is clearly telling the President that any direct US role in such a coup would be abhorrent but that the coup itself was preferable to a Communist take-over (with both agreeing that the US did not assist the plot).

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago, telling him: "''My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.''"<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref>

Using its leverage over Pinochet to curtail Chilean human rights abuses, the US simultaneously pressured Chile to introduce a series of free market economic reforms, a process that escalated sharply in the eighties. This led to a period of rapid economic expansion and development without precedent in Latin America, in which growth averaged 7% annually, that came to be known as the "''miracle of Chile''" (it also included the region's greatest reductions in infant mortality<ref>Nick Eberstadt, The Poverty of Communism (Transaction Publishers, 1990), pp188,
196-206, 240-6, in which he discusses living standards in Communist Cuba versus Pinochet's Chile.</ref>). In turn, this allowed Chile to make a long-term transition to sustainable democratic rule that would likely have been otherwise inconceivable.<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

In [[Argentina]], the Socialist government of [[Isabel Perón]] had been persuaded to declare a state of emergency (suspending, among other rights, ''Habeas Corpus'') on February 5, 1975. Drafted so they may (in her words) "annihilate the subversives," the decree led to ''Operativo Independencia'', a military campaign notorious for the brutality it exacted on not only the violent; but also elected officials, magistrates and University of Tucumán faculty (even secondary school teachers). The Peronists' own political mainstay (the labor movement) was also subject to the "subversive" labels and consequent reprisals. The country plunged into a low-level civil war. Fighting between Communist and anti-Communist forces claimed nearly 1,000 lives, with widespread social chaos and inflation peaking at 33%, before the Argentine military, led by [[Jorge Videla]], deposed Perón on March 24, 1976.

As the new regime consolidated power, launching brutal reprisals and "disappearances" against political opponents, Kissinger took a similar line as he had toward Chile. During a meeting with Argentine foreign minister César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger assured him that the United States was an ally, but urged him to ''"get back to normal procedures"'' quickly before the U.S. Congress reconvened and had a chance to consider sanctions. The US cut-off aid in 1977 due to human rights violations.

Nixon sought a "special relationship" with [[Brazil]], and proposed a direct line of communication between the Brazilian and American Presidents. He appointed Kissinger to serve as a "special representative" to Brazil.

In [[Cuba]], Kissinger supported a renewal of diplomatic relations and cultural exchange with the [[Castro]] regime. Although President Ford repeatedly reached out to the Cubans; their military interventions in [[Angola]], [[Mozambique]], and [[Ethiopia]] destroyed Kissinger's hopes.

===South Asia===
During the South Asian crisis in 1971, the White House stood firmly behind Pakistani president Yahya Khan and demonstrated a disdain for India and particularly its leader, [[Indira Gandhi]], because of India's tilt or favoritism towards the Soviet Union. Kissinger had disdain for India and was using Pakistan as a tool to reach China, which he considered much more important to the U.S.

Khan's administration was responding to an insurrection launched by Communist guerillas (the ''Awami League''), armed with Indian weapons and demanding independence for East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with a massive campaign of violence dubbed "''Operation Searchlight.''" India was exploiting these internal tensions within Pakistan as part of a divide-and-rule strategy; it hoped for Pakistan's division into smaller Indian proxy states that could be played against one another and it used the violence committed by Pakistani forces as a possible pretext for military intervention in Pakistani affairs.

Nixon relayed messages to Yahya, urging him to restrain Pakistani forces.<ref>Black, Conrad, Richard Nixon: A Life in Full (2007), p. 751.</ref> His objective was to prevent a war and safeguard Pakistan's interests, though he feared an Indian invasion of West Pakistan that would lead to Indian domination of the sub-continent and strengthen the position of the [[Soviet Union]].<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877618-2,00.html</ref> Similarly, Yahya Khan feared that an independent Bangladesh could lead to the disintegration of Pakistan. Indian military support for Bengali guerillas led to war between India and Pakistan.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,878408,00.html</ref>

Nixon met with Indian Prime Minister [[Indira Gandhi]] and did not believe her assertion that she would not invade Pakistan;<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 752</ref> he did not trust her and once referred to her as an "old witch". Kissinger maintained that Nixon made specific proposals to Gandhi on a solution for the crisis, some of which she heard for the first time; for example, mutual withdrawal of troops from the Indo-East Pakistan borders. Nixon also expressed a wish to fix a time limit with Yahya for political accommodation in East Pakistan. Nixon asserted that India could count on US endeavors to ease the crisis within a short time. But, both Kissinger and Gandhi aide Jayakar maintained, Gandhi did not respond to these proposals. Kissinger noted that she “listened to what was in fact one of Nixon's better presentations with aloof indifference” but “took up none of the points.” Jayakar pointed out that Gandhi listened to Nixon “without a single comment, creating an impregnable space so that no real contact was possible.” She also refrained from assuring that India would follow Pakistan's suit if it withdrew from India's borders. As a result, the main agenda was “dropped altogether.”<ref>Jayakar, Indira Gandhi, p. 232; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 878 & 881-82.
</ref> On December 3, Yahya preemptively attacked the Indian Air Force and Gandhi retaliated, pushing into East Pakistan.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 753.</ref> Nixon issued a statement blaming Pakistan for starting the conflict and blaming India for escalating it, because he favored a cease-fire.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 755.</ref> The United States was secretly encouraging the shipment of military equipment from [[Iran]], [[Turkey]], and [[Jordan]] to Pakistan, reimbursing those countries despite Congressional objections.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79/</ref> The US used the threat of an aid cut-off to force Pakistan to back down, while its continued military aid to Islamabad prevented India from launching incursions deeper into the country. A cease fire was reached on December 16, leading to the creation of the independent state of [[Bangladesh]]. Sheikh Mujib led the newly established People's Republic of Bangladesh as a one-party, dictatorial state.

A 2008 study in the ''British Medical Journal'' concluded that 269,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the war.<ref>http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/269000_died_in_Bangladesh_war/articleshow/3147513.cms</ref> Reportedly, as many as 200,000 Bengali women were raped.

The US remained hostile to the Mujib regime, and considered Mujib himself to be a demagogue. His government's mismanagement of food grain stocks ultimately caused a massive famine in Bangladesh from March to December 1974, leading to the death of more than one million people. During this famine, Mujib rejected food aid from the United States and exported food to [[Cuba]]. By the time Mujib agreed to end support for Cuba, and the US began shipments of food to Bangladesh, it was 'too late for famine victims'.<ref>http://www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/opinions/dsharma/faminecommerce.htm</ref> In addition, his regime committed widespread human rights violations and tortured and executed thousands of dissidents. Nixon and Kissinger argued that these atrocities were far worse than anything Pakistan had committed in Bangladesh.

===Africa===
In the Angolan Civil War, the Communist MPLA (''People's Movement for the Liberation of [[Angola]]'') government was pitted against various right-wing insurgencies as well as an invasion from [[South Africa]]. The CIA covertly attempted to overthrow the MPLA dictatorship in 1975,<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35COXObeo8&feature=fvw Former CIA head in Angola discusses the operation on CNN</ref> but Cuba militarily intervened to save the regime from certain collapse. The Communist government subsequently killed up to one million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999</ref> The U.S., advised by Kissinger, supported the rebels FNLA (''National Front for the Liberation of Angola''), led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA (''National Union for the Total Independence of Angola''), led by [[Jonas Savimbi]], as well as the ''Mozambican National Resistance'' (RENAMO), and the invasion of Angola by South African troops. The FNLA was defeated and UNITA was forced to take its fight into the bush. Only under Reagan's presidency would U.S. support for UNITA return. (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Angola would be plagued for decades with constant civil war. In 1992, blatantly rigged elections were held with next to no international supervision, in which MPLA claimed victory. After 500,000 UNITA voters were disenfranchised, UNITA sent a peace delegation to the capital; all of its members, along with 20,000 civilian supporters, were brutally massacred.<ref>National Society for Human Rights, Ending the Angolan Conflict, Windhoek, Namibia, July 3, 2000</ref> Nevertheless, Savimbi remained supportive of the elections, until the MPLA systematically exterminated many tens of thousands of UNITA supporters throughout the country. Human rights observers have accused the MPLA of "genocidal atrocities," "systematic extermination," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."<ref>Namibia's National Human Rights Organisation, Press Releases, September 12, 2000, May 16, 2001</ref>

The Democrats in Congress cut off aid to UNITA under President Ford, just as they abandoned South Vietnam and Cambodia to murderous Communist bloodbath. "''A great nation cannot escape its responsibilities,''" Ford admonished them. Emboldened, Cuba would soon militarily intervene on behalf of the Communist dictatorship in [[Ethiopia]], which killed 1.25 million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Washington Post, March 18, 1978; New York Times, December 14, 1994.</ref>

The Nixon White House staunchly opposed the maniacal tyrant [[Idi Amin]] of [[Uganda]], who slaughtered 100-500,000 innocent people and ethnically cleansed<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/7/newsid_2492000/2492333.stm</ref> Uganda of all Asians. Amin was armed almost exclusively by the [[Soviet Union]] and [[Libya]]. The US urged Americans to evacuate the country, and began developing contingency plans to combat the regime's threatening posture in 1972.<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> Ambassador Thomas P. Melady described the Amin regime as "racist, erratic, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, militaristic, and, above all, xenophobic."<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> The British, fearful of a massacre, sought American help in preparing the logistics for an evacuation of the 7,000 British subjects in the country, should it prove necessary.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,906445-3,00.html</ref> Kissinger and Nixon agreed. On September 24, 1972, they had the following conversation:

: '''Nixon''': Isn’t a person a person, goddamnit? You know, they talk about Vietnam, ‘these people far away that we don’t know,’ and you remember Chamberlain talking about the Czechs, that they’re far away and we don’t know them very well? Well, goddamnit, people are people! … I’m getting tired of this business of letting these Africans beat a hundred thousand people to death and do nothing about it.
: '''Kissinger''': And all these bleeding hearts in this country who say we like to kill yellow people…
: '''Nixon''': That’s right!
: '''Kissinger''': There haven’t been as many killed in eight years of the war than were killed in three months in Burundi.
: '''Nixon''': …They’re talking about how many we have bombed in the North. And I told your staff to get the figures for me: How many South Vietnamese or anti-Communist North Vietnamese have been killed by the North Vietnamese government? Civilians! How many? It’s ''unbelievable''! Nobody gives a damn! … We need a new African policy. We shouldn’t have 42 ambassadors to these goddamn countries. Looking at Uganda, ''of course'' we have to help those 7,000 people!<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kph0lygo40</ref>

Amin was deposed by the armed forces of [[Tanzania]] on April 11, 1979.

===South East Asia===
Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan1.pdf</ref> To combat this dangerous expansionism, Kissinger closely aligned the United States with anti-Communist nations in the area, such as [[Suharto]]'s [[Indonesia]], which was once described as ''the greatest prize in Asia.'' As tens of thousands fled a Communist take-over in the small island of [[East Timor]] under horrible conditions following a civil war that resulted in the death or displacement of 9,000 individuals; Ford and Kissinger gave Suharto their approval to annex East Timor and remove the Soviet-backed Communist government.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf</ref> Over the 24-year occupation; some 140,000<ref>http://www.cavr-timorleste.org/en/Brief.htm</ref> East Timorese soldiers and civilians were killed by all sides, out of a population of less than a million. In 1975, 49% of all violent killings in East Timor were the work of the Communist (FRETELIN) resistance.<ref>http://www.ictj.org/static/Timor.CAVR.English/07.2_Unlawful_Killings_and_Enforced_Disappearances.pdf</ref> Although Congress wanted to stop arm sales to Indonesia, the Ford administration manipulated them by agreeing to an aid cut-off that was never actually implemented. In his own words, "Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law."<ref>http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/#29</ref>

Kissinger also worked to maintain good relations with [[Thailand]]. In order to prevent Communist hegemony in the area, he sought to deliberately provoke tension between the Vietnamese Stalinists and their Maoist comrades in Phnom Penh. In a 1975 meeting, he told Thailand's foreign minister: "We don't mind Chinese influence in Cambodia to balance North Vietnam. As I told the Chinese when we last met when we were discussing the Vietnamese victory in Indochina, it is possible to have an ideological victory which is a geopolitical defeat. The Chinese did not disagree with me."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/kissinger_chatichai.htm</ref>

In the end, Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia for more than a decade (killing many hundreds of thousands in the process<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref>). Bogged down in an endless guerilla war regularly dubbed ''Vietnam's Vietnam'' in the American press, Communist Vietnam was unable to advance its expansionist objectives abroad; as a result, no more dominos fell in the area.

===Personal Advice to Nixon===
In an April 17, 1973 conversation, Nixon told Kissinger that he was considering whether or not to resign and let [[Spiro Agnew]] take the Presidency, to which Kissinger responded: "''With all due respect, Mr. President, that is out of the question. That cannot be considered....Why should you do it? What good would it do? Whom would it help? It wouldn’t help the country; it wouldn’t help any of the individuals involved….and, of course, it would be personally unjust.''" He also asked him to consider what it would do to weaken the institution of the Presidency.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri3He6n1Dv4</ref>

===Losing power===
Despite his real accomplishments, Kissinger's tenure was marked by much controversy. Revelations of his knowledge of Nixon's secret bombings in [[Cambodia]] in 1969 and the U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970 stirred particularly strong hatreds on the left, as did later discoveries that he had authorized wiretaps aimed at stopping leaks of classified information.

Much more serious, however, was the attack from the right by Ronald Reagan, who rejected détente with the Soviets as a viable strategy, warning that the Soviets would see it as a sign of American weaknesses and mobilize its Third World allies to subvert pro-American governments wherever it could and expand Soviet influence. Reagan's analysis proved correct and Ford was forced to reduce Kissinger's role, taking away in 1975 Kissinger's double role as National Security Advisor.

In 1976 Ford was challenged by [[Ronald Reagan]] for the GOP nomination. Ford won a very long, close and intensely fought battle. Attacks on détente policy was the focus of Reagan's campaign as the GOP moved to the right on foreign policy. President [[Jimmy Carter]], however, did not recognize the failure of détente until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 destroyed that policy and reopened the [[Cold War]] at a more intense level.

Kissinger remained on as secretary of state until the end of the Ford term in January 1977.

==Retirement==
Out of office Kissinger became a highly visible corporate consultant on world affairs, and wrote his detailed and insightful memoirs. His advice has been sought out by every President since his retirement, and he was one of President [[George W. Bush]]'s most-frequent advisors on the [[Iraq War]]. He also helped design the Bush administration's opening to [[India]] in the wake of the War on Terror.

Kissinger has met with Russian leader [[Vladimir Putin]] on several occasions in an attempt to buttress US-Russian relations. Noting that the US has no border with Russia nor designs on Russian territory, as well as Russia's frontiers with both the Islamic world and China; Kissinger believes that the United States and Russia have compatible interests.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1690757_1691285-1,00.html></ref> He is apparently well-liked by some in the Russian press.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/europe/07russiasumm.html?_r=1 Although Russian TV calls him a "war criminal" due to his imaginary crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia.</ref>

Kissinger has strongly supported the foreign policy of President Bush, writing:

<blockquote>
Extraordinary advances of democracy have occurred in recent months: elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and Palestine; local elections in Saudi Arabia; Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; the opening up of the presidential election in Egypt; and upheavals against entrenched authoritarians in Kyrgyzstan. This welcome trend was partly triggered by President Bush’s Middle East policy and accelerated by his second inaugural address, which elevated the progress of freedom in the world to the defining objective of U.S. foreign policy.

Pundits have interpreted these events as a victory of “idealists” over “realists” in the debate over conduct of American foreign policy. In fact, the United States is probably the only country in which “realist” can be used as a pejorative epithet. No serious realist should claim that power is its own justification. No idealist should imply that power is irrelevant to the spread of ideals. The real issue is to establish a sense of proportion between these two essential elements of policy. Overemphasis of either leads to stagnation or overextension.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp051605.html</ref>
</blockquote>

He added in a separate piece:
<blockquote>
President Bush's visit has brought relations between India and the United States to an unprecedented level of cooperation and interdependence, which promises to make a seminal contribution to international peace and prosperity.
</blockquote>

Kissinger believes that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be worse than the consequences of defeat in Vietnam.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref>

Kissinger returned to teaching for a time after he left office, and today gives eloquent lectures and speeches across the United States. He has appeared regularly on a wide range of television stations to offer his insight, and frequently contributes editorials to newspapers.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles.html</ref> Conrad Black has praised Kissinger as "a political memoirist surpassed, if at all, only by [[Winston Churchill]] and [[Charles de Gaulle]]."

Kissinger delivered a beautiful and heartfelt eulogy for President Ford at his 2007 funeral.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/eulogies/010207.html</ref>

Throughout his life, Kissinger has enjoyed long-standing friendships with such notables as Katherine Graham, Walt Wriston, Beverly Sills, Bill Paley, Hans Morgenthau, Fritz Kraemer, Ahmet Ertegun, Sir James Goldsmith, Marion Dönhoff, Gianni Agnelli, John Aspinall, Rudolf Augstein, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John McCain, [[Mohammed Reza Pahlavi]],<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref> Anatoly Dobrynin and Bill and Pat Buckley.

Kissinger is a fan of [[soccer]].<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/nw061206.html</ref>

In the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis, Kissinger wrote:
<blockquote>
A major cause of the crisis has been the gap between the economic and the political organization of the world. The economic world has been globalized. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their national political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order. Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point. So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place, so far without achieving more than stemming incipient panic. International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
All these urgent issues are taking place against a background of a historic shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But there are much fewer trans-Pacific institutional ties with America than exist in the Atlantic. This raises the danger that, over time, the regions will confront each other as strategic and economic adversaries. The emergence of a new regional mercantilism and strategic confrontation by groups possessing large numbers of weapons of mass destruction needs to be resisted. This is why the U.S. relationship with China is so central. A relationship that started on both sides as essentially a strategic design to constrain a common adversary has evolved over the decades into a pillar of the international system. China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernization and reform of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods. Each side of the Pacific needs the cooperation of the other in addressing the consequences of the financial crisis.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/iht011209.html</ref>
</blockquote>

==Image and reputation==
Kissinger was loathed by some liberals who viewed him as a war criminal<ref>http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0611-03.htm</ref> and criticized by hardliners for [[detente]]. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for pulling the United States out of Vietnam.

Kissinger was a Machiavellian figure, skilled at manipulating people around him and currying favor in the media. At one point he admitted allowing secret wiretapping of his own aides' conversations.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref> The aura of Kissinger's influence was due partly to a cultivated image of high intelligence, including a PhD degree from Harvard University. He has been called "the only European-style realist" to head US foreign policy.

===Major Controversies===
[[Bryce Harlow]], former Eisenhower White House staff member, claimed to have "a double agent working in the White House....I kept Nixon informed." Harlow and Henry Kissinger (who was friendly with both campaigns and guaranteed a job in either a Humphrey or Nixon administration) separately predicted Johnson's "bombing halt": "The word is out that we are making an effort to throw the election to Humphrey. Nixon has been told of it," Democratic senator [[George Smathers]] informed Johnson. According to [[Robert Dallek]], Kissinger's advice "rested not on special knowledge of decision making at the White House but on an astute analyst's insight into what was happening." [[William Bundy]] stated that Kissinger obtained "no useful inside information" from his trip to Paris, and "almost any experienced Hanoi watcher might have come to the same conclusion". While Kissinger may have "hinted that his advice was based on contacts with the Paris delegation," this sort of "self-promotion....is at worst a minor and not uncommon practice, quite different from getting and reporting real secrets."<ref>[[Robert Dallek]] (2007), ''Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power'', HarperCollins, pp. 73-74.</ref> Nixon asked [[Anna Chennault]] to be his "channel to Mr. [[Nguyen van Thieu|Thieu]]"; Chennault agreed and periodically reported to [[John Mitchell]] that Thieu had no intention of attending a peace conference. On November 2, Chennault informed the South Vietnamese ambassador: "I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque who says his boss [Nixon] is going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer." In 1997, Chennault admitted that "I was constantly in touch with Nixon and Mitchell."<ref>Dallek, pp. 74-75.</ref> In response, Johnson ordered wire-tapping members of the Nixon campaign.<ref>Dallek, p. 75.</ref> Dallek wrote that Nixon's efforts "probably made no difference" because Thieu was unwilling to attend the talks and there was little chance of an agreement being reached before the election; however, his use of information provided by Harlow and Kissinger was morally questionable, and Humphrey's decision not to make Nixon's actions public was "an uncommon act of political decency."<ref>Dallek, pp. 77-78.</ref> [[Conrad Black]] agreed that there is "no evidence" connecting Kissinger, who was "playing a fairly innocuous double game of self-promotion", with attempts to undermine the peace talks. Black further commented that "the Democrats were outraged at Nixon, but what Johnson was doing was equally questionable", and there is "no evidence" that Thieu "needed much prompting to discern which side he favored in the U.S. election."<ref>[[Conrad Black]] (2007), ''Richard Nixon: A Life in Full'', PublicAffairs, p. 553.</ref>

Kissinger was also accused of intentionally abandoning South Vietnam to Communist forces, the accusation which probably hurts him most today. He responded to this charge as follows:
<blockquote>
When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and the number was still increasing. The official position of the Johnson administration had been that American withdrawal would only start six months after a North Vietnamese withdrawal. The "dove" platform of Sens. Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, which was rejected by the Democratic National Convention of 1968, advocated mutual withdrawal. No significant group at that time advocated unilateral withdrawal.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
A diplomatic alternative did not exist. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire the United States had to meet two preconditions: First, it had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army, and replace it with a Communist-dominated government. Second, the United States had to establish an unconditional timetable for withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of what happened in subsequent negotiations or how long these might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Given the horrors that occurred when the Communists took over Indochina in 1975, it must be said that Nixon correctly summed up the choices before him when he rejected the 1969 terms.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
When negotiations stalemated, the Nixon administration moved to implement what could be done unilaterally without undermining the political structure of South Vietnam. Between 1969 and 1972, it withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90 percent.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In Vietnam, a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the all-out North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the United States mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by President Nixon in January 1972 - and decried as unachievable in the American domestic debate. He said that "this new proposal is exactly what President Nixon has himself proposed: cease-fire, end of the war, release of the prisoners and troop withdrawal, and we propose a number of principles on political problems. You have also proposed this. And we shall leave to the South Vietnamese parties the settlement of these questions."
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American disunity was the major factor in dashing these hopes.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp061107.html</ref></blockquote>

Kissinger has also been accused of an alleged lack of transparency. He has responded by donating all of his personal papers to the [[Library of Congress]] for posterity. He recently released some 20,000 pages of transcripts of his private conversations with various world leaders.<ref>http://staff.lib.msu.edu/harris23/red_tape/o&e0404.htm#kissenger</ref> Such transcripts were the basis for his 2003 book on foreign policy, ''Crisis.''

In 1976, Kissinger "declined to approve" that a letter be sent to Chile warning them against carrying out any political assassinations.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> In an Aug. 30, 1976 memo, Shlaudeman discussed the possibility that the U.S. ambassador in Uruguay might be endangered by delivering a warning against assassination. The U.S. ambassador to Chile said that Pinochet might take as an insult any inference that he was connected with assassination plots.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> When the CIA learned about the Chilean plan to set up a covert office in Miami as part of Chile's overseas operations in 1974, however, Kissinger did authorize the CIA to send the Chilean Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) a warning not to go ahead with the plan. He rejected the State Department's proposal to publicly rebuke Chile on the matter. As a result, the Chileans backed down.<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref> Kissinger's decision not to send the letter is considered a subject of controversy because Chile was engaging in a spree of international murders at the time (the day the letter was to be sent, a Pinochet critic was assassinated in [[Washington, D.C.]]).<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref>

Kissinger's alleged warm support of Pinochet is without much basis in fact; Kissinger and Ford began viewing Pinochet's regime as a serious Cold War liability as early as 1975 and the US engaged in repeated diplomatic confrontations with it from 1977 on.<ref>http://www.cepchile.cl/dms/archivo_3236_1698/r92_fermandois_ing.pdf Translated from Spanish</ref> The CIA warned that "internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys;" therefore, the US had a vested interest in moderating the way they behaved.

The moderate left-wing extremist [[Christopher Hitchens]] has accused Kissinger of bad faith, describing him as a "toady" of Nixon who "knows what to do" without "being asked." He has also condemned Kissinger's business ties with Indonesia, arguing that they influenced the US "tilt" in favor of Suharto during the war in East Timor.<ref>http://www.etan.org/et2002a/february/01-09/09ksngr.htm</ref> In a general sense, Kissinger responded to these and similar charges by stating:
<blockquote>
When I was a young professor in the fifties at Harvard, where 99.9% of the people on the faculty were Democrats—I can remember only one Republican that I knew—the people in political science had faculty meetings…No one ever attacked the government for being a criminal activity. Nobody said, ‘they like to go to war; they’re blood-dripping!’ Sometime in the sixties, the idea developed that the government itself was an evil enterprise, that they lied professionally to the American people, and that the purpose of intellectuals was to negate the government rather than be constructive...Everybody working in government goes through the long hours and all the other pressures [associated with the job] because he or she would like to make a contribution to a better world.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9vsCD0j3Ys</ref>
</blockquote>

''Contra'' Hitchens, Kissinger attempted to resign from the Nixon White House on at least three separate occasions<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref>—not exactly the sort of thing one would expect from a "toady."

Conrad Black has written that "Kissinger has sincere compassion for the victims of the grinding wheels of history," although "he tends to take his distance from the beleaguered...during their ordeals." On Vietnam, he maintains that Kissinger "toiled demiurgically for the war's end without a disaster, and his anger [at the Democrats and the media] is real and earned." The "claims of the demented left," that he committed "crimes against Cambodia or Chile" are "bunk."

===The Schneider Affair===
The main controversy over the American role in Chile was an alleged attempt on the life of Chilean general Rene Schneider in 1970, due to his support for the appointment of Allende. The Church hearings found that the CIA did in fact give weapons to a group of men who it knew had attacked him twice before, ostensibly as a test of loyalty so that the CIA would remain privy to their information, but that the weapons provided and the group thereby armed were not the ones who actually killed him. The weapons were returned unused to the CIA and then discarded in the Pacific Ocean.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> Schneider was assassinated by a rival group of right-wing extremists.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> On June 11, 1971, Kissinger and Nixon said the following in a private conversation:

: '''Kissinger''': —when they did try to assassinate somebody, it took three attempts—
: '''Nixon''': Yeah.
: '''Kissinger''': —and he lived for three weeks afterwards.<ref>http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/07/nixon_tape_reveals_oval_office.html</ref>

There are two possible interpretations of these remarks: a) Kissinger was telling the President that a military coup could not succeed in Chile because there were no officers both willing and ''able'' to carry one out; or b) the two men were mocking the CIA's squeamishness about killing Schneider.

According to ''Commentary,'' however, regardless of what they said in the aftermath (quoting from the Nixon Tapes):
<blockquote>
"Kissinger seems to have been unaware of the plot...Karamassines phoned the National Security Adviser who asked if he "cleared everything in advance with you. He said no, you were too busy." In the same private conversation, Kissinger remarks that, although he did not know about the second plot, he might have approved it. Then he adds: "I thought that after we turned off that one thing [the Viaux plot], nothing more had happened and in fact that other thing [the Schneider kidnapping] had happened."<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>
</blockquote>

The death of Schneider had the opposite effect of what was intended by the Nixon administration—even as the CIA worked to buy off the Congress so as to prevent Allende's appointment, it ensured that the nation would rally behind the otherwise polarizing leader.

==Evaluation==
A smooth-talking, charming ''bon vivant,'' Kissinger was an international celebrity in high society, with the opposite personality of Nixon, yet they made a remarkably effective team with surprisingly little friction. They thought alike, and both could conceptualize and make plans for the complex interactions of international affairs. Neither was interested in economics, and only Nixon mastered the nitty gritty of politics and elections, while only Kissinger understood nuclear strategy.

Kissinger and Nixon were "realists" who deemphasized idealistic goals like anti-communism or promotion of democracy worldwide, because those goals were seen as too expensive in terms of America's economic capabilities. Instead of a Cold War they wanted peace, trade and cultural exchanges. Instead Nixon and Kissinger sought to downsize America's global commitments in proportion to its reduced economic, moral and political power. They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive; neither man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under Communism. Kissinger's realism fell out of fashion as idealism returned to American foreign policy with Carter's moralism emphasizing human rights, and Reagan's rollback strategy aimed at destroying Communism.

==Bibliography==

*Black, Conrad. ''Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full,'' PublicAffairs (2007), includes lengthy analysis of foreign policy.
* Bundy, William P. ''A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Web-Making-Foreign-Presidency/dp/186064273X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175404&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]
* Dallek, Robert. ''Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power'' (2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Nixon-Kissinger-Partners-Robert-Dallek/dp/0060722312/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], dual biography by leading scholar; hostile
* Garthoff, Raymond L. ''Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan '' (2nd ed. 1994) [http://www.amazon.com/Detente-Confrontation-American-Soviet-Relations-Reagan/dp/0815730411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175809&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], favorable analysis by proponent of detente
* Goh, Evelyn. ''Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961-1974: From "Red Menace" to "Tacit Ally."'' (2005). 299 pp.
* Goh, Evelyn. "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. Issn: 0145-2096 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "'Dr. Kissinger' or 'Mr. Henry'? Kissingerology, Thirty Years and Counting." ''Diplomatic History'' 2003 27(5): 637-676 full text at [[EBSCO]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "Ironies and Turning Points: Détente in Perspective," in Odd Arne Westad, ed. ''Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory'' (2000), pp 326–42; [http://www.amazon.com/Reviewing-Cold-War-Approaches-Interpretations/dp/0714681202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175936&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
*Horne, Alistair. "Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year" (2009); one of the best books on the man.
* Isaacson, Walter. ''Kissinger'' (1992); a major biography [http://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-Biography-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743286979/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577598&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Kuklick, Bruce. ''Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger.'' (2006). 241 pp. says nearly everyone with substantial academic credentials in the early Cold War decades was wrong nearly all the time.
* Litwak, Robert S. ''Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969-1976'' (1986)
* Macmillan, Margaret. ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)
* Mann, James. ''About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton'' (1999).
* Nelson, Keith L. ''The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam'' (1995)
* Qureshi, Lubna Zakia. "''"Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile'' (2009)
* Rodman, Peter. ''Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush,'' Knopf (2009).
* Ross, Robert S. ''Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989,'' Stanford University Press, 1995 [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=92018683 online edition]
* Schulzinger, Robert D. ''Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy.'' (1989).
* Serewicz, Lawrence W. ''America at the Brink of Empire: Rusk, Kissinger, And the Vietnam War'' (2007), stresses commitment to [[republicanism]] [http://www.amazon.com/America-Brink-Empire-Kissinger-Traditions/dp/0807131792/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-6 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=175941177686117 online review]
* Suri, Jeremi. ''Henry Kissinger and the American Century'' (2007), intellectual biography focused on pre-1969
* Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf. "Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China." ''Journal of American History'' 2005 92(1): 109-135. [http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/92.1/tucker.html in History Cooperative]
* Warner, Geoffrey. "Nixon, Kissinger and the Rapprochement with China, 1969-1972." ''International Affairs'' 2007 83(4): 763-781. Issn: 0020-5850 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Willbanks, James H. ''Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Abandoning-Vietnam-America-Left-South/dp/0700613315/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-15 excerpt and text search]

===Primary Sources===
* Kissinger, Henry. ''White House Years'' (1979). Nov. 1968-Jan. 1973; ''Years of Upheaval'' (1982). Jan. 1973 to Aug. 1974; ''Years of Renewal'' (1999), Aug. 1974 to Jan. 1977 [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Renewal-Henry-Kissinger/dp/075675383X/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-16 excerpt and text search vol 3]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political Thought of Metternich" ''The American Political Science Review,'' Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec., 1954), pp. 1017–1030 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1951008 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Congress of Vienna: A Reappraisal," ''World Politics,'' Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jan., 1956), pp. 264–280 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2008974 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22.'' (1957), his revised PhD dissertation.
* Kissinger, Henry. "Acceptance Speech" for The Nobel Peace Prize 1973 [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/kissinger-acceptance.html online edition]
* Kissinger, Henry. "Address to the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly," ''International Organization,'' Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer, 1974), pp. 573–583 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706310 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''American Foreign Policy'' (3rd ed. 1977), his speeches
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Kissinger Commission on Population and Development in Central America," ''Population and Development Review,'' Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 381–389 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1973103 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Diplomacy'' (1994) an interpretive history since 1815
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War'' (2003) [http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Vietnam-War-Involvement-Extrication/dp/074321532X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Haldeman, H. R. ''The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House'' (1994)
* Nixon, Richard. ''RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon'' (1981) [http://www.amazon.com/RN-Memoirs-Richard-Nixon/dp/0671707418/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577855&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]

==Online sources==
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB106/index.htm William Burr, ed. "Nixon's Trip to China Records now Completely Declassified, Including Kissinger Intelligence Briefing and Assurances on Taiwan" ''The National Security Archive'' (2003)]

== References ==
{{reflist|2}}
[[Category:Nobel laureates in Peace]]
[[Category:United States Secretaries of State]]
[[Category:Cold War]]
[[Category:United States History]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kissinger, Henry}}
[[Category:Diplomacy]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[Category:1960s]]
[[Category:Middle East]]
[[Category:American Jews]]
[[Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom award winners]]
[[Category:RINOs]]

Central Intelligence Agency

2016-01-10T04:50:19Z

JakeRMurrin: I must apologize for some of the errors I promoted on this site years ago. This section is entirely inaccurate. As the report makes clear, the goal was to incapacitate the colonel for 3 months, not to kill him; the target was colonel Fadhil al-Mahdawi.

[[Image:CIA HQ.jpg|thumb|right|The CIA Headquarters]]
The '''Central Intelligence Agency''', or CIA is an intelligence-gathering agency in the [[United States]] government. As the U.S.'s primary [[intelligence agency]], it is responsible for obtaining and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, entities, and persons, and reporting such information to the branches of the U.S. government. The head is the "Director of Central Intelligence" (DCI).

It is also involved in covert [[espionage]] and paramilitary operations in support of its mission to protect the national security of the United States.

Based in Langley, [[Virginia]], the CIA is a widespread organization spanning the globe.

==History==
[[Image:CIA Logo.gif|thumb|left|The CIA Seal]]
===OSS in World War II===
In 1941 President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] was relying on intelligence information provided by British intelligence (and slanted by them to favor their position.) In 1941 he created the '''OSS''' [[Office of Strategic Services]], which was the first independent US intelligence agency. Due to extensive Soviet-Communist penetration,<ref>[http://webroots.org/library/usamisc/oss-cia0.html ''The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency''], Michael Warner, CIA History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Published: United States Central Intelligence Agency, 2000. </ref> the OSS was disbanded after the war and its functions were split between the Departments of State and War. A Central Intelligence Group was reorganized in January 1946.<ref>https://www.cia.gov/kids-page/6-12th-grade/operation-history/history-of-the-cia.html#changing-face-of-intelligence</ref>

Every U.S. President since [[George Washington]] has used covert action as a part of their broader foreign policy, whether Republican or Democratic, [[Liberalism|liberal]] or conservative.<ref>Daugherty (2004), p.23.</ref> The majority of these covert action operations were successful.<ref name="Daugherty 2004, Preface XX">Daugherty (2004), Preface XX.</ref> Most of the operations that were not successful were directed by the President over the objections of the CIA.<ref name="Daugherty 2004, Preface XX"/> Some of the most controversial "covert action" programs, such as the [[Iran-Contra]] affair, were not primarily the work of the CIA.<ref>Daugherty (2004), p.30.</ref> Covert action programs are also much less expensive than overt political or military actions. The Pentagon commissioned a study to determine whether the CIA or the [[U.S. Department of Defense]] (DoD) should conduct covert action paramilitary operations. Their study determined that the CIA should maintain this capability and be the "sole government agency conducting covert action." The DoD found that, even under U.S. law, it does not have the legal authority to conduct covert action, nor the operational agility to carry out these types of missions.<ref>Study Urges CIA Not To Cede Paramilitary Functions to Pentagon, Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post Staff Writer, February 5, 2005; Page A08, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A168-2005Feb4.htm</ref> The operation in May 2011 that resulted in the death of [[Osama bin Laden]] was a covert action under the authority of the CIA.<ref name="washingtonpost1">{{cite news|url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/osama_bin_laden_killed_in_cia_operation/2011/05/01/AFLiqoVF_gallery.html?wprss=rss_national-security |title=Osama bin Laden killed in CIA operation |work=The Washington Post |accessdate=May 19, 2011 |date=May 8, 2011}}</ref><ref name="Dilanian">{{cite news|last=Dilanian |first=Ken |url=http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-osama-bin-laden-cia-20110502,0,6466214.story?track=rss |title=CIA led U.S. special forces mission against Osama bin Laden |work=Los Angeles Times |date=May 2, 2011 |accessdate=May 19, 2011}}</ref>

===CIA established 1947===
in 1944, [[William J. Donovan]], the OSS's head, proposed a new organization directly supervised by the President: "which will procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods and will at the same time provide intelligence guidance, determine national intelligence objectives, and correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies." Under Donovan's plan, a powerful, centralized civilian agency would have coordinated all the intelligence services, including those run by the military. He also proposed that this agency have authority to conduct "subversive operations abroad," but "no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad."

In September 1947, the National Security Act of 1947 established both the "National Security Council" and the Central Intelligence Agency. Americans, still mesmerized by the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor, welcomed the new spy agency because it seemed to promise the nation would always stay on alert. The CIA's Ivy League intellectuals and scions of high society contrasted sharply with the Pentagon brass; an adversarial relationship was born that still sours relations between the two. The CIA's budget was minuscule ($5 million) until NSC-68 in 1950 provided blueprints for an active Cold War.

====Congress====
From the start isolationists warned of the danger that the CIA might become an out-of-control "American Gestapo" like the Nazi secret police, which could trample American civil liberties On the other side was fear of a nuclear Pearl Harbor without warning.

In general Congress defered to the White House until the 1970s on intelligence matters. Only a few members of a few select committees had any legislative oversight; they kept floor debate and written records to a minimum. Congress supported covert action, even though Roscoe Hillenkoetter (DCI 1947-50) and Walter Bedell Smith (DCI 1950-53), both military men, showed little interest. President Eisenhower, by contrast, demanded more covert activities and Allen Dulles (DCI 1953-61) obliged.

Congressional support for more aggressive policies increased throughout the 1950s. Congress took its oversight responsibilities seriously and even challenged the CIA when an alarming intelligence failure, such as when the CIA failed to predict the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb (1950), the Korean War (1953), the [[Hungarian uprising]] (1956), or the U-2 downing (1960). Eisenhower discouraged Congressional probes of agency activities, but Dulles, sometimes gained Congressional support by leaking bits of information to influential conngressmen.<ref>David M. Barrett, ''The CIA & Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy'' (2005)</ref>

The CIA often functions as a resource to both individual legislators and congressional committees supplying related background and assessment for congressional decision. An example of this is the 1991 referral to the agency by Senator [[Jesse Helms]], ranking member of Minority Staff of the Committee on Foreign Relations, requesting information and verification of information coming from Israel concerning the survival of the passsengers and crew (including Cong. [[Larry McDonald]]) of [[Korean Airlines Flight 007]], shot down by the Soviets in 1983. Helms wrote his letter [http://www.rescue007.org/helms_letter.htm] to Boris Yelstin requesting the military communications of the shootdown and locations of camps holding suvivors based on the CIA response to his request [http://www.rescue007.org/nance_letter.htm].

===Soviet Estimates===
The CIA began systematic estimates of the Soviet economy during Max Millikan's tenure as the founding director of the Office of Research and Reports (1951-1952). The strategy was to start with an "inventory of ignorance" and then reduce the list of unknowns through successive approximations. Soviet military expenditures were estimated by the "building-block method," which began by estimating the number ships, planes, jeeps, barracks and even soldiers in use, then estimating the procurement and operating costs of each, and adding them up using estimated prices. The building blocks had advantages in that published data on physical units seemed accurate and in any case were easier to verify through covert means. The elaborate reports of the 1990s included almost 1800 such categories. Since the Soviets lackd computers and had rudimentary accounting procedures, the CIA had a better overall picture of Soviet military spending than did the Kremlin. The reports emphasized physical units, realizing that expenditures alone could not predict what sort of military threat in the future would be presented by the Red Army. To estimate costs the CIA used analogs--using Soviet trucks or American tanks, for instance, to estimate the costs of Soviet tanks--and then adjusted for differences in weight and performance. Analog-based data, far shakier than direct-cost data, accounted for over half of earlier estimates, dropping to about one-third by the late 1980s. In the 1960s the CIA increasingly used quantitative techniques, of the sort promoted in American business schools. A crisis in the mid-1970s was caused by as a combination of external pressures, new data (some from a key Russian who defected to the West) and internal works forced a major revision of the defense burden, showing the proportion of of the overall Soviet economy devoted to the military. The crisis sparked heated public debate when the CIA announced that their earlier estimates of Soviet defense spending at 6-8% of GNP was too low by as much as half; the revised estimated burden ranged from 11-13%, indicating a severe economic burden that slowed Soviet growth.<ref> Noel E. Firth and James H. Noren, ''Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates, 1950-1990.'' (1998)</ref>

===Directorate of Science & Technology===
The Directorate of Science & Technology was established to research, create, and manage technical collection disciplines and equipment. Many of its innovations were transferred to other intelligence organizations, or, as they became more overt, to the military services. Albert D. "Bud" Wheeler (1963-66) and Carl E. Duckett (1966-76) built the directorate into a strong component of the CIA and then guided it through its golden age of technical innovation. In contrast, decisions by Ruth David (1995-98) contributed, Richelson (2001) argues, to a decline in the importance and status of the directorate as it lost control over key responsibilities, including the analysis of satellite photography.

Richelson (2001) explains the major DS&T's achievements, especially reconnaissance airplanes and a series of increasingly sophisticated surveillance satellites, with cameras that could photograph Soviet bomber bases and missile sites with startling clarity from orbits deep in space. In 1960, the first effective satellite produced coverage of more than one million square miles, surpassing all previous U-2 photography combined. This imagery revealed that the Soviets had far fewer bombers and (later) [[ICBM|ICBMs]] than the Pentagon expected. The worst-case estimates of the U.S. Air Force proved wildly exaggerated, and the myths of the bomber and missile "gaps" were punctured by empirical data.

===Dulles years 1953-51===
[[Allen Dulles]], who had been a key OSS operations officer in Switzerland during the Second World War, took over from Smith, at a time where US policy was dominated by a containment policy, with serious discussions of roll-back policies going on, especially in the State Department. Dulles enjoyed a high degree of flexibility, as his brother, [[John Foster Dulles]], was simultaneously Secretary of State. Allen Dulles was head of CIA 1953-61.

Allen Dulles became the trusted advisor on what was going to happen in the world to President Eisenhower and to his brother John Foster Dulles. The CIA gathered information and provided written assessments of the capabilities and intentions of all world leaders. Its regular briefings gave each president the sense that he knew exactly what was happening across the globe. Like ingenious prognosticators through the ages, the CIA's predictions seemed highly explicit yet never could quite be pinned down. They failed to predict any of the major surprises of the postwar era. On the other hand, estimates of the performance of the Soviet economy proved much more accurate than the information Moscow itself possessed, and forecast the failure of that economy in the 1980s.

Numerous covert actions were launched to neutralize perceived Communist expansion in Iran and Guatemala. Some of the largest operations were aimed at [[Cuba]] after the coming to power of the communists in early 1960. In 1960-61 the CIA organized Cuban exiles, whose invasion of Cuba failed totally at the [[Bay of Pigs]] invasion.

Dulles devoted 80% of his much enlarged budget ($82 million) to covert (secret) operations to contain Communism. On the other side was the Soviet [[KGB]]. The head of the K.G.B.'s first chief directorate, Leonid Shabarshin later explained, "The essence of the KGB's active undertakings was to inflict political and moral damage on our basic opponent, the United States. . . . [so] We compromised political figures, organs of the press, and Americans whose activities were in some way unwelcome [to the Soviets]." The KGB veteran revealed that every "active measure" against the enemies of the Soviet Union abroad was submitted by KGB to the Politburo “and was implemented only with its permission. The results of the action were also reported to the Politburo."<ref> See [http://www.iwp.edu/news/newsID.139/news_detail.asp Herbert Romerstein, "Divide and Conquer: The KGB disinformation campaign against Ukrainians and Jews," ''Ukrainian Quarterly'' Fall 2004 online edition]</ref> Which side performed better remains an open question. CIA money subsidized anti-communist intellectuals and strengthened liberal political parties across Europe and the Third World. Striking low-cost successes early on reinforced the CIA's mastermind image. CIA-supported parties defeated the Communists in Italy and France in the late 1940s. A handful of agents provided assistance to opposition groups which forced anti-American prime ministers out of office in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). CIA counterintelligence tried to neutralize the KGB and other hostile agencies, like the GRU (Soviet military intelligence), Communist East Germany's [[Stasi]] and Cuba's DGI.

===Early Operations===
The principal problem facing the first generation of covert operators was murky objectives. Was covert action designed merely to "contain" the Soviet Union or to "roll it back?" Covert operations were handled by the CIA's "Office of Policy Coordination" (OPC). There was confusion on its mission OPC --was it merely to stir up trouble behind the Iron Curtain or to "liberate" and [[rollback]] the Kremlin's Eastern European satellites? One early covert operation was a total failure in Albania, where the OPC worked with Britain's [[MI6]] to train and deploy anti-communist commandos committed to overthrowing the Soviet-backed regime of Enver Hoxha. Frank Wisner, the first OPC director, regarded the Albanian operation as "a clinical experiment to see whether larger rollback operations would be feasible elsewhere," but [[Kim Philby]], a Soviet mole inside MI6, leaked the details to the Kremlin, with ghastly results for the anti-Hoxha forces.

The CIA supported resistance movements and dissidents in the communist regimes of [[Eastern Europe]] and the Soviet Union during the [[Cold War]]. One example is the counterespionage operations following the discovery of the Farewell dossier which some argue contributed to the fall of the Soviet regime.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002 |title=CIA slipped bugs to Soviets |work=[[Washington Post]] |publisher=[[NBC]] |date= |accessdate=2008-11-21}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/96unclass/farewell.htm |title=The Farewell Dossier|publisher=[[Central Intelligence Agency]] |date= |accessdate=2008-11-21}}</ref>

====Korea====
The CIA sponsored a variety of activities during the [[Korean War]]. These activities included maritime operations behind North Korean lines. Yong Do Island, connected by a rugged isthmus to Pusan, served as the base for those operations. These operations were carried out by well-trained Korean guerrillas. The four principal U.S. advisers responsible for the training and operational planning of those special missions were Dutch Kramer, Tom Curtis, George Atcheson and Joe Pagnella. All of these Paramilitary Operations Officers operated through a CIA front organization called the Joint Advisory Commission, Korea (JACK), headquartered at Tongnae, a village near Pusan, on the peninsula's southeast coast.<ref name="historynet.com">{{cite web|url=http://www.historynet.com/korean-war-cia-sponsored-secret-naval-raids.htm |title=Korean War: CIA-Sponsored Secret Naval Raids |publisher=History Net |accessdate=May 19, 2011}}</ref> These paramilitary teams were responsible for numerous maritime raids and ambushes behind North Korean lines, as well as [[prisoner of war]] rescue operations. These were the first maritime [[unconventional warfare]] units that trained indigenous forces as [[Proxy war|surrogates]]. They also provided a model, along with the other CIA-sponsored ground based paramilitary Korean operations, for the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) activities conducted by the U.S. military and the CIA/SAD in [[Vietnam]]. In addition, CIA paramilitary ground-based teams worked directly for U.S. military commanders, specifically with the 8th Army, on the "White Tiger" initiative. This initiative included inserting South Korean commandos and CIA Paramilitary Operations Officers prior to the two major amphibious assaults on [[North Korea]], including the landing at [[Inchon]].

====Iran 1953====
Prime Minister [[Mohammed Mossadegh]], originally elected in one of the Shah's elections, had driven out the Shah and become the de facto dictator of Iran, as he dissolved the Parliament and abolished free elections with a secret ballot, after declaring victory in a referendum where he claimed 99.9% of the vote.<ref>{{Cite news| url=http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-chapter2.html | title=Trying to Persuade a Reluctant Shah | work=The New York Times}}</ref> He gained power through organized terrorism and received funding from the [[KGB]].<ref>http://jebhemelli.net/mossadegh/mossaddegh_1951m_of_y%20Page%202.htm ''Time'' article from 1951 on Mossadegh's seizure of power</ref> Suppressing widespread discontent, as recounted in a 2003 ''Time Magazine'' report, he ordered police to violently massacre more than 300 unarmed protestors.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,450997-1,00.html</ref> Under his rule, Iran became the first Middle Eastern country to simply steal and nationalize Western oil fields--even though the Iranians did not know how to use them on their own.<ref>http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/index.php?news=2635</ref> The result was the total collapse of the Iranian economy. Iranian oil supplies were taken off the world market.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,450997-1,00.html</ref><ref>http://jebhemelli.net/mossadegh/mossaddegh_1951m_of_y%20Page%202.htm</ref> This doomed all future economic development in Iran, a "basket-case" nation plagued with rampant disease, illiteracy, and religious fanaticism.
President Truman had met with Mossadegh and pledged US support against the English, expressing admiration for his efforts at economic justice. His administration concluded that England sought "''a rule or ruin''" policy on Iran. The Eisenhower administration saw things rather differently.

When Mossadegh delayed settling with Anglo-Iranian Oil on the takeover of the company, the British, under [[Winston Churchill]], approached the CIA with a plan to remove the Premier. The British could not do it alone. Allen Dulles, the CIA director, and his brother John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State, agreed. The Dulles brothers assigned the task of overseeing the clandestine venture to intelligence operative Kermit Roosevelt.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,450997-1,00.html#ixzz16K23QRPB</ref> According to ''Time'':
<blockquote>
The CIA's fingerprints were everywhere. Operatives paid off Iranian newspaper editors to print pro-Shah and anti-Mossadegh stories. They produced their own stories and editorial cartoons and published fabricated interviews. They secured the cooperation of the Iranian military. They spread antigovernment rumors. They prepared phony documents to show secret agreements between Mossadegh and the local Communist Party. They masqueraded as communists, threatened conservative Muslim clerics and even staged a sham fire-bombing of the home of a religious leader. They incited rioters to set fire to a pro-Mossadegh newspaper. They stage-managed the appearance of Mossadegh's successor, General Zahedi, whose personal bank account they fattened.
</blockquote>

Mossadegh was overthrown, and the ousted [[Mohammed Reza Pahlavi| Shah]] returned to Iran in triumph. Cheering crowds trumpeted his return, as he promptly launched new electoral reforms introducing voting to all members of society--including women. Iran was praised in the West as a beacon of stability, and maintained close relations with the United States until 1979.

The administration of [[Bill Clinton]] formally apologized to Iran for the CIA-supported coup in a speech made in 2000.<ref>http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/speeches/albright-17-03-00.htm</ref> President [[Barack Obama]] also made a seperate apology.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/227855/zeal-zelaya/conrad-black</ref>

Conrad Black, arguing that the CIA role was minimal as compared to the efforts of the Iranian army and the internal fighting in Iran, mocked Obama over "''his apology for President Eisenhower’s approval of the overthrow of the deranged Iranian demagogue Mohammed Mossadegh.''"<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/227855/zeal-zelaya/conrad-black</ref>

====Guatemala 1954====
The CIA helped overthrow the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in [[Guatemala]] in 1954. This was one of its most controversial operations, its model for subsequent covert action against countries like [[Cuba]], and its first attempt at regime change in Latin America.

Arbenz was elected without a secret ballot. He considered himself a communist and joined the Communist Party in 1957. His land reform, designed by the Communist Party, was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which he then purged. His regime openly praised Stalin, relied on the communists for key decisions, and received arms from the Soviet
bloc.<ref>Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954
(Princeton University Press, 1991), pp84, 147, 145, 155, 181-2, a virtual hagiography of Arbenz.</ref> He killed hundreds of his opponents.<ref>“Antecedentes Inmediatos (1944-1961): El derrocamiento de Arbenz y la intervención militar de
1954,” in Comisión para el Esclaracimiento Histórico (CEH), Guatemala: Memoria Del Silencio
(Guatemala, 1999), Capítulo primero (findings of Guatemala's independant truth commission after the restoration of civilian rule and democracy)</ref> The CIA intervened because it feared that a communist dictatorship would become a Soviet beachhead in the Western Hemisphere.<ref>Nicholas Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operation in Guatemala,
1952-1954 (Stanford University Press, 1999) pp24-7, based on the CIA archives</ref>

The Truman administration began developing contingency plans to remove Arbenz in 1952, in the event that he became a threat to American interests in the region. In the face of widespread popular discontent in Guatemala and mass protests organized by the Catholic Church, the CIA used black propaganda to spread panic among the population. In the midst of a low-level internal civil war, the Eisenhower administration mobilized disaffected Guatemalan exiles to invade the country from neighboring [[Honduras]]. Arbenz, a fighter until the end, donned his colonel's uniform and prepared himself for war with the United States. Ultimately, however, there was very little fighting at all; the military failed to support Arbenz due to its own concerns over his perceived radicalism. The US-armed rebellion quickly took over the country, to the surprise of the CIA, which had expected much fiercer resistance. With the army promptly joining the revolt, Arbenz fled the country in a panic. He was allowed exile by the new regime.

Vice-President [[Richard Nixon]] praised the new elections held by the military regime, declaring that Guatemala represented "the first time in history that a Communist government has ever been overthrown and replaced by a free one." However, Guatemala would be plagued with instability for decades. A series of military coups rocked the country, as Soviet and Cuban support for Communist violence caused bloody civil strife. After a 1982 coup, Guatemala was placed under a US arms embargo imposed on human rights grounds. A vicious genocide reminiscent of the mass killing of the Hmong in [[Laos]] was then carried out against the Mayan Indians, in which scores of thousands were massacred.

In Guatemala in 1954, the CIA operation was marked by chronic lapses in security, the failure to plan beyond the operation's first stages, the Agency's poor understanding of the intentions of the Guatemalan Army, the local communist party (the Guatemalan Labor Party), and the government, the hopeless weakness of invasion leader Carlos Castillo Armas's troops, and the failure to make provisions for the possibility of defeat. Just as the entire operation seemed hopeless, and before there were any significant violent attacks against it, the leftist Guatemalan government suddenly, inexplicably collapsed and a pro-American government took over.<ref>Nick Cullather, ''Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954.'' (1999)</ref>

====Cuba====
The Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations approved initiatives for CIA-trained Cuban anti-communist exiles and refugees to land in [[Cuba]] and attempt to overthrow the government of Cuban leader [[Fidel Castro]]. Plans originally formed under Eisenhower were scaled back under Kennedy. The largest and most complicated coup effort, approved at White House level, was the [[Bay of Pigs]] operation.

The CIA made a number of attempts to assassinate Castro, often with White House approval, as in Operation Mongoose.

====Dominican Republic 1961====
The CIA supported the overthrow of [[Rafael Trujillo]], dictator of the [[Dominican Republic]], on 30 May 1961.<ref>Frank, Mitch. [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1004176,00.html "The CIA's Secret Army."] ''Time Magazine.'' February 3, 2003.</ref> In a report to the Deputy [[Attorney General of the United States]], CIA officials described the agency as having "no active part" in the assassination and only a "faint connection" with the groups that planned the killing,<ref>[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/family_jewels_wilderotter.pdf Justice Department Memo, 1975;] [[National Security Archive]]</ref> but the internal CIA investigation, by its Inspector General, "disclosed quite extensive Agency involvement with the plotters."<ref name="NSAEBB222-1973-05-08">{{citation
| url = http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm
| volume = George Washington University National Security Archives Electronic Briefing Book No. 222, "The CIA's Family Jewels"
| title = Memorandum for the Executive Secretary, CIA Management Committee. Subject: Potentially Embarrassing Agency Activities
| editor = Blanton, William (editor)
| date = 8 May 1973
}}</ref> Trujillo had killed 50,000 of his own people.

====Congo Crisis====
Humberto Fontova has written with his characteristic wit and élan:
<blockquote>
Later, many of these Cuban-American BOP vets itched to get back into the fight (but with ammo and air cover this time). The CIA obliged and sent them with ex-marine Rip Robertson to the Congo in ‘65. There they linked up with the legendary mercenary "Mad Mike" Hoare and his "Wild Geese."

Together Mad Mike, Rip and the Cubans made short work of the alternately Chinese-and Soviet-backed "Simbas" of Laurent Kabila, who were murdering, raping and munching (many were cannibals) their way through the defenseless Europeans still left in the recently abandoned Belgian colony.

Forget Frank Church and the Clintonites. Ask the hundreds of Europeans rescued from butchery (literally!) by these men. You'll hear a different song, believe me. You can read about their exploits in Hoare's book, "Congo Mercenary," and in Enrique Ros' "Cubanos Combatientes" (sadly, available only in Spanish).

Kabila made Idi Amin look like Gandhi. Castro, itching to be rid of this nuisance, sent Che (code-named "Tatu") and a force of his rebel army "veterans" to help these cannibals. The Congolese reds, unfamiliar with Che's true record, accepted Tatu gratefully.

The masterful "Tatu's" first order of business was plotting an attack on a garrison guarding a hydroelectric plant in a place called Front Bendela on the Kimbi River in Eastern Congo. His masterstroke was to be an elaborate ambush of the garrison.

The wily Tatu was stealthily leading his force into position when they heard shots. Whoops! ... Hey?! WHAT THE?! Ambushers became ambushed – and by the same garrison he thought was guarding the plant. Che lost half his men and barely escaped with his life.

....Thing was, any teen gang member in East L.A. or south Bronx has 10 times the battle experience and savvy of any of these strutting Fidelista "Comandantes." Imagine the Germans atop Monte Cassino outnumbering and outgunning the Allies 10 to 1 in early ‘44. Hell, they'd STILL be there. It was a defender's dream.

Well, the brilliant Tatu and his comandantes had that very set-up in a place called Fizi-Baraka in Eastern Congo for their second clash with the mad dogs of imperialism. Mad Mike and his CIA allies sized the place up and attacked. Within one day the mighty Che's entire force was scrambling away in panic, throwing away their arms, running and screaming like old ladies with rats running up their legs.<ref>http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/world/cuba/4455-the-real-che-guevara.html</ref>
</blockquote>

====Laos====
The CIA organized [[Hmong people|Hmong]] tribes to fight against the North Vietnamese-backed [[Pathet Lao]] communists in [[Laos]], and used [[Air America (airline)|Air America]] to "drop 46 million pounds of foodstuffs....transport tens of thousands of troops, conduct a highly successful photoreconnaissance program, and engage in numerous clandestine missions using night-vision glasses and state-of-the-art electronic equipment."<ref>Leary, William M. "CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955-1974." CIA. June 27, 2008. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art7.html</ref>

====Chile 1970-3====
The election of Marxist candidate [[Salvador Allende]] as President of Chile in September 1970 led President [[Richard Nixon]] to order that Allende not be allowed to take office.<ref name="The Pinochet File">{{cite book|last=Kornbluh|first=Peter|title=The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability|year=2003|publisher=The New Press|location=New York|isbn=1-56584-936-1}}</ref> Nixon pursued a vigorous campaign of covert resistance to Allende, first designed to convince the Chilean congress to confirm [[Jorge Alessandri]] as the winner of the election. When this failed, [[false flag]] operatives approached senior Chilean military officers, in "some two dozen contacts", with the message that "the U.S. desired....a coup."<ref name="The Pinochet File"/> Once Allende took office, extensive covert efforts continued with U.S.-funded [[black propaganda]] placed in ''[[El Mercurio]]'', strikes organized against Allende, and funding for Allende opponents. When ''El Mercurio'' requested significant funds for covert support in September 1971, “...in a rare example of presidential micromanagement of a covert operation, Nixon personally authorized the $700,000—and more if necessary—in covert funds to ''El Mercurio''<ref name="The Pinochet File"/>. Following an extended period of social, political, and economic unrest, General [[Augusto Pinochet]] assumed power in a violent coup d'état on September 11, 1973; among the dead was Allende.

The Chilean Chamber of Deputies accused Allende of support of armed groups, torture, illegal arrests, muzzling the press, confiscating private property, and not allowing people to leave the country.<ref>[[s:Agreement of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile|"Declaration on the Breakdown of Chile's Democracy,"]] Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies, Chile, August 22, 1973.</ref> Mark Falcoff credits the CIA with preserving democratic opposition to Allende and preventing the "consolidation" of his supposed "totalitarian project".<ref name="Kissinger and Chile">Falcoff, Mark, "Kissinger and Chile", ''Commentary,'' 2003. See also his ''Modern Chile.''</ref> However, Peter Kornbluh asserts that the CIA destabilized Chile and helped create the conditions for the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état]], which led to years of dictatorship under [[Augusto Pinochet]].<ref name="The Pinochet File"/>

====Iraq 1973-5====
The CIA armed Kurdish rebels fighting Ba'athist tyranny.

====Angola 1975====
In the Angolan Civil War, the Communist MPLA (''People's Movement for the Liberation of [[Angola]]'') government was pitted against various right-wing insurgencies as well as an invasion from [[South Africa]]. The CIA covertly attempted to overthrow the MPLA dictatorship in 1975,<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35COXObeo8&feature=fvw Former CIA head in Angola discusses the operation on CNN</ref> but Cuba militarily intervened to save the regime from certain collapse. The Communist government subsequently killed up to one million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999</ref> The U.S., advised by Kissinger, supported the rebels FNLA (''National Front for the Liberation of Angola''), led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA (''National Union for the Total Independence of Angola''), led by [[Jonas Savimbi]], as well as the ''Mozambican National Resistance'' (RENAMO), and the invasion of Angola by South African troops. The FNLA was defeated and UNITA was forced to take its fight into the bush. Only under Reagan's presidency would U.S. support for UNITA return. (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

The Democrats in Congress cut off aid to UNITA under President Ford, just as they abandoned South Vietnam and Cambodia to murderous Communist bloodbath. "''A great nation cannot escape its responsibilities,''" Ford admonished them. Emboldened, Cuba would soon militarily intervene on behalf of the Communist dictatorship in [[Ethiopia]], which killed 1.25 million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Washington Post, March 18, 1978; New York Times, December 14, 1994.</ref>

===Scandals===
Attacks on the CIA came to a head in the early 1970s, around the time of the [[Watergate scandal|Watergate]] political burglary affair. A dominant feature of political life during that period was the attempts of Congress to assert oversight of U.S. Presidency, take control of war-making, and more closely supervise the executive agencies.<ref> Kathryn S. Olmsted, ''Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI.'' (1996). 255 pp. </ref> Revelations about past CIA activities, such as assassinations and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders, illegal domestic spying on U.S. citizens, provided the opportunities to execute Congressional oversight of U.S. intelligence operations. Hastening the Central Intelligence Agency's fall from grace were the burglary of the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic Party by ex-CIA agents, and President [[Richard Nixon]]'s subsequent use of the CIA to impede the FBI's investigation of the burglary.<ref> In the famous "smoking gun" recording that led to President Nixon's resignation, Nixon ordered his chief of staff, [[H.R. Haldeman]], to tell the CIA that further investigation of Watergate would "open the whole can of worms" about the [[Bay of Pigs Invasion|Bay of Pigs]] of Cuba, and, therefore, that the CIA should tell the FBI to cease investigating the Watergate burglary, due to reasons of "national security".</ref>

The CIA sent hundreds of agents to Vietnam and Laos to build up anticommunist guerrilla groups. The CIA assisted (but did not actually operate) the "Phoenix" program by which South Vietnamese police forces identified and arrested Viet Cong leaders (torturing many and killing several thousand of them). In the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, it planned several assassinations, with [[Fidel Castro]] a target of "Operation Mongoose." Castro was never harmed. Indeed, as a hostile Senate committee concluded, the agency did not in fact assassinate anyone. Congress has never passed a law forbidding assassinations, but every president since Ford has issued executive orders that prohibit direct (or indirect) attempts at assassination.

===Revival under Reagan===
In 1981 President Reagan appointed his campaign manager [[Bill Casey]] to run the CIA; Casey, a dynamic veteran of O.S.S. espionage, revived the CIA into a powerful instrument of rollback policy. With nuclear deterrence tying the Kremlin's hands, Casey used the CIA to attack the weak links in the Soviet empire. In Afghanistan, it funded and trained Mujahidin guerrillas who deliberately created "another Vietnam" to weaken the Soviet invaders, and indeed finally did defeat the Soviet invasion. Anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan and Cambodia received strong support from Congress, but operations in Angola and especially Nicaragua became the focus of intense political controversy. When Congress one year prohibited the CIA from operating in Nicaragua, Reagan's White House exploited a loophole by sending its own staffer, [[Oliver North]], to funnel arms and money to the Contra guerrillas.

====Afghanistan 1978-89====
From 1950 to 1979, U.S. foreign assistance provided Afghanistan with more than $500 million in loans, grants, and surplus agricultural commodities to develop transportation facilities, increase agricultural production, expand the educational system, stimulate industry, and improve government administration. The [[Peace Corps]] was active in Afghanistan between 1962 and 1979.

After the April 1978 Saur Revolution, relations between the two nations deteriorated. In February 1979, U.S. Ambassador Adolph "Spike" Dubs was murdered in Kabul after Afghan security forces burst in on his kidnappers. The U.S. then reduced bilateral assistance and terminated a small military training program. All remaining assistance agreements were ended after the [[Soviet-Afghan War| Soviet invasion of Afghanistan]].

One of the CIA's longest and most expensive covert operations was the supplying of billions of dollars in arms to the Afghan mujahideen militants.<ref>Time Magazine, 13 May 2003, "The Oily Americans," http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,450997-2,00.html</ref> About $3 billion dollars were sent to equip them through the [[Pakistan]]i secret service, the ISI, in a program called ''Operation Cyclone''.

With US and other funding, the ISI armed and trained over 100,000 insurgents. On July 20, 1987, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country was announced pursuant to the negotiations that led to the Geneva Accords of 1988,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/co_mission/ungomap/background.html |title=United Nations Good Offices Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Background |publisher=United Nations |date= |accessdate=2008-11-21}}</ref> with the last Soviets leaving on February 15, 1989.

No Americans trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen.<ref>Bergen, Peter. Holy War, Inc. New York: Free Press, 2001. Pg.66</ref> The skittish CIA had fewer than 10 operatives in the region.<ref>The New Republic, "TRB FROM WASHINGTON, Back to Front" by Peter Beinart, October 8, 2001.</ref> Pakistan's secret service, [[Inter-Services Intelligence]] (ISI), was used as an intermediary for most of these activities to disguise the sources of support for the resistance.

The early foundations of [[al-Qaida]] were allegedly built in part on relationships and weaponry that came from the billions of dollars in U.S. support for the Afghan mujahadin during the war to expel Soviet forces from that country.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/10/27/we_arm_the_world.php |title=We Arm The World |work=TomPaine.com |date=October 27, 2006 |first=William D. |last=Hartung |accessdate=January 27, 2012 }}</ref> However, scholars such as [[Jason Burke]], [[Steve Coll]], [[Peter Bergen]], [[Christopher Andrew (historian)|Christopher Andrew]], and [[Vasily Mitrokhin]] have argued that Bin Laden was "outside of CIA eyesight" and that there is "no support" in any "reliable source" for "the claim that the CIA funded bin Laden or any of the other Arab volunteers who came to support the mujahideen."<ref>Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda (Penguin, 2003), p59.</ref><ref>Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (Penguin, 2006), p579n48.</ref><ref>Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden (Penguin, 2004), p87.</ref><ref>Peter Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know (Free Press, 2006), pp60-1.</ref>

Michael Johns, the former [[Heritage Foundation]] foreign policy analyst and [[White House]] speechwriter to President [[George H. W. Bush]], argued that "the Reagan-led effort to support [[Resistance movement|freedom fighters]] resisting Soviet oppression led successfully to the first major military defeat of the Soviet Union... Sending the Red Army packing from Afghanistan proved one of the single most important contributing factors in one of history's most profoundly positive and important developments."<ref>[http://michaeljohnsonfreedomandprosperity.blogspot.com/2008/01/charlie-wilsons-war-was-really-americas.html "Charlie Wilson's War Was Really America's War," by Michael Johns], January 19, 2008.</ref>

====Poland 1980-81====
The U.S. supported the [[Solidarity (Polish trade union)|Solidarity]] movement in [[Poland]], and—based on CIA intelligence—waged a public relations campaign to deter what the Carter administration felt was "an imminent move by large Soviet military forces into Poland." When the Polish government launched a crackdown of its own in 1981, however, Solidarity was not alerted. Potential explanations for this vary; some believe that the CIA was caught off guard, while others suggest that American policy-makers viewed an internal crackdown as preferable to an "inevitable Soviet intervention."<ref>MacEachin, Douglas J. [https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/us-intelligence-and-the-polish-crisis-1980-1981/index.htm "US Intelligence and the Polish Crisis 1980-1981."] CIA. June 28, 2008.</ref>

====Cambodia 1979-95====
The Reagan Administration sought to apply the [[Reagan Doctrine]] of aiding anti-Soviet resistance movements abroad to Cambodia, which was under Vietnamese occupation following the [[Cambodian genocide]] carried out by the Communist [[Khmer Rouge]]. The Vietnamese had installed a Communist dictatorship led by a Khmer Rouge dissident. According to R.J. Rummel; the Vietnamese invasion, occupation, puppet regime, ongoing guerilla warfare, and ensuing famine killed over one million Cambodians in addition to the roughly 2.2 million who had been killed by the Khmer Rouge.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> Ironically; the largest resistance movement fighting Cambodia's communist government was largely made up of members of the former Khmer Rouge regime, whose human rights record was among the worst of the 20th century. Therefore; Reagan authorized the provision of aid to a smaller Cambodian resistance movement, a coalition called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, known as the KPNLF and then run by Son Sann; in an effort to force an end to the Vietnamese occupation. Eventually, the Vietnamese withdrew.

====El Salvador 1980-92====
In the Salvadoran Civil War between the military-led government of El Salvador and the [[Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front]] (FMLN), a coalition or umbrella organization of five left-wing militias; the US supported the Salvadoran military government.<ref name="DiPiazza">{{Cite book|title=El Salvador in Pictures|author=Francesca Davis DiPiazza|page=32}}</ref><ref name="supply">(No author.)[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922440,00.html "Supply Line for a Junta,"] ''[[TIME Magazine]]'' March 16, 1981. Retrieved 2008-07-16.</ref> America also supported the centrist Christian Democrats, who were targets of death squads. The security forces were split between reformists and right-wing extremists, who used death squads to stop political and economic change. The Carter Administration repeatedly intervened to prevent right-wing coups. The Reagan Administration repeatedly threatened aid suspensions to halt right-wing atrocities. As a result, the death squads made plans to kill the American Ambassador.<ref>Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1982 (Christian Democrats killed); Washington Post, February 24, July 13, 1980 (Carter); New York Times, November 20, 26, December 12, 1983 (Reagan); New York Times, June 24, 1984, Washington Post, June 27, 1984 (Ambassador)</ref> After years of bloody fighting; the rebels were forced, in part due to US involvement, to concede defeat. The US then threatened to cut off aid to the Salvadoran regime unless it made democratic reforms, which might have let the rebels regroup. The regime accepted. As a result; a new Constitution was promulgated, the Armed Forces regulated, a ''civilian'' police force established, the FMLN metamorphosed from a guerrilla army to a political party that competed in free and fair elections, and an amnesty law was legislated in 1993.<ref>[http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37088 Amnesty Law Biggest Obstacle to Human Rights, Say Activists] by Raúl Gutiérrez, [[Inter Press Service News Agency]], May 19, 2007</ref> El Salvador is today a prosperous and democratic nation. In 2002, a BBC article about President [[George W. Bush]]'s visit to El Salvador reported that ''U.S. officials say that President George H.W. Bush's policies set the stage for peace, turning El Salvador into a democratic success story.''<ref name="brutal">[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1891145.stm "US role in Salvador's brutal war,"] BBC, March 24, 2002. Retrieved 2008-07-16.</ref>

====Nicaragua 1981-90====
After seizing power in Nicaragua, the Sandinista regime instituted dictatorial rule as early as December 1979, and formally announced a State of Emergency in 1982.
Under the new "Law for the Maintenance of Order and Public Security" the "Tribunales Populares Anti-Somozistas" allowed for the indefinite holding of suspected counter-revolutionaries without trial. The State of Emergency, however, most notably affected rights and guarantees contained in the "Statute on Rights and Guarantees of Nicaraguans. Many civil liberties were curtailed or canceled such as the freedom to organize demonstrations, the inviolability of the home, freedom of the press, freedom of speech and, the freedom to strike. <ref>West, W. Gordon. "The Sandista Record on Human Rights in Nicaragua (1979-1990)" http://www.reds.msh-paris.fr/publications/revue/pdf/ds22/ds022-03.pdf (PDF). Réseau Européen Droit et Société. Retrieved 2009-03-30.</ref>
All independent news program broadcasts were suspended. In total, twenty-four programs were cancelled. In addition, Sandinista censor Nelba Cecilia Blandón issued a decree ordering all radio stations to hook up every six hours to government radio station, La Voz de La Defensa de La Patria.<ref>Chomorro Cardenal, Jaime (1988). La Prensa, The Republic of Paper. University Freedom House. p. 20.</ref>
The rights affected also included certain procedural guarantees in the case of detention including habeas corpus.<ref>West, W. Gordon, ibid.</ref> The State of Emergency was not lifted during the 1984 elections. There were many instances where rallies of opposition parties were physically broken up by Sandinsta youth or pro-Sandinista mobs. Opponents to the State of Emergency argued its intent was to crush resistance to the FSLN. James Wheelock justified the actions of the Directorate by saying "... We are annulling the license of the false prophets and the oligarchs to attack the revolution.” <ref>"Behind the State of Emergency". Envío. November 1985. http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/3413. Retrieved 2008-02-16.</ref>

Jamie Glazov describes human rights under this goverment as follows: "All Nicaraguans had to take part in the Marxist experiment. Thus, in perfect Khmer Rouge style, the Sandinistas inflicted a ruthless forcible relocation of tens of thousands of Indians from their land. Like Stalin, they used state-created famine as a weapon against these "enemies of the people." The Sandinista army committed myriad atrocities against the Indian population, killing and imprisoning approximately 15,000 innocent people. The crimes included not only mass murders of innocent natives themselves, but a calculated liquidation of their entire leadership – as the Soviet army had perpetrated against the Poles in Katyn in 1943. According to the Nicaraguan Commission of Jurists, the Sandinistas carried out over 8,000 political executions within three years of the revolution. The number of "anti-revolutionary" Nicaraguans who had "disappeared" in Sanadinista hands or had died "trying to escape" were numbered in the thousands. By 1983, the number of political prisoners in the Sandinistas' ruthless tyranny were estimated at 20,000. Torture was institutionalized. Numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission, have documented the atrocious record of Sandinista human rights abuses, which stood as the worst in Latin America. Political prisoners in Sandinista prisons, such as in Las Tejas, were consistently beaten, deprived of sleep and tortured with electric shocks. They were routinely denied food and water and kept in dark cubicles that had a surface of less than one square meter, known as chiquitas (little ones). These cubicles were too small to sit up in, were completely dark and had no sanitation and almost no ventilation.”<ref>http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=25257</ref>

The Sandinistas sent Soviet helicopter gunships and elite army units to attack the Indians; carried out mass arrests, jailings and torture; burned down 65 Indian communities; inflicted ethnic cleansing on 70,000 Indians; and tried to starve the Indians by cutting off food supplies. The Sandinistas boasted that they were “ready to eliminate the last Miskito Indian to take Sandinism to the Atlantic Coast.” <ref>Roger Miranda and William Ratliff, The Civil War in Nicaragua (Transaction Publishers, 1993), pp253-4.</ref>

For decades, Nicaragua had experienced some of the fastest economic growth in the hemisphere. Within a few years of Sandinista rule, wages had been fixed below poverty level and there was mass unemployment. There were shortages of nearly all basic goods, with inflation at 30,000%. Government studies found that three-quarters of schoolchildren suffered from malnutrition, while living standards were lower than Haiti. The World Bank found that Nicaragua was on the economic level of Somalia.

From 1981-90, the CIA aids the Contra revolution, plants harbor mines and sinks civilian ships to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. After the Boland Amendment was enacted, it became illegal under U.S. law to fund the Contras; National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, Deputy National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter, National Security Council staffer Col. Oliver North and others continued an illegal operation to fund the Contras, leading to the Iran-Contra affair. The U.S argued that:<ref>"Nicaragua's role in revolutionary internationalism". U.S. Department of State Bulletin. 1986.</ref>

<blockquote>
The United States initially provided substantial economic assistance to the Sandinista-dominated regime. We were largely instrumental in the OAS action delegitimizing the Somoza regime and laying the groundwork for installation for the new junta. Later, when the Sandinista role in the Salvadoran conflict became clear, we sought through a combination of private diplomatic contacts and suspension of assistance to convince Nicaragua to halt its subversion. Later still, economic measures and further diplomatic efforts were employed to try to effect changes in Sandinista behavior.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Nicaragua's neighbors have asked for assistance against Nicaraguan aggression, and the United States has responded. Those countries have repeatedly and publicly made clear that they consider themselves to be the victims of aggression from Nicaragua, and that they desire United States assistance in meeting both subversive attacks and the conventional threat posed by the relatively immense Nicaraguan Armed Forces.
</blockquote>

Due to US pressure, the Sandinistas held a blatantly rigged<ref>Martin Kriele, “Power and Human Rights in Nicaragua,” German Comments, April 1986, pp56-7, 63-7, a chapter excerpted from his Nicaragua: Das blutende Herz Amerikas (Piper, 1986). See also Robert S. Leiken, “The Nicaraguan Tangle,” New York Review of Books, December 5, 1985 and “The Nicaraguan Tangle: Another Exchange,” New York Review of Books, June 26, 1986; Alfred G. Cuzan, Letter, Commentary, December 1985 and “The Latin American Studies Association vs. the United States,” Academic Questions, Summer 1994.</ref> election in 1984. On October 5, 1985 the Sandinistas broadened the 1982 State of Emergency and suspended many more civil rights. A new regulation also forced any organization outside of the government to first submit any statement it wanted to make public to the censorship bureau for prior censorship.<ref>Chamorro Cardenal, Jaime (1988). La Prensa, A Republic of Paper, Freedom House, p. 23.</ref>

As the Contras continued to advance due to US aid, the Sandinistas struggled to maintain power. They were overthrown in 1990, when they ended the SOE and held an election that all the main opposition parties were allowed to compete in. According to P.J. O'Rourke, the Sandinistas were forced to agree to the elections by the US and the Contras, and lost them despite "the unfair advantages of using state resources for party ends, the Sandinista control of the transit system that prevented UNO supporters from attending rallies, the Sandinista domination of the army that forced soldiers to vote for Ortega and the Sandinista bureaucracy keeping $3.3 million of U.S. campaign aid from getting to UNO while Daniel Ortega spent millions donated by overseas people and millions and millions more from the Nicaraguan treasury.”<ref>“The Return of the Death of Communism: Nicaragua, February 1990," a chapter in Give War a Chance... by P. J. O'Rourke. Grove Press; reprint edition (November 2003, ISBN 0-8021-4031-9).</ref>

The Contras and the United States were accused of war crimes{{fact}} for fighting against the brutal dictatorship. Nicaraguan voters in the 1990 elections, however, thought otherwise, thanking the US for liberating them from Communist slavery: "The longer they were in power, the worse things became. It was all lies, what they promised us" (unemployed person); "I thought it was going to be just like 1984, when the vote was not secret and there was not all these observers around" (market vendor); "Don’t you believe those lies [about fraud], I voted my conscience and my principles, and so did everyone else I know" (young mother); "the Sandinistas have mocked and abused the people, and now we have given our vote to [the opposition] UNO" (ex-Sandinista officer).<ref>New York Times, March 5, 1990.</ref>

====Angola 1980s====
War between the Cuban-backed [[MPLA]] government in [[Angola]] and South African-backed [[UNITA]] forces led to decades of civil war that may have cost as many as 1 million lives.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, "Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation," August 1999</ref> The Reagan administration offered covert aid to the anti-communist [[UNITA]] rebels, led by [[Jonas Savimbi]]. Dr. Peter Hammond, a Christian missionary who lived in Angola at the time, recalled:

<blockquote>"There were over 50,000 Cuban troops in the country. The communists had attacked and destroyed many churches. MiG-23s and Mi-24 Hind helicopter gun ships were terrorising villagers in Angola. I documented numerous atrocities, including the strafing of villages, schools and churches. In 1986, I remember hearing Ronald Reagan's speech – carried on the BBC Africa service – by short wave radio: "We are going to send stinger missiles to the UNITA Freedom Fighters in Angola!" Those who were listening to the SW radio with me looked at one another in stunned amazement. After a long silence as we wondered if our ears had actually heard what we thought we heard, one of us said: "That would be nice!" We scarcely dared believe that it would happen. But it did. Not long afterwards the stinger missiles began to arrive in UNITA controlled Free Angola. Soviet aircraft were shot down. The bombing and strafing of villagers, schools and churches came to an end. Without any doubt, Ronald Reagan's policies saved many tens of thousands of lives in Angola."<ref>Hammond, Peter,[http://frontline-org-za.win03.glodns.net/articles/reagan.htm Reagan Saved Lives in Angola], ''FrontLine Fellowship,'' accessed August 9, 2012.</ref></blockquote>

Human rights observers have accused the MPLA of "genocidal atrocities," "systematic extermination," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."<ref>National Society for Human Rights, Press Releases, September 12, 2000, May 16, 2001.</ref> The MPLA held blatantly rigged elections in 1992, which were rejected by eight opposition parties. An official observer wrote that there was little UN supervision, that 500,000 UNITA voters were disenfranchised and that there were 100 clandestine polling stations. UNITA sent peace negotiators to the capital, where the MPLA murdered them, along with 20,000 UNITA members. Savimbi was still ready to continue the elections. The MPLA then massacred tens of thousands of UNITA and [[FNLA]] voters nationwide.<ref>National Society for Human Rights, Ending the Angolan Conflict, Windhoek, Namibia, July 3, 2000.</ref><ref>John Matthew, Letters, The Times, UK, November 6, 1992 (election observer).</ref>

====Afghanistan 2001====
In 2001, the CIA's [[Special Activities Division]] units were the first U.S. forces to enter Afghanistan. Their efforts organized the [[Afghan Northern Alliance]] for the subsequent arrival of [[United States Special Operations Command|USSOCOM]] forces. The plan for the invasion of Afghanistan was developed by the CIA, the first time in United States history that such a large-scale military operation was planned by the CIA.<ref name="channel.nationalgeographic.com">{{cite web|url=http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/cia-confidential/4199/Overview |title=CIA Confidential , Hunt for Bin Laden , National Geographic Channel |publisher=Channel.nationalgeographic.com |accessdate=May 19, 2011}}</ref> SAD, U.S. Army Special Forces and the [[Northern Alliance]] combined to overthrow the [[Taliban]] in Afghanistan with minimal loss of U.S. lives. They did this without the need for U.S. military conventional ground forces.<ref>{{cite book |title=First In: An insiders account of how the CIA spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan |first=Gary |last=Schroen |year=2005}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |title=Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: A personal account by the CIA's field Commander |first=Gary |last=Berntsen |coauthors=Ralph Pezzulla |publisher=Crown |isbn=978-0-307-23740-8 |year=2005}}</ref><ref>Woodward, Bob (2002) "Bush at War", Simon & Schuster, Inc.</ref>

The [[Washington Post]] stated in an editorial by [[John Lehman]] in 2006:

:"What made the Afghan campaign a landmark in the U.S. Military's history is that it was prosecuted by Special Operations forces from all the services, along with Navy and Air Force tactical power, operations by the Afghan Northern Alliance and the CIA were equally important and fully integrated. No large Army or Marine force was employed".<ref>Washington Post Editorial, John Lehman former Secretary of the Navy, October 2008</ref>

In a 2008 [[New York Times]] book review of ''Horse Soldiers'', a book by [[Doug Stanton]] about the invasion of Afghanistan, [[Bruce Barcott]] wrote:

:"The valor exhibited by Afghan and American soldiers, fighting to free Afghanistan from a horribly cruel regime, will inspire even the most jaded reader. The stunning victory of the horse soldiers – 350 Special Forces soldiers, 100 C.I.A. officers and 15,000 Northern Alliance fighters routing a Taliban army 50,000 strong – deserves a hallowed place in American military history".<ref>{{cite news| url=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/books/review/Barcott-t.html?pagewanted=2 | work=The New York Times | title=Special Forces | first=Bruce | last=Barcott | date=May 17, 2009 | accessdate=March 27, 2010}}</ref>

====Iraq war====
The mission that captured Saddam Hussein was called "[[Operation Red Dawn]]". It was planned and carried out by the JSOC's Delta Force and SAD/SOG teams (together called [[Task Force 121]]). The operation eventually included around 600 soldiers from the 1st Brigade of the [[4th Infantry Division (United States)|4th Infantry Division]].<ref name="Iraq War 2004">'Black ops' shine in Iraq War, VFW Magazine, Feb, 2004, Tim Dyhouse.</ref><ref>"Saddam 'caught like a rat' in a hole". CNN. December 15, 2003. http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/12/14/sprj.irq.saddam.operation/index.html?iref=newssearch.</ref> Special operations troops probably numbered around 40. Much of the publicity and credit for the capture went to the 4th Infantry Division soldiers, but CIA and JSOC were the driving force. "Task Force 121 were actually the ones who pulled Saddam out of the hole" said Robert Andrews, former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. "They can't be denied a role anymore."<ref name="Iraq War 2004"/>

CIA paramilitary units continued to team up with the JSOC in Iraq and in 2007 the combination created a lethal force many credit with having a major impact in the success of "[[the Surge]]". They did this by killing or capturing many of the key al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq.<ref name='Woodward 2008'>Woodward, Bob. (2008) The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006–2008. Simon and Schuster</ref><ref>{{cite news| url=http://us.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/09/09/iraq.secret/index.html |publisher=CNN | accessdate=March 30, 2010 | title=Secret killing program is key in Iraq, Woodward says | date=September 9, 2008}}</ref> In a [[CBS]] [[60 Minutes]] interview, [[Pulitzer Prize]]-winning journalist [[Bob Woodward]] described a new special operations capability that allowed for this success. This capability was developed by the joint teams of CIA and JSOC.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns_3VpOEkzM |title=‪Bob Woodward "60 Minutes" Highlights‬‏ |publisher=YouTube |date=September 7, 2008 |accessdate=May 19, 2011}}</ref> Several senior U.S. officials stated that the "joint efforts of JSOC and CIA paramilitary units was the most significant contributor to the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq".<ref name='Woodward 2008'/><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104561441 |title=New U.S. Commander In Afghanistan To Be Tested |publisher=NPR |accessdate=May 19, 2011}}</ref> The CIA's Phoneix Program played a similar role in decimating Viet Cong insurgents during the Vietnam war.

====Libya 2011====
After the [[Arab Spring]] movement overthrew the rulers of [[Tunisia]] and [[Egypt]], its neighbours to the west and east respectively, Libya had a major revolt beginning in February 2011.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/02/17/live-blog-libya |title=Live Blog – Libya , Al Jazeera Blogs |publisher=Blogs.aljazeera.net |date=February 17, 2011 |accessdate=February 23, 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://archive.libyafeb17.com/category/newsfeed/ |title=News ,t Libya February 17th |publisher=Libyafeb17.com |accessdate=February 23, 2011}}</ref> In response, the [[Obama administration]] sent in CIA [[Special Activities Division]] paramilitary operatives to assess the situation and gather information on the opposition forces.<ref>{{cite web|last=Allen |first=Bennett |url=http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/03/cia-operatives-on-the-ground-in-libya.html |title=C.I.A. Operatives on the Ground in Libya , VF Daily |publisher=Vanity Fair |accessdate=May 19, 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|last=Levinson |first=Charles |url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704530204576235170339510798.html?mod=googlenews_wsj |title=Ragtag Rebels Struggle in Battle |work=The Wall Street Journal |date=April 1, 2011 |accessdate=May 19, 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|last=Michael |first=Vicker |url=http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-20/news/31212864_1_stratfor-provides-syrian-opposition-regime-change|title=The US Government Sent CIA / Blackwater Veteran To Fight With Rebels In Libya And Syria |publisher=Business Insider |accessdate=March 24, 2012}}</ref>

During the early phases of the Libyan air strike offensive, paramilitary operatives assisted in the recovery of a U.S. Air Force pilot who had crashed due to mechanical problems.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.dailybreeze.com/latestnews/ci_17742586?source=pkg |title=UPDATED: Gates calls for limited role aiding Libyan rebels |publisher=The Daily Breeze |date=March 9, 2010 |accessdate=May 19, 2011}}</ref> There was also speculation in ''[[The Washington Post]]'' that President Obama issued a covert action finding in March 2011 that authorized the CIA to carry out a clandestine effort to provide arms and support to the Libyan opposition.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-libya-cia-is-gathering-intelligence-on-rebels/2011/03/30/AFLyb25B_story.html |title=In Libya, CIA is gathering intelligence on rebels |work=The Washington Post |date=March 30, 2011 |accessdate=May 19, 2011 |first=Greg |last=Jaffe}}</ref>

[[Muammar Gaddafi]] was ultimately overthrown in the [[Libyan War]].

====Drone war in Pakistan====
Analysis by the [[RAND Corporation]] suggests that "drone strikes are associated with decreases in both the frequency and the lethality of militant attacks overall and in IED and suicide attacks specifically."<ref>Johnston, Patrick B., and Anoop Sarbahi, [http://patrickjohnston.info/materials/drones.pdf The Impact of U.S. Drone Strikes on Terrorism in Pakistan], RAND Corporation, 25 February 2012.</ref> Civilian deaths from drone strikes fell to 1-2% of the total in 2012.

===9-11===
A major criticism is failure to forestall the [[9-11 Attack]] in 2001 because of three organizational deficiencies: the inability of multiple American intelligence agencies to work together, organizational incentives to take the wrong analytical actions, and resistance to new technologies and ideas.<ref>Amy B. Zegart, "CNN with Secrets": 9/11, the CIA, and the Organizational Roots of Failure." ''International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence'' 2007 20(1): 18-49. Issn: 0885-0607 </ref> The ''9/11 Commission Report'' identifies failures in the IC as a whole. One problem, for example, was the FBI failing to "connect the dots" by sharing information among its decentralized field offices. The report, however, criticizes both CIA analysis, and impeding their investigation. The CIA Inspector General in 2007 concluded that former DCI [[George Tenet]] failed to adequately prepare the agency to deal with the danger posed by [[Al Qaeda]] prior to the [[9-11 Attack]].

==Image and Reputation==
Cloak and dagger stories became part of the popular culture of the Cold War in both East and West, with innumerable novels and movies that showed how polarized and dangerous the world was. Soviet audiences thrilled at spy stories showing how their KGB agents protected the motherland by foiling dirty work by America's nefarious CIA, Britain's devious MI 6, and Israel's devilish Mossad. After 1963, Hollywood increasingly depicted the CIA as clowns (as in the comedy TV series "Get Smart") or villains (as in Oliver Stone's "JFK" (1992). In the genre of spy thrillers, the films 'Three Days of the Condor' (1975) and 'Spy Game' (2001) have been among the top box office attractions in American cinema. They both star Robert Redford and both portray the CIA as a wicked organization.<ref>Loch K. Johnson, "Spies In The American Movies: Hollywood's Take On Lese Majeste." ''Intelligence & National Security'' 2008 23(1): 5-24 </ref> The plotlines of Robert Ludlum's novel 'The Bourne Identity' (1980) and the 2002 film based on the novel mix truth and fiction. Some topics are distorted while others stick very closely to the truth. Congressional oversight, ethical dilemmas tied to assassination, and real-life antagonists play significant roles in both the novel and the film. In the book the antagonists are terrorists, particularly Carlos the Jackal, but in the movie version the 'bad people' are CIA officials. Although the antagonist changes between the novel and the film, they both are realistic aspects that draw the audience in.<ref>Shannon Mollie Eppa, "The Bourne Actuality: A Look at Reality's Role in the Bourne Identity Novel and Film" ''Intelligence & National Security'' 2008 23(1): 103-111 </ref>

Leftists around the globe routinely blamed the mysterious CIA for events that displeased them, putting the image of the USA as a champion of freedom and democracy in disrepute. The CIA lost influence after 1963. President [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] disliked its pessimistic forecasts about Vietnam; President [[Richard M. Nixon]] and his national security advisor [[Henry Kissinger]] did not seek its advice. After Watergate (1974) it came under heavy attack for promoting right-wing governments, hampering the success of genuinely democratic protest movements, illegally monitoring dissent inside the USA, and frustrating democracy at home by its secrecy and lack of accountability. Was it needed in an age of detente? With 15,000 employees in 1973, it had a budget of about $740 million, of which $440 went to clandestine operations. Congressional committees began to monitor the agency closely. Employment and budgets were cut sharply (the totals are secret), and most covert operations were abandoned. Morale plummeted as the agency retreated to a mission of collecting and interpreting information about the Soviets.

==See Also==
[[Korean Airlines Flight 007]] - [[Jesse Helms]]/CIA verification of survivor reports

==External Links==
* [https://www.cia.gov/ CIA website]
* [https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/history-of-the-cia/index.html CIA history], CIA official website
** [https://www.cia.gov/kids-page/6-12th-grade/operation-history/history-of-the-cia.html CIA history], CIA website aimed at students

==Bibliography==
===Surveys===
* Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri and Andrew, Christopher, eds. ''Eternal Vigilance? 50 Years of the CIA.'' (1997). 246 pp.
* Powers, Thomas. ''Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Wars-American-Al-Qaeda-Collections/dp/1590170989/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210939963&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]
* Ranelagh, John. ''The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. From Wild Bill Donovan to William Casey.'' (1986). 847 pp
* Rositzke, Harry. ''The CIA's Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage, and Covert Action'' (1988) 290 pp. [http://www.questia.com/read/82295474?title=The%20CIA's%20Secret%20Operations%3a%20Espionage%2c%20Counterespionage%2c%20and%20Covert%20Action online edition]
* Trahair, Richard C. S. ''Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies, and Secret Operations'' (2004) [http://www.questia.com/SM.qst?act=adv&contributors=Richard%20C.%20S.%20Trahair&dcontributors=Richard%20C.%20S.%20Trahair online edition]
* Weiner, Tim. ''Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA'' (2008) [http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/0307389006/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254153112&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]

===Special topics===
* Arbel, David, and Ran Edelist. ''Western Intelligence and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1980-1990: Ten Years That Did Not Shake the World'' (2003) [http://www.questia.com/read/108511611?title=Western%20Intelligence%20and%20the%20Collapse%20of%20the%20Soviet%20Union%2c%201980-1990%3a%20%20Ten%20Years%20That%20Did%20Not%20Shake%20the%20World online edition]
* Barrett, David M. ''The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy.'' (2005). 542 pp.
* Coll, Steve. ''Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.'' (2004) 695 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210940048&sr=1-4 excerpt and text search]
* Conboy, Kenneth and Morrison, James. ''The CIA's Secret War in Tibet.'' (2002). 301 pp. Covers the entire history of CIA support for armed Tibetan opposition to Chinese rule: from the seizure of Lhasa in August 1951 and subsequent flight of the Dalai Lama, to the rout of the last Tibetan guerrilla redoubt by the Royal Nepalese Army in 1974. It is a record of almost unmitigated failure. [http://www.amazon.com/CIAs-Secret-War-Tibet/dp/0700611592/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210940048&sr=1-10 excerpt and text search]
* Darling, Arthur B. ''The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950'' (1990) [http://www.questia.com/read/23121271?title=The%20Central%20Intelligence%20Agency%3a%20An%20Instrument%20of%20Government%2c%20to%201950 online edition]
* Firth, Noel E. and Noren, James H. ''Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates, 1950-1990.'' (1998). 291 pp. [http://www.questia.com/read/8097712?title=Soviet%20Defense%20Spending%3a%20A%20History%20of%20CIA%20Estimates%2c%201950-1990 online edition]
* Grant, Zalin. ''Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam.'' (1991). 395 pp.
* Haines, Gerald K. "An Emerging New Field of Study: U.S. Intelligence." ''Diplomatic History,'' June 2004, Vol. 28 Issue 3, pp 441-449, in [[EBSCO]]
* Higgins, Trumbull. ''The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs.'' (1987). 224 pp. [http://www.questia.com/read/105410511?title=The%20Perfect%20Failure%3a%20%20Kennedy%2c%20Eisenhower%2c%20and%20the%20CIA%20at%20the%20Bay%20of%20Pigs online edition]
* Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. ''The CIA and American Democracy.'' (1989). 338 pp
* Johnston, Rob. ''Analytic Culture in the US Intelligence Community: An Ethnographic Study.'' (2005) https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/analytic-culture-in-the-u-s-intelligence-community/full_title_page.htm
* Kent, Sherman. ''Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy.'' (1947) (2000 reprint)). Seminal work on CIA intelligence analysis, especially the estimative process.
* Kessler, Ronald. ''The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror,'' (2003), 496 pp [http://www.amazon.com/CIA-War-Inside-Campaign-Against/dp/0312319320/ref=sid_dp_dp excerpt and text search]
* Moyar, Mark. ''Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA's Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong.'' (1997). 416 pp
* Olmsted, Kathryn S. ''Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI.'' (1996). 255 pp. [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=5001364299 online edition]
* Powers, Thomas. ''The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA.'' (1979). 393 pp.
* Prados, John. ''Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby.'' (2003). 380 pp. [http://www.questia.com/read/103547153?title=Lost%20Crusader%3a%20The%20Secret%20Wars%20of%20CIA%20Director%20William%20Colby online edition]
* Prados, John. ''Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA.'' (2006). 696 pp
* Richelson, Jeffrey T. ''The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.'' (2001). 386 pp.
* Richelson, Jeffrey T. ''The U.S. Intelligence Community'' (1999) [http://www.questia.com/read/59323941?title=The%20U.S.%20Intelligence%20Community online edition]
* Russell, Richard L. ''Sharpening Strategic Intelligence: Why the CIA Gets It Wrong and What Needs to Be Done to Get It Right.'' (2007). 232 pp.
* Saunders, Francis Stonor. ''The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.'' (2000). 509 pp.
* Scott-Smith, Giles. ''The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Post-War American Hegemony.'' (2002). 233 pp.
* Taubman, Philip. ''Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage.'' (2003). 441 pp
* Thomas, Evan. ''The Very Best Men. Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA.'' (1995). 427 pp.
* Troy, Thomas F. ''Wild Bill and Intrepid: Donovan, Stephenson, and the Origin of CIA.'' (1996). 259 pp.
* Wise, David. ''Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA''. (1992). Source on James Jesus Angleton's searches inside the CIA, and on the Golitsyn-Nosenko controversy.
* Woodward, Bob. ''Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987'' (2005)
* Zegart, Amy B. ''Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC.'' (1999). 317 pp. [http://www.questia.com/read/35536329?title=Flawed%20by%20Design%3a%20The%20Evolution%20of%20the%20CIA%2c%20JCS%2c%20and%20NSC online edition]

===Primary sources and memoirs===
* Central Intelligence Agency. ''A Compendium of Analytic Tradecraft Notes'' (1997) http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cia/tradecraft_notes/contents.htm. The basic training guide for CIA analysts.
* Cullather, Nick. ''Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954.'' (1999). 142 pp. [http://www.questia.com/read/79224452?title=Secret%20History%3a%20The%20CIA's%20Classified%20Account%20of%20Its%20Operations%20in%20Guatemala%2c%201952-1954 online edition]
* Gates, Robert. ''From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War,'' (1997).
* McAuliffe, Mary S., ed. ''CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962.'' (1992). 376 pp.
* Murphy, David E.; Kondrashev, Sergei A.; and Bailey, George. ''Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War.'' (1997). 530 pp. brings together personal recollections from CIA and KGB officers, and previously unpublished documents.
* Tenet, George. ''At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA'' (2007), DCI 1997 to 2004
* Turner, Stansfield. ''Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition.'' (1985). 304 pp.
* Westerfield, H. Bradford, ed. ''Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal, 1955-1992.'' (1995). 489 pp.

====references====
<references/>
[[Category:Espionage]]
[[Category:Intelligence Agencies]]
[[Category:United States Intelligence Agencies]]

American Israeli Political Action Committee

2013-04-04T18:40:47Z

JakeRMurrin: /* Israelian members */

The '''American Israeli Political Action Committee''' (AIPAC) is an american organization to support [[Israel]], which has 100.000 members.

== Famous members ==
=== American members ===
* [[Hillary Clinton]]
* [[Bill Clinton]]
* [[Nancy Pelosi]]
* [[John Kerry]]
* [[George H.W. Bush]]
* [[George W. Bush]]
* [[John Mccain]]
* [[Condoleezza Rice]]
* [[Dick Cheney]]
=== Israeli members ===
* [[Benjamin Netanyahu]]
* [[Ehud Olmert]]
* [[Yitzhak Rabin]]
* [[Shimon Peres]]
* [[Ehud Barak]]
* [[Ariel Sharon]]

== External links ==
* [http://www.aipac.org/ Official Site]

[[Category:Organizations]]

Operation Iraqi Freedom

2013-03-31T05:40:33Z

JakeRMurrin: Expand/revise material on sanctions

'''Operation Iraqi Freedom''' was the largest of several active fronts in the ongoing [[War on Terrorism]]. Other fronts include [[Afghanistan]], [[Philippines]], and the [[Horn of Africa]]. Operation Iraqi Freedom began on 3 March 2003 with the removal of the [[Ba'athist]] regime of [[Saddam Hussein]] by a "Coalition of the Willing" led by the [[United States]] and allies including the [[United Kingdom]].<ref>[http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/11/20/prague.bush.nato/ Bush: Join 'coalition of willing'], retrieved March 21, 2007</ref> An interim government, Constitutional Assembly, and later an elected Parliament and Executive have assumed authority, however sectarian insurgent violence has hindered stability and reconstruction efforts by US contractors and the new government. [[Iraq]]'s new Constitution strictly limits the emergency powers of the Executive in dealing with civil strife--a post Saddam democratic reform.

President [[Barack Obama]] declared an official end to Operation Iraqi Freedom on August 31, 2010. <ref>[http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/08/31/excerpts-president-barack-obamas-address-nation-end-combat-operations-ir President Barack Obama's Address to the Nation on the End of Combat Operations in Iraq]</ref>

==Background To Regime Change==

In the post-[[9/11]] analysis to determine discontent in the Islamic world that had produced a flurry of dedicated suicide [[jihad]]ists, the twelve year old UN-imposed sanctions upon Iraq and the resultant humanitarian crisis was one such often cited reason.<ref>Chris Suellentrop, [http://slate.msn.com/id/1008414/ Are 1 Million Children Dying in Iraq?], Slate, Oct. 9, 2001.</ref><ref>Norman Bauman, [http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/wtc.htm Why they hate us: "Stopping cancer treatments will not topple a dictatorship"], 14 October 2001.</ref><ref>Michael Rubin, [http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2001/issue4/jv5n4a6.htm Sanctions on Iraq: A Valid Anti-American Grievance?], Middle East review of International Affairs, Volume 5, No. 4 - December 2001.</ref><ref>Matt Welch, [http://www.reason.com/news/show/28346.html The Politics of Dead Children: Have sanctions against Iraq murdered millions?], Reason Magazine, March 2002.</ref><ref>Alan W. Dowd, [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0IBR/is_3_33/ai_109580224 Thirteen Years of Causes and Consequences for the Was in Iraq], Parameters, Autumn, 2003.[http://www.ciaonet.org/special_section/iraq_review/pi_epy/pi_epy_02.html]</ref> After the Gulf War of 1991 the United States kept troops permanently stationed in Saudi Arabia to defend against an Iraqi invasion of the Kingdom. In the findings of the the 9/11 Commission Report for example, in a section entitled, ''The Foundation of the New Terrorism'', referring to Osama bin Laden's motivations for his Declaration of War and attack on the United States, the Commission found the following:
:He inveighed against the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites. He spoke of the suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of sanctions imposed after the Gulf War, and he protested U.S. support of Israel.<ref>9/11 Commission Report[http://www.gpoaccess.gov/911/pdf/sec2.pdf ''The Foundation of the New Terrorism'']</ref>

Saddam had taken advantage of corruption in both the [[United Nations]] Secretariat and [[Security Council]] to revive the Iraqi economy after the 1991 [[Gulf War]] through the [[Oil for Food]] program, nevertheless few of the intended beneficiaries of these alleged UN humanitarian efforts saw the intended relief. Meanwhile, Saddam kept intact the "intellectual capital" or "know-how" to revive [[weapons of mass destruction]] (WMD) programs which were credited with ensuring the survival of the Ba'athist regime in both the 1980-1988 War with Iran, and preventing a US overthrow of the regime in 1991. As the 90s progressed and the millennium changed, Saddam's top priority was ending the sanctions, and then a full resumption of operational WMD programs. <ref>[https://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/Comp_Report_Key_Findings.pdf Regime Strategic Intent], Duelfer Report, 2004.</ref>
[[Image:Dynamicduo.JPG|right|thumb|300px|Sen. Hillary Clinton was a leading spokesperson in the bipartisan decision to commit troops to Iraq.]]
Senator [[Hillary Rodham Clinton]], addressing a gathering of the radical anti-war group [[Code Pink]] spoke from her own knowledge and experience,
{{Cquote|'''There is a very easy way for to prevent anyone from being put into harms way and that is for Saddam Hussein to disarm. And I have absolutely no belief that he will. I have to say that this is something that I have followed for a decade. If he were serious about disarming, he would have been much more forthcoming. There may be progress, we may be destroying his missiles, there is no accounting for the chemical and biological stocks. I just have to respectfully disagree what the proximate cause of any action that might be taken is. …For now nearly 20 years the principal reason why women and children in Iraq have suffered is because of his leadership. His not only tyrannical and dictatorial leadership, but his reign of terror against women and children.''' <ref>[http://www.archive.org/details/HillaryClintonsviewsongoingtowarSaddamandWMDs Hillary Clinton's views on going to war, Saddam, and WMD]</ref> }}

Egyptian President [[Hosni Mubarek]] and Libyan [[Socialist]] General Secretary [[Muammar Gaddafi]] in negotiations with [[Saddam Hussein]] relayed a message through Italian Prime Minister [[Silvio Berlusconi]] and Spanish President [[Jose Maria Aznar]] to UK Prime Minister [[Tony Blair]] and US President [[George W. Bush]] that Saddam would be willing to avoid removal by force and voluntarily go into exile, provided Saddam was allowed to take $1 billion dollars and "all the information he wants about [[weapons of mass destruction]]." <ref>[http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2007/09/saddam_risked_his_life_for_wmd_1.asp Saddam Risked His Life for WMD Secrets], ''WeeklyStandard.com. September 29, 2007.</ref><ref>[http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003646639 Scoop for Spanish Daily: Transcript of Private 2003 Bush Talk Promising Iraq Invasion], ''Editor & Publisher'', September 26, 2007.</ref><ref>[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/26/AR2007092602414.html Report Says Hussein Was Open To Exile Before 2003 Invasion], He Is Said to Have Sought $1 Billion and Information on Arms, By Karen DeYoung and Michael Abramowitz, ''[[Washington Post]], September 27, 2007; Page A17.</ref><ref>[http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/Llego/momento/deshacerse/Sadam/elpepunac/20070926elpepinac_1/Tes Llegó el momento de deshacerse de Sadam], ''El Pais'', 26/09/2007. (In Spanish).</ref> For 12 years, the international community gave Saddam chance after chance, Saddam defied it all including WMD declarations. Dozens of [[UN]] resolutions and mandated sanctions failed to persuade Saddam's grip on power. In 1998, the course for present day Iraq began in earnest. President Clinton signed into law H.R. 4655, the Iraq Liberation Act. This act declares that it should be the policy of the [[United States]] to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government.

==Arguments For Regime Change==

The concern which has led to this front on the War on Terror was summarized by Raymond S. Kraft in his "Historical Review of the Iraq Situation" <ref> http://righttruth.typepad.com/right_truth/2006/03/historical_revi.html </ref> He states, quote: "there is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons almost anywhere in the world, unless they are prevented from doing so. France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling them weapons technology as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan. These weapons were paid for with billions of dollars that Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For Food" program administered by the UN with the complicity of Kofi Annan and his son.

The militant Muslim Jihadists believe that a radically conservative form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world; and that all who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel and purge the world of Jews. This is what they say.

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East - for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which will win - the Inquisition, or the Reformation. If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East and the OPEC oil. The US, European, and Asian economies, the techno-industrial economies, will be at the mercy of OPEC - not an OPEC dominated by the well-educated and rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away. A moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge." (end of quote)

What the West decided to do was help the Reformation side win. To do that the West had to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist movements. The battle had to happen somewhere, and since the West could not fight everywhere at once, the West chose to create a focal point for the battle, in Iraq. Mr Kraft went on to summarize what the West did and is doing which is important in Iraq, quote:

(1)We deposed Saddam Hussein. Although Saddam Hussein was not directly involved in 9/11, it is not disputed that Saddam had been actively supporting certain terrorist groups for decades. Saddam was a mass-murdering totalitarian dictator responsible for the deaths more than one million Iraqis and arguably for the as many as 400,000 Iraqis and Iranians who died in the [[Iran-Iraq War]].

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. This has focused the battle. The ones killed there won't have to be killed here, or somewhere else. We have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

The Europeans could have done this, but they didn't, and they won't. We now know that rather than opposing the rise of the Jihadist, the French, Germans, and Russians were selling them arms - we have found more than a million tons of weapons and munitions in Iraq. If Iraq was not a threat to anyone, why did Saddam have a million tons of weapons?

The bottom line here is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it (or are defeated by it), whenever that is. It will not go away on its own. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates. The Iraq war is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. Now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons unless WE prevent them.

The Iraq war is expensive, and uncertain, yes. But the consequences of not fighting and winning it will be horrifically greater. The history of the world is the history of civilization clashes - cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas. Ideas about what society and civilization should be like. The most determined always win. Those who are willing to be the most ruthless win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.

Today, in Iraq, the stakes are high . . . a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms . . . or a world dominated by the radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihadist under the Mullahs and the Sharia. The Liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. But if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy. If the Jihad wins, it will be the death of Liberalism. (end of quote)

Former U.S. Attorney General in the [[Johnson Administration]], [[Ramsey Clark]], wrote the UN Security Council on July 29, 2002 claiming UN sanctions, "are the direct cause of the very cruel deaths of more than a million people" <ref>[http://www.radioislam.org/bush/act.htm Letter from Ramsey Clark to the U.N. Security Council members], 29 July 2002.</ref> [[Osama bin Laden]] cited this same figure in his 1998 Declaration of War Against the United States.<ref>http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1998.html</ref> However:
*[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4329469?uid=3739656&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101871211641 Amatzia Baram], Director of the Center for Iraq Studies at the University of Haifa, reported almost no difference in the rate of Iraq’s population growth between 1977 and 1987 (35.8%) and between 1987 and 1997 (35.1%). The latter period also corresponds with the escalation of the war with Iran, genocide of the Kurds, invasion of Kuwait, Gulf War, and 1991 massacres.
*[http://www.democracynow.org/2004/6/22/bill_clinton_loses_his_cool_in Bill Clinton] noted: "Before the sanctions, the year before the Gulf War—how much money did Iraq earn from oil? Answer: $16 billion. How much money did Iraq earn last year from oil? How much money did they get, cash on the barrel head, to Saddam Hussein? Answer: $19 billion, that he can use exclusively for food, for medicine, to develop his country. He’s got more money now, $3 billion a year more, than he had nine years ago. If any child is without food or medicine or a roof over his or her head in Iraq, it’s because he is claiming the sanctions are doing it and sticking it to his own children. We have worked like crazy to make sure that the embargo only applies to his ability to reconstitute his weapons system and his military state."
*The [http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1999/09/iraq99.htm US State Department] has stated that Iraq was offered the Oil-for-Food Program in 1991 but that Iraq refused to accept it for years. In addition: "In Northern Iraq, where the UN administers humanitarian assistance, child mortality rates have fallen below pre-Gulf War levels. Now those Iraqi children are better off than before the war. Child mortality figures have more than doubled in the south and center of the country, where the Iraqi government—rather than the UN—controls the program. If a turn-around on child mortality can be made in the north, which is under the same sanctions as the rest of the country, there is no reason it cannot be done in the south and center. The fact of the matter is, however, that the government of Iraq does not share the international community's concern about the welfare of its people. Baghdad's refusal to cooperate with the oil-for-food program and its deliberate misuse of resources are cynical efforts to sacrifice the Iraqi people's welfare in order to bring an end to UN sanctions without complying with its obligations."
*[http://www.iraqwatch.org/perspectives/meria-rubin-sanctions-1201.htm Michael Rubin], adjunct fellow of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote: "While claiming to face dire food shortages, Iraq actually exported food to other countries....Less than six months after the end of hostilities, the Security Council adopted resolutions to allow Iraq to sell its oil in order to provide revenue for the purchase of essential humanitarian supplies. The Iraqi government refused....Before the imposition of sanctions, the Iraqi government spent less than 25% of its income on humanitarian programs. Under the sanctions regime, Iraq was ordered to allocate 72% of its oil income for humanitarian projects. While there is plenty of money for meeting the needs of the Iraqi people, there is supposed to be none left over for obtaining weapons....While trying to pressure the Iraqi government to dispense with its WMD programs, the sanctions regime has also tried to force that same government to pay more attention to the needs of its own people. The health and welfare of those in Iraq has increased tremendously, at least when the Iraqi government does not interfere with the implementation of the oil-for-food program. It is difficult to be hungry when receiving oil-for-food rations....Barham Salih recently called the sanctions regime "truly revolutionary" in that "never before in our history have we had a government obliged by international law to devote Iraq's oil revenues to the well being of the Iraqi people."....The per capita income available in Saddam's Iraq is now far higher than it was in Iraqi Kurdistan, and yet the Iraqi government continues to either not spend the revenue available, or not spend it wisely. Most damning to arguments about disproportionate funding in the north is that, according to Oil-for-food coordinators in Irbil, northern Iraq has so far only spent half the money actually allocated to it....The oil-for-food program has already spent more than $1 billion in water and sanitation projects in Iraq. There is no reason to blame sanctions for any degradation in water and sanitation systems."
*The UNICEF report on infant mortality was co-authored by the Iraqi government, and claimed that Kuwait was part of Iraq. Iraq [http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/12/world/iraq-won-t-let-outside-experts-assess-sanctions-impact-on-lives.html denied] UN requests to admit independent experts to assess living conditions. [http://www.instituteforthestudyofgenocide.org/oldsite/newsletters/28/Saddam.html Milton Leitenberg], from the Center for International and Security Studies, pointed out: "All alleged post-1990 figures on infant and child mortality in Iraq are supplied by the Iraqi government agencies." (Independent observers were allowed in the north, where conditions improved as a result of the sanctions regime.)
*According to economist [http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Truth%20and%20Death.pdf Michael Spagat], "one potential explanation" for the statistics showing an increase in child mortality is that "they were not real, but rather results of manipulations by the Iraqi government."

These claims, despite their falsity, became an extremely effective recruiting tool for suicide terrorists. In the aftermath of the [[9/11 terror attacks]] policymakers and legislators, such a [[John Kerry]], [[John Edwards]] and Richard Gephardt became convinced of the necessity of removing Saddam and ending sanctions. Senator [[Hillary Rodham Clinton]] said in a floor speech on October 10, 2002,
{{Cquote|In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members. <ref>[http://clinton.senate.gov/speeches/iraq_101002.html October 10, 2002 Floor Speech of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on S.J. Res. 45, A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq], United States Senate, October 10, 2002. </ref>}}

==Liberation From Ba'athist Tyranny==
[[Image:Qwwqqe.jpg|thumb|right|An Iraqi Army unit prepares to board a Task Force Baghdad UH-60 Blackhawk [[helicopter]] for a counterinsurgency mission in Baghdad.]]

After the decapitation of the Ba'athist leadership from the military under its command in April 2003, President Bush said in his address:
*Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. (Applause.) And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country. [http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html]

Other comments from President Bush's May 1, 2003 speech <ref> http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html </ref> show that the context of these victory comments include warnings to Americans of an ongoing struggle to establish Iraqi democracy and counter the threat of terrorism. Quotes, "We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq. Our mission continues. Al Qaeda is wounded, not destroyed. The scattered cells of the terrorist network still operate in many nations, and we know from daily intelligence that they continue to plot against free people. The [[proliferation]] of deadly weapons remains a serious danger. The enemies of freedom are not idle, and neither are we. Our government has taken unprecedented measures to defend the homeland. And we will continue to hunt down the enemy before he can strike. The war on terror is not over; yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide. No act of the terrorists will change our purpose, or weaken our resolve, or alter their fate. Their cause is lost. Free nations will press on to victory." <ref> http://newsbusters.org/node/12386 </ref>

Many Iraqis welcomed the American invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and in the preceding months, showed optimism about their country's future. An 'American Enterprise'-'Wall Street Journal'-'Zogby' poll in September 2003 found that "Seven out of 10 say they expect their country and their personal lives will be better five years from now. On both fronts, 32% say things will become much better."<ref>[http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003991 What Iraqis Really Think], retrieved March 21, 2007</ref> Furthermore, in a March 2004 poll of Iraqis, the BBC found that Iraqis have great hope in a stable, unified government for their country, with 80% of respondents favoring a centralized state ruled from Baghdad. <ref>[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3514504.stm Survey finds hope in occupied Iraq]</ref> From 2004 to before the surge, the unceasing violence by the insurgents had caused some people (mainly in the West) to refer to the ongoing strife as a 'civil war'. <ref> [http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070301faessay86201/james-d-fearon/iraq-s-civil-war.html Iraq's Civil War], retrieved March 21, 2007</ref>
Since the surge, this has ceased as 60-80% of the violence has been stopped. On Sat Feb 16, 2008 Reuters reported, "Attacks by insurgents and rival sectarian militias have fallen up to 80 percent in Baghdad. The U.S. military says attacks have fallen across Iraq by 60 percent since June on the back of security clampdowns and the deployment of 30,000 extra American troops." <ref> http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080216/ts_nm/iraq_dc </ref>
[[Image:Bagpipe.jpg|left|thumb|400px|Proposed Baghdad reconstruction Plan]]
2007 - Four years into the war, the biggest poll since coalition troops entered Iraq on March 20, 2003 showed that by a majority of two to one, Iraqis preferred the current leadership to Saddam Hussein’s regime, regardless of the security situation and a lack of public services. It also revealed that contrary to the views of many western analysts, most Iraqis did not believe they were embroiled in a civil war; indeed, only 27% believed they were caught up in a civil war and 64% of the Iraqis still wanted to see a united Iraq under a central national government. <ref>[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article1530526.ece Resilient Iraqis ask what civil war?], retrieved March 21, 2007</ref>

ABC News (and USA Today) conducted a poll <ref>[http://abcnews.go.com/images/US/1033aIraqpoll.pdf PDF Iraq Poll], retrieved March 21, 2007</ref>and found that 56 percent of Iraqis did not believe there was a “civil war,” and a British poll determined 61 percent did not believe they were in a civil war. The Times of London's summary of the poll: “Iraqis: life is getting better." <ref>[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article1530762.ece Iraqis: life is getting better], retrieved March 21, 2007</ref> A version of the combined articles as posted by The Australian: “It's better than Saddam, say hopeful Iraqis.” <ref>[http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21404747-2703,00.html It's better than Saddam, say hopeful Iraqis], retrieved March 21, 2007</ref>

On January 21, 2008 there was a report about a cache of documents discovered in the fall of 2007 by U.S. forces in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar. It gave the individual records of 606 foreign fighters who entered Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007 saying, "Based on the Sinjar records, U.S. military officials in Iraq said they now think that nine out of 10 suicide bombers have been foreigners, compared with earlier estimates of 75 percent. Similarly, they assess that 90 percent of foreign fighters entering Iraq during the one-year period ending in August came via Syria, a greater proportion than previously believed. Although Saudi Arabia was by far the most common country of origin of foreign fighters, with about 40 percent of the total, a surprising share -- 19 percent -- came from Libya. Overall, about 40 percent were North African." <ref> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/20/AR2008012002609.html </ref> This certainly justifies these poll results where Iraqis stated that many of the attacks against the Iraqi populace are the work of foreign forces rather than out of the Iraqi population (civil war).

==Insurgency==
Since the removal of Saddam, Iraq has seen the rise of sectarian violence between [[Sunni]] Muslims and [[Shia]] Muslims. However many Iraqis remain grateful to the United States for freeing them from Saddam's dictatorship. To many Sunnis, the US has been viewed suspiciously because it supports the democratically elected Shia majority rule. Though a minority, the Sunni have traditionally ruled Iraq and view themselves entitled to continue the privilege of doing so. There are also some intractable Sunni whose interpretation of Muslim law says that the Shia are considered heretics, and thus not fit to lead the nation.

The Shia majority, notably the [[Jaysh Al-Madhi]], have had militant factions who not only attacked Sunni Muslims but also American and other coalition troops even while the coalition was protecting the democratically elected Shia from Sunni attacks. Other Shia groups that have not attacked coalition forces have pursued their own factional aims while relying on the US to ensure Shia majority rule, instead of seeking unity and a cohesive representatively fair national political structure, which hampered progress and reconciliation efforts. <ref> Testimony of Edward N. Luttwak, Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate , Hearings on [http://www.csis.org/media/csis/congress/ts070123luttwak.pdf Securing America's Interest in Iraq], retrieved March 21, 2007</ref>

However, as reported on May 31, 2007, in the article "US Eyes Cease-Fires End Violence in Iraq" the No. 2 American commander, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, said he thought 80 percent of Iraqis — including Sunni insurgents and Shia militants — can reach reconciliation. "We are talking about cease-fires, and maybe signing some things that say they won't conduct operations against the government of Iraq or against coalition forces. I believe there are elements that are irreconcilable, but I believe the large majority are. I believe about 80 percent are reconcilable, both [[Jaysh Al-Madhi]] as well as Sunni insurgents." <ref> http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/05/31/national/w114445D86.DTL </ref>

===Propaganda===
Since the invasion in 2003, both Shiite and Sunni clerics have been repeating over and over again that the Americans and their mostly "[[Christian]]" allies are in Iraq to destroy [[Islam]] in its cultural heartland as well as to steal the country’s oil. The clerics dismiss all talk of [[democracy]] and [[human rights]] by the invaders as mere hypocrisy--except for [[women’s rights]], which are promoted in earnest, the clerics say, to induce Iraqi daughters and wives to dishonor their families by aping the shameless disobedience of Western women.

At first, a majority of Iraqis believed these religious leaders. The alternative was difficult for them to believe--that foreigners have been unselfishly expending their own blood and treasure to help them. Some polls and incidents demonstrate to insurgents that Americans are out to rob Muslim Iraqis not only of their territory and oil, but also of their religion and even their family honor. The most visible effects of these sentiments were the deadly attacks, the aiding and abetting of such attacks, and celebration by impromptu crowds of spectators. When the victims are members of the Iraqi police or National Guard, bystanders, family members, and local clerics routinely accused the Americans of being the attackers--usually by missile strikes that cleverly simulate car-bombs. As to why the Americans would want to kill Iraqis they are themselves recruiting, training, and paying, no explanation was offered, because no obligation was felt to unravel each and every sub-plot of the dark "Christian conspiracy" against Iraq, the Arab world, and Islam. <ref>Luttwak Testimony, [http://www.csis.org/media/csis/congress/ts070123luttwak.pdf Committee on Foreign Relations,]U.S. Senate, pgs. 6-7.</ref>

One key to the success which has now spread all across Iraq and caused a drop in violence in Iraq by 60-80% <ref> http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080216/ts_nm/iraq_dc </ref> is the willingness of the Sunnis to take back their country from the insurgent violence. In an article February 10, 2008 called, "U.S. Military Says Seized Docs Show Al Qaeda in Iraq Is Weakened" it states, "A diary and another document seized during U.S. raids show some Al Qaeda in Iraq leaders fear the terror group is crumbling, with many fighters defecting to American-backed neighborhood groups."

The reason for this shift, "the author describes an Al Qaeda in crisis, with citizens growing weary of militants' presence and foreign fighters too eager to participate in suicide missions rather than continuing to fight, "We lost cities and afterward, villages... We find ourselves in a wasteland desert," Smith quoted the document as saying. The memo — believed to have been written in summer 2007 — cites militants' increasing difficulty in moving around and transporting weapons and suicide belts because of better equipped Iraqi police and more watchful citizens, Smith said."

The populace of Iraq has rejected the extremist viewpoint and are now willing to stand up and do what it takes to get peace in the country for themselves and their future. The article further states, "The diary, seized by U.S. troops south of Balad, was written in autumn 2007 by Abu Tariq, who refers to himself as sector leader for al-Qaida in Iraq, Smith said. Tariq wrote that he was once in charge of 600 fighters, but only 20 were left "after the tribes changed course" — a reference to how many Sunni tribesmen have switched sides to fight alongside the Americans, Smith said. The new organizations, called awakening councils or neighborhood watch groups, were key to helping push Al Qaeda in Iraq out of Anbar province, once one of the country's most violent. The terror network's top leaders are now based somewhere in northern Iraq, Smith said, having moved out of Anbar and into Diyala province last year.<ref> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,330235,00.html </ref>

The indomitable spirit of the Iraqis has been put to the test and is prevailing against their enemies as they stand up for their country and reject the extremist view and their brutal ways (including torture) which are documented in the next section.

Most U.S. media companies have a significant stake in shaping the view of this conflict with the American public. Propaganda by U.S. media companies reported a common theme; advocating American failure and defeat in Iraq. As the conflict raged, the American public was given large doses of negative reporting for four years. During 2007, General Petraeus got approval and implemented the 'Surge' strategy for securing Baghdad. Result, deaths and bombings by militias, rogue bandits and terror cells have significantly decreased. Success was rarely reported including the 'Surge' progress. No longer the chance of a failed state along with an extraordinary decrease in violence, U.S. media reports on Iraq are now virtually non-existent.

===US troop surge and progress in Iraq===


Since the new US-Iraqi offensive was launched in February 2007, anti-government forces have been put on the defensive in their former insurgent stronghold of Anbar, Britain’s top general in Iraq said (March 2007). <ref>[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b3fd545e-d70f-11db-b9d7-000b5df10621.html Iraq insurgents ‘on the defensive’], retrieved March 21, 2007</ref> The insurgency “didn’t do too well in Anbar . . . Their claims have failed to come to fruition,” he said, referring to the declaration by Islamic radicals that they had established a “caliphate”, or successorship, encompassing much of western Iraq. Lt Gen Lamb said that US and Iraqi forces were recruiting hundreds of police for the first time in towns in the Anbar region and that the forces were working together in shared combat outposts. While conceding that car bomb attacks In Baghdad and a surge of violence in neighboring Diyala had to be addressed, he said that US and Iraqi planners were learning to reduce the threat, establishing an outer cordon around the city as well as barriers, or “point defense” protection around key targets inside. The US military has reported cases in which car bombs have been stopped at checkpoints. In some cases the bombs detonated killing Iraqi security forces, but the casualties would arguably have been much greater had the blasts hit crowded commercial districts. General Lamb, who commanded British ground forces in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 said that multinational forces now had the benefit of four years of experience in fighting the insurgents.

The increasing pressure from US forces with this Surge strategy has caused Sadr and his commanders flee to Iran as The Guardian reported Feb 15, 07, "Senior commanders of the Mehdi army, the militia loyal to the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, have been spirited away to Iran to avoid being targeted in the new security push in Baghdad, a high-level Iraqi official told the Guardian. "Over the last three weeks, they [Iran] have taken away from Baghdad the first and second-tier military leaders of the Mehdi army," he said. The aim of the Iranians was to "prevent the dismantling of the infrastructure of the Shia militias" in the Iraqi capital -- one of the chief aims of the United States-backed security drive. The chief US military spokesperson in Baghdad said the anti-Western cleric had fled to Iran. US forces were tracking him "very closely", he said.
<ref> http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news/&articleid=299085 </ref>

The Surge is showing signs as a solid strategy which is being used to good effect as Al Jazeera reports that the Baathist terrorists have begun to criticize Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in their article Sunni group condemns Iraq al-Qaeda <ref> http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/A6EC4EAB-854C-4D2F-A922-754648CDED8D.htm </ref> where it states: "An influential Iraqi Sunni armed group has called on al-Qaeda in Iraq to “review” its behavior in the country. The Islamic Army in Iraq, believed to be the largest group of former Baathists and army officers fighting Iraqi and US forces, called on Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, to take more responsibility for al-Qaeda in Iraq. “Killing Sunnis has become a legitimate target for them, especially rich ones. Either they pay them what they want or they kill them,” a statement from the group said. “They would kill any critic or whoever tries to show them their mistakes.” Sunni Arab officials have also urged what they call “the real resistance” to disown al-Qaeda and engage in talks with the government to end violence which has driven the country closer to an all-out civil war."

Now, the increasing pressure appears to have caused an actual break in relations between terrorist groups as this April 12, 07 article states, quote, "One of Iraq's main armed groups has confirmed a split with al-Qaeda, according to a spokesman for the dissenting organization. Ibrahim al-Shammari told Al Jazeera on Thursday that the Islamic Army in Iraq had decided to disunite from al-Qaeda in Iraq after its members were threatened. ".. after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi died, the gap between us [and al-Qaeda] widened, because [they] started to target our members. They killed about 30 of our people, and we definitely don't recognize their establishment of an Islamic state - we consider it invalid." The Islamic Army in Iraq is one of several nationalist groups which opposes hitting Iraqi civilians, but it has carried out high-profile attacks against multinational forces. Al-Shammari said they would be willing to deal with the Americans if certain conditions are met. Al-Shammari said that his group didn't consider US forces to be the main danger in Iraq. "There are two occupations: Iranian and American, and the Iranian one is more dangerous than American because Iran considers Iraq as a part of their country." The Islamic Army in Iraq's statement comes after Iraq's president said the presidential office was in contact with five insurgent groups. Jalal Talabani said on Wednesday that the contacts mark an attempt to bring the groups into the mainstream political process. <ref> http://www.iraqupdates.com/p_articles.php/article/16414 </ref>

Additional progress was detailed in "Corps Commander Highlights Progress in Iraq", Apr 13, 2007, where Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of Multinational Corps in Iraq said there has been progress in the security situation in Baghdad. Three of the five promised U.S. brigades are in place in the city, an additional three Iraqi brigade headquarters and 11 additional battalions have moved into Baghdad in support of the operation. Twenty-six joint security stations in Baghdad are manned by Iraqi army, Iraqi police and coalition forces, as are more than 21 combat outposts. "This continuous presence is making the Iraqi people feel safer and has greatly increased the amount of information provided to the Iraqi army, police and coalition forces by the public," Odierno said. Sectarian murders have dropped in Baghdad, and some displaced families are returning to the city. In addition, coalition and Iraqi forces have doubled the number of arms caches found since the beginning of the operation two months ago. Security forces allow citizens to return to a more normal existence. "Across Baghdad, markets are being hardened with checkpoints and barriers, and merchants have returned to sell their produce," he said. "And Iraqis are busy shopping in the markets of Rusafa and Dura, and there are more projects such as these ... that will occur in the near future."

Positive changes are not limited to Baghdad, he said, they are also happening in Anbar province, where coalition and Iraqi security forces are working with local tribal leaders. "The people of al Anbar are fighting back and winning," Odierno said. "They've effectively turned back the tide of al Qaeda, but there will be counterattacks by al Qaeda." The general said there were nine attacks last week in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. "During the same week a year ago, there were over 84 attacks," he said. Odierno said he also sees promise in the northern part of Iraq. Coalition forces there have set up 33 U.S. police transition teams to build law enforcement capability in that region. Oil is flowing out of the Bayji refinery thanks to Iraqi security force efforts to protect distribution tankers. Progress continues in the country's south, as well. "In the south, Operation Black Eagle in Diwaniyah, conducted by joint Iraqi and coalition forces, uncovered a headquarters of a rogue element of Jaysh al-Mahdi, with a major weapons cache including materials for IED-making," he said. Even the demonstrations called by radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr on April 9 to protest the U.S. presence in Iraq are a good sign, Odierno said. "This demonstration took place without incident," he said. "It is worth mentioning three points related to this demonstration. First, the government of Iraq allowed the demonstration to take place, unthinkable under the former regime. Second, the demonstrators waved Iraqi flags rather than black flags or pictures of ayatollahs. And third, the demonstrators numbered no more than 15,000, rather than the one million its organizers called for." <ref> http://www.blackanthem.com/News/International_21/Corps_Commander_Highlights_Progress_in_Iraq5809.shtml </ref>

That being said, anti-democratic and sectarian violence in the war, as expected and predicted by the Bush Administration, is continuing: a recent Al-Qaida attack at the Parliamentary cafeteria killed one, and on April 18 2007, a series of car bombs killed 131 Baghdad residents. <ref>US CENTCOM Press Release, [http://www.centcom.mil/sites/uscentcom2/Lists/Current%20Press%20Releases/DispForm.aspx?ID=4767 131 Dead, More Than 160 Wounded by Multiple Car Bomb Attacks in Baghdad Multi-National Division], Release Number: 07-01-03P, 4/18/2007. </ref>

In the ABC article, "Al-Qaida claims Iraq parliament attack", the U.S. military revised the death toll sharply downward to one dead in the the parliament suicide bombing. Iraqi officials said the bomber was believed to have been a bodyguard for a Sunni lawmaker who was not among the casualties. Parliament officials said the victim was Mohammed Awad, a moderate Sunni lawmaker. Iraqi lawmakers gathered Friday in a rare - and defiant - session of parliament on the Muslim day of prayer. A red and white bouquet sat in Awad's place in the parliament chamber. Lawmakers took the podium one after another to denounce the bombing. One MP had his arm in sling and a woman lawmaker wore a neck brace. "The more they (terrorists) act, the more solid we become. When they take from us one martyr, we will offer more martyrs," Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi said. "The more they target our unity, the stronger our unity becomes." Iraqi parliament speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani said Friday's session was "a clear message to all the terrorists and all those who dare try to stop this (political) process, that we will sacrifice in order for it to continue." <ref> http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=nation_world&id=5205895 </ref>

At a news conference with Defense Secretary Robert Gates (reported Fri Apr 20, 2007), Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul-Qader al-Obaidi said the Iraqis are making progress in countering the insurgency. "Our need for support is getting less and less each day," al-Obaidi said. Gates said the U.S. troop buildup will continue at least until late summer. "We need some time for things to work," he said. Three of the five extra brigades Bush ordered into Iraq to stem violence have arrived. Officials want the rest in place by June, for a total of 160,000. Soon after that, they will assess how much longer the higher troop level — about 30,000 more than before the buildup — will be needed. Since the troop buildup or "Surge" has not even been completed, it is not surprising that the premature and rash comments by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saying the war was already lost and the troop buildup was not stemming violence in Iraq were rejected by Gates. "I respectfully disagree," Gates said when asked by a reporter about Reid's Thursday remarks. He assured al-Maliki that the U.S. continues to be committed to the Iraqi government and the Baghdad security plan, Gates said.<ref> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070420/ap_on_re_mi_ea/gates_iraq </ref>

April 20, 2007 - Iraqi President Nouri al Malaki affirmed the indigenous Iraqi Assyrian Christians' right to have a Province of their own, which could be provided for under the Iraqi Constitution. Malaki was addressing questions concerning the minorities, many of whom are in neighboring countries, including an estimated nearly 500,000 Assyrian Christians. Additionally, Malaki said, "I think it is important to let the world know that things in our country are improving dramatically. Our unemployment rate has gone from nearly 70 percent to now under 30 percent. Our most recent growth rate was 3 percent and we have seen, in particular as a result of the recent Baghdad program, a dramatic drop in so-called sectarian violence. What is particularly encouraging to me is the changes we have seen in our security forces and the trust from our people once again. We are finally seeing individual citizens provide information to our forces, which has changed the situation dramatically in rooting out those who are determined to ruin our country."

Malaki stressed three key goals. National Reconciliation, Economic Development and Expanded Security as the way forward. "In spite of much information to the contrary, we are seeing a return to the Iraq we all once knew when we considered ourselves all Iraqis and not belonging to a particular sect or group," he said. "Recently we have brought back large numbers of former members of the Ba'ath Party who were not involved in any problems in the past and this has significantly helped to bring our people together. Economic development is taking place at a good rate. Part of the reason we are here is to encourage even more investment into our country. The monthly income of our people has gone from about $20 a month to now over $200. The dramatic rise in electrical use is one good sign that the economy is taking off. The stores are full." Describing the current military situation as "moving from sectarian to outside interference," Malaki stressed that the so called Baghdad Plan was working. "We are seeing a dramatic drop in the sectarian conflicts and see our major challenge as that from the outside including Al Quaida and remainders of the Ba'athist groups," he said. "In the end we will be able to take care of ourselves. Meanwhile, we need the help of our friends to stand against those who want to harm us."
<ref> http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/2007/s07040107.htm </ref>

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said in a recent interview, that the increase of nearly 30,000 U.S. troops in the country had achieved "modest progress" but had also had setbacks such as a rise in suicide bombings and other problems. Petraeus also stated that he was uncertain whether his counterinsurgency strategy would be ultimately succeed, but he stated "We have certainly pulled [Baghdad] neighborhoods back from the brink." Assessing the first two months of the U.S. and Iraqi plan to pacify the capital, senior American commanders -- including Petraeus; Adm. William Fallon, head of U.S. forces in the Middle East; Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of military operations in Iraq; and top regional commanders -- see mixed results. Critical now, they said in interviews last week, is for Iraqi leaders to forge the political compromises needed for long-term stability. The deployment of additional troops in Baghdad is only 60 percent complete, and a major concern shared by U.S. military leaders is whether al-Maliki's government is capable of solidifying gains in security as well as making the crucial political compromises needed to achieve peace.
<ref> http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070423/NEWS/70422011</ref>

In an interview of Iraq's national security adviser, Mowaffak Al-Rubaie aired May 10, 2007, Mr. Rubaie stated, "This is an ideological war. This is a -- a long-term war. This is a war on a global scale. This is a war, if it gets out of control, it will spill over to Europe and America in no time. And it will disturb the oil flow in the Gulf. What happened in Iraq is not something minor and simple, like a coup d'etat or a revolution. What happened is a hurricane. What happened is a huge, major shift, from the old order of 1,000 years of persecution, of dictatorship, of religious supremacy, of prosecuting minorities, to a completely new order, which is called democracy, human rights, accountability, and transparency, and all this. This paradigm shift needs some time. You cannot -- it needs strategic patience. And it needs time. You cannot fit this major shift and the strategic objectives in the election cycle of Washington. You cannot do that."

He went on to note progress and plead for patience, "I think we made a remarkable progress over the last three years. In June 2004, we had only one battalion in the Iraqi army. Now we have 11 divisions. And, in June 2004, we did not have policemen. We did not have national police, local police, an intelligence service. We didn't have anything. Now we have Iraqi security forces, several hundreds of thousands of them. And what we need, we need some refinements, some tuning. We need some training. And we need some equipment and logistical support. We need to build the system within the Iraqi security forces. In a very short period of time, we're going to be self-reliant."

"Take, for example, in Baghdad. Last year, Baghdad was under the command of an American general called General Thurman. And now Baghdad is under the command-and- control of general -- an Iraqi general called General Abboud. And he is commanding and leading and controlling 2.5 Iraqi army division and 11 or 13 Iraqi police, national police, brigades. -- we needed the upsurge, and we need the upsurge to clear some areas of these neighborhoods and to hold them and to build them. When we have this upsurge, let's the best use of it. And let's clear these areas and hold it and build it." <ref> http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0705/10/acd.01.html </ref>

May 12, 2007, "Iraq's top Shi'ite party changes platform" gave the stunning news that "Iraq's biggest Shi'ite party, The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), pledged its allegiance to the country's top Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in a move that would distance it from Shi'ite Iran where it was formed. They said the party had been close to Sistani for some time, but a two-day conference formalized relations with the influential cleric. Officials said the party, which was formed in Iran in the 1980s to oppose Saddam, had previously taken its guidance from the religious establishment of Welayat al Faqih, led by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran. The party then pledged to follow the guidance of the Shi'ite establishment and also said it had introduced significant policy changes and changed its name to the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) -- dropping the word "Revolution". <ref> http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/latest/tm_headline=iraq-s-top-shi-ite-party-changes-platform&method=full&objectid=19092898&siteid=89520-name_page.html </ref>

This was hailed in the Middle East as a very significant development, stating "The real change of direction and leadership of Iraqi Shiites to Sistani is the greatest victory of the new era of constitutionalism and civility in Iraq. The shifting of Shiite Islam to Najaf, instead of Qum, is a huge change and a direct result of Iraq's freedom that has changed the balance of power in Iraq and Iran. The New York Times-owned Boston Globe reports from Tehran that the influence of Iraqi Shiites is growing even there: "Some Iranians are intrigued by the more freewheeling experiment in Shi'ite empowerment taking place across the border in Iraq, where--Iraq's myriad problems aside--imams can say whatever they want in political Friday sermons, newspapers and satellite channels regularly slam the government, and religious observance is respected and encouraged but not required." <ref> http://www.globalpolitician.com/articledes.asp?ID=2815&cid=2&sid=38 </ref>

CBS Evening News May 29, 2007 presented, "an exclusive interview, Iraq's Prime Minister tells CBS News the security crackdown is working." The network relayed how, “in his first American television interview since the U.S. troop surge began in February, Iraq's Prime Minister told CBS News today the additional forces here have prevented an even greater catastrophe.” Maliki also disclosed that there have been many victories in breaking up al Qaeda and other militant cells. <ref> http://newsbusters.org/node/13073 </ref>

Then on May 31, 07, the article "US Eyes Cease-Fires End Violence in Iraq" added, quote: U.S. military commanders are talking with Iraqi militants about cease-fires and other arrangements to try to stop the violence, the No. 2 American commander Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno said. He thinks 80 percent of Iraqis — including Sunni insurgents and Shia militants — can reach reconciliation with each other. "We are talking about cease-fires, and maybe signing some things that say they won't conduct operations against the government of Iraq or against coalition forces. I believe there are elements that are irreconcilable, but I believe the large majority are. I believe about 80 percent are reconcilable, both Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Sunni insurgents." He said the increased effort by commanders to reach out to militants goes hand in hand with reconciliation efforts by the Iraqi government. Odierno noted that efforts to engage tribal leaders in Anbar province — who have been turning against al-Qaida there — has helped draw people to serve in the Iraqi security forces in record numbers and has helped reduce attacks there. For example, the attacks in Anbar in May 2006 totaled 811, while this May they were just barely over 400. Since the beginning of 2007, over 12,000 Iraqi citizens have volunteered for Iraqi security forces in Anbar. In all of 2006, only 1,000 had volunteered. <ref> http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/05/31/national/w114445D86.DTL </ref>

Even Newsweek's June 4 edition on page 33, has a story by Melinda Liu on actual progress in Iraq, headlined: "Gathering the Tribes: U.S. field commanders are finally beginning to tap the traditional networks that helped Saddam stay in power." Liu reported from Ramadi that "Marines and Iraqi tribesmen and police are sitting together, swapping jokes and stories. Some of these Iraqis were probably shooting at Americans less than a year ago. Now they and the Marines are fighting side by side against Al Qaeda." The story also carried a large, bolded quote: 'Last year the Americans were our biggest enemies,' says one cop. 'Now they're how we get what we need.' The captions on the pictures read: PEACE SIGNS: Tribal recruits man a check-point in Ramadi (above); children and others now freely interact with Americans (right). <ref> http://newsbusters.org/node/13080 </ref>

And on May 31 a report "Sunnis Revolt Against al-Qaida in Iraq" confirmed the trend stating, "U.S. troops battled al-Qaida in west Baghdad on Thursday after Sunni Arab residents challenged the militants and called for American help to end furious gunfire that kept students from final exams and forced people in the neighborhood to huddle indoors. Backed by helicopter gunships, U.S. troops joined the two-day battle in the Amariyah district, according to residents of the Sunni district. Lt. Col. Dale C. Kuehl, commander of 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, who is responsible for the Amariyah area of the capital, confirmed the U.S. military's role in the fighting in the Sunni district. "The events of the past two days are promising developments. Sunni citizens of Amariyah that have been previously terrorized by al-Qaida are now resisting and want them gone. They're tired of the intimidation that included the murder of women," Kuehl said. Casualty figures were not immediately available. But the district councilman said Haji Hameed, the al-Qaida leader in Amariyah, was killed and 45 other fighters were detained. <ref>http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/05/31/international/i154309D51.DTL </ref>

Meanwhile, U.S. forces handed over responsibility for security in Iraq's three northern provinces to the Kurdish regional government. Seven Iraqi provinces, including Najaf, Muthanna, Dhi Qar and Maysan, now have responsibility for their own security – a third of the total. The United States hopes to add more as Iraqi forces grow in capability. <ref> http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=74626 </ref>

March 2008 - 62% of Iraqis now say they want the US troops to stay in their country.. and a full 55% say their lives are going well. 

Marking the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, ABC's anchor Charles Gibson on World News Monday March 18, 2008 explained “we have polled inside Iraq and there is some good news.” Specifically, “today, 55 percent of Iraqi say their lives are going well. Last summer that number was 39 percent.” From Iraq, Terry McCarthy reported, "As our poll takers spread across the country they found that for the first time in three years, people were more worried about economic and social problems than violence. And almost half think their country will be better off in a year -- double the number six months ago. In Dora, in southern Baghdad, we found these kids playing on the street. A year ago, they would haven't dared to come outside.... McCarthy also noted in a telling reality check, only 38 percent want U.S. troops to leave now, afraid that the gains in security might be reversed.” This obviously means that 62 percent of the Iraqis polled want US troops to stay in their country until they are certain the gains in security and stability will not be reversed. “Even Fallujah has turned around,” McCarthy learned, “as the local population has largely abandoned the insurgency and now they're focusing on rebuilding the city from the ruins of war,” though tough tasks remain with most complaining about electrical shortages and poor health care services. <ref> http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2008/03/18/abc-finds-optimistic-iraqis-kids-playing-safely-street </ref>

CNN Headline News anchor Glenn Beck stated "[If the United States were to withdraw, it] would be America’s most shameful act of immorality since slavery". He added that Democrat Congressional war opponents are "just plain stupid" and "can't see the future." Beck stated that if U.S. forces pull out, a "genocide" will take place that will make Darfur "look like a picnic." For support he turned to Van Hipp, Chairman and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army who said, "Unfortunately, Glenn, I believe you`re right. And I tell you, if we surrender now, I believe you will see a humanitarian catastrophe much like or even worse than the situation in Darfur right now, the death count -- and the estimate right now beginning in a few months, they could be looking at 100,000 deaths a month." <ref> http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0704/24/gb.01.html </ref>

John McCain, on Feb 15, 2008 delineated his position for the continuance of the war effort stated in this article, "Republican frontrunner John McCain drew sharp distinctions with his Democratic White House rivals over Iraq, saying an untimely US withdrawal would bring about "genocide." "Both Senator Obama and Clinton want to set a date for withdrawal. That means chaos. That means genocide," the Arizona senator told CNN's Larry King late Thursday. "That means undoing all the success we've achieved, and Al-Qaeda tells the world they defeated the United States of America. I won't let that happen, as president of the United States."<ref> http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/McCain:_Early_Pullout_Fro/2008/02/15/72973.html
</ref>

===Al-Qaeda's Use Of Torture===
Key to any insurgency is its ability to have the support of the people, or at least their assent. If the people turn against the insurgency as they now have in Iraq, the insurgents have no basis of operations to hide in and the insurgency crumbles. This is why the insurgents have fled to northern Iraq, as stated above. However, working toward forcing cooperation by the populace, the terrorists in Iraq have used incredible amounts of intimidation - kidnap, torture, threats and murder - to prevent the local Iraqi populace from cooperating with those who will bring them a free and democratic Iraq (the US/Coalition forces and the Democratically aligned Iraqi government forces). From the ordinary Iraqi's point of view, cooperating with those who will bring them freedom can have a high cost. If found out, the media will splash their name all over the papers, making it easy for the terrorists to target them for reprisals. Family members can go missing or they can. They could be tortured or killed.

The great tragedy in the Mainstream Media ([[MSM]]) covering up the inhumane torture methods of the terrorists while trumpeting outrage at the far milder US intimidation techniques (Abu Gharib, etc), is that it hides from public view what risks the Iraqi population must take to cooperate with those who would bring them their freedom. In the article, "Media Totally Ignore Al Qaeda Torture Manual" it says, "Glenn Reynolds this morning pointed out that “Silence is complicity,” while leading the reader to Don Surber’s piece on the subject which went much further in condemning the media boycott (emphasis added): And yet such false stories as the “flushed Koran” got widespread play in the newspapers and on television. We are hearing those awful “Sounds of Silence” that Simon and Garfunkel warned us about. Whether intentional or not, the message is clear: The United States must be above even false reports of torture, while the enemy is allowed to promote eye removal, blowtorching skin and horrors I won’t go into. The handbook shows that the enemy really is perverted; they are sickos who like to torture people. As much as I admire and respect John McCain’s war service, he is wrong when he says our interrogation methods encourage the enemy to torture our people. The enemy was torturing and beheading people well before 9/11."<ref>http://newsbusters.org/node/13002</ref>

Apart from brief mentions on Fox News and CNN, reports on this issue in the days prior or subsequent have been few. As a result, the populace of the US sees daily news coverage of just how ruthless the insurgents are in their attacks upon the populace in the way of guns and bombs, but are not given substantive evidence of the intimidation (torture) which the Iraqi people face. And it is this torture and intimidation which was the direct cause of slowing US progress, hampering the swift end of the insurgency in Iraq. Thinking that the people of Iraq support the insurgency and are not merely being intimidated by them, the US populace has been impatient for instant progress and their support for the Iraqi people obtaining their freedom from such a ruthless enemy waned. As a result - before the success of the surge, the drop in violence and the standing up of the Iraqis against this intimidation - US support for the war dropped significantly and many discouraged American people turned to supporting the anti-American sentiments of the far left saying America should pull the troops from Iraq.

===Results of the Surge on casualties and terrorist attacks===
The surge has resulted in a 60% reduction in terrorist attacks and causalities since June of 2007 to the present.<ref>http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=48515</ref> Indeed, the year 2008 saw a decline in soldier deaths to 309 from 906 the year before.<ref>http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/30/iraq.main/index.html</ref>

Many insurgents returned to [[Libya]], [[Syria]], and other places of origin to continue jihad against [[Muammar Gaddafi]], [[Bashar al Assad]] and other [[secular]] rulers.

==Iraq Strategy in Relation to the Global War on Terrorism==

As reported in the State Department's annual Country Reports on Terrorism <ref>http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2006/</ref> released April 30, 2007, there are steep declines in terrorist attacks and murders in many regions of the globe. Though terrorism has increased markedly in Iraq, aside from the Middle East (which does not include Afghanistan according to State), the number of terrorist attacks worldwide is down from a year ago by over 300 incidents. In other words, the Bush administration's idea that making Iraq the "central front in the war on terror" seems to be working. According to the State report, terrorism in South Asia is down by 10 percent from a year ago. In Europe, it's down 18 percent. In Central and South America, terrorism-related deaths are down 54 percent. <ref>http://newsbusters.org/node/12431 </ref>

==Weapons of Mass Destruction==

Weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, just not the amount considered enough used to justify -one- of the reasons for removing Saddam. <ref>[http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/ WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results, Wired, October 23, 2010</ref> Over one-third of 36 million captured Ba'ath party records have been examined by a linguist and a summary gist of the document prepared.<ref>[http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/duelfer.html Comprehensive Report of the Special Adviser to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD], retrieved March 21, 2007</ref> Many believe the physical WMDs that had been produced prior to the invasion were smuggled out of the country, possibly to [[Syria]], before the onset of the war. But recently in July 2008, <ref>[http://www.abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=5314609 The USA Military found 550 metric tons of yellow cake uranium in Iraq]</ref> The USA Military found 550 metric tons of yellow cake uranium and parts to make nuclear weapons in Tuwaitha 12 miles south of Baghdad, as proof that George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and the CIA were right about Saddam owning yellow cake uranium. An article 07/08/2008 states, "In recent weeks, the U.S. secretly has helped the Iraqi government ship it all to Canada, where it was bought by a Canadian company for further processing into nuclear fuel — thus keeping it from potential use by terrorists or unsavory regimes in the region. The scary math behind Saddam's uranium hoard: 500 tons of yellowcake, once refined, could make 142 nuclear weapons. This would seem to vindicate Bush's decision to invade. According to the AP, the military also discovered 'four devices for controlled radiation exposure ... that could potentially be used in a weapon.'"<ref> http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=462856&Ntt=yellowcake+found+in+iraq </ref>

Saddam's General says they had WMD - As FrontPageMagazine.com reported in its article "Symposium: Iraq, WMDs and Troubling Revelations" on May 29th 2006 - "Just recently, Saddam Hussein's former southern regional commander, Gen. Al-Tikriti, gave the first videotaped testimony confirming that Iraq had WMDs up to the American invasion in 2003 and that Russia helped remove them prior to the war. His testimony confirms numerous other sources that have pointed to Russia's secret alliance with Iraq and the coordinated moving of WMDs before the American liberation." <ref> http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22645 </ref> However, there is no way to obtain hard physical evidence to back up their assertions due to the fact that Syria will not allow such intrusive inspection and searching in their country. Intelligence sources do, however, say that General Al-Tikriti is a credible witness as is the pilot who also testified that he flew such missions.

According to the Duelfer Report, Saddam used the Iraq Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MHESR) through its universities and research programs to maintain, develop, and acquire expertise, to advance or preserve existent research projects and developments, and to procure goods prohibited by United Nations Security Council sanctions.<ref>Duelfer Report, Vol. 1, Regime Finance and Procurement, p. 10 (pdf)</ref>

In keeping with that finding, on March 10, 2010 the Washington Post revealed the existence of documents showing that Saddam had been approached with the offer of a $150 million nuclear "package" deal that included not only weapons designs but also production plants and foreign experts to supervise the building of a nuclear bomb, according to documents uncovered by a former U.N. weapons inspector. The offer, "guaranteed Iraq a weapons-assembly line capable of producing nuclear warheads in as little as three years." At the time of the 1990 offer, Iraq was embarked in a crash program to develop nuclear weapons and "Iraqi officials at the time appear to have taken the offer seriously and asked the Pakistanis for sample drawings as proof of their ability to deliver." The article goes on to state that "Aid from the Pakistani scientist could have accelerated Iraq's quest for a weapon if the Iraqi leader had not run out of time, writes Albright, a former U.N. inspector who now heads the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security."
<ref>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/09/AR2010030903775.html?wprss=rss_world&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wp-dyn%2Frss%2Fworld%2Findex_xml+%28washingtonpost.com+-+World%29 </ref>

Additionally, concerning the 36 million captured pages of documentation, when it was put on the net for public translation, it was removed after they found quote, "detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb." As The New York Times confirmed in their issue November 3, 2006, Saddam had complete plans for a nuclear weapon and was in the process of procuring parts when the US removed him. Quote: "nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away." <ref> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03documents.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ei=5094&en=1511d6b3da302d4f&hp&ex=1162530000&partner=homepage </ref>

Additionally, tapes with Saddam speaking on them also surfaced and certain sinister remarks Saddam made on the tapes were translated which showed that he threatened to use WMD on Washington, DC. In the article , "Saddam Translator: ABC Reinterpreted Tapes" dated Feb. 17th 2006, the FBI translator who supplied the 12 hours of Saddam Hussein audiotapes excerpted by ABC's "Nightline" says the network discarded his translations and went with a less threatening version of the Iraqi dictator's comments. In the "Nightline" version of the 1996 recording, Saddam predicts that Washington, D.C., would be hit by terrorists. But he adds that Iraq would have nothing to do with the attack. Tierney says, however, that what Saddam actually said was much more sinister. "He was discussing his intent to use chemical weapons against the United States and use proxies so it could not be traced back to Iraq," he told Hannity. In a passage not used by "Nightline," Tierney says Saddam declares: "Terrorism is coming. ... In the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. What if we consider this technique, with smuggling?" <ref> http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/2/17/125334.shtml </ref>

Concerning additional tapes uncovered where Saddam is being briefed by his Son-in-law, Lieutenant General Hussein, ABC News reports his words to Saddam Hussein: "Sir, I would not be speaking so openly if it were not for your excellency's and Mr. Tariq's clarification and statement that we produced biological weapons. We did not reveal all that we have. Secondly, they don't know about our work in the domain of missiles. With regard to the issue of the chemical, sir, ... In the chemical, sir, they have a problem far bigger than the biological, bigger than the biological. Not the type of the weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct. They don't know any of this. We did not reveal the volume of the chemical weapons that we had produced. We did not reveal the type of the chemical weapons. We did not reveal the truth about the volume of the imported materials. In the nuclear, sir, in the biological, we also disagree with them. As for the nuclear, we say we have disclosed everything but no. We have undeclared problems in nuclear as well, and I believe that they know. There are teams working with no one knowing about some of them. I go back to the question of whether we should reveal everything or continue to be silent... I would say it is in our interest not to reveal. Not just out of fear of disclosing the technology we achieved, or to hide it for future work... <ref> http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Investigation/story?id=1623307&page=1 </ref>

Another of the documents show that Saddam ordered suicide attacks on the US, which then, within a year, could have become nuclear. In the article "Saddam Ordered Suicide Attacks on U.S. Targets" dated April 6th 2006, it states, "A newly translated document from Saddam Hussein's intelligence files indicates that the Iraqi dictator ordered suicide attacks against U.S. targets six months before the 9/11 attacks." <ref>http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/4/6/230437.shtml?s=lh </ref>

Also, there was another document discovered proving that Saddam was intending to attack London in this article "Saddam was training terrorists for attacks in London" dated March 27th 2006 - "Among the documents released last week was a translation of a three-page Iraqi Intelligence memo regarding a wave of attacks to be conducted by the Saddam Fedayeen.According to those orders, the Fedayeen Saddam was "to start planning from now on to perform special operations (assassinations/bombings) for the centers and the traitor symbols in the fields of (London/Iran/self-ruled areas) and for coordination with the Intelligence service to secure deliveries, accommodations, and target guidance."" <ref> http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/024eyieu.asp </ref>

The UK government Feb 18, 2008 released an early draft of its controversial dossier on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, after losing a bid to keep it secret. The government has always maintained Williams' paper was not relevant as the final dossier was the work of its intelligence agencies. The dossier, quote: "concentrates on allegations that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's regime had acquired uranium, retained the ability to manufacture chemical and biological weapons and was developing long-range missiles." Even the UK's opposition Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Edward Davey conceded that, "The core analysis of the threat allegedly posed by Iraq is the same in both documents." <ref> http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/080218/world/britain_iraq_war_dossier_politics_intelligence_1 </ref>

These allegations are not in dispute, as the quoted detractors in the article make clear when it says of them, "Campaigners have been pushing for it to be made public, claiming it could show that the final dossier -- in which it was claimed Iraq could launch WMD within 45 minutes -- was the work of government "spin doctors"."

Apart from whether Iraq could have launched WMD in that time frame, the core analysis shows ample reason and justification for beginning Operation Iraqi Freedom - including weapons grade uranium, the ability to launch long-range missiles at Western allies and the ability to manufacture at will chemical and biological weapons. Saddam was a WMD threat with malicious intent and although how close to launching such attacks he was remains in question, the fact he was one year from acquiring the bomb and was calling for attacks and agents to be in place (in the West) while developing missiles to deliver these weapons against allied Western targets, figured strongly in the case for war.

CNSNews.com reported that an Oct. 4, 2004, report by Cybercast News Service included 42 pages of Iraqi Intelligence Service memos that revealed Saddam's purchase of mustard gas and anthrax as recently as the summer of 2000 and his extensive ties to al Qaeda. Then in June, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) and U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) released declassified portions of an intelligence report that they said confirmed Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction, including mustard gas. The report indicated that 500 such weapons had been destroyed by the U.S.-led coalition since 2003 and that the U.S. and its allies were racing against terrorist groups in trying to control the remaining weapons in Iraq. "It is essential for the American people to understand that these weapons are in Iraq," Santorum said during the news conference.<ref> http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200607/NAT20060725a.html </ref>

How many WMD means Saddam had some? - Fox News reported on May 17th, 2004 that a roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent was confirmed to have exploded near a U.S. military convoy, but the incident was downplayed along with the note that mustard gas had also been found. Quote, "The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy." Bush administration officials told Fox News that mustard gas was also recently discovered. <ref> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120137,00.html </ref>

Concluding that "the mustard gas was "stored improperly," which made the gas "ineffective,"" these deadly agents were ignored and the view that WMD do not exist remains remains perpetuated. The same Fox News article notes, "They believe the mustard gas shell may have been one of 550 projectiles for which former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein failed to account when he made his weapons declaration shortly before Operation Iraqi Freedom began last year. Iraq also failed to then account for 450 aerial bombs with mustard gas. That, combined with the shells, totaled about 80 tons of unaccounted for mustard gas. It also appears some top Pentagon officials were surprised by the sarin news; they thought the matter was classified, administration officials told Fox News."

ABC News reported on 7/1/2004 this article, "Polish troops find sarin warheads in Iraq" which stated, "Polish troops have found two warheads in Iraq believed to contain a deadly nerve agent. The two warheads were found in early June in a bunker in the area controlled by Polish forces, and they tested positive for cyclosarin, a substance many times stronger than sarin, the ministry said in a statement. Another dozen were found later in June. <ref> http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-07-01-poland-iraq-sarin_x.htm </ref> This finding was updated 2 days later as testing found that all sixteen rockets had initially showed traces of sarin, but were now "all empty and tested negative for any type of chemicals." <ref>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24403-2004Jul2.html</ref> The article went on to state, "In January 2003, U.N. inspectors discovered a dozen old 122-millimeter rockets that chief inspector Hans Blix described at the time as "designed to carry chemical weapons." Iraq later turned up several more, and all were destroyed. Blix later said he was not sure whether Iraq mentioned them in the 12,000-page weapons declaration it submitted in December 2002.

As for anthrax, on Jan 1st 2004, aim.org covered an article saying of Saddam's anthrax production capability, quote, "Investigative journalist Richard Miniter says there is evidence to indicate Saddam’s anthrax program was capable of producing the kind of anthrax that hit America shortly after 9/11. Miniter (said) that during November he interviewed U.S. weapons inspector Dr. David Kay in Baghdad and that he was "absolutely shocked and astonished" at the sophistication of the Iraqi program. Miniter said that Kay told him that, "the Iraqis had developed new techniques for drying and milling anthrax—techniques that were superior to anything the United States or the old Soviet Union had. That would make the former regime of Saddam Hussein the most sophisticated manufacturer of anthrax in the world."" <ref> http://www.aim.org/publications/media_monitor/2004/01/01.html </ref>

Democrats say Bush lied about the weapons of mass destruction. However, the Butler report and a British Intelligence Agency back up the claim that Saddam was trying to get uranium from Niger as early as 2002. To some criticism, there were some forged documents but these weren’t the ones Bush was referring to. <ref> http://www.factcheck.org/article222.html </ref>

Saddam has used chemical weapons before so why would he change it now? <ref> http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/</ref>

===Saddam's Links to Al Qaeda===

BEFORE the United States went to war to depose the threat of Saddam to its Homeland, in March 2002 and February 2003, CIA Director George Tenet Testified that Iraq had clear ties to Al Qaeda. Coupled with the above statement by the NY Times article that they were only one year from a nuclear bomb and the sinister statements by the translator Tierney, along with the article about Saddam ordering preparation for suicide attacks on US targets before 911, the case for invading Iraq to secure the US from further destruction was both logical and justified.

In February 2003, CIA Director George Tenet Testified That Iraq Had Links To Al Qaeda. TENET: "Iraq is harboring senior members of a terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a close associate of al Qaeda. ... Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb-making to al Qaeda. It has also provided training in poisons and gases to two al Qaeda associates. One of these associates characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful. ... I know that part of this - and part of this Zarqawi network in Baghdad are two dozen [[Egyptian Islamic Jihad|Egyptian Islamic jihad]] which is indistinguishable from al Qaeda - operatives who are aiding the Zarqawi network, and two senior planners who have been in Baghdad since last May.

Now, whether there is a base or whether there is not a base, they are operating freely, supporting the Zarqawi network that is supporting the poisons network in Europe and around the world. So these people have been operating there. And, as you know - I don't want to recount everything that Secretary Powell said, but as you know a foreign service went to the Iraqis twice to talk to them about Zarqawi and were rebuffed. So there is a presence in Baghdad that is beyond Zarqawi." (George Tenet, Select Committee On Intelligence, U.S. Senate, Hearing, 2/11/03)

Tenet Testified That Iraq Was Providing Safe Haven To Al Qaeda. SEN. CARL LEVIN (D-MI): "Would you say, Mr. Tenet, that the Zarqawi terrorist network is under the control or sponsorship of the Iraqi government?" TENET: "I don't know that, sir, but I know that there's a safe haven that's been provided to this network in Baghdad." LEVIN: "So you're not - well, you're saying that you don't know if they're under the support - that they are under the control or direction?" TENET: "Yes, sir. We have said - what we've said is Zarqawi and this large number of operatives are in Baghdad. They say the environment is good. And it is inconceivable to us that the Iraqi intelligence service doesn't know that they live there or what they're doing." (George Tenet, Select Committee On Intelligence, U.S. Senate, Hearing, 2/11/03)

In March 2002, Tenet Testified On Iraq's Links To Al Qaeda. TENET: "We continue to watch Iraq's involvement in terrorists' activities. Baghdad has a long history of supporting terrorism, altering its targets to reflect changing priorities and goals. It is also had contacts with Al Qaeda." (George Tenet, Committee On Armed Services, U.S. Senate, Hearing, 3/19/02)<ref> http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060915-4.html </ref>

As mentioned above, CNSNews.com reported that an Oct. 4, 2004, report by Cybercast News Service included 42 pages of Iraqi Intelligence Service memos that revealed Saddam's purchase of mustard gas and anthrax as recently as the summer of 2000 and his extensive ties to al Qaeda. <ref> http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200607/NAT20060725a.html </ref>

In the article The proof that Saddam worked with bin Laden dated 27/04/2003 The Telegraph claimed to have found Iraqi intelligence documents in Baghdad which "provided evidence of a direct link between Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist network and Saddam Hussein's regime." It went on to state, "Papers found yesterday in the bombed headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, reveal that an al-Qa'eda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad in March 1998. The documents show that the purpose of the meeting was to establish a relationship between Baghdad and al-Qa'eda based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia. The meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad. Intriguingly, the Iraqis talk about sending back an oral message to bin Laden, perhaps aware of the risk of a written message being intercepted." The article ends, "The file contradicts the that there was no link between the Iraqi regime and al-Qa'eda." <ref> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/27/walq27.xml </ref> Additional citations of the documentation are given by The Telegraph in their article titled, "'We'll pay all expenses to gain the knowledge from bin Laden and convey a message back" which is a quote from the documentation itself.<ref> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=3NQI3V5KB2T53QFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2003/04/27/walq127.xml </ref> The intelligence documents are again cited by a Canadian eyewitness source in "Saddam, bin Laden link found: Canadian reporter" <ref>
http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2003/04/26/saddam_osama030426.html </ref>

It is noteworthy that under President Clinton, reported in February of 1999, the article (still available to view on the net) titled, "Saddam link to Bin Laden" - Terror chief 'offered asylum' in Iraq? The article states, "Saddam Hussein's regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials. The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. News of the negotiations emerged in a week when the US attorney general, Janet Reno, warned the Senate that a terrorist attack involving weapons of mass destruction was a growing concern. "There's a threat, and it's real," Ms Reno said, adding that such weapons "are being considered for use." US embassies around the world are on heightened alert as a result of threats believed to emanate from followers of Bin Laden, who has been indicted by a US court for orchestrating the bombing last August of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 259 people died. US delegations in Africa and the Gulf have been shut down in recent weeks after credible threats were received. In this year's budget, President Clinton called for an additional $2 billion to spend on counter-terrorist measures... Ahmed Allawi, a senior member of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC), based in London, said he had heard reports of the December meeting which he believed to be accurate. "There is a long history of contacts between Mukhabarat [Iraqi secret service] and Osama bin Laden," he said. Mr Hijazi, formerly director of external operations for Iraqi intelligence offered Mr bin Laden asylum in Iraq, most likely in return for co-operation in launching attacks on US and Saudi targets." <ref> http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,314700,00.html </ref>

Bin Laden was a threat to the United States at the time Saddam was in power and his efforts have been ongoing in terrorism since Saddam's regime was toppled. His plots have included targeting the United States as disclosed May 22, 2007 in the article "White House says bin Laden ordered Iraq plots" where it cites newly declassified intelligence which states, "Osama bin Laden ordered al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to form a cell in 2005 to plot attacks outside of Iraq and make the United States his main target. Townsend said that in the spring of 2005 bin Laden also told Hamza Rabia, then al Qaeda's top operations man, to brief Zarqawi on the group's "external operations planning, including homeland plots (targeting the United States)." <ref> http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/05/23/white_house_says_bin_laden_ordered_iraq_plots/ </ref>

SEE: The Saddam Connection To Osama by ABC News: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWFWCg1BdRg

Fox News reported March 23, 2008 that "Saddam Hussein’s Son Plotted London Assassination Attack", stating that "Saddam Hussein's son Uday planned to carry out an attack in London, England to assassinate the leader of an Iraqi opposition group in April 2000." Based on seized documents, Uday Hussein's elite paramilitary group — the Fedayeen — were given orders "to carry out assassinations and bombings in London, the Times reported."

Further, "While the study showed no link between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda, it does detail the former Iraq dictator's support for Middle Eastern terror groups, including those linked to Al Qaeda. Also in the report are memos showing Uday ordered officials to “start planning special operations in the centres of the traitors’ symbols in the fields of London / Iran / self-ruled areas [Kurdish northern Iraq]”, it was reported." <ref> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,340745,00.html </ref>
The Ba'athist party was a terror organization. Seeking additional support for terror in the region, Saddam was paying Palestine families $25,000 in U.S. dollars, if their sons blew themselves up in Israel<ref>http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/03/25/1017004766310.html , Sydney Morning Herald Saddam stokes war with suicide bomber cash, March 26,2002</ref>

This June 29, 2010 article shows proof that "both Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda supported Ansar al Islam, a Jihadist Kurdish outfit that has tried to kill the current Kurdish prime minister, Barham Salih. In 2008, the Institute for Defense Analyses released a more thorough report on Iraq's involvement in terrorism between the two gulf wars that was based on more than 600,000 captured Iraqi documents."

The report uncovers many different points of connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, including evidence that the IIS funded Ayman Zawahiri in the early 1990s when he was the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The IIS also sought out suicide bombers to attack the Saudi royal family, and Iraq also sought to send assistance to jihadists fighting U.S. peacekeepers in Somalia in the early 1990s as well. This says nothing of Saddam's support for Hamas and other Palestinians suicide bombers in the second intifada.

The report also undercuts the claim that Saddam Hussein, being a secular Ba'athist, was incapable of cooperating with radical Islamists who viewed the Iraqi dictator as an apostate ruler. Instead, the report said that Iraq's relationship to radical Islamic terrorist groups was more like the relationship between rival Colombian cocaine cartels, in that it was possible for wary cooperation on mutual short term goals, and then violent competition later.

In addition to the IDA report, which I think is more definitive because it is an analysis of documents captured during the war and not simply derived from interviews with captured senior leaders, there are other good reasons to think Iraq and al Qaeda had more of a relationship than widely believed by the net left. Carl Ford, the head of the State Department's Intelligence and Research bureau before the war wrote in a memo in 2003, "We have some evidence that Iraqi Intelligence has been in contact with elements in the northeastern area. And the al-Qaeda operatives there are in regular contact with other operatives located in Baghdad. The Iraqi government has also received information from other sources alerting it to the presence of al-Qaeda operatives in Baghdad." Carl Ford in an interview with PBS Frontline has stood by his contention that al Qaeda operatives were flooding into Iraq before the war.

<ref>http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/06/on-that-dastardly-saddam-al-qaeda-connection/58901/ </ref>

===Summary update on WMD and Iraq/terrorist/Al Qaeda connections NOT being falsified===

The Los Angeles Times article, "Bush never lied to us about Iraq - The administration simply got bad intelligence. Critics are wrong to assert deception." By James Kirchick, June 16, 2008, a great deal of summary about these two previous sections on WMD and links to the Al Qaeda are given. The article states that, "Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of the charge.. that the Bush administration deceived the American people. Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House "manipulation" -- that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods." <ref> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kirchick16-2008jun16,0,4808346.story </ref>

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments." The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found "no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." 

Even concerning the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, 2008, quote, "what did this report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were "substantiated by intelligence information." The same goes for claims about Hussein's possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program."

The article contends that if Democrats wish to contend they were "misled" into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA. It then asserts, "This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the Democrats' lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers." <ref> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kirchick16-2008jun16,0,4808346.story </ref>

Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt also brought out what Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee found in their June 5, 2008 report, saying, quote:
<ref> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/08/AR2008060801687.html </ref>

There's no question that the administration, and particularly Vice President Cheney, spoke with too much certainty at times and failed to anticipate or prepare the American people for the enormous undertaking in Iraq.

But dive into [Sen. Jay] Rockefeller's report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.

On Iraq's nuclear weapons program? The president's statements "were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates." 

On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president's statements "were substantiated by intelligence information."

On chemical weapons, then? "Substantiated by intelligence information."

On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information."

Delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles? "Generally substantiated by available intelligence."

Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information." 

As you read through the report, you begin to think maybe you've mistakenly picked up the minority dissent. But, no, this is the Rockefeller indictment. So, you think, the smoking gun must appear in the section on Bush's claims about Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to terrorism.

But statements regarding Iraq's support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information."

Statements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda "were substantiated by the intelligence assessments," and statements regarding Iraq's contacts with al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information."

The report is left to complain about "implications" and statements that "left the impression" that those contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation.

Hiatt then noted what the Republican part of the report said, "the reports essentially validate what we have been saying all along: that policymakers' statements were substantiated by the intelligence." 

<ref> http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2008/06/09/bush-lied-argument-doesnt-match-facts-democrats-say </ref>

==The Duelfer Report==

In 2004, the [[Iraq Survey Group]], ISG, whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, released what has been called the [[Duelfer Report]]. <ref> https://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/index.html </ref> The ISG found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official was quoted as saying. <ref> http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38213 </ref> Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner. The United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.

When former weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States had found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his conclusions made front-page news, as did Duelfer's similarly worded conclusion in his report. But when Kay detailed what the ISG had found in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, few took notice.

Both Duelfer and Kay found Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects." "Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'" They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors," the official said.

In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer revealed the ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents. The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a "high-speed rail gun," a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad.

How did this happen? According to the Duelfer Report, half of the picture rests with entities outside Iraq. Saddam was trying to end the UN sanctions to pursue his conventional, dual-use, and WMD-related programs. In Saddam’s efforts to influence United Nations Security Council members - namely Russia, France, and China - to end sanctions, Saddam’s ordered the Iraq Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) to formulate and implement a strategy aimed at these Security Council members and international public opinion with the purpose of ending UN sanctions by diplomatic and economic means. Saddam also made use of “Protocols” or government-to-government economic trade agreements to generate a large amount of revenue outside the purview of the UN. His success emboldened Saddam to pursue his reconstitution efforts of conventional, dual-use, and WMD-related programs starting in 1997.<ref>Duelfer Report, Vol. 1, Regime Finance and Procurement, p. 9 (pdf)</ref> Quote: "By 2000-2001, Saddam had managed to mitigate many of the effects of sanctions and undermine their international support," the (Duelfer) report said. <ref> http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20041007-092535-2936r.htm </ref>

The Regime’s authorities devised front companies that had close relationships with foreign government officials who worked to procure illicit goods, services, and technologies for Iraq’s WMD-related, conventional arms, and/or dual-use goods programs. Saddam used the ''Mukhabarat'', or Iraqi Intelligence Servise (IIS) to facilitate importation of UN sanctioned and dual-use goods through Syria, Jordan, Belarus, Turkey and others. Numerous foreign trade intermediaries disguised illicit items, hid the identity of the end user, and/or changed the final destination of the item to move it to the region. For a cut of the profits they smuggled prohibited items to entry points along the Iraqi border. Companies in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, UAE, and Yemen assisted Saddam with the acquisition of prohibited items through deceptive trade practices. In the case of Syria and Yemen, this included support from agencies or personnel within the government itself.

===Regime Intent===

The Iraqi Survey Group in interrogations of Ba'athist officials from the leadership of the intelligence and security services, and Qusay’s inner circle, undertook interviews of Ba'athists in custody. Some detainees’ statements were made to minimize their culpability leading to potential prosecution. Detainees were very concerned about their fate and were not willing to implicate themselves in sensitive matters of interest such as WMD, in light of looming prosecutions. Debriefers noted the tendency to place blame or knowledge with individuals who were not in a position to contradict the detainee’s statements, such as deceased individuals or individuals who were not in custody or who had fled the country, or providing debriefers with previously known information. Some former high ranking officials, such as ‘Ali Hasan Al Majid Al Tikriti (Chemical ‘Ali), never gave substantial information, despite speaking colorfully and at length. Some obstructed all attempts to elicit information on WMD and illicit activities of the former Regime. Others, however, were keen to help clarify every issue, sometimes to the point of self-incrimination.

The ISG's key findings stated that Saddam never abandoned his intentions to resume a chemical weapons effort when sanctions were lifted. Saddam and many Iraqis regarded chemical weapons as a proven weapon against an enemy’s superior numerical strength, a weapon that had saved the nation at least once already—during the [[Iran-Iraq war]]— and contributed to deterring the Coalition in 1991 from advancing to Baghdad. After 1991, Saddam did express his intent to retain the intellectual capital, or the know-how that was developed during the Iraqi Nuclear Program. Saddam indicated that he would develop the weapons necessary to counter any Iranian threat. Starting around 1992, in a bid to retain the intellectual core of the former weapons program workers with know-how, Baghdad transferred many nuclear scientists to related jobs in the Military Industrial Commission (MIC). The work undertaken by these scientists at the MIC helped them maintain their weapons knowledge base. The Regime prevented scientists from the former nuclear weapons program from leaving either their jobs or Iraq. Moreover, in the late 1990s, personnel from both MIC and the IAEC received significant pay raises in a bid to retain them, and the Regime undertook new investments in university research in a bid to ensure that Iraq retained technical knowledge.

The way Iraq organized its chemical industry after the mid-1990s allowed it to conserve the knowledge-base needed to restart a CW program, conduct a modest amount of dual-use research, and partially recover from the decline of its production capability caused by the effects of the Gulf war and UN-sponsored destruction and sanctions. Iraq implemented a rigorous and formalized system of nationwide research and production of chemicals. The Regime employed a cadre of trained and experienced researchers, production managers, and weaponization experts from the former CW program. Iraq constructed a number of new plants starting in the mid-1990s that enhanced its chemical infrastructure.

ISG judged, based on available chemicals, infrastructure, and scientist debriefings, that Iraq at OIF probably had a capability to produce large quantities of sulfur mustard within three to six months. A former nerve agent expert indicated that Iraq retained the capability to produce nerve agent in significant quantities within two years, given the import of required phosphorus precursors. However, we have no credible indications that Iraq acquired or attempted to acquire large quantities of these chemicals through its existing procurement networks for sanctioned items. In addition to new investment in its industry, Iraq was able to monitor the location and use of all existing dualuse process equipment. This provided Iraq the ability to rapidly reallocate key equipment for proscribed activities, if required by the Regime.

Iraq’s historical ability to implement simple solutions to weaponization challenges allowed Iraq to retain the capability to weaponize CW agent when the need arose. Iraq could indigenously produce a range of conventional munitions, throughout the 1990s, many of which had previously been adapted for filling with CW agent.

Saddam’s Leadership Defense Plan consisted of a tactical doctrine taught to all Iraqi officers and included the concept of a “red-line” or last line of defense. Uday — head of the Fedayeen Saddam — attempted to obtain chemical weapons for use during OIF. ISG uncovered information that the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) maintained throughout 1991 to 2003 a set of undeclared covert laboratories to research and test various chemicals and poisons, primarily for intelligence operations. The existence, function, and purpose of the laboratories of which were never declared to the UN. The IIS program included the use of human subjects for testing purposes.

The IIS provided the BW program with security and participated in biological research, probably for its own purposes, from the beginning of Iraq’s BW effort in the early 1970s until the final days of Saddam Husayn’s Regime. In 1991, Saddam Husayn regarded BW as an integral element of his arsenal of WMD weapons, and would have used it if the need arose. At a meeting of the Iraqi leadership immediately prior to the Gulf war in 1991, Saddam Husayn personally authorized the use of BW weapons against Israel, Saudi Arabia and US forces. Saddam envisaged all-out use. For example, all Israeli cities were to be struck and all the BW weapons at his disposal were to be used. Saddam specified that the “many years” agents, presumably anthrax spores, were to be employed against his foes. ISG judged that Iraq’s actions between 1991 and 1996 demonstrate that the state intended to preserve its BW capability and return to a steady, methodical progress toward a mature BW program when and if the opportunity arose.

===Misreporting the Duelfer Report===

As The Washington Times reported in their editorial titled "Misreporting the Duelfer Report" <ref> http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20041007-092535-2936r.htm </ref> the day following its release, October 08, 2004, quote: ""Gotcha, Mr. President." This was the consensus of the headlines from nearly every daily newspaper yesterday responding to the CIA's Iraq Survey Group report on Iraq's prewar weapons programs. Yes, the report found no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. But were these the findings that the report highlighted in the first line of its Key Findings summary? No. "Saddam [Hussein] so dominated the Iraqi Regime that its strategic intent was his alone," the summary begins. "He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) when sanctions were lifted." This hardly sounds as if the Iraq Survey Group, headed by Charles A. Duelfer, thought Saddam was cooperating with the international community.

The article goes on to explain that Saddam was attempting to get the sanctions lifted, targeting the three members of the Security Council - France, China and Russia - and then he intended to use the Oil for Food program "to acquire foreign exchange both to further undermine sanctions and to provide the means to enhance dual-use infrastructure and potential WMD-related development." Then notes, "While the United Nations turned a blind eye, Saddam cheated and committed mass murder in an effort to achieve his goals. To suggest that "containment" could have been sustained without dire results verges on the delusional. There is a very pertinent lesson in the Duelfer report; too bad no one told the headline writers."

===Threat Level Concern===

It is worth noting the following concerning a current controversy about the level of threat Saddam posed. If you consider the terrorists as various minority factions all working toward the same goal, as stated by Mr. Kraft on this page when he says, "there is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons almost anywhere in the world, unless they are prevented from doing so." It doesn't matter which of these factions would have been used to specifically target the civilized world in a nuclear or biological/chemical attack. Although recently the extent of Saddam's ties to one specific group (the Al-Qaeda terrorists) has been questioned and a recent article stated that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, the same article goes on to say concerning Al-Qaeda that "it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups." <ref> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/05/AR2007040502263.html </ref> Therefore, it is known that Saddam had forged long term relationships with known terrorist GROUPS (plural) and so it was not that there was no threat from any terrorists groups, just that the threat would have come from those OTHER terrorists as the threat to the collective security of the civilized world if the US hadn't taken out Saddam.

It also remains to be seen if the ties with Al-Qaeda would have remained "limited" if that group had stepped up and volunteered to take the completed nuclear weapons from Saddam (which he would have had within a year according to The New York Times - see the WMD section, this page) into Washington and detonate them using sophisticated and existing sleeper cell suicide bombers as Saddam was contemplating. It appears likely that Saddam would have listened and handed them his stocks of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons by his statements (see Mr. Tierney's translation on this page). From his past actions, Saddam was an equal opportunity employer for all the terrorist groups.. including those they admit in this report with whom he had "long-term relationships." As Mr. Kraft observes, it is many "barbarians" at our gates with sophisticated weapons of mass destruction for the first time, not only one group (Al-Qaeda.) It is global in scope, hence the reason for calling this a "Global War on Terror" not a "War on Terror in Iraq." As such, it is a fight for world supremacy, and the civilized world would do well not to ignore or minimize what the civilized world is fighting over.

===Accusations of Cover-Ups===

While both parties continue to squabble over the above documents and claims, quote, "Both Republicans and Democrats charged the other side was trying using the release of more information for its political purposes," <ref> http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51952 </ref> there were others who claimed there were cover-ups happening to stop further evidence becoming public. A NYsun article states, "A former special investigator for the Pentagon during the Iraq war said he found four sealed underground bunkers in southern Iraq that he is sure contain stocks of chemical and biological weapons. But when he asked American weapons inspectors to check out the sites, he was rebuffed. Between March and July 2003, Mr. Gaubatz was taken by (his) sources to four locations - three in and around Nasiriyah and one near the port of Umm Qasr, where he was shown underground concrete bunkers with the tunnels leading to them deliberately flooded. In each case, he was told the facilities contained stocks of biological and chemical weapons, along with missiles whose range exceeded that mandated under U.N. sanctions. But because the facilities were sealed off with concrete walls, in some cases up to 5 feet thick, he did not get inside. He filed reports with photographs, exact grid coordinates, and testimony from multiple sources. And then he waited for the Iraq Survey Group to come to the sites. "I have no doubts the sites were never exploited by ISG. We agents begged and begged for weeks and months to get ISG to respond to the sites with the proper equipment," Mr. Gaubatz said in a telephone interview. "An adequate search would have required heavy equipment to uncover the concrete, and additional equipment to drain the water." Mr. Gaubatz would not disclose the names of his Iraqi sources, but he said they were "highly credible" by his supervisors. <ref> http://www.nysun.com/article/27183?access=890075 </ref>

In the exhaustive search for WMDs in Iraq, CNN has left all stones unturned - or have they? These are the words right out of the mouth of CNN reporter Jane Arraf <ref> http://www.cjr.org/iraq/chapt1.html </ref>, quote: "And if you had a bureau there, like we did, and it was a known bureau and a known company like CNN was, it was a beacon for everybody. It was a beacon for Iraqis who believed they had stories. Iraqis would show up, there would be Iraqis lined up outside the door. There... would be the Iraqis who told you they had nuclear documents in their basement and would you like to come and look [laughter]. You know, there was almost that pang when you turned somebody away, [you were] thinking, “Damn, maybe this guy really does have nuclear weapons in his basement, but I don’t have time.” So you never really knew."

==Costs==

''(Needs more statistics)''
Since the war is not yet over, the total cost has yet to be tallied. However, the [[Congressional Budget Office]] estimates that the war has, as of 3/12/2007, cost less than $400 Billion.<ref>[http://www.newstatesman.com/200703120024 Iraq: the hidden cost of the war]</ref> The National Priorities Project, though, indicates that the war costs some $195,000 '''per minute''', according to numbers based on Congressional appropriations, and the tally had reached $412.8 billion as of 3/30/2007.<ref>http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182</ref> A 2008 study estimated that the Iraq War cost the United States $12 billion a month.<ref>[http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080310/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_war_costs;_ylt=ApGg20eC4zcjyEaIxwc8CC6s0NUE Studies: Iraq costs US $12 billion per month]</ref> This makes the Iraq war the most expensive endeavor in U.S. history.

==Death Toll Under Saddam Versus War==

According to the current government of Iraq, it is estimated that well over one million Iraqis were murdered by or "disappeared" under the rule of Saddam’s regime.<ref>http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/09/23/allawi.transcript/</ref> By the time of the invasion, Saddam's regime was killing people at a rate of 15 to 20 thousand per year.<ref>http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/889tngrz.asp?page=3&pg=2</ref>

Methods of torture employed by Saddam's regime included: amputation of tongues, crucifixion, eye-gouging, genital electric shock, gang rape, mutilation with electric drills and vats of acid, imprisonment in confined spaces in darkness for years at a time, and the amputation of limbs.

Veteran BBC correspondent John Sweeney said during Saddam's rule: "I have been to Baghdad a number of times. Being in Iraq is like creeping around inside someone else’s migraine. The fear is so omnipresent you could almost eat it. No one talks."

Saddam's deliberate manipulation of the sanctions regime cost the lives of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of whom were women and children.<ref>http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1999/09/iraq99.htm</ref> Researcher Richard Garfield estimated "a minimum of 100,000 and a more likely estimate of 227,000 excess deaths among young children from August 1991 through March 1998" from all causes including sanctions.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.casi.org.uk/info/garfield/dr-garfield.html |title=Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children |publisher=Casi.org.uk |date= |accessdate=2009-06-15}}</ref> It is a matter of public record that the sanctions specifically exempted food and medicine; that they applied only to weaponry; that Iraq had far more humanitarian supplies available to it under the Oil For Food program (first offered to Iraq in 1992) than it would have had over the same period based on the trends that existed ''before'' the Gulf War; and that excess deaths did not occur in the North of Iraq, where the US and UN administered the same program under the same sanctions regime, but only in those parts of Iraq were Saddam was charged with rationing the humanitarian supplies.<ref>http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1999/09/iraq99.htm</ref> The number of deaths Saddam caused by refusing to allow aid to reach his people for propaganda purposes is disputed, but his cynical nature can be observed by the fact that he wildly exaggerated the number of people he was killing in order to blame them all on the UN and US. Since the fall of Saddam, independent research from the CIA has found that roughly 5,000 children were dying every year from Saddam's manipulation of the sanctions, in addition to the 3 or 4 times that number he was killing annually by other means.<ref>http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/224705.php</ref> Therefore, by 2013, Saddam would have killed (roughly) between 200,000 and 250,000 Iraqis had he remained in power.

It has long been suspected that Saddam, based on his annual rate of killing, must have killed (conservatively) at least half a million people in executions.<ref>http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/889tngrz.asp?page=3&pg=2</ref> Since his fall, the Documental Center For Human Rights in Iraq and other human rights organizations have been able to document more than 600,000 political murders perpetrated by the former regime based on its own records.<ref>http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/17/1047749719178.html</ref> The real toll may be higher. In addition, Saddam's bloody purges and pogroms against the Kurds (including the Anfal campaign, in which as many as 182,000 were killed) throughout the eighties and early nineties, left as many as 300,000 dead.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm#Kurdistan2</ref> Saddam's 1991 crackdown killed 90,000 or more individuals, while the Gulf War killed roughly 10,000<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat6.htm</ref> including 2,000 Kuwaiti and 1,000 Iraqi civilians. If one assumes that Saddam's manipulation of the sanctions regime resulted in the deaths of about 200,000 Iraqis, in total Saddam was probably responsible for the deaths of over 1,200,000 Iraqis, or 5% of the population.

===Coalition Troop Casualties===
According to the US Department of Defense, over 4,200 U.S. and 300 troops from coalition countries have died in the war. Over 30,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in combat.<ref>[http://www.defenselink.mil Department of Defense]</ref> Despite a dramatic decrease in violence in the latter half of the year, 2007 was the worst year in Iraq in terms of U.S. casualties. Over 900 American troops died or went [[missing in action]] during the year.<ref>[www.icasualties.org Iraq War casualties]</ref>

===Enemy Casualties===
In March, 2007, Larry Schweikart, Professor of History at the University of Dayton and a military historian, calculated that, "a low estimate of 30,000 terrorists have been killed since 9/11, and an upperbound number of 60,000. On top of that, between 120 and 240,000 terrorists have been wounded. This is where it gets tricky. Likely because their medicine isn’t as good as ours, they have a higher death rate among wounded, which probably means that instead of 1 out of 8 dying of wounds, it’s more like 3 out of 8, and that number is in my first set of stats. In addition, we have captured close to 50,000 terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, and since the beginning of hostilities in Iraq, using traditional desertion rates, I figure at least another 10,000 jihadists have put away the old IED and gone home. So, a low estimate is that we have removed from the order of battle about 210,000 on the low end to 360,000 on the high end. This is an entire generation of jihadists, and will, if nothing else, significantly feminize Muslim society."<ref> http://newsbyus.com/more.php?id=7673_0_1_0_M </ref>

===Civilian Casualties===
The anti-war Iraq Body Count website has chronicled and tallied virtually all reported Iraqi civilian deaths from the war that have multiple sources in print, coming to a present total of 98-107,000 deaths.<ref>http://www.iraqbodycount.org/</ref> However, this sum certainly understates the case to a considerable extent, given that the total number of deaths could not all have been reported and tallied. On November 11, 2006, Iraqi Health Minister Ali al-Shamari estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 civilians had been killed during the war.<ref>[http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2006/11/11/2003335773 Iraq death toll may go as high as 150,000]</ref> A 2008 estimate by the [[World Health Organization]] placed the civilian death toll at 151,000.<ref>[http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080110/wl_nm/iraq_deaths_survey_dc 151,000 Iraqis killed since U.S.-led invasion: WHO]</ref>
Based on a careful analysis of IBC's figures, only 1-2% of Iraqi civilian deaths during the occupation were caused by US troops, and the rest by the insurgency they were combating.<ref>http://www.aina.org/news/2007110894701.jsp</ref> The American army in Iraq has taken ''three times'' as many casualties as it has inflicted on Iraqi civilians in collateral damage, which must be a first in the history of military occupation.<ref>http://www.aina.org/news/2007110894701.jsp</ref> The US invasion killed an additional 3,000<ref> http://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8.html</ref> to 7,000<ref> http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/year-four/</ref> Iraqi civilians, and at least 7,600–10,800 Iraqi combatants. <ref> http://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8.html</ref>

In 2006, the Lancet medical journal published an extremely high estimate of 655,000 civilian deaths caused by the war. These figures have been extensively discredited, with the following summary from the IBC being the most succicent explanation:
<blockquote>
The Iraqi mortality estimates published in the Lancet in October 2006 imply, among other things, that:

On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms; some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment; over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq; half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued; the Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive "Shock and Awe" invasion and the major assaults on Falluja. If these assertions are true, they further imply: Incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began; bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis; the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas; and an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year. In the light of such extreme and improbable implications, a rational alternative conclusion to be considered is that the authors have drawn conclusions from unrepresentative data. In addition, totals of the magnitude generated by this study are unnecessary to brand the invasion and occupation of Iraq a human and strategic tragedy.<ref>http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/reality-checks/</ref>
</blockquote>

In September of 2011, the Lancet themselves retracted this overinflated casualty figure, revising it down from 655,000 to 108,624, quote, "The corrupt Lancet journal this week announced that 108,624 Iraqis were killed during the Iraq War not 655,000 as they previously reported. CNN reported:

Suicide bombers are responsible for killing more than 12,000 Iraqi civilians and wounding more than 30,000 since the war began, according to study released by the British medical journal Lancet.

The study found that 1,003 documented suicide bombings accounted for 12,284 of 108,624 Iraqi civilian deaths, 11% of those killed between March 20, 2003, and December 31, 2010.

<ref>http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/09/04/iraq.suicide.bomb.casualties/index.html?hpt=hp_t2</ref><ref>http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/09/corrupt-leftists-at-lancet-now-say-108000-iraqis-were-killed-in-war-not-655000</ref>

A far more comprehensive and exact survey, using the same exact methods as the Lancet but with a massively larger number of interviews spread out further across the country, found 151,000 civilians had died in the conflict.<ref>http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr02/en/index.html</ref> Because this was three times higher than the IBC estimate at the time<ref>http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr02/en/index.html</ref>, it would indicate a total sum of approximately 300,000 Iraqis as of today. This is probably an absolute ''maximum'' estimate because the ratio of 1 out of every 3 deaths being recorded by the IBC has been altered considerably by the great decline in violence following the surge, so that the IBC’s recent figures are much more inclusive of the total sum than its earlier findings.

Columnist [[Christopher Hitchens]], who supports the war, has boldly argued that the estimates of the death toll are irrelevant:

<blockquote>
Here is the clinching and obvious point: Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion. It has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Like the Ceausescu edifice in Romania, it is a pyramid balanced on its apex (its powerbase a minority of the Sunni minority), and when it falls, all the consequences of a post-Saddam Iraq will be with us anyway. To suggest that these consequences—-Sunni-Shi'a rivalry, conflict over the boundaries of Kurdistan, possible meddling from Turkey or Iran, vertiginous fluctuations in oil prices and production, social chaos—-are attributable only to intervention is to be completely blind to the impending reality. The choices are two and only two: to experience these consequences with an American or international presence or to watch them unfold as if they were none of our business.<ref>http://www.slate.com/?id=2073634</ref>
</blockquote>

==Summary of Justifications for the Iraq War Taken From This Entry==

If President Bush had not removed Saddam Hussein we now know that, QUOTE: The New York Times confirmed in their issue November 3, 2006, Saddam had complete plans for a nuclear weapon and was in the process of procuring parts when the US removed him. Quote: "nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away." <ref> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03documents.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ei=5094&en=1511d6b3da302d4f&hp&ex=1162530000&partner=homepage </ref> (end quote)

And we know that Saddam was discussing using WMD on Washington, DC (remember/keep-in-mind his soon nuclear capability from the last paragraph), QUOTE: In the article , "Saddam Translator: ABC Reinterpreted Tapes" dated Feb. 17th 2006, the FBI translator who supplied the 12 hours of Saddam Hussein audiotapes excerpted by ABC's "Nightline" says the network discarded his translations and went with a less threatening version of the Iraqi dictator's comments. In the "Nightline" version of the 1996 recording, Saddam predicts that Washington, D.C., would be hit by terrorists. But he adds that Iraq would have nothing to do with the attack. Tierney says, however, that what Saddam actually said was much more sinister. "He was discussing his intent to use chemical weapons against the United States and use proxies so it could not be traced back to Iraq," he told Hannity. In a passage not used by "Nightline," Tierney says Saddam declares: "Terrorism is coming. ... In the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. What if we consider this technique, with smuggling?" <ref> http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/2/17/125334.shtml </ref> (end quote)

President Bush's decision to depose Saddam Hussein meant that this plan Saddam was discussing in these tapes here - or with the atomic nuclear capacity he was to possess within a year - never came into execution. It is credible that literally MILLIONS of Americans are alive today because Saddam was stopped before he had the ability to put his plans into action. We know he had ties to terrorists, including, QUOTE:

In the article "The proof that Saddam worked with bin Laden" dated 27/04/2003 The Telegraph claimed to have found Iraqi intelligence documents in Baghdad which "provided evidence of a direct link between Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist network and Saddam Hussein's regime." It went on to state, "Papers found yesterday in the bombed headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, reveal that an al-Qa'eda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad in March 1998. The documents show that the purpose of the meeting was to establish a relationship between Baghdad and al-Qa'eda based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia. The meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad. Intriguingly, the Iraqis talk about sending back an oral message to bin Laden, perhaps aware of the risk of a written message being intercepted." The article ends, "The file contradicts the that there was no link between the Iraqi regime and al-Qa'eda." <ref> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/27/walq27.xml </ref> Additional citations of the documentation are given by The Telegraph in their article titled, "'We'll pay all expenses to gain the knowledge from bin Laden and convey a message back" which is a quote from the documentation itself. <ref> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=3NQI3V5KB2T53QFIQMFCFGGAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2003/04/27/walq127.xml </ref> The intelligence documents are again cited by a Canadian eyewitness source in "Saddam, bin Laden link found: Canadian reporter" <ref>
http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2003/04/26/saddam_osama030426.html </ref>

It is noteworthy that under President Clinton, reported in February of 1999, the article (still available to view on the net) titled, "Saddam link to Bin Laden" - Terror chief 'offered asylum' in Iraq?" The article states, "Saddam Hussein's regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials. The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. News of the negotiations emerged in a week when the US attorney general, Janet Reno, warned the Senate that a terrorist attack involving weapons of mass destruction was a growing concern. "There's a threat, and it's real," Ms Reno said, adding that such weapons "are being considered for use." US embassies around the world are on heightened alert as a result of threats believed to emanate from followers of Bin Laden, who has been indicted by a US court for orchestrating the bombing last August of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 259 people died. US delegations in Africa and the Gulf have been shut down in recent weeks after credible threats were received. In this year's budget, President Clinton called for an additional $2 billion to spend on counter-terrorist measures... Ahmed Allawi, a senior member of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC), based in London, said he had heard reports of the December meeting which he believed to be accurate. "There is a long history of contacts between Mukhabarat [Iraqi secret service] and Osama bin Laden," he said. Mr Hijazi, formerly director of external operations for Iraqi intelligence offered Mr Bin Laden asylum in Iraq, most likely in return for co-operation in launching attacks on US and Saudi targets." <ref> http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,314700,00.html </ref> (end quote)

To say that the US should never have deposed Saddam when he posed such a threat is irresponsible. The detractors from the Iraq War today would presently be decrying the dead and dying in America and saying President Bush should have gone to war to prevent such devastating losses, had he refrained from engaging in the Iraq War. We know that since then Bin Laden has worked toward attacking the US on his own, without the assistance of Saddam. QUOTE:

Bin Laden was a threat to the United States at the time Saddam was in power and his efforts have been ongoing in terrorism since Saddam's regime was toppled. His plots have included targeting the United States as disclosed May 22, 2007 in the article "White House says bin Laden ordered Iraq plots" where it cites newly declassified intelligence which states, "Osama bin Laden ordered al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to form a cell in 2005 to plot attacks outside of Iraq and make the United States his main target. Townsend said that in the spring of 2005 bin Laden also told Hamza Rabia, then al Qaeda's top operations man, to brief Zarqawi on the group's "external operations planning, including homeland plots (targeting the United States)." <ref> http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/05/23/white_house_says_bin_laden_ordered_iraq_plots/ </ref> (end quote)

The act of war on Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein was justified to protect the Homeland of America from Saddam's planned and certain future catastrophic attack. The [[red herring]] <ref> http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/red-herring.html </ref> of not finding the WMD in Saddam's backyard does not diminish the threat to the Homeland of America because Saddam had proven his willingness to use such WMD on the Kurdish people in Iraq <ref> http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article351987.ece
</ref> and he would have had the atom bomb within a year by expert opinion. To expect that he would not have put into execution his stated aims against America is to act like an ostrich and put one's head in the sand.

If the atomic threat is not sufficient, under "regime intent", above, the Iraqi Survey Group's key findings stated that Saddam never abandoned his intentions to resume a chemical weapons effort when sanctions were lifted. The section on The Duelfer Report points out that there were reference strains of biological agents which were found and evidence of the ability to quickly start chemical and biological warfare production, QUOTE: Both Duelfer and Kay found Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects." "Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer revealed the ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents (end quote)

Saddam's son in law tells Saddam, quote: In the chemical, sir, they have a problem far bigger than the biological, bigger than the biological. Not the type of the weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct. They don't know any of this. We did not reveal the volume of the chemical weapons that we had produced. We did not reveal the type of the chemical weapons. We did not reveal the truth about the volume of the imported materials. In the nuclear, sir, in the biological, we also disagree with them. As for the nuclear, we say we have disclosed everything but no. There are teams working with no one knowing about some of them. I go back to the question of whether we should reveal everything or continue to be silent... I would say it is in our interest not to reveal. Not just out of fear of disclosing the technology we achieved, or to hide it for future work... <ref> http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Investigation/story?id=1623307&page=1 </ref> (end quote)
Also, there is credible testimony that Saddam had the weapons and moved them, quote: Saddam Hussein's former southern regional commander, Gen. Al-Tikriti, gave the first videotaped testimony confirming that Iraq had WMDs up to the American invasion in 2003 and that Russia helped remove them prior to the war. His testimony confirms numerous other sources that have pointed to Russia's secret alliance with Iraq and the co-ordinated moving of WMDs before the American liberation." <ref> http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22645 </ref> (end quote)

There are those who think that attacks upon America must actually happen in order to prove that these things exist or pose an imminent threat. The Iraq War was a preventative war and as such its merit relies on the mental ability of the public to perceive future threats and act in keeping with that threat and not ignore it - just as a person must swerve their car in the face of oncoming traffic in order to avoid an accident. As with this example, it does little good to discuss the merits of whether there would have been a crash or not after the fact since the evidence of past destruction which was avoided will never be obtainable.
==External links==
*[http://frontpagemag.com/2013/alan-w-dowd/iraq-ten-years-later/ Iraq, Ten Years Later]
*[http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/why-we-were-in-iraq/ Why We Were in Iraq]

==References==
{{reflist|2}}

[[Category:Wars]]
[[Category: United States of America]]

Khmer Rouge

2013-03-31T04:22:56Z

JakeRMurrin: Better source

The '''Khmer Rouge''' was the Cambodian communist organization led by [[Pol Pot]]. They seized control of [[Cambodia]] in 1975, and were ousted by [[Vietnam]] in 1978 in response to Khmer Rouge attacks occurring on the Vietnamese/Cambodian border. However, during the four years that the group was in power, they managed to kill 2.0 to 2.5 million people, or over 25% of Cambodia's population (8 million) at the time.<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =March 30, 2013}}</ref>

==References==
<references/>

[[category:genocide]]
[[Category:Communism]]
[[Category:Cambodia]]

Noam Chomsky

2013-03-24T08:56:08Z

JakeRMurrin: Undo revision 1025594 by IIlllII (talk)

[[Image:Chomsky3.gif|right|130px]]
'''Noam Chomsky''' (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist who was a pioneer in [[Chomsky hierarchy|generative grammar]]. Later he became an extreme left-wing propagandist and genocide denier<ref>http://www.jim.com/chomsdis.htm</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/labedz.pdf</ref>. He advocates holding America to an absolute standard of ethics in foreign relations, but has not held such a standard elsewhere. He tends to ignore such violations by other countries, even when they have been far worse. Fellow liberal academic, [[Arthur Schlesinger]], once referred to Chomsky as "an intellectual crook." <ref>"He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook." -- [[Arthur Schlesinger]] - ''Commentary'' magazine, December 1969</ref>

He is an institute professor of [[linguistics]] (Emeritus) at the [[MIT|Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT) <ref>http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/index.html</ref>.
Chomsky is very critical of [[America]]n and [[Israel]]i foreign policy, sympathizes with [[Palestine|Palestinians]] and has shown support for the terrorist organization [[Hezbollah]]<ref>http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1151</ref>. He has also been criticized for [[anti-Semitism]], despite having come from a Jewish family and having once spoken and written Hebrew.<ref>http://books.google.com/books?id=RKUbyYPG4mcC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=noam+chomsky+%22jewish+heritage%22&source=bl&ots=_DSi5cwxKc&sig=xHoUkX3zV4_dFwO2Gb-xrIxMJbw&hl=en&ei=Bf8iS7-DB5CXlAeXx8zzCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CBoQ6AEwBQ#v=snippet&q=chomsky%20jewish%20family&f=false</ref>

== Background ==
Chomsky was born '''Avram Noam Chomsky''' in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Chomsky, a [[Russia]]n immigrant, and Elsie Simonofsky Chomsky. His parents both practiced Judaism. His father taught [[Hebrew]], and published a scholarly edition of a medieval Hebrew grammar.<ref>http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/chomsky_noam.html</ref>. He received his education at the [[University of Pennsylvania]] where he studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy, and eventually earned his [[Ph. D.]] in 1955. Since then, he has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He previously held the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics, and is now an Institute Professor.

==Linguistic Works==
Chomsky's work is considered to be the spark of modern linguistic thought. His research deals with questions including the critical analysis of language and grammar, the role of biology in language and language acquisition, and the importance (or lack there of) of structural grammar and formal grammar in language function and development.

Chomsky has argued that the primary role the linguist should play is to decipher a language's grammatical structure. Chomsky has provided the field of linguistics path and policy in describing language as a concept and particular languages, as well as core functions of any particular language.

===Generative Grammar===
Noam Chomsky advocates the view that the human mind has innate ability to generate grammatical sentences, thus, all utterances deemed sensible to the speaker are necessarily grammatical. All humans, he argues, share a core of grammar that explodes into the thousands and thousands of distinct languages spoken by humans over time and place. Generative grammar ultimately suggests that the brain is like an unlabeled map, and a child's role is to assign different "paths" with particular labels.

===Universal Grammar===
Noam Chomsky also proposed the theory that a kind of universal grammar, a grammar that underlies all human languages, is hard-wired in the human brain. Thus all human languages are fundamentally the same, with only superficial differences.

===Criticism===
Both the theory of universal grammar as well as generative grammar have been criticized over time. A primary argument is that the majority of Chomsky's studies are based in English, and do not represent "human language" as a whole. Linguist Geoffrey Sampson suggests that the core of his arguments are not scientifically falsifiable, and therefore hold no more weight than mere opinion or conjecture. Sampson follows that Chomsky does not seem to be able to make predictions of what is possible in a language.
Finally, many of his critics claim that Chomsky's books are riddled with factual inaccuracies <ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>.

===Challenges===
In 2005 former [[missionary]] Daniel Everett published a controversial article titled "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã" which challeneged the notion that [[recursion]] is inherent in universal grammar. Since this oublication Everett has experienced academic and (stemming from this) political bullying and Chomsky himself labelled him a charlatan.

==Political Views==
Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in The Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised libertarian socialism.

His opponents accuse him of expressing admiration for governmental systems such as the Soviet Union, Chinese and Cambodian governments which are characterized by central control, xenophobia, and rejection of free expression, though he has openly expressed opposition to the Soviet Union and other regimes characterized by authoritarianism, arguing that they are not legitimate forms of socialism.<ref>http://chomsky.info/articles/1986----.htm</ref> He also counters that he is merely pointing out the West's own crimes and not condoning authoritarian governments that the West opposes. His stated justification for this is that criticism of other authoritarian governments will do nothing except give the United States ammunition against other countries, while being able to freely ignore their own crimes, whereas criticism of his own country may bring about what he considers to be positive reform. Chomsky identifies himself as a libertarian socialist who is opposed to both neoliberalism and authoritarianism. <ref>http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19446</ref>
=== Anti-Semitism ===
Chomsky has been accused for [[anti-Semitism]].<ref>http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Dershowitz.htm</ref><ref>http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15381</ref>. In addition to his support for Hezbollah, He has stated that Jews are "the most privileged and influential part of the population", and that "Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control"<ref>http://www.variant.randomstate.org/16texts/Chomsky.html</ref>.

Chomsky has supported controversial author [[Norman Finkelstein]], author of ''The Holocaust Industry'', who has argued that claims of anti-Semitism are used to silence critics of Israel and that the Holocaust is exploited by some Jewish institutions for their own gain.<ref>[http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=311000&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news University denies tenure to Holocaust academic], ''Mail & Guardian'', 12 June 2007.</ref> Noam Chomsky has also supported the right of Holocaust deniers, among them the notorious Robert Faurisson, to express their views. Chomsky has claimed he sees this as a free-speech issue and does not himself support Holocaust deniers.<ref>[http://frontpagemag.com/2011/02/15/chomsky-calls-elie-wiesel-%E2%80%9Cone-of-the-major-frauds-of-our-time%E2%80%9D/ Chomsky Calls Elie Wiesel “One of The Major Frauds of Our Time”] - [[FrontPage Magazine]]</ref>

It should be noted that both Finkelstein and Chomsky are from Jewish-American backgrounds <ref>[http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=150]</ref><ref>http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/noamchomsky2005</ref>, and that both Chomsky's parents were devout and involved in Jewish scholarship. It is unclear whether Chomsky still practices Judaism.

===Controversies===
#Chomsky denied the Cambodian Genocide, claiming that the killing had been inflated "by a factor of 100."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/encounter.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/labedz.pdf</ref> He further asserted that the (in reality) 2 to 3 million Cambodians slaughtered by the [[Khmer Rouge]] from 1975 to 1978 were morally comparable to Nazi collaborators during WW2, and that [[Pol Pot]]'s Cambodia was "comparable to France after liberation [from the Nazis]."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm</ref>
#Chomsky recently (1995) claimed, in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated "by a factor of a ''thousand''."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm#fn61</ref> Since he was responding to an estimate of two million dead, his words would imply that the real toll was on the order of two thousand. (Note: Investigators have uncovered and examined the remains of 1,386,734 Cambodians found in mass graves near Khmer Rouge execution centers whose cause of death has been determined by the investigators to have been virtually exclusively execution by the former Khmer Rouge regime.<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/toll.htm</ref><ref>http://welcome.to/dccam</ref> Because no ''more'' than roughly ''half'' of those who died during the Khmer Rouge years were executed (the rest having died from other causes like state-created famine, the deliberate withholding of basic necessities by the state, the refusal by the state to allow foreign aid, the abolishing of medicine and hospitals by the state, systematic overwork and slave labor by the state, and normal mortality), the Documentation Center of Cambodia estimates that the former regime killed or otherwise caused the unnecessary deaths of, between 2 and 2.5 million Cambodians (with 2.5 to 3 million dying and half a million of these representing normal mortality for the period).<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref> A UN investigation reported 2-3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million dead.<ref>William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref>
#Chomsky has claimed that [[Pearl Harbor]] saved millions of lives and that America and Britain used Nazi armies to attack the [[Soviet Union]] and prolong the [[Holocaust]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/newyorker1.html</ref>
#Chomsky has stated: “Of course, no one supposed that Mao literally murdered tens of millions of people, or that he ‘intended’ that any die at all.”<ref>“Second Reply to Casey,” ZNet, September 2001: http://www.zmag.org/chomreply2.htm</ref> In fact, a comprehensive analysis by Professor R.J. Rummel concluded that Mao was responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM</ref>
#Chomsky regularly compares the "alleged" genocide in Cambodia to the 24-year occupation of [[East Timor]] by [[Indonesia]]. He wrote: “The harshest critics claim that perhaps 100,000 people have been slaughtered [in Cambodia]… Comparing East Timor with Cambodia, we see that the time frame of alleged atrocities is the same, the numbers allegedly slaughtered are roughly comparable in absolute terms, and five to ten times as high in East Timor relative to population… my own conclusion is that the sources in the [case of] East Timor are more credible…”<ref>Radical Priorities (rev. ed., AK Press, 2003), p80.</ref> Based on the findings of genocide investigators, as mentioned above; about 2.2 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in less than 4 years. A Truth Commission found that 89-214,000 Timorese out of more than 700,000 were killed during the 24-year occupation, about 3/4 of them by Indonesia.<ref>Final Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR), January 30, 2006, part 6, paras. 47, 56-7: http://www.ictj.org/en/news/features/846.html</ref> [[Suharto]] killed far less people in absolute terms over decades in one of the world's most populous countries than Pol Pot killed in three years in a country with 8 million people, and exponentially less relative to the size of the population.
#Chomsky denied any genocide or mass reprisals in [[Laos]] after the Communist victory, stating that the Pathet Lao "have made some efforts to achieve a reconciliation with the mountain tribesmen who had been organized in the CIA clandestine army."<ref>After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), p122.</ref> Some 100,000 tribespeople had been exterminated in a campaign of genocide at the time.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989), p8 (estimate); Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 (Indiana Uniersity Press, 1999), pp337-460 (atrocities).</ref>
#Chomsky once wrote: “At the end of 1978 Cambodia [under the Khmer Rouge] was the only country in Indochina that had succeeded at all in overcoming the agricultural crisis that was left by the American destruction.”<ref>Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), pp245-6. Cf.: “it was a condition of survival to turn (or return) the populations to productive work. The victors in Cambodia undertook drastic and often brutal measures to accomplish this task… At a heavy cost, these measures appear to have overcome the dire and destructive consequences of the US war by 1978,” After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), pviii.</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to “the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,”<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid. The Cambodian communists' economic plans were, at times, utterly surreal. Scholar David Chandler notes that, in a Democratic Kampuchea report on General Political Tasks of 1976, there are three lines devoted to education, and six devoted to urine. The document states that, regarding human urine, "We collect thirty per cent. That leaves a surplus of 70%." These were indicative of the types of policies that Chomsky and his co-writer, Edward Herman, claimed had lifted Cambodia out of the ashes of war.
#Chomsky openly claimed in 1977 that Pol Pot had saved up to one million lives.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/cambodiacomments.pdf</ref> He did so by citing a Ford administration prediction that the Khmer Rouge would likely kill more than one million people, and then falsely restating it to imply that more than one million Cambodians would starve to death if US aid was cut off. At the time of this essay, the Khmer Rouge had probably already killed more than one million people, but Chomsky was still claiming that "executions numbered at most in the thousands," that Khmer Rouge atrocities had been "inflated by a factor of 100" and that those the Khmer Rouge had allegedly refrained from killing were actually ''saved'' by the Khmer Rouge. One million people had not died since aid was terminated, he said, therefore one million lives had been saved from starvation by the Khmer Rouge's ingenious economic policies. Thus did Chomsky praise Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge for "saving" the lives of dead people ''who they had murdered''. (Chomsky is also implying that the US cut off aid to Cambodia, when it actually had an unconditional offer to supply aid to it. Aid was terminated ''by the Khmer Rouge'').
#Chomsky has praised Imperial Japan for allegedly "saving maybe tens of millions of lives."<ref>Interview, International Socialist Review, September-October 2002.</ref>
#Chomsky has expressed support for the former Communist dictatorship of [[Angola]]: “The defense of Angola was one of Cuba’s most significant contributions to the liberation of Africa.”<ref>Hegemony or Survival (Penguin, 2004), p94.</ref> Cuban military intervention in support of the communist MPLA dictatorship in Angola led to decades of civil war that cost 1 million lives. Other Cuban “contributions to the liberation of Africa” include fighting for the communist dictatorship in Ethiopia, which killed 1.25 million people by massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999 (Angola death toll); Washington Post, March 18, 1978 (Ethiopia intervention); New York Times, December 14, 1994(Ethiopia death toll).</ref>
#Chomsky has repeatedly denied that the former Sandinista regime in [[Nicaragua]] committed any human rights violations at all.<ref>The Culture of Terrorism (South End Press, 1988), p137.</ref> According to the Nicaraguan Commission of Jurists, the regime carried out some 8,000 political murders within its first three years in power.
#Chomsky also strongly approved of the Sandinista's economic policies, writing that “the crime of the Sandinistas was to carry out successful development… they immediately began to divert resources to the poor part of the population.”<ref>Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization (Ocean Press, 1999), p57.</ref> Within a few years of Sandinista rule, wages had been fixed below poverty level and there was mass unemployment. There were shortages of nearly all basic goods, with inflation at 30,000%. Government studies found that three-quarters of schoolchildren suffered from malnutrition, while living standards were lower than Haiti. The World Bank found that Nicaragua was on the economic level of Somalia.<ref>Roger Miranda and William Ratliff, The Civil War in Nicaragua (Transaction, 1993), pp183-4.</ref>
#Chomsky referred to 22 Israeli schoolchildren murdered by Palestinian terrorists as "members of a paramilitary youth group."<ref>Pirates and Emperors, Old and New (rev. ed., Pluto Press, 2002), p65.</ref> He falsely claimed there had been "an exchange of fire" between the schoolchildren and the terrorists.
#Chomsky claimed after the [[9/11]] attacks that “Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that [in Afghanistan]… Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide… we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people…”<ref>“The New War Against Terror,” Lecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 18, 2001.</ref> Far from killing millions, the American intervention saved lives. UNICEF figures indicate that the deaths of 112,000 children and 7,500 pregnant women have been prevented every year since as a result.<ref>New York Times, February 1, 2002.</ref> The US invasion ''saved'' millions of Afghans from starvation.<ref>http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42858-2001Dec30?language=printer</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24019</ref> Chomsky responded by claiming in 2002 that it was still possible that millions might starve to death, but that the Americans and the media could cover it up: "What the effects will be, we will never know. Starvation is not something that kills people instantly. People eat roots and leaves and they drag on for a while. And the effects of starvation may be the death of children born from malnourished mothers a year or two from now, and all sorts of consequences. Furthermore, nobody’s going to look because the West is not interested in such things and others don’t have the resources."<ref>http://www.leftwatch.com/articles/2004/chomsky-backpedals-on-silent-genocide-in-afghanistan/</ref>
#Chomsky believes that there are “no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.”<ref>Quoted in W.D. Rubinstein, “Chomsky and the Neo-Nazis,” Quadrant, October 1981.</ref>
#Chomsky has repeatedly claimed that there has never been so much as a misplaced comma in any of his writings and that no valid criticism of any of his statements or ideas has ever been published by anyone.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKPtwYzehYM</ref>
#Chomsky has lied about the views of Holocaust deniers (Faurisson, Serge Thion) by praising them as "libertarian Socialists with a long-standing record of opposition to all forms of totalitarianism."<ref>“His Right to Say It,” The Nation, February 28, 1981.</ref> He also published one of his books (The Political Economy of Human Rights, a book filled with more noble efforts to disprove the bloodbath in Cambodia) in a series directed by a Holocaust denier (Pierre Guillaume). He has praised Holocaust deniers, endorsed their political and academic credentials, collaborated in their propaganda campaigns, and whitewashed their antisemitic and neo-Nazi agenda.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> He signed a petition in support of Faurisson's denials of the Holocaust; although he claimed that he was only expressing solidarity with his right to free speech, the petition that Chomsky signed dignified Faurisson’s writings by affirming his scholarly credentials (“a respected professor” of “document criticism”); describing his lies as “extensive historical research”; placing the term “Holocaust” in derisory quotation marks; and portraying his lies as "findings" (a very typical Chomsky propaganda technique).<ref>The text of the petition is reproduced in Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (Avukah Press, 1995), pp53-4.</ref> More obscenely, Chomsky added that "I sign innumerable petitions of this nature, and do not recall ever having refused to sign one."<ref>Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), p290.</ref> At the time of this controversy, Chomsky had just finished publicly bragging about his outspoken refusual to sign petitions calling for human rights in Communist Vietnam--even as it massacred many hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children en masse and drowned at sea hundreds of thousands more. On that occasion, he had explained that “public protest is a political act, to be judged in terms of its likely human consequences,” which included the likelihood that the American media “would distort and exploit it for their propagandistic purposes.”<ref>Unpublished interview, March 28, 1977; Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), p176.</ref>
#More recently, Chomsky has promoted a conspiracy theory (now popularized in Oliver Stone's ''Untold History of the United States'') that Zbigniew Brzezinski (national security advisor under president [[Jimmy Carter]]) secretly armed the Afghan mujahideen prior to 1979 in an elaborate plot to "trap" the Soviets. Brzezinski, however, has strongly denied anything of the kind,<ref>Interview, ''The Real News'', January 15, 2010.</ref> while Cyrus Vance's close aide Marshall Shulman "insists that the State Department worked hard to ''dissuade'' the Soviets from invading and would never have undertaken a program to encourage it."<ref>''The Nation'', November 12, 2001.</ref> Needless to say, declassified records from the time are at variance with Chomsky's fantasy. (It is likely, given the crucial Soviet role in initiating the Korean and Vietnam wars, that this claim is the product of projection.)

===Chomsky's Criticisms of the West===
Chomsky is one of the most vocal critics of the [[United States]] foreign policy. Some of his criticisms are:
#The overthrow of [[Mohammed Mossadegh]] in Iran and replacement with the Shah in 1953 (Done by the US and the UK)
#The overthrow of communist dictator Jacobo Arbenz in [[Guatemala]] in 1954
#The alleged US support for the overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende in Chile on 9/11 in 1973
#The Contra war against the Sandinista dictatorship in [[Nicaragua]] in the 1980s
#The backing of a brutal military dictatorship in [[El Salvador]] during the same time period
#Selling weapons to a terror-state ([[Iran]]) to fund the Contras. (See [[Iran-Contra Affair]])
#Supporting [[Saddam Hussein]] during the Iran-Iraq war.
#Supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s
#Invading [[Iraq]] in 2003 despite lack of support from the [[UN]]
#Blatant Support of [[Israel]] which Chomsky believes is a terror state despite his [[Jew]]ish ethnicity
(Source: Hegemony or Survival)

== External links ==
*[http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/publications.html List of Chomsky's Publications]
*[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk8pxyAWTBk Chomsky Speaks about American Politics] Chomsky believes the Democrats and Republicans are a single entity
*[http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1136# Video of Noam Chomsky with Hezbollah Leaders in Lebanon]
*[http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomskyhoax.html The Chomsky Hoax] by Paul Bogdanor
*[http://www.grsampson.net/AGwg.html Grammar Without Grammaticality] by Geoffrey Sampson
*[http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23543 Chomsky's New Blood Libel] by Alan Dershowitz
*[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXMZZCvFtlw Chomsky on Middle East Television] Chomsky speaks about American "imperialism."

==References==
<references/>
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chomsky, Noam}}
[[category:Scientists]]
[[Category:Linguists]]
[[category:Authors]]
[[Category:Socialists]]

Henry Kissinger

2013-03-21T22:34:11Z

JakeRMurrin: Correction

[[Image:Kissinger Henry.jpg|frame|right]]
'''Henry Kissinger''' (1923- ), American statesman and exponent of "realism" in foreign policy; he dominated foreign policy in the the administrations of presidents [[Richard Nixon]] and [[Gerald Ford]], as [[Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs|National Security Advisor]] and [[United States Secretary of State|Secretary of State]], holding both positions for a time. He won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for reaching a peace that ended the [[Vietnam War]]. In close collaboration with Nixon, he created a '''[[détente]] policy''' that called for an end to the [[Cold War]] and for friendly relations with both the [[Soviet Union]] and [[China]]. His position on détente was rejected by [[Ronald Reagan]] in the 1976 campaign for the presidential nomination. But Reagan lost the election to Ford, and in turn Ford was defeated by Democrat [[Jimmy Carter]], as Kissinger retired to write his highly revealing memoirs and consult for businesses worldwide.
==Life==
Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923 to a middle class Jewish family. They fled Nazi persecution, and arrived in New York in 1938, where he changed his first name from Heinz to Henry and rapidly Americanized in everything except his thick accent. He attended public schools and City University before being drafted at age 19. He returned to Europe during World War II fighting with the U.S. Army; he was in the infantry at first, but his heroism, courage, and daring got him promoted to intelligence. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1946. He spent a year as a civilian instructor in ''de-Nazification'' at an Army school in Germany; charged with de-Nazifying a German town, he did so with remarkable ease. He had power and responsibility far beyond his years because of his intelligence, his energy, and his commitment to opposing the Nazis.

In the army, Kissinger was informally tutored by Fritz Kraemer, a fellow refugee with two PhD's. In 1950 Kissinger earned his B.A. ''summa cum laude'' at Harvard with a 377 page essay on "The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant."<ref> William Y. Elliott was his director but only read half of it; the Government Department thereupon ruled that future senior theses could not exceed 40,000 words.</ref> He finished his Ph.D. in 1956 at Harvard, with a dissertation on "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars.

He married Ann Fleischer in 1949 and was divorced in 1964. There were two children, Elizabeth and David. In 1974 he married Nancy Maginnes.

==Harvard professor==
Kissinger became a full professor in Harvard's Department of Government in 1962. As the director of Harvard's University Summer International Seminar, 1952-69, he brought in nearly 700 young European and Asian scholars, many of whom became high officials in their own country. Kissinger met practically every intellectual in international relations at home and abroad.

Kissinger was eager to serve on national commissions. He served as Study Director, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, for the Council of Foreign Relations from 1955 to 1956; Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 to 1958; and Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program from 1958 to 1971. He resigned from Harvard in January 1971 when his two-year leave of absence expired.

In 1957 Kissinger published ''Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,'' which proposed a flexible defense posture, including provision for "limited warfare" and the strategic employment of nuclear weapons as an alternative to the doctrine of "massive retaliation" against direct foreign aggression, which dominated military thinking during the mid-1950s. The book brought Kissinger to national attention, and he became an mid-level advisor on security questions under presidents [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], [[John F. Kennedy]], and [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]; he was foreign policy advisor in [[Nelson Rockefeller]]'s 1968 quest for the Republican party nomination, but Nixon won the nomination and Kissinger switched to the winner.

Kissinger was consultant to the Department of State (1965-68), United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1961-68), Rand Corporation (1961-68), [[National Security Council]] (1961-62), Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1959-60), Operations Coordinating Board (1955), Director of the Psychological Strategy Board (1952), Operations Research Office (1951), and Chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1983-84). In 2001 he was not appointed to head the commission studying the [[9-11 Attack]] because he was too controversial.

==National Security Advisor and Secretary of State==
In 1969 Nixon appointed him his top advisor on foreign affairs as "Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs" )or "National Security Advisor") in charge of the [[National Security Council]] staff, which he made his base of power. He and Nixon largely ignored the State Department in setting the main lines of foreign policy. In 1973, Kissinger gained the additional role as secretary of state. He was the only person ever to hold the two top national security roles at the same time, and in 1975 he was replaced as head of the NSC.

Kissinger's approach to foreign policy was shaped by his vision of world peace achieved through a global balance of power; and accordingly Kissinger believed that effective U.S. diplomacy needed to be backed by force and guided by the pragmatism of Realpolitik rather than by high ideals and abstract causes. In practice his diplomacy, which mixed a highly visible, personal style with secret, behind-the-scenes maneuverings, was marked by bold, often controversial, initiatives and by frequent travel between world capitals in what came to be known as "shuttle diplomacy".
===Nuclear strategy===
On taling office Nixon and Kissinger were briefed on the US nuclear war plan, the [[Single Integrated Operational Plan]] (SIOP). Appalled by the catastrophic scale of the SIOP, Nixon and Kissinger sought military options that were more credible than massive nuclear strikes. Participants in the Air Force Nuclear Options project also supported more flexible nuclear war plans. Although Kissinger repeatedly asked Defense Department officials to construct limited options, they were skeptical that it would be possible to control nuclear escalation or to introduce greater flexibility without weakening the SIOP. Interagency studies presented a mixed verdict about the desirability of limited options; nevertheless, continued White House pressure encouraged Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to sponsor a major review of nuclear targeting. In 1972 the John Foster panel developed concepts of limited, selective, and regional nuclear options that were responsive to Kissinger's interest in credible nuclear threats. The Foster panel's report led to the controversial "Schlesinger Doctrine" and further efforts to revise the SIOP, but serious questions endured about the whole concept of controlled nuclear warfare.<ref> William Burr, "The Nixon Administration, the 'Horror Strategy,' and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969-1972: Prelude to the Schlesinger Doctrine." ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' 2005 7(3): 34-78. Issn: 1520-3972 Fulltext: [[Project Muse]]; Aaron L. Friedberg, "A History of U.S. Strategic 'Doctrine'—1945 to 1980," ''Journal of Strategic Studies,'' Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1980), pp. 37-71; Scott Sagan, ''Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security'' (1989). </ref>
===Détente with Soviet Union and China===
Kissinger's first priority in office was the achievement of détente with the Soviet Union and China, and playing them off against each other . Recognizing and accepting the Soviet Union as a superpower, Kissinger sought both to maintain U.S. military strength and to inaugurate peaceful economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges to engage the Soviet Union in the international system. This policy flourished under Kissinger's direction and led in 1972 to the signing of the first [[Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty]] (SALT I). At the same time Kissinger successfully engineered a rapprochement with Communist China, leading to the astonishing news in 1971 that Nixon would visit China, which he and Kissinger did in 1972.<ref> Margaret Macmillan, ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)</ref>

Aware that China and the Soviet Union were at sword's point, with rival claims to be the true Communists, Kissinger used the "Soviet card" to win over China by playing up the Soviet threat to the Chinese as a way of promoting closer relations with China. He even hinted at a US-China alliance to oppose the Soviets, and, with Nixon's trips to Moscow, hinted that China had better come to terms lest the US form an alliance with Moscow. The tactics worked, resulting in a friendly relationship with both Beijing and Moscow. As part of the détente, both powers reduced or ended their aid to North Vietnam, thus allowing a settlement of the [[Vietnam War]].<ref>Evelyn Goh, "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. </ref>

"In the Soviet Union, there is really nobody left who has any memory of an entrepreneurial tradition," said Kissinger. "In China, there are many people left who participated in Chinese entrepreneurial life." He believed that a Sino-US alliance to oppose Soviet aggression could encourage internal reform within the Chinese system while promoting a more peaceful international order. After China made such reforms, hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty.<ref>http://www.huliq.com/37702/rising-economic-growth-in-china-india-contributes-to-food-inflation "...hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty in the past few decades"</ref>

===Vietnam===
Kissinger worked to achieve a disengagement of U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam. He promoted Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization," aimed at turning the burden of actual combat over to the South Vietnamese, with repeated shows of U.S. air strength, notably in the bombings of Cambodia and North Vietnam. Kissinger met secretly with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris from 1969 on, finally concluding a cease-fire in January 1973, for which he and chief North Vietnamese negotiator [[Le Duc Tho]] were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Later rumors to the effect that Kissinger knew the South Vietnamese government was too weak to survive long were wrong; Kissinger and Nixon had built South Vietnam into one of the strongest militaries in Asia--much stronger than the North Vietnamese--and they had stripped away much of Hanoi's support from Moscow and Beijing. The problem was that Saigon put all its future on the continuation of Nixon in office and his promises to intervene militarily if necessary. Nixon collapsed unexpectedly (because of Watergate) and his personal promises were gone. Saigon despaired and desperately fought back when Hanoi did invade in 1975, after Nixon was gone and Congress forbad further American intervention.

Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city. Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos. The Ford administration's prediction that the Khmer Rouge would murder at least one million people<ref>Washington Post, June 4, 23, 1975</ref> was laughed off by liberal reporters. Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "''She Was Poor But She Was Honest''": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2 From an important study by genocide survivor Sophal Ear. Note that the source is, of all people, William Shawcross.</ref>

In one of [[Vietnam_War#Aftermath| the largest mass killings since the Nazi Holocaust]], the victorious Communists murdered 3-4 million people throughout Indochina, including over 2 million killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia alone.

===Middle East===
One challenge to détente under Kissinger came with the outbreak of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Faced with a threat of Soviet intervention, Kissinger successfully urged that U.S. forces be placed on worldwide alert. With Israel facing possible defeat at the hands of the Arab aggressors, President Nixon launched the largest airlift in military history to replenish Israel's stocks (the left would condemn his actions no matter how big or how small, Nixon said, so "''let's make it big''"). Kissinger had urged Nixon to delay the airlift so as to let Israel "bleed a little", in the hopes that a badly bruised Israel would be more pliable to concessions in post-war negotiations, but Nixon refused.

When the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army at the end of the war, Kissinger believed that the United States had a tremendous opportunity. Egypt was now dependent on solely the United States for the survival of its Third Army, and Kissinger hoped that the United States could mediate the dispute and wean Egypt from Soviet influence. As a result, he exerted intense pressure on Israel not to destroy the Third Army and to allow it to receive non-military supplies. Among other things, he threatened that the United States would resupply the Third Army by helicopter, support a UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal to positions held before the Third Army's encirclement, and falsely told the Israelis that the Soviet Union had threatened to intervene over the Third Army.

Kissinger then employed shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and the Arab states and to restore U.S.-Egyptian diplomatic ties, broken since 1967. Kissinger's goal was to drive the Soviets out of Egypt by showing the Egyptians that only the United States could persuade Israel to make concessions. The US assisted in a vast rescue operation conducted by Israeli forces to save Egyptian troops stranded in the Sinai.<ref>The Times, UK, June 15, 1967.</ref> US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt continued past Nixon's term. Though negotiations were tough, with both sides sometimes intransigent, President Ford ended up securing the first peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, which would be finalized under President Carter. In turn, [[Jordan]] felt compelled to reach a separate peace, which resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994.

Kissinger and Nixon approved a covert [[CIA]] campaign of subversion and sabotage designed to weaken the Socialist government of [[Iraq]] in 1973. Done in collaboration with the [[Shah]] of neighboring [[Iran]], it involved Soviet arms captured from Egypt and [[Syria]] in the 1973 war being dispatched to Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. The Shah cynically used the Kurds to pressure the Ba'athist government to back down on a number of serious territorial disputes between the two nations. The US brokered a peace treaty between Iraq and Iran in 1975, and aid to the Kurds was subsequently cut off. The Kurds were then viciously slaughtered. "''Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,''" Kissinger famously declared.<ref>http://www.slate.com/id/2156400/</ref>

Kissinger helped to diffuse sectarian conflicts in [[Lebanon]] in order to prevent a possible regional war, and opposed the Soviet-backed attempt by Communist forces to conquer North [[Yemen]] (which was the recipient of much US aid).

On 20 July 1974, [[Turkey]] invaded northern [[Cyprus]], overthrew its Greek-backed dictatorship (headed by Nikos Sampson), and installed a new regime. This led to the collapse of the Greek military junta, and the restoration of democracy in Greece, three days later--July 23, 1974. Sampson had been brought to power by the Greek Cypriot national guard (acting under the orders of Athens), which ousted the elected president, Makarios; Turkey removed him from power after a mere eight days in office. "Had Turkey not intervened," Sampson told the Greek newspaper Eleftherotipia, "I would not only have proclaimed Enosis [union of Cyprus with Greece] but I would have annihilated the Turks in Cyprus as well."<ref>http://www.britains-smallwars.com/cyprus/Most%20wanted/most%20wanted%20files/EOKA_Members_List_s.html</ref> Turkey took control of one-third of the country. Civilian casualties were remarkably light. Turkey restored democracy to Cyprus, and new elections brought Glafcos Clerides to power. President Makarios, in his speech to the UN Security Council on 19 July 1974, described the coup that replaced him as "an invasion of Cyprus by Greece."

Both the Turks and the Greeks committed indiscriminate ethnic cleansing against the other side. <ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR01.html 1st Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (20 July 1974 - 18 May 1976)</ref><ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR02.html 2nd Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (19 May 1976 to 10 February 1983)</ref> Facts and information on the death and the burial site of 201 out of 500 cases of Turkish Cypriot "missing" persons were provided by the Cyprus government on 12 May 2003. A typical report stated:
<blockquote>
In a Greek raid on a small Turkish village near Limassol, 36 people out of a population of 200 were killed. The Greeks said that they had been given orders to kill the inhabitants of the Turkish villages before the Turkish forces arrived.<ref>Washington Post, 23 July 1974
</ref>
</blockquote>

Numerous studies reported accounts of "anti-Turkish pograms," hostage taking, and mass murder.

Kissinger approved of the Turkish invasion, viewing the Greek junta as a Cold War liability.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/NATO_Joseph_Luns_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger had resolved to find a solution to the Cyprus problem in May 1974.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/Dept_Of_State_Kissinger_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger intervened to prevent a planned British military response to the second phase of the Turkish invasion in order to avoid a war between the two American allies.

Some 70,000 Turkish civilians were displaced by the Greeks. It is estimated by independant sources that 140,000 to 160,000<ref>Borowiec, Andrew (2000), Cyprus: A Troubled Island. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp2</ref> Greek civilians were displaced by the Turkish invaders. Only 20,000 Greeks remained in the north. Five Americans disappeared during the Turkish invasion.

===Latin America===
The Nixon administration sought to protect the economic and commercial interests of the United States during a period of heightened Latin American nationalism and expropriations, 1969-74. Though the administration initially adopted a flexible policy toward Latin American governments that nationalized American corporations' assets, the influence of Nixon's economic ideology, domestic political pressures, and the advice of Secretary of the Treasury [[John Connally]], led to a more confrontational stance toward Latin American countries. As the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and Kissinger had warned, however, Latin American countries took an even more anti-US stance and expropriated even more assets. Nixon's "get tough" stance, therefore, had a negative effect on American credibility and influence in the hemisphere.<ref>Hal Brands, "Richard Nixon and Economic Nationalism in Latin America: the Problem of Expropriations, 1969-1974." ''Diplomacy & Statecraft'' 2007 18(1): 215-235. Issn: 0959-2296 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref>

The ''de facto'' Communist dictatorship in [[Chile]] headed by [[Salvador Allende]] (originally elected in 1970 with a minority of the vote) presented a major obstacle to American interests in the region.

The CIA, as recounted in the Church Committee report, was involved in various plots designed to remove Allende and then let the Chileans vote in a new election where he would not be a candidate: It tried to buy off the Chilean Congress to prevent his appointment, worked to sway public opinion against him to prevent his election, and financed protests designed to bring the country to a stand-still and make him resign.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> Convinced that a conventional military uprising was still not possible in Chile, the CIA, acting with the approval of the 40 Committee—the body charged with overseeing covert actions abroad—devised what in effect was a constitutional coup. The most expeditious way to prevent Allende from assuming office was somehow to convince the Chilean congress to confirm Alessandri as the winner of the election. Once elected by the congress, Alessandri—a party to the plot through intermediaries—was prepared to resign his presidency within a matter of days so that new elections could be held.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> The CIA also learned of a number of plots to establish a military dictatorship. Although it pointedly refused to materially assist any of them, and actually intervened to prevent one of the plots for fear it would fail and strengthen Allende; it also encouraged several of the plots and did nothing to prevent them. It assured the plotters that such an event would be welcomed in Washington and that the US would not cut off aid over potential human rights violations.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> In addition, the CIA provided funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973. Though the CIA maintained contact with a notorious right-wing extremist named Roberto Viaux, Nixon and Kissinger, recognizing that "nothing could be worse than an abortive coup," repeatedly relayed messages to him urging restraint and went to great lengths to deter him from staging a coup.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>

The extent of Kissinger's involvement in or support of these plans is a subject of controversy.

Although the US considered economic sanctions against the Allende regime, it never actually implemented them. Although Latin Americans viewed the US as omnipotent, future Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet mocked it as a paper tiger and felt free to launch terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., during his reign. The US ended up giving more aid to Allende's Chile than any of the prior administrations. The US worked to diffuse potential coups that it had once warmly encouraged, fearing that it would be blamed if they failed. Though hesitant and uneasy, the CIA vowed to "continue to put pressure on every Allende weak spot" even after his appointment. The CIA had warned that the odds of either a military or a constitutional coup succeeding were one in twenty; after they both failed to occur in 1970, US policy shifted towards maintaining a democratic opposition to the Allende regime.

US intelligence reports implicated Allende in the assassination of several opponents,<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf Includes discussion of intelligence reports of Allende-backed hit jobs; note that Cuban intelligence reached the same conclusion--hence the infamous "packages" scandal.</ref> while KGB files smuggled out of Russia by Vasily Mitrokhin indicate that Allende received funds from the Soviet Union.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Allende was formally condemned by Chile's parliament for systematically destroying democracy in Chile.<ref>“Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy,” Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies, Chile, August 22, 1973.</ref> The Chilean Chamber of Deputies Resolution of August 22, 1973, accused Allende of support of armed groups, torture, illegal arrests, muzzling the press, confiscating private property, and not allowing people to leave the country. In the infamous "Cuban Packages Scandal" that precipitated the coup, large quantities of weapons were sent from Castro's Cuba to arm pro-Allende terrorists in Chile.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Kissinger privately told Nixon that Allende might declare martial law.<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf</ref> By 1973, as a result of covert US aid to Chilean dissidents and financing of pro-democracy protestors, US intelligence indicated Allende would likely lose the next Chilean election if it was held.<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> According to ''The Wall Street Journal,'' faced with illegal seizures of farms and factories, of defiance of judicial orders, unchecked street violence and death threats against the judges themselves, the Supreme Court warned on May 26, 1973, in a unanimous and unprecedented message, that Chile faced "a peremptory or imminent breakdown of legality."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref> Inflation reached 1,000%. Volodia Teitelboim, the chief ideologue of the Communist Party in Chile, declared that if civil war came, "it probably would signify immense loss of human lives, between half a million and one million."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

On September 11, 1973, Allende committed suicide during a military coup launched by Army Commander-in-Chief [[Augusto Pinochet]], who became President. Allende's policies had turned the country into a dictatorship that would kill thousands.

On September 16, 1973, the following exchange about the coup took place between Kissinger and President Nixon:

: '''Nixon''': Nothing new of any importance or is there?
: '''Kissinger''': Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
: '''Nixon''': Isn't that something. Isn't that something.
: '''Kissinger''': I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
: '''Nixon''': Well we didn't – as you know – our hand doesn't show on this one though.
: '''Kissinger''': We didn't do it. I mean we helped them....created the conditions as great as possible.
: '''Nixon''': That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played.<ref>[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/chile.htm The Kissinger Telcons: Kissinger Telcons on Chile], National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123, edited by Peter Kornbluh, posted May 26, 2004. This particular dialogue can be found at [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/Box%2022,%20File%203,%20Telcon,%209-16-73%2011,50%20Mr.%20Kissinger-The%20Pres%202.pdf TELCON: September 16, 1973, 11:50 a.m. Kissinger Talking to Nixon]. Retrieved November 26, 2006.</ref>

Kissinger is clearly telling the President that any direct US role in such a coup would be abhorrent but that the coup itself was preferable to a Communist take-over (with both agreeing that the US did not assist the plot).

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago, telling him: "''My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.''"<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref>

Using its leverage over Pinochet to curtail Chilean human rights abuses, the US simultaneously pressured Chile to introduce a series of free market economic reforms, a process that escalated sharply in the eighties. This led to a period of rapid economic expansion and development without precedent in Latin America, in which growth averaged 7% annually, that came to be known as the "''miracle of Chile''" (it also included the region's greatest reductions in infant mortality<ref>Nick Eberstadt, The Poverty of Communism (Transaction Publishers, 1990), pp188,
196-206, 240-6, in which he discusses living standards in Communist Cuba versus Pinochet's Chile.</ref>). In turn, this allowed Chile to make a long-term transition to sustainable democratic rule that would likely have been otherwise inconceivable.<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

In [[Argentina]], the Socialist government of [[Isabel Perón]] had been persuaded to declare a state of emergency (suspending, among other rights, ''Habeas Corpus'') on February 5, 1975. Drafted so they may (in her words) "annihilate the subversives," the decree led to ''Operativo Independencia'', a military campaign notorious for the brutality it exacted on not only the violent; but also elected officials, magistrates and University of Tucumán faculty (even secondary school teachers). The Peronists' own political mainstay (the labor movement) was also subject to the "subversive" labels and consequent reprisals. The country plunged into a low-level civil war. Fighting between Communist and anti-Communist forces claimed nearly 1,000 lives, with widespread social chaos and inflation peaking at 33%, before the Argentine military, led by Jorge Videla, deposed Perón on March 24, 1976.

As the new regime consolidated power, launching brutal reprisals and "disappearances" against political opponents, Kissinger took a similar line as he had toward Chile. During a meeting with Argentine foreign minister César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger assured him that the United States was an ally, but urged him to ''"get back to normal procedures"'' quickly before the U.S. Congress reconvened and had a chance to consider sanctions. The US cut-off aid in 1977 due to human rights violations.

Nixon sought a "special relationship" with [[Brazil]], and proposed a direct line of communication between the Brazilian and American Presidents. He appointed Kissinger to serve as a "special representative" to Brazil.

In [[Cuba]], Kissinger supported a renewal of diplomatic relations and cultural exchange with the [[Castro]] regime. Although President Ford repeatedly reached out to the Cubans; their military interventions in [[Angola]], [[Mozambique]], and [[Ethiopia]] destroyed Kissinger's hopes.

===South Asia===
During the South Asian crisis in 1971, the White House stood firmly behind Pakistani president Yahya Khan and demonstrated a disdain for India and particularly its leader, [[Indira Gandhi]], because of India's tilt or favoritism towards the Soviet Union. Kissinger had disdain for India and was using Pakistan as a tool to reach China, which he considered much more important to the U.S.

Khan's administration was responding to an insurrection launched by Communist guerillas (the ''Awami League''), armed with Indian weapons and demanding independence for East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with a massive campaign of violence dubbed "''Operation Searchlight.''" India was exploiting these internal tensions within Pakistan as part of a divide-and-rule strategy; it hoped for Pakistan's division into smaller Indian proxy states that could be played against one another and it used the violence committed by Pakistani forces as a possible pretext for military intervention in Pakistani affairs.

Nixon relayed messages to Yahya, urging him to restrain Pakistani forces.<ref>Black, Conrad, Richard Nixon: A Life in Full (2007), p. 751.</ref> His objective was to prevent a war and safeguard Pakistan's interests, though he feared an Indian invasion of West Pakistan that would lead to Indian domination of the sub-continent and strengthen the position of the [[Soviet Union]].<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877618-2,00.html</ref> Similarly, Yahya Khan feared that an independent Bangladesh could lead to the disintegration of Pakistan. Indian military support for Bengali guerillas led to war between India and Pakistan.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,878408,00.html</ref>

Nixon met with Indian Prime Minister [[Indira Gandhi]] and did not believe her assertion that she would not invade Pakistan;<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 752</ref> he did not trust her and once referred to her as an "old witch". Kissinger maintained that Nixon made specific proposals to Gandhi on a solution for the crisis, some of which she heard for the first time; for example, mutual withdrawal of troops from the Indo-East Pakistan borders. Nixon also expressed a wish to fix a time limit with Yahya for political accommodation in East Pakistan. Nixon asserted that India could count on US endeavors to ease the crisis within a short time. But, both Kissinger and Gandhi aide Jayakar maintained, Gandhi did not respond to these proposals. Kissinger noted that she “listened to what was in fact one of Nixon's better presentations with aloof indifference” but “took up none of the points.” Jayakar pointed out that Gandhi listened to Nixon “without a single comment, creating an impregnable space so that no real contact was possible.” She also refrained from assuring that India would follow Pakistan's suit if it withdrew from India's borders. As a result, the main agenda was “dropped altogether.”<ref>Jayakar, Indira Gandhi, p. 232; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 878 & 881-82.
</ref> On December 3, Yahya preemptively attacked the Indian Air Force and Gandhi retaliated, pushing into East Pakistan.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 753.</ref> Nixon issued a statement blaming Pakistan for starting the conflict and blaming India for escalating it, because he favored a cease-fire.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 755.</ref> The United States was secretly encouraging the shipment of military equipment from [[Iran]], [[Turkey]], and [[Jordan]] to Pakistan, reimbursing those countries despite Congressional objections.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79/</ref> The US used the threat of an aid cut-off to force Pakistan to back down, while its continued military aid to Islamabad prevented India from launching incursions deeper into the country. A cease fire was reached on December 16, leading to the creation of the independent state of [[Bangladesh]]. Sheikh Mujib led the newly established People's Republic of Bangladesh as a one-party, dictatorial state.

A 2008 study in the ''British Medical Journal'' concluded that 269,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the war.<ref>http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/269000_died_in_Bangladesh_war/articleshow/3147513.cms</ref> Reportedly, as many as 200,000 Bengali women were raped.

The US remained hostile to the Mujib regime, and considered Mujib himself to be a demagogue. His government's mismanagement of food grain stocks ultimately caused a massive famine in Bangladesh from March to December 1974, leading to the death of more than one million people. During this famine, Mujib rejected food aid from the United States and exported food to [[Cuba]]. By the time Mujib agreed to end support for Cuba, and the US began shipments of food to Bangladesh, it was 'too late for famine victims'.<ref>http://www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/opinions/dsharma/faminecommerce.htm</ref> In addition, his regime committed widespread human rights violations and tortured and executed thousands of dissidents. Nixon and Kissinger argued that these atrocities were far worse than anything Pakistan had committed in Bangladesh.

===Africa===
In the Angolan Civil War, the Communist MPLA (''People's Movement for the Liberation of [[Angola]]'') government was pitted against various right-wing insurgencies as well as an invasion from [[South Africa]]. The CIA covertly attempted to overthrow the MPLA dictatorship in 1975,<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35COXObeo8&feature=fvw Former CIA head in Angola discusses the operation on CNN</ref> but Cuba militarily intervened to save the regime from certain collapse. The Communist government subsequently killed up to one million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999</ref> The U.S., advised by Kissinger, supported the rebels FNLA (''National Front for the Liberation of Angola''), led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA (''National Union for the Total Independence of Angola''), led by [[Jonas Savimbi]], as well as the ''Mozambican National Resistance'' (RENAMO), and the invasion of Angola by South African troops. The FNLA was defeated and UNITA was forced to take its fight into the bush. Only under Reagan's presidency would U.S. support for UNITA return. (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Angola would be plagued for decades with constant civil war. In 1992, blatantly rigged elections were held with next to no international supervision, in which MPLA claimed victory. After 500,000 UNITA voters were disenfranchised, UNITA sent a peace delegation to the capital; all of its members, along with 20,000 civilian supporters, were brutally massacred.<ref>National Society for Human Rights, Ending the Angolan Conflict, Windhoek, Namibia, July 3, 2000</ref> Nevertheless, Savimbi remained supportive of the elections, until the MPLA systematically exterminated many tens of thousands of UNITA supporters throughout the country. Human rights observers have accused the MPLA of "genocidal atrocities," "systematic extermination," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."<ref>Namibia's National Human Rights Organisation, Press Releases, September 12, 2000, May 16, 2001</ref>

The Democrats in Congress cut off aid to UNITA under President Ford, just as they abandoned South Vietnam and Cambodia to murderous Communist bloodbath. "''A great nation cannot escape its responsibilities,''" Ford admonished them. Emboldened, Cuba would soon militarily intervene on behalf of the Communist dictatorship in [[Ethiopia]], which killed 1.25 million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Washington Post, March 18, 1978; New York Times, December 14, 1994.</ref>

The Nixon White House staunchly opposed the maniacal tyrant [[Idi Amin]] of [[Uganda]], who slaughtered 100-500,000 innocent people and ethnically cleansed<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/7/newsid_2492000/2492333.stm</ref> Uganda of all Asians. Amin was armed almost exclusively by the [[Soviet Union]] and [[Libya]]. The US urged Americans to evacuate the country, and began developing contingency plans to combat the regime's threatening posture in 1972.<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> Ambassador Thomas P. Melady described the Amin regime as "racist, erratic, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, militaristic, and, above all, xenophobic."<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> The British, fearful of a massacre, sought American help in preparing the logistics for an evacuation of the 7,000 British subjects in the country, should it prove neccessary.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,906445-3,00.html</ref> Kissinger and Nixon agreed. On September 24, 1972, they had the following conversation:

: '''Nixon''': Isn’t a person a person, goddamnit? You know, they talk about Vietnam, ‘these people far away that we don’t know,’ and you remember Chamberlain talking about the Czechs, that they’re far away and we don’t know them very well? Well, goddamnit, people are people! … I’m getting tired of this business of letting these Africans beat a hundred thousand people to death and do nothing about it.
: '''Kissinger''': And all these bleeding hearts in this country who say we like to kill yellow people…
: '''Nixon''': That’s right!
: '''Kissinger''': There haven’t been as many killed in eight years of the war than were killed in three months in Burundi.
: '''Nixon''': …They’re talking about how many we have bombed in the North. And I told your staff to get the figures for me: How many South Vietnamese or anti-Communist North Vietnamese have been killed by the North Vietnamese government? Civilians! How many? It’s ''unbelievable''! Nobody gives a damn! … We need a new African policy. We shouldn’t have 42 ambassadors to these goddamn countries. Looking at Uganda, ''of course'' we have to help those 7,000 people!<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kph0lygo40</ref>

Amin was deposed by the armed forces of [[Tanzania]] on April 11, 1979.

===South East Asia===
Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan1.pdf</ref> To combat this dangerous expansionism, Kissinger closely aligned the United States with anti-Communist nations in the area, such as [[Suharto]]'s [[Indonesia]], which was once described as ''the greatest prize in Asia.'' As tens of thousands fled a Communist take-over in the small island of [[East Timor]] under horrible conditions following a civil war that resulted in the death or displacement of 9,000 individuals; Ford and Kissinger gave Suharto their approval to annex East Timor and remove the Soviet-backed Communist government.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf</ref> Over the 24-year occupation; some 140,000<ref>http://www.cavr-timorleste.org/en/Brief.htm</ref> East Timorese soldiers and civilians were killed by all sides, out of a population of less than a million. In 1975, 49% of all violent killings in East Timor were the work of the Communist (FRETELIN) resistance.<ref>http://www.ictj.org/static/Timor.CAVR.English/07.2_Unlawful_Killings_and_Enforced_Disappearances.pdf</ref> Although Congress wanted to stop arm sales to Indonesia, the Ford administration manipulated them by agreeing to an aid cut-off that was never actually implemented. In his own words, "Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law."<ref>http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/#29</ref>

Kissinger also worked to maintain good relations with [[Thailand]]. In order to prevent Communist hegemony in the area, he sought to deliberately provoke tension between the Vietnamese Stalinists and their Maoist comrades in Phnom Penh. In a 1975 meeting, he told Thailand's foreign minister: "We don't mind Chinese influence in Cambodia to balance North Vietnam. As I told the Chinese when we last met when we were discussing the Vietnamese victory in Indochina, it is possible to have an ideological victory which is a geopolitical defeat. The Chinese did not disagree with me."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/kissinger_chatichai.htm</ref>

In the end, Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia for more than a decade (killing many hundreds of thousands in the process<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref>). Bogged down in an endless guerilla war regularly dubbed ''Vietnam's Vietnam'' in the American press, Communist Vietnam was unable to advance its expansionist objectives abroad; as a result, no more dominos fell in the area.

===Personal Advice to Nixon===
In an April 17, 1973 conversation, Nixon told Kissinger that he was considering whether or not to resign and let [[Spiro Agnew]] take the Presidency, to which Kissinger responded: "''With all due respect, Mr. President, that is out of the question. That cannot be considered....Why should you do it? What good would it do? Whom would it help? It wouldn’t help the country; it wouldn’t help any of the individuals involved….and, of course, it would be personally unjust.''" He also asked him to consider what it would do to weaken the institution of the Presidency.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri3He6n1Dv4</ref>

===Losing power===
Despite his real accomplishments, Kissinger's tenure was marked by much controversy. Revelations of his knowledge of Nixon's secret bombings in [[Cambodia]] in 1969 and the U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970 stirred particularly strong hatreds on the left, as did later discoveries that he had authorized wiretaps aimed at stopping leaks of classified information.

Much more serious, however, was the attack from the right by Ronald Reagan, who rejected détente with the Soviets as a viable strategy, warning that the Soviets would see it as a sign of American weaknesses and mobilize its Third World allies to subvert pro-American governments wherever it could and expand Soviet influence. Reagan's analysis proved correct and Ford was forced to reduce Kissinger's role, taking away in 1975 Kissinger's double role as National Security Advisor.

In 1976 Ford was challenged by [[Ronald Reagan]] for the GOP nomination. Ford won a very long, close and intensely fought battle. Attacks on détente policy was the focus of Reagan's campaign as the GOP moved to the right on foreign policy. President [[Jimmy Carter]], however, did not recognize the failure of détente until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 destroyed that policy and reopened the [[Cold War]] at a more intense level.

Kissinger remained on as secretary of state until the end of the Ford term in January 1977.

==Retirement==
Out of office Kissinger became a highly visible corporate consultant on world affairs, and wrote his detailed and insightful memoirs. His advice has been sought out by every President since his retirement, and he was one of President [[George W. Bush]]'s most-frequent advisors on the [[Iraq War]]. He also helped design the Bush administration's opening to [[India]] in the wake of the War on Terror.

Kissinger has met with Russian leader [[Vladimir Putin]] on several occasions in an attempt to buttress US-Russian relations. Noting that the US has no border with Russia nor designs on Russian territory, as well as Russia's frontiers with both the Islamic world and China; Kissinger believes that the United States and Russia have compatible interests.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1690757_1691285-1,00.html></ref> He is apparently well-liked by some in the Russian press.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/europe/07russiasumm.html?_r=1 Although Russian TV calls him a "war criminal" due to his imaginary crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia.</ref>

Kissinger has strongly supported the foreign policy of President Bush, writing:

<blockquote>
Extraordinary advances of democracy have occurred in recent months: elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and Palestine; local elections in Saudi Arabia; Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; the opening up of the presidential election in Egypt; and upheavals against entrenched authoritarians in Kyrgyzstan. This welcome trend was partly triggered by President Bush’s Middle East policy and accelerated by his second inaugural address, which elevated the progress of freedom in the world to the defining objective of U.S. foreign policy.

Pundits have interpreted these events as a victory of “idealists” over “realists” in the debate over conduct of American foreign policy. In fact, the United States is probably the only country in which “realist” can be used as a pejorative epithet. No serious realist should claim that power is its own justification. No idealist should imply that power is irrelevant to the spread of ideals. The real issue is to establish a sense of proportion between these two essential elements of policy. Overemphasis of either leads to stagnation or overextension.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp051605.html</ref>
</blockquote>

He added in a seperate piece:
<blockquote>
President Bush's visit has brought relations between India and the United States to an unprecedented level of cooperation and interdependence, which promises to make a seminal contribution to international peace and prosperity.
</blockquote>

Kissinger believes that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be worse than the consequences of defeat in Vietnam.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref>

Kissinger returned to teaching for a time after he left office, and today gives eloquent lectures and speeches across the United States. He has appeared regularly on a wide range of television stations to offer his insight, and frequently contributes editorials to newspapers.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles.html</ref> Conrad Black has praised Kissinger as "a political memoirist surpassed, if at all, only by [[Winston Churchill]] and [[Charles de Gaulle]]."

Kissinger delivered a beautiful and heartfelt eulogy for President Ford at his 2007 funeral.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/eulogies/010207.html</ref>

Throughout his life, Kissinger has enjoyed long-standing friendships with such notables as Katherine Graham, Walt Wriston, Beverly Sills, Bill Paley, Hans Morgenthau, Fritz Kraemer, Ahmet Ertegun, Sir James Goldsmith, Marion Dönhoff, Gianni Agnelli, John Aspinall, Rudolf Augstein, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John McCain, [[Mohammed Reza Pahlavi]],<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref> Anatoly Dobrynin and Bill and Pat Buckley.

Kissinger is a fan of [[soccer]].<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/nw061206.html</ref>

In the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis, Kissinger wrote:
<blockquote>
A major cause of the crisis has been the gap between the economic and the political organization of the world. The economic world has been globalized. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their national political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order. Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point. So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place, so far without achieving more than stemming incipient panic. International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
All these urgent issues are taking place against a background of a historic shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But there are much fewer trans-Pacific institutional ties with America than exist in the Atlantic. This raises the danger that, over time, the regions will confront each other as strategic and economic adversaries. The emergence of a new regional mercantilism and strategic confrontation by groups possessing large numbers of weapons of mass destruction needs to be resisted. This is why the U.S. relationship with China is so central. A relationship that started on both sides as essentially a strategic design to constrain a common adversary has evolved over the decades into a pillar of the international system. China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernization and reform of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods. Each side of the Pacific needs the cooperation of the other in addressing the consequences of the financial crisis.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/iht011209.html</ref>
</blockquote>

==Image and reputation==
Kissinger was loathed by some liberals who viewed him as a war criminal<ref>http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0611-03.htm</ref> and criticized by hardliners for [[detente]]. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for pulling the United States out of Vietnam.

Kissinger was a Machiavellian figure, skilled at manipulating people around him and currying favor in the media. At one point he admitted allowing secret wiretapping of his own aides' conversations.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref> The aura of Kissinger's influence was due partly to a cultivated image of high intelligence, including a PhD degree from Harvard University. He has been called "the only European-style realist" to head US foreign policy.

===Major Controversies===
[[Bryce Harlow]], former Eisenhower White House staff member, claimed to have "a double agent working in the White House....I kept Nixon informed." Harlow and [[Henry Kissinger]] (who was friendly with both campaigns and guaranteed a job in either a Humphrey or Nixon administration) separately predicted Johnson's "bombing halt": "The word is out that we are making an effort to throw the election to Humphrey. Nixon has been told of it," Democratic senator [[George Smathers]] informed Johnson. According to [[Robert Dallek]], Kissinger's advice "rested not on special knowledge of decision making at the White House but on an astute analyst's insight into what was happening." [[William Bundy]] stated that Kissinger obtained "no useful inside information" from his trip to Paris, and "almost any experienced Hanoi watcher might have come to the same conclusion". While Kissinger may have "hinted that his advice was based on contacts with the Paris delegation," this sort of "self-promotion....is at worst a minor and not uncommon practice, quite different from getting and reporting real secrets."<ref>[[Robert Dallek]] (2007), ''Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power'', HarperCollins, pp. 73-74.</ref> Nixon asked [[Anna Chennault]] to be his "channel to Mr. [[Nguyen van Thieu|Thieu]]"; Chennault agreed and periodically reported to [[John Mitchell]] that Thieu had no intention of attending a peace conference. On November 2, Chennault informed the South Vietnamese ambassador: "I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque who says his boss [Nixon] is going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer." In 1997, Chennault admitted that "I was constantly in touch with Nixon and Mitchell."<ref>Dallek, pp. 74-75.</ref> In response, Johnson ordered wire-tapping members of the Nixon campaign.<ref>Dallek, p. 75.</ref> Dallek wrote that Nixon's efforts "probably made no difference" because Thieu was unwilling to attend the talks and there was little chance of an agreement being reached before the election; however, his use of information provided by Harlow and Kissinger was morally questionable, and Humphrey's decision not to make Nixon's actions public was "an uncommon act of political decency."<ref>Dallek, pp. 77-78.</ref> [[Conrad Black]] agreed that there is "no evidence" connecting Kissinger, who was "playing a fairly innocuous double game of self-promotion", with attempts to undermine the peace talks. Black further commented that "the Democrats were outraged at Nixon, but what Johnson was doing was equally questionable", and there is "no evidence" that Thieu "needed much prompting to discern which side he favored in the U.S. election."<ref>[[Conrad Black]] (2007), ''Richard Nixon: A Life in Full'', PublicAffairs, p. 553.</ref>

Kissinger was also accused of intentionally abandoning South Vietnam to Communist forces, the accusation which probably hurts him most today. He responded to this charge as follows:
<blockquote>
When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and the number was still increasing. The official position of the Johnson administration had been that American withdrawal would only start six months after a North Vietnamese withdrawal. The "dove" platform of Sens. Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, which was rejected by the Democratic National Convention of 1968, advocated mutual withdrawal. No significant group at that time advocated unilateral withdrawal.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
A diplomatic alternative did not exist. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire the United States had to meet two preconditions: First, it had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army, and replace it with a Communist-dominated government. Second, the United States had to establish an unconditional timetable for withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of what happened in subsequent negotiations or how long these might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Given the horrors that occurred when the Communists took over Indochina in 1975, it must be said that Nixon correctly summed up the choices before him when he rejected the 1969 terms.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
When negotiations stalemated, the Nixon administration moved to implement what could be done unilaterally without undermining the political structure of South Vietnam. Between 1969 and 1972, it withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90 percent.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In Vietnam, a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the all-out North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the United States mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by President Nixon in January 1972 - and decried as unachievable in the American domestic debate. He said that "this new proposal is exactly what President Nixon has himself proposed: cease-fire, end of the war, release of the prisoners and troop withdrawal, and we propose a number of principles on political problems. You have also proposed this. And we shall leave to the South Vietnamese parties the settlement of these questions."
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American disunity was the major factor in dashing these hopes.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp061107.html</ref></blockquote>

Kissinger has also been accused of an alleged lack of transparency. He has responded by donating all of his personal papers to the [[Library of Congress]] for posterity. He recently released some 20,000 pages of transcripts of his private conversations with various world leaders.<ref>http://staff.lib.msu.edu/harris23/red_tape/o&e0404.htm#kissenger</ref> Such transcripts were the basis for his 2003 book on foreign policy, ''Crisis.''

In 1976, Kissinger "declined to approve" that a letter be sent to Chile warning them against carrying out any political assassinations.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> In an Aug. 30, 1976 memo, Shlaudeman discussed the possibility that the U.S. ambassador in Uruguay might be endangered by delivering a warning against assassination. The U.S. ambassador to Chile said that Pinochet might take as an insult any inference that he was connected with assassination plots.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> When the CIA learned about the Chilean plan to set up a covert office in Miami as part of Chile's overseas operations in 1974, however, Kissinger did authorize the CIA to send the Chilean Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) a warning not to go ahead with the plan. He rejected the State Department's proposal to publicly rebuke Chile on the matter. As a result, the Chileans backed down.<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref> Kissinger's decision not to send the letter is considered a subject of controversy because Chile was engaging in a spree of international murders at the time (the day the letter was to be sent, a Pinochet critic was assassinated in [[Washington, D.C.]]).<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref>

Kissinger's alleged warm support of Pinochet is without much basis in fact; Kissinger and Ford began viewing Pinochet's regime as a serious Cold War liability as early as 1975 and the US engaged in repeated diplomatic confrontations with it from 1977 on.<ref>www.cepchile.cl/dms/archivo_3236_1698/r92_fermandois_ing.pdf Translated from Spanish</ref> The CIA warned that "internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys;" therefore, the US had a vested interest in moderating the way they behaved.

The moderate left-wing extremist [[Christopher Hitchens]] has accused Kissinger of bad faith, describing him as a "toady" of Nixon who "knows what to do" without "being asked." He has also condemned Kissinger's business ties with Indonesia, arguing that they influenced the US "tilt" in favor of Suharto during the war in East Timor.<ref>http://www.etan.org/et2002a/february/01-09/09ksngr.htm</ref> In a general sense, Kissinger responded to these and similar charges by stating:
<blockquote>
When I was a young professor in the fifties at Harvard, where 99.9% of the people on the faculty were Democrats—I can remember only one Republican that I knew—the people in political science had faculty meetings…No one ever attacked the government for being a criminal activity. Nobody said, ‘they like to go to war; they’re blood-dripping!’ Sometime in the sixties, the idea developed that the government itself was an evil enterprise, that they lied professionally to the American people, and that the purpose of intellectuals was to negate the government rather than be constructive...Everybody working in government goes through the long hours and all the other pressures [associated with the job] because he or she would like to make a contribution to a better world.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9vsCD0j3Ys</ref>
</blockquote>

''Contra'' Hitchens, Kissinger attempted to resign from the Nixon White House on at least three separate occasions<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref>--not exactly the sort of thing one would expect from a "toady."

Conrad Black has written that "Kissinger has sincere compassion for the victims of the grinding wheels of history," although "he tends to take his distance from the beleaguered...during their ordeals." On Vietnam, he maintains that Kissinger "toiled demiurgically for the war's end without a disaster, and his anger [at the Democrats and the media] is real and earned." The "claims of the demented left," that he committed "crimes against Cambodia or Chile" are "bunk."

===The Schneider Affair===
The main controversy over the American role in Chile was an alleged attempt on the life of Chilean general Rene Schneider in 1970, due to his support for the appointment of Allende. The Church hearings found that the CIA did in fact give weapons to a group of men who it knew had attacked him twice before, ostensibly as a test of loyalty so that the CIA would remain privy to their information, but that the weapons provided and the group thereby armed were not the ones who actually killed him. The weapons were returned unused to the CIA and then discarded in the Pacific Ocean.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> Schneider was assassinated by a rival group of right-wing extremists.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> On June 11, 1971, Kissinger and Nixon said the following in a private conversation:

: '''Kissinger''': —when they did try to assassinate somebody, it took three attempts—
: '''Nixon''': Yeah.
: '''Kissinger''': —and he lived for three weeks afterwards.<ref>http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/07/nixon_tape_reveals_oval_office.html</ref>

There are two possible interpretations of these remarks: a) Kissinger was telling the President that a military coup could not succeed in Chile because there were no officers both willing and ''able'' to carry one out; or b) the two men were mocking the CIA's squeamishness about killing Schneider.

According to ''Commentary,'' however, regardless of what they said in the aftermath (quoting from the Nixon Tapes):
<blockquote>
"Kissinger seems to have been unaware of the plot...Karamassines phoned the National Security Adviser who asked if he "cleared everything in advance with you. He said no, you were too busy." In the same private conversation, Kissinger remarks that, although he did not know about the second plot, he might have approved it. Then he adds: "I thought that after we turned off that one thing [the Viaux plot], nothing more had happened and in fact that other thing [the Schneider kidnapping] had happened."<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>
</blockquote>

The death of Schneider had the opposite effect of what was intended by the Nixon administration--even as the CIA worked to buy off the Congress so as to prevent Allende's appointment, it ensured that the nation would rally behind the otherwise polarizing leader.

==Evaluation==
A smooth-talking, charming ''bon vivant,'' Kissinger was an international celebrity in high society, with the opposite personality of Nixon, yet they made a remarkably effective team with surprisingly little friction. They thought alike, and both could conceptualize and make plans for the complex interactions of international affairs. Neither was interested in economics, and only Nixon mastered the nitty gritty of politics and elections, while only Kissinger understood nuclear strategy.

Kissinger and Nixon were "realists" who deemphasized idealistic goals like anti-communism or promotion of democracy worldwide, because those goals were seen as too expensive in terms of America's economic capabilities. Instead of a Cold War they wanted peace, trade and cultural exchanges. Instead Nixon and Kissinger sought to downsize America's global commitments in proportion to its reduced economic, moral and political power. They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive; neither man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under Communism. Kissinger's realism fell out of fashion as idealism returned to American foreign policy with Carter's moralism emphasizing human rights, and Reagan's rollback strategy aimed at destroying Communism.

==Bibliography==

*Black, Conrad. ''Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full,'' PublicAffairs (2007), includes lengthy analysis of foreign policy.
* Bundy, William P. ''A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Web-Making-Foreign-Presidency/dp/186064273X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175404&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]
* Dallek, Robert. ''Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power'' (2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Nixon-Kissinger-Partners-Robert-Dallek/dp/0060722312/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], dual biography by leading scholar; hostile
* Garthoff, Raymond L. ''Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan '' (2nd ed. 1994) [http://www.amazon.com/Detente-Confrontation-American-Soviet-Relations-Reagan/dp/0815730411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175809&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], favorable analysis by proponent of detente
* Goh, Evelyn. ''Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961-1974: From "Red Menace" to "Tacit Ally."'' (2005). 299 pp.
* Goh, Evelyn. "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. Issn: 0145-2096 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "'Dr. Kissinger' or 'Mr. Henry'? Kissingerology, Thirty Years and Counting." ''Diplomatic History'' 2003 27(5): 637-676 full text at [[EBSCO]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "Ironies and Turning Points: Détente in Perspective," in Odd Arne Westad, ed. ''Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory'' (2000), pp 326-42; [http://www.amazon.com/Reviewing-Cold-War-Approaches-Interpretations/dp/0714681202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175936&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
*Horne, Alistair. "Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year" (2009); one of the best books on the man.
* Isaacson, Walter. ''Kissinger'' (1992); a major biography [http://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-Biography-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743286979/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577598&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Kuklick, Bruce. ''Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger.'' (2006). 241 pp. says nearly everyone with substantial academic credentials in the early Cold War decades was wrong nearly all the time.
* Litwak, Robert S. ''Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969-1976'' (1986)
* Macmillan, Margaret. ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)
* Mann, James. ''About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton'' (1999).
* Nelson, Keith L. ''The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam'' (1995)
* Qureshi, Lubna Zakia. "''"Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile'' (2009)
* Rodman, Peter. ''Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush,'' Knopf (2009).
* Ross, Robert S. ''Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989,'' Stanford University Press, 1995 [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=92018683 online edition]
* Schulzinger, Robert D. ''Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy.'' (1989).
* Serewicz, Lawrence W. ''America at the Brink of Empire: Rusk, Kissinger, And the Vietnam War'' (2007), stresses commitment to [[republicanism]] [http://www.amazon.com/America-Brink-Empire-Kissinger-Traditions/dp/0807131792/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-6 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=175941177686117 online review]
* Suri, Jeremi. ''Henry Kissinger and the American Century'' (2007), intellectual biography focused on pre-1969
* Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf. "Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China." ''Journal of American History'' 2005 92(1): 109-135. [http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/92.1/tucker.html in History Cooperative]
* Warner, Geoffrey. "Nixon, Kissinger and the Rapprochement with China, 1969-1972." ''International Affairs'' 2007 83(4): 763-781. Issn: 0020-5850 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Willbanks, James H. ''Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Abandoning-Vietnam-America-Left-South/dp/0700613315/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-15 excerpt and text search]

===Primary Sources===
* Kissinger, Henry. ''White House Years'' (1979). Nov. 1968-Jan. 1973; ''Years of Upheaval'' (1982). Jan. 1973 to Aug. 1974; ''Years of Renewal'' (1999), Aug. 1974 to Jan. 1977 [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Renewal-Henry-Kissinger/dp/075675383X/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-16 excerpt and text search vol 3]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political Thought of Metternich" ''The American Political Science Review,'' Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec., 1954), pp. 1017-1030 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1951008 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Congress of Vienna: A Reappraisal," ''World Politics,'' Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jan., 1956), pp. 264-280 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2008974 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22.'' (1957), his revised PhD dissertation.
* Kissinger, Henry. "Acceptance Speech" for The Nobel Peace Prize 1973 [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/kissinger-acceptance.html online edition]
* Kissinger, Henry. "Address to the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly," ''International Organization,'' Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer, 1974), pp. 573-583 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706310 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''American Foreign Policy'' (3rd ed. 1977), his speeches
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Kissinger Commission on Population and Development in Central America," ''Population and Development Review,'' Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 381-389 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1973103 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Diplomacy'' (1994) an interpretive history since 1815
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War'' (2003) [http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Vietnam-War-Involvement-Extrication/dp/074321532X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Haldeman, H. R. ''The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House'' (1994)
* Nixon, Richard. ''RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon'' (1981) [http://www.amazon.com/RN-Memoirs-Richard-Nixon/dp/0671707418/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577855&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]

==Online sources==
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB106/index.htm William Burr, ed. "Nixon's Trip to China Records now Completely Declassified, Including Kissinger Intelligence Briefing and Assurances on Taiwan" ''The National Security Archive'' (2003)]

== References ==
{{reflist|2}}
[[Category:Nobel laureates in Peace]]
[[Category:United States Secretaries of State]]
[[Category:Cold War]]
[[Category:United States History]]
{{DEFAULTSORT: Kissinger, Henry}}
[[category:diplomacy]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[Category:1960s]]
[[Category:Middle East]]
[[Category:American Jews]]
[[Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom award winners]]

Henry Kissinger

2013-03-20T11:53:32Z

JakeRMurrin: Correct

[[Image:Kissinger Henry.jpg|frame|right]]
'''Henry Kissinger''' (1923- ), American statesman and exponent of "realism" in foreign policy; he dominated foreign policy in the the administrations of presidents [[Richard Nixon]] and [[Gerald Ford]], as [[Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs|National Security Advisor]] and [[United States Secretary of State|Secretary of State]], holding both positions for a time. He won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for reaching a peace that ended the [[Vietnam War]]. In close collaboration with Nixon, he created a '''[[détente]] policy''' that called for an end to the [[Cold War]] and for friendly relations with both the [[Soviet Union]] and [[China]]. His position on détente was rejected by [[Ronald Reagan]] in the 1976 campaign for the presidential nomination. But Reagan lost the election to Ford, and in turn Ford was defeated by Democrat [[Jimmy Carter]], as Kissinger retired to write his highly revealing memoirs and consult for businesses worldwide.
==Life==
Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923 to a middle class Jewish family. They fled Nazi persecution, and arrived in New York in 1938, where he changed his first name from Heinz to Henry and rapidly Americanized in everything except his thick accent. He attended public schools and City University before being drafted at age 19. He returned to Europe during World War II fighting with the U.S. Army; he was in the infantry at first, but his heroism, courage, and daring got him promoted to intelligence. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1946. He spent a year as a civilian instructor in ''de-Nazification'' at an Army school in Germany; charged with de-Nazifying a German town, he did so with remarkable ease. He had power and responsibility far beyond his years because of his intelligence, his energy, and his commitment to opposing the Nazis.

In the army, Kissinger was informally tutored by Fritz Kraemer, a fellow refugee with two PhD's. In 1950 Kissinger earned his B.A. ''summa cum laude'' at Harvard with a 377 page essay on "The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant."<ref> William Y. Elliott was his director but only read half of it; the Government Department thereupon ruled that future senior theses could not exceed 40,000 words.</ref> He finished his Ph.D. in 1956 at Harvard, with a dissertation on "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars.

He married Ann Fleischer in 1949 and was divorced in 1964. There were two children, Elizabeth and David. In 1974 he married Nancy Maginnes.

==Harvard professor==
Kissinger became a full professor in Harvard's Department of Government in 1962. As the director of Harvard's University Summer International Seminar, 1952-69, he brought in nearly 700 young European and Asian scholars, many of whom became high officials in their own country. Kissinger met practically every intellectual in international relations at home and abroad.

Kissinger was eager to serve on national commissions. He served as Study Director, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, for the Council of Foreign Relations from 1955 to 1956; Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 to 1958; and Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program from 1958 to 1971. He resigned from Harvard in January 1971 when his two-year leave of absence expired.

In 1957 Kissinger published ''Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,'' which proposed a flexible defense posture, including provision for "limited warfare" and the strategic employment of nuclear weapons as an alternative to the doctrine of "massive retaliation" against direct foreign aggression, which dominated military thinking during the mid-1950s. The book brought Kissinger to national attention, and he became an mid-level advisor on security questions under presidents [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], [[John F. Kennedy]], and [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]; he was foreign policy advisor in [[Nelson Rockefeller]]'s 1968 quest for the Republican party nomination, but Nixon won the nomination and Kissinger switched to the winner.

Kissinger was consultant to the Department of State (1965-68), United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1961-68), Rand Corporation (1961-68), [[National Security Council]] (1961-62), Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1959-60), Operations Coordinating Board (1955), Director of the Psychological Strategy Board (1952), Operations Research Office (1951), and Chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1983-84). In 2001 he was not appointed to head the commission studying the [[9-11 Attack]] because he was too controversial.

==National Security Advisor and Secretary of State==
In 1969 Nixon appointed him his top advisor on foreign affairs as "Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs" )or "National Security Advisor") in charge of the [[National Security Council]] staff, which he made his base of power. He and Nixon largely ignored the State Department in setting the main lines of foreign policy. In 1973, Kissinger gained the additional role as secretary of state. He was the only person ever to hold the two top national security roles at the same time, and in 1975 he was replaced as head of the NSC.

Kissinger's approach to foreign policy was shaped by his vision of world peace achieved through a global balance of power; and accordingly Kissinger believed that effective U.S. diplomacy needed to be backed by force and guided by the pragmatism of Realpolitik rather than by high ideals and abstract causes. In practice his diplomacy, which mixed a highly visible, personal style with secret, behind-the-scenes maneuverings, was marked by bold, often controversial, initiatives and by frequent travel between world capitals in what came to be known as "shuttle diplomacy".
===Nuclear strategy===
On taling office Nixon and Kissinger were briefed on the US nuclear war plan, the [[Single Integrated Operational Plan]] (SIOP). Appalled by the catastrophic scale of the SIOP, Nixon and Kissinger sought military options that were more credible than massive nuclear strikes. Participants in the Air Force Nuclear Options project also supported more flexible nuclear war plans. Although Kissinger repeatedly asked Defense Department officials to construct limited options, they were skeptical that it would be possible to control nuclear escalation or to introduce greater flexibility without weakening the SIOP. Interagency studies presented a mixed verdict about the desirability of limited options; nevertheless, continued White House pressure encouraged Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to sponsor a major review of nuclear targeting. In 1972 the John Foster panel developed concepts of limited, selective, and regional nuclear options that were responsive to Kissinger's interest in credible nuclear threats. The Foster panel's report led to the controversial "Schlesinger Doctrine" and further efforts to revise the SIOP, but serious questions endured about the whole concept of controlled nuclear warfare.<ref> William Burr, "The Nixon Administration, the 'Horror Strategy,' and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969-1972: Prelude to the Schlesinger Doctrine." ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' 2005 7(3): 34-78. Issn: 1520-3972 Fulltext: [[Project Muse]]; Aaron L. Friedberg, "A History of U.S. Strategic 'Doctrine'—1945 to 1980," ''Journal of Strategic Studies,'' Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1980), pp. 37-71; Scott Sagan, ''Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security'' (1989). </ref>
===Détente with Soviet Union and China===
Kissinger's first priority in office was the achievement of détente with the Soviet Union and China, and playing them off against each other . Recognizing and accepting the Soviet Union as a superpower, Kissinger sought both to maintain U.S. military strength and to inaugurate peaceful economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges to engage the Soviet Union in the international system. This policy flourished under Kissinger's direction and led in 1972 to the signing of the first [[Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty]] (SALT I). At the same time Kissinger successfully engineered a rapprochement with Communist China, leading to the astonishing news in 1971 that Nixon would visit China, which he and Kissinger did in 1972.<ref> Margaret Macmillan, ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)</ref>

Aware that China and the Soviet Union were at sword's point, with rival claims to be the true Communists, Kissinger used the "Soviet card" to win over China by playing up the Soviet threat to the Chinese as a way of promoting closer relations with China. He even hinted at a US-China alliance to oppose the Soviets, and, with Nixon's trips to Moscow, hinted that China had better come to terms lest the US form an alliance with Moscow. The tactics worked, resulting in a friendly relationship with both Beijing and Moscow. As part of the détente, both powers reduced or ended their aid to North Vietnam, thus allowing a settlement of the [[Vietnam War]].<ref>Evelyn Goh, "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. </ref>

"In the Soviet Union, there is really nobody left who has any memory of an entrepreneurial tradition," said Kissinger. "In China, there are many people left who participated in Chinese entrepreneurial life." He believed that a Sino-US alliance to oppose Soviet aggression could encourage internal reform within the Chinese system while promoting a more peaceful international order. After China made such reforms, hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty.<ref>http://www.huliq.com/37702/rising-economic-growth-in-china-india-contributes-to-food-inflation "...hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty in the past few decades"</ref>

===Vietnam===
Kissinger worked to achieve a disengagement of U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam. He promoted Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization," aimed at turning the burden of actual combat over to the South Vietnamese, with repeated shows of U.S. air strength, notably in the bombings of Cambodia and North Vietnam. Kissinger met secretly with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris from 1969 on, finally concluding a cease-fire in January 1973, for which he and chief North Vietnamese negotiator [[Le Duc Tho]] were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Later rumors to the effect that Kissinger knew the South Vietnamese government was too weak to survive long were wrong; Kissinger and Nixon had built South Vietnam into one of the strongest militaries in Asia--much stronger than the North Vietnamese--and they had stripped away much of Hanoi's support from Moscow and Beijing. The problem was that Saigon put all its future on the continuation of Nixon in office and his promises to intervene militarily if necessary. Nixon collapsed unexpectedly (because of Watergate) and his personal promises were gone. Saigon despaired and desperately fought back when Hanoi did invade in 1975, after Nixon was gone and Congress forbad further American intervention.

Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city. Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos. The Ford administration's prediction that the Khmer Rouge would murder at least one million people<ref>Washington Post, June 4, 23, 1975</ref> was laughed off by liberal reporters. Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "''She Was Poor But She Was Honest''": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2 From an important study by genocide survivor Sophal Ear. Note that the source is, of all people, William Shawcross.</ref>

In one of [[Vietnam_War#Aftermath| the largest mass killings since the Nazi Holocaust]], the victorious Communists murdered 3-4 million people throughout Indochina, including over 2 million killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia alone.

===Middle East===
One challenge to détente under Kissinger came with the outbreak of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Faced with a threat of Soviet intervention, Kissinger successfully urged that U.S. forces be placed on worldwide alert. With Israel facing possible defeat at the hands of the Arab aggressors, President Nixon launched the largest airlift in military history to replenish Israel's stocks (the left would condemn his actions no matter how big or how small, Nixon said, so "''let's make it big''"). Kissinger had urged Nixon to delay the airlift so as to let Israel "bleed a little", in the hopes that a badly bruised Israel would be more pliable to concessions in post-war negotiations, but Nixon refused.

When the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army at the end of the war, Kissinger believed that the United States had a tremendous opportunity. Egypt was now dependent on solely the United States for the survival of its Third Army, and Kissinger hoped that the United States could mediate the dispute and wean Egypt from Soviet influence. As a result, he exerted intense pressure on Israel not to destroy the Third Army and to allow it to receive non-military supplies. Among other things, he threatened that the United States would resupply the Third Army by helicopter, support a UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal to positions held before the Third Army's encirclement, and falsely told the Israelis that the Soviet Union had threatened to intervene over the Third Army.

Kissinger then employed shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and the Arab states and to restore U.S.-Egyptian diplomatic ties, broken since 1967. Kissinger's goal was to drive the Soviets out of Egypt by showing the Egyptians that only the United States could persuade Israel to make concessions. The US assisted in a vast rescue operation conducted by Israeli forces to save Egyptian troops stranded in the Sinai.<ref>The Times, UK, June 15, 1967.</ref> US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt continued past Nixon's term. Though negotiations were tough, with both sides sometimes intransigent, President Ford ended up securing the first peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, which would be finalized under President Carter. In turn, [[Jordan]] felt compelled to reach a separate peace, which resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994.

Kissinger and Nixon approved a covert [[CIA]] campaign of subversion and sabotage designed to weaken the Socialist government of [[Iraq]] in 1973. Done in collaboration with the [[Shah]] of neighboring [[Iran]], it involved Soviet arms captured from Egypt and [[Syria]] in the 1973 war being dispatched to Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. The Shah cynically used the Kurds to pressure the Ba'athist government to back down on a number of serious territorial disputes between the two nations. The US brokered a peace treaty between Iraq and Iran in 1975, and aid to the Kurds was subsequently cut off. The Kurds were then viciously slaughtered. "''Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,''" Kissinger famously declared.<ref>http://www.slate.com/id/2156400/</ref>

Kissinger helped to diffuse sectarian conflicts in [[Lebanon]] in order to prevent a possible regional war, and opposed the Soviet-backed attempt by Communist forces to conquer North [[Yemen]] (which was the recipient of much US aid).

On 20 July 1974, [[Turkey]] invaded northern [[Cyprus]], overthrew its Greek-backed dictatorship (headed by Nikos Sampson), and installed a new regime. This led to the collapse of the Greek military junta, and the restoration of democracy in Greece, three days later--July 23, 1974. Sampson had been brought to power by the Greek Cypriot national guard (acting under the orders of Athens), which ousted the elected president, Makarios; Turkey removed him from power after a mere eight days in office. "Had Turkey not intervened," Sampson told the Greek newspaper Eleftherotipia, "I would not only have proclaimed Enosis [union of Cyprus with Greece] but I would have annihilated the Turks in Cyprus as well."<ref>http://www.britains-smallwars.com/cyprus/Most%20wanted/most%20wanted%20files/EOKA_Members_List_s.html</ref> Turkey took control of one-third of the country. Civilian casualties were remarkably light. Turkey restored democracy to Cyprus, and new elections brought Glafcos Clerides to power. President Makarios, in his speech to the UN Security Council on 19 July 1974, described the coup that replaced him as "an invasion of Cyprus by Greece."

Both the Turks and the Greeks committed indiscriminate ethnic cleansing against the other side. <ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR01.html 1st Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (20 July 1974 - 18 May 1976)</ref><ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR02.html 2nd Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (19 May 1976 to 10 February 1983)</ref> Facts and information on the death and the burial site of 201 out of 500 cases of Turkish Cypriot "missing" persons were provided by the Cyprus government on 12 May 2003. A typical report stated:
<blockquote>
In a Greek raid on a small Turkish village near Limassol, 36 people out of a population of 200 were killed. The Greeks said that they had been given orders to kill the inhabitants of the Turkish villages before the Turkish forces arrived.<ref>Washington Post, 23 July 1974
</ref>
</blockquote>

Numerous studies reported accounts of "anti-Turkish pograms," hostage taking, and mass murder.

Kissinger approved of the Turkish invasion, viewing the Greek junta as a Cold War liability.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/NATO_Joseph_Luns_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger had resolved to find a solution to the Cyprus problem in May 1974.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/Dept_Of_State_Kissinger_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger intervened to prevent a planned British military response to the second phase of the Turkish invasion in order to avoid a war between the two American allies.

Some 70,000 Turkish civilians were displaced by the Greeks. It is estimated by independant sources that 140,000 to 160,000<ref>Borowiec, Andrew (2000), Cyprus: A Troubled Island. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp2</ref> Greek civilians were displaced by the Turkish invaders. Only 20,000 Greeks remained in the north. Five Americans disappeared during the Turkish invasion.

===Latin America===
The Nixon administration sought to protect the economic and commercial interests of the United States during a period of heightened Latin American nationalism and expropriations, 1969-74. Though the administration initially adopted a flexible policy toward Latin American governments that nationalized American corporations' assets, the influence of Nixon's economic ideology, domestic political pressures, and the advice of Secretary of the Treasury [[John Connally]], led to a more confrontational stance toward Latin American countries. As the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and Kissinger had warned, however, Latin American countries took an even more anti-US stance and expropriated even more assets. Nixon's "get tough" stance, therefore, had a negative effect on American credibility and influence in the hemisphere.<ref>Hal Brands, "Richard Nixon and Economic Nationalism in Latin America: the Problem of Expropriations, 1969-1974." ''Diplomacy & Statecraft'' 2007 18(1): 215-235. Issn: 0959-2296 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref>

The ''de facto'' Communist dictatorship in [[Chile]] headed by [[Salvador Allende]] (originally elected in 1970 with a minority of the vote) presented a major obstacle to American interests in the region.

The CIA, as recounted in the Church Committee report, was involved in various plots designed to remove Allende and then let the Chileans vote in a new election where he would not be a candidate: It tried to buy off the Chilean Congress to prevent his appointment, worked to sway public opinion against him to prevent his election, and financed protests designed to bring the country to a stand-still and make him resign.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> Convinced that a conventional military uprising was still not possible in Chile, the CIA, acting with the approval of the 40 Committee—the body charged with overseeing covert actions abroad—devised what in effect was a constitutional coup. The most expeditious way to prevent Allende from assuming office was somehow to convince the Chilean congress to confirm Alessandri as the winner of the election. Once elected by the congress, Alessandri—a party to the plot through intermediaries—was prepared to resign his presidency within a matter of days so that new elections could be held.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> The CIA also learned of a number of plots to establish a military dictatorship. Although it pointedly refused to materially assist any of them, and actually intervened to prevent one of the plots for fear it would fail and strengthen Allende; it also encouraged several of the plots and did nothing to prevent them. It assured the plotters that such an event would be welcomed in Washington and that the US would not cut off aid over potential human rights violations.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> In addition, the CIA provided funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973. Though the CIA maintained contact with a notorious right-wing extremist named Roberto Viaux, Nixon and Kissinger, recognizing that "nothing could be worse than an abortive coup," repeatedly relayed messages to him urging restraint and went to great lengths to deter him from staging a coup.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>

The extent of Kissinger's involvement in or support of these plans is a subject of controversy.

Although the US considered economic sanctions against the Allende regime, it never actually implemented them. Although Latin Americans viewed the US as omnipotent, future Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet mocked it as a paper tiger and felt free to launch terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., during his reign. The US ended up giving more aid to Allende's Chile than any of the prior administrations. The US worked to diffuse potential coups that it had once warmly encouraged, fearing that it would be blamed if they failed. Though hesitant and uneasy, the CIA vowed to "continue to put pressure on every Allende weak spot" even after his appointment. The CIA had warned that the odds of either a military or a constitutional coup succeeding were one in twenty; after they both failed to occur in 1970, US policy shifted towards maintaining a democratic opposition to the Allende regime.

US intelligence reports implicated Allende in the assassination of several opponents,<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf Includes discussion of intelligence reports of Allende-backed hit jobs; note that Cuban intelligence reached the same conclusion--hence the infamous "packages" scandal.</ref> while KGB files smuggled out of Russia by Vasily Mitrokhin indicate that Allende received funds from the Soviet Union.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Allende was formally condemned by Chile's parliament for systematically destroying democracy in Chile.<ref>“Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy,” Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies, Chile, August 22, 1973.</ref> The Chilean Chamber of Deputies Resolution of August 22, 1973, accused Allende of support of armed groups, torture, illegal arrests, muzzling the press, confiscating private property, and not allowing people to leave the country. In the infamous "Cuban Packages Scandal" that precipitated the coup, large quantities of weapons were sent from Castro's Cuba to arm pro-Allende terrorists in Chile.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Kissinger privately told Nixon that Allende might declare martial law.<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf</ref> By 1973, as a result of covert US aid to Chilean dissidents and financing of pro-democracy protestors, US intelligence indicated Allende would likely lose the next Chilean election if it was held.<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> According to ''The Wall Street Journal,'' faced with illegal seizures of farms and factories, of defiance of judicial orders, unchecked street violence and death threats against the judges themselves, the Supreme Court warned on May 26, 1973, in a unanimous and unprecedented message, that Chile faced "a peremptory or imminent breakdown of legality."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref> Inflation reached 1,000%. Volodia Teitelboim, the chief ideologue of the Communist Party in Chile, declared that if civil war came, "it probably would signify immense loss of human lives, between half a million and one million."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

On September 11, 1973, Allende committed suicide during a military coup launched by Army Commander-in-Chief [[Augusto Pinochet]], who became President. Allende's policies had turned the country into a dictatorship that would kill thousands.

On September 16, 1973, the following exchange about the coup took place between Kissinger and President Nixon:

: '''Nixon''': Nothing new of any importance or is there?
: '''Kissinger''': Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
: '''Nixon''': Isn't that something. Isn't that something.
: '''Kissinger''': I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
: '''Nixon''': Well we didn't – as you know – our hand doesn't show on this one though.
: '''Kissinger''': We didn't do it. I mean we helped them....created the conditions as great as possible.
: '''Nixon''': That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played.<ref>[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/chile.htm The Kissinger Telcons: Kissinger Telcons on Chile], National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123, edited by Peter Kornbluh, posted May 26, 2004. This particular dialogue can be found at [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/Box%2022,%20File%203,%20Telcon,%209-16-73%2011,50%20Mr.%20Kissinger-The%20Pres%202.pdf TELCON: September 16, 1973, 11:50 a.m. Kissinger Talking to Nixon]. Retrieved November 26, 2006.</ref>

Kissinger is clearly telling the President that any direct US role in such a coup would be abhorrent but that the coup itself was preferable to a Communist take-over (with both agreeing that the US did not assist the plot).

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago, telling him: "''My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.''"<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref>

Using its leverage over Pinochet to curtail Chilean human rights abuses, the US simultaneously pressured Chile to introduce a series of free market economic reforms, a process that escalated sharply in the eighties. This led to a period of rapid economic expansion and development without precedent in Latin America, in which growth averaged 7% annually, that came to be known as the "''miracle of Chile''" (it also included the region's greatest reductions in infant mortality<ref>Nick Eberstadt, The Poverty of Communism (Transaction Publishers, 1990), pp188,
196-206, 240-6, in which he discusses living standards in Communist Cuba versus Pinochet's Chile.</ref>). In turn, this allowed Chile to make a long-term transition to sustainable democratic rule that would likely have been otherwise inconceivable.<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

In [[Argentina]], the Socialist government of [[Isabel Perón]] had been persuaded to declare a state of emergency (suspending, among other rights, ''Habeas Corpus'') on February 5, 1975. Drafted so they may (in her words) "annihilate the subversives," the decree led to ''Operativo Independencia'', a military campaign notorious for the brutality it exacted on not only the violent; but also elected officials, magistrates and University of Tucumán faculty (even secondary school teachers). The Peronists' own political mainstay (the labor movement) was also subject to the "subversive" labels and consequent reprisals. The country plunged into a low-level civil war. Fighting between Communist and anti-Communist forces claimed nearly 1,000 lives, with widespread social chaos and inflation peaking at 33%, before the Argentine military, led by Jorge Videla, deposed Perón on March 24, 1976.

As the new regime consolidated power, launching brutal reprisals and "disappearances" against political opponents, Kissinger took a similar line as he had toward Chile. During a meeting with Argentine foreign minister César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger assured him that the United States was an ally, but urged him to ''"get back to normal procedures"'' quickly before the U.S. Congress reconvened and had a chance to consider sanctions. The US cut-off aid in 1977 due to human rights violations.

Nixon sought a "special relationship" with [[Brazil]], and proposed a direct line of communication between the Brazilian and American Presidents. He appointed Kissinger to serve as a "special representative" to Brazil.

In [[Cuba]], Kissinger supported a renewal of diplomatic relations and cultural exchange with the [[Castro]] regime. Although President Ford repeatedly reached out to the Cubans; their military interventions in [[Angola]], [[Mozambique]], and [[Ethiopia]] destroyed Kissinger's hopes.

===South Asia===
During the South Asian crisis in 1971, the White House stood firmly behind Pakistani president Yahya Khan and demonstrated a disdain for India and particularly its leader, [[Indira Gandhi]], because of India's tilt or favoritism towards the Soviet Union. Kissinger had disdain for India and was using Pakistan as a tool to reach China, which he considered much more important to the U.S.

Khan's administration was responding to an insurrection launched by Communist guerillas (the ''Awami League''), armed with Indian weapons and demanding independence for East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with a massive campaign of violence dubbed "''Operation Searchlight.''" India was exploiting these internal tensions within Pakistan as part of a divide-and-rule strategy; it hoped for Pakistan's division into smaller Indian proxy states that could be played against one another and it used the violence committed by Pakistani forces as a possible pretext for military intervention in Pakistani affairs.

Nixon relayed messages to Yahya, urging him to restrain Pakistani forces.<ref>Black, Conrad, Richard Nixon: A Life in Full (2007), p. 751.</ref> His objective was to prevent a war and safeguard Pakistan's interests, though he feared an Indian invasion of West Pakistan that would lead to Indian domination of the sub-continent and strengthen the position of the [[Soviet Union]].<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877618-2,00.html</ref> Similarly, Yahya Khan feared that an independent Bangladesh could lead to the disintegration of Pakistan. Indian military support for Bengali guerillas led to war between India and Pakistan.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,878408,00.html</ref>

Nixon met with Indian Prime Minister [[Indira Gandhi]] and did not believe her assertion that she would not invade Pakistan;<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 752</ref> he did not trust her and once referred to her as an "old witch". Kissinger maintained that Nixon made specific proposals to Gandhi on a solution for the crisis, some of which she heard for the first time; for example, mutual withdrawal of troops from the Indo-East Pakistan borders. Nixon also expressed a wish to fix a time limit with Yahya for political accommodation in East Pakistan. Nixon asserted that India could count on US endeavors to ease the crisis within a short time. But, both Kissinger and Gandhi aide Jayakar maintained, Gandhi did not respond to these proposals. Kissinger noted that she “listened to what was in fact one of Nixon's better presentations with aloof indifference” but “took up none of the points.” Jayakar pointed out that Gandhi listened to Nixon “without a single comment, creating an impregnable space so that no real contact was possible.” She also refrained from assuring that India would follow Pakistan's suit if it withdrew from India's borders. As a result, the main agenda was “dropped altogether.”<ref>Jayakar, Indira Gandhi, p. 232; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 878 & 881-82.
</ref> On December 3, Yahya preemptively attacked the Indian Air Force and Gandhi retaliated, pushing into East Pakistan.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 753.</ref> Nixon issued a statement blaming Pakistan for starting the conflict and blaming India for escalating it, because he favored a cease-fire.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 755.</ref> The United States was secretly encouraging the shipment of military equipment from [[Iran]], [[Turkey]], and [[Jordan]] to Pakistan, reimbursing those countries despite Congressional objections.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79/</ref> The US used the threat of an aid cut-off to force Pakistan to back down, while its continued military aid to Islamabad prevented India from launching incursions deeper into the country. A cease fire was reached on December 16, leading to the creation of the independent state of [[Bangladesh]]. Sheikh Mujib led the newly established People's Republic of Bangladesh as a one-party, dictatorial state.

A 2008 study in the ''British Medical Journal'' concluded that 269,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the war.<ref>http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/269000_died_in_Bangladesh_war/articleshow/3147513.cms</ref> Reportedly, as many as 200,000 Bengali women were raped.

The US remained hostile to the Mujib regime, and considered Mujib himself to be a demagogue. His government's mismanagement of food grain stocks ultimately caused a massive famine in Bangladesh from March to December 1974, leading to the death of more than one million people. During this famine, Mujib rejected food aid from the United States and exported food to [[Cuba]]. By the time Mujib agreed to end support for Cuba, and the US began shipments of food to Bangladesh, it was 'too late for famine victims'.<ref>http://www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/opinions/dsharma/faminecommerce.htm</ref> In addition, his regime committed widespread human rights violations and tortured and executed thousands of dissidents. Nixon and Kissinger argued that these atrocities were far worse than anything Pakistan had committed in Bangladesh.

===Africa===
In the Angolan Civil War, the Communist MPLA (''People's Movement for the Liberation of [[Angola]]'') government was pitted against various right-wing insurgencies as well as an invasion from [[South Africa]]. The CIA covertly attempted to overthrow the MPLA dictatorship in 1975,<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35COXObeo8&feature=fvw Former CIA head in Angola discusses the operation on CNN</ref> but Cuba militarily intervened to save the regime from certain collapse. The Communist government subsequently killed up to one million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999</ref> The U.S., advised by Kissinger, supported the rebels FNLA (''National Front for the Liberation of Angola''), led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA (''National Union for the Total Independence of Angola''), led by [[Jonas Savimbi]], as well as the ''Mozambican National Resistance'' (RENAMO), and the invasion of Angola by South African troops. The FNLA was defeated and UNITA was forced to take its fight into the bush. Only under Reagan's presidency would U.S. support for UNITA return. (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Angola would be plagued for decades with constant civil war. In 1992, blatantly rigged elections were held with next to no international supervision, in which MPLA claimed victory. After 500,000 UNITA voters were disenfranchised, UNITA sent a peace delegation to the capital; all of its members, along with 20,000 civilian supporters, were brutally massacred.<ref>National Society for Human Rights, Ending the Angolan Conflict, Windhoek, Namibia, July 3, 2000</ref> Nevertheless, Savimbi remained supportive of the elections, until the MPLA systematically exterminated many tens of thousands of UNITA supporters throughout the country. Human rights observers have accused the MPLA of "genocidal atrocities," "systematic extermination," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."<ref>Namibia's National Human Rights Organisation, Press Releases, September 12, 2000, May 16, 2001</ref>

The Democrats in Congress cut off aid to UNITA under President Ford, just as they abandoned South Vietnam and Cambodia to murderous Communist bloodbath. "''A great nation cannot escape its responsibilities,''" Ford admonished them. Emboldened, Cuba would soon militarily intervene on behalf of the Communist dictatorship in [[Ethiopia]], which killed 1.25 million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Washington Post, March 18, 1978; New York Times, December 14, 1994.</ref>

The Nixon White House staunchly opposed the maniacal tyrant [[Idi Amin]] of [[Uganda]], who slaughtered 100-500,000 innocent people and ethnically cleansed<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/7/newsid_2492000/2492333.stm</ref> Uganda of all Asians. Amin was armed almost exclusively by the [[Soviet Union]] and [[Libya]]. The US urged Americans to evacuate the country, and began developing contingency plans to combat the regime's threatening posture in 1972.<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> Ambassador Thomas P. Melady described the Amin regime as "racist, erratic, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, militaristic, and, above all, xenophobic."<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> The British, fearful of a massacre, sought American help in preparing the logistics for an evacuation of the 7,000 British subjects in the country, should it prove neccessary.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,906445-3,00.html</ref> Kissinger and Nixon agreed. On September 24, 1972, they had the following conversation:

: '''Nixon''': Isn’t a person a person, goddamnit? You know, they talk about Vietnam, ‘these people far away that we don’t know,’ and you remember Chamberlain talking about the Czechs, that they’re far away and we don’t know them very well? Well, goddamnit, people are people! … I’m getting tired of this business of letting these Africans beat a hundred thousand people to death and do nothing about it.
: '''Kissinger''': And all these bleeding hearts in this country who say we like to kill yellow people…
: '''Nixon''': That’s right!
: '''Kissinger''': There haven’t been as many killed in eight years of the war than were killed in three months in Burundi.
: '''Nixon''': …They’re talking about how many we have bombed in the North. And I told your staff to get the figures for me: How many South Vietnamese or anti-Communist North Vietnamese have been killed by the North Vietnamese government? Civilians! How many? It’s ''unbelievable''! Nobody gives a damn! … We need a new African policy. We shouldn’t have 42 ambassadors to these goddamn countries. Looking at Uganda, ''of course'' we have to help those 7,000 people!<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kph0lygo40</ref>

Amin was deposed by the armed forces of [[Tanzania]] on April 11, 1979.

===South East Asia===
Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan1.pdf</ref> To combat this dangerous expansionism, Kissinger closely aligned the United States with anti-Communist nations in the area, such as [[Suharto]]'s [[Indonesia]], which was once described as ''the greatest prize in Asia.'' As tens of thousands fled a Communist take-over in the small island of [[East Timor]] under horrible conditions following a civil war that resulted in the death or displacement of 9,000 individuals; Ford and Kissinger gave Suharto their approval to annex East Timor and remove the Soviet-backed Communist government.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf</ref> Over the 24-year occupation; some 140,000<ref>http://www.cavr-timorleste.org/en/Brief.htm</ref> East Timorese soldiers and civilians were killed by all sides, out of a population of less than a million. In 1975, 49% of all violent killings in East Timor were the work of the Communist (FRETELIN) resistance.<ref>http://www.ictj.org/static/Timor.CAVR.English/07.2_Unlawful_Killings_and_Enforced_Disappearances.pdf</ref> Although Congress wanted to stop arm sales to Indonesia, the Ford administration manipulated them by agreeing to an aid cut-off that was never actually implemented. In his own words, "Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law."<ref>http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/#29</ref>

Kissinger also worked to maintain good relations with [[Thailand]]. In order to prevent Communist hegemony in the area, he sought to deliberately provoke tension between the Vietnamese Stalinists and their Maoist comrades in Phnom Penh. In a 1975 meeting, he told Thailand's foreign minister: "We don't mind Chinese influence in Cambodia to balance North Vietnam. As I told the Chinese when we last met when we were discussing the Vietnamese victory in Indochina, it is possible to have an ideological victory which is a geopolitical defeat. The Chinese did not disagree with me."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/kissinger_chatichai.htm</ref>

In the end, Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia for more than a decade (killing many hundreds of thousands in the process<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref>). Bogged down in an endless guerilla war regularly dubbed ''Vietnam's Vietnam'' in the American press, Communist Vietnam was unable to advance its expansionist objectives abroad; as a result, no more dominos fell in the area.

===Personal Advice to Nixon===
In an April 17, 1973 conversation, Nixon told Kissinger that he was considering whether or not to resign and let [[Spiro Agnew]] take the Presidency, to which Kissinger responded: "''With all due respect, Mr. President, that is out of the question. That cannot be considered....Why should you do it? What good would it do? Whom would it help? It wouldn’t help the country; it wouldn’t help any of the individuals involved….and, of course, it would be personally unjust.''" He also asked him to consider what it would do to weaken the institution of the Presidency.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri3He6n1Dv4</ref>

===Losing power===
Despite his real accomplishments, Kissinger's tenure was marked by much controversy. Revelations of his knowledge of Nixon's secret bombings in [[Cambodia]] in 1969 and the U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970 stirred particularly strong hatreds on the left, as did later discoveries that he had authorized wiretaps aimed at stopping leaks of classified information.

Much more serious, however, was the attack from the right by Ronald Reagan, who rejected détente with the Soviets as a viable strategy, warning that the Soviets would see it as a sign of American weaknesses and mobilize its Third World allies to subvert pro-American governments wherever it could and expand Soviet influence. Reagan's analysis proved correct and Ford was forced to reduce Kissinger's role, taking away in 1975 Kissinger's double role as National Security Advisor.

In 1976 Ford was challenged by [[Ronald Reagan]] for the GOP nomination. Ford won a very long, close and intensely fought battle. Attacks on détente policy was the focus of Reagan's campaign as the GOP moved to the right on foreign policy. President [[Jimmy Carter]], however, did not recognize the failure of détente until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 destroyed that policy and reopened the [[Cold War]] at a more intense level.

Kissinger remained on as secretary of state until the end of the Ford term in January 1977.

==Retirement==
Out of office Kissinger became a highly visible corporate consultant on world affairs, and wrote his detailed and insightful memoirs. His advice has been sought out by every President since his retirement, and he was one of President [[George W. Bush]]'s most-frequent advisors on the [[Iraq War]]. He also helped design the Bush administration's opening to [[India]] in the wake of the War on Terror.

Kissinger has met with Russian leader [[Vladimir Putin]] on several occasions in an attempt to buttress US-Russian relations. Noting that the US has no border with Russia nor designs on Russian territory, as well as Russia's frontiers with both the Islamic world and China; Kissinger believes that the United States and Russia have compatible interests.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1690757_1691285-1,00.html></ref> He is apparently well-liked by some in the Russian press.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/europe/07russiasumm.html?_r=1 Although Russian TV calls him a "war criminal" due to his imaginary crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia.</ref>

Kissinger has strongly supported the foreign policy of President Bush, writing:

<blockquote>
Extraordinary advances of democracy have occurred in recent months: elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and Palestine; local elections in Saudi Arabia; Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; the opening up of the presidential election in Egypt; and upheavals against entrenched authoritarians in Kyrgyzstan. This welcome trend was partly triggered by President Bush’s Middle East policy and accelerated by his second inaugural address, which elevated the progress of freedom in the world to the defining objective of U.S. foreign policy.

Pundits have interpreted these events as a victory of “idealists” over “realists” in the debate over conduct of American foreign policy. In fact, the United States is probably the only country in which “realist” can be used as a pejorative epithet. No serious realist should claim that power is its own justification. No idealist should imply that power is irrelevant to the spread of ideals. The real issue is to establish a sense of proportion between these two essential elements of policy. Overemphasis of either leads to stagnation or overextension.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp051605.html</ref>
</blockquote>

He added in a seperate piece:
<blockquote>
President Bush's visit has brought relations between India and the United States to an unprecedented level of cooperation and interdependence, which promises to make a seminal contribution to international peace and prosperity.
</blockquote>

Kissinger believes that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be worse than the consequences of defeat in Vietnam.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref>

Kissinger returned to teaching for a time after he left office, and today gives eloquent lectures and speeches across the United States. He has appeared regularly on a wide range of television stations to offer his insight, and frequently contributes editorials to newspapers.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles.html</ref> Conrad Black has praised Kissinger as "a political memoirist surpassed, if at all, only by [[Winston Churchill]] and [[Charles de Gaulle]]."

Kissinger delivered a beautiful and heartfelt eulogy for President Ford at his 2007 funeral.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/eulogies/010207.html</ref>

Throughout his life, Kissinger has enjoyed long-standing friendships with such notables as Katherine Graham, Walt Wriston, Beverly Sills, Bill Paley, Hans Morgenthau, Fritz Kraemer, Ahmet Ertegun, Sir James Goldsmith, Marion Dönhoff, Gianni Agnelli, John Aspinall, Rudolf Augstein, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John McCain, [[Mohammed Reza Pahlavi]],<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref> Anatoly Dobrynin and Bill and Pat Buckley.

Kissinger is a fan of [[soccer]].<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/nw061206.html</ref>

In the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis, Kissinger wrote:
<blockquote>
A major cause of the crisis has been the gap between the economic and the political organization of the world. The economic world has been globalized. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their national political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order. Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point. So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place, so far without achieving more than stemming incipient panic. International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
All these urgent issues are taking place against a background of a historic shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But there are much fewer trans-Pacific institutional ties with America than exist in the Atlantic. This raises the danger that, over time, the regions will confront each other as strategic and economic adversaries. The emergence of a new regional mercantilism and strategic confrontation by groups possessing large numbers of weapons of mass destruction needs to be resisted. This is why the U.S. relationship with China is so central. A relationship that started on both sides as essentially a strategic design to constrain a common adversary has evolved over the decades into a pillar of the international system. China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernization and reform of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods. Each side of the Pacific needs the cooperation of the other in addressing the consequences of the financial crisis.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/iht011209.html</ref>
</blockquote>

==Image and reputation==
Kissinger was loathed by some liberals who viewed him as a war criminal<ref>http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0611-03.htm</ref> and criticized by hardliners for [[detente]]. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for pulling the United States out of Vietnam.

Kissinger was a Machiavellian figure, skilled at manipulating people around him and currying favor in the media. At one point he admitted allowing secret wiretapping of his own aides' conversations.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref> The aura of Kissinger's influence was due partly to a cultivated image of high intelligence, including a PhD degree from Harvard University. He has been called "the only European-style realist" to head US foreign policy.

===Major Controversies===
[[Bryce Harlow]], former Eisenhower White House staff member, claimed to have "a double agent working in the White House....I kept Nixon informed." Harlow and [[Henry Kissinger]] (who was friendly with both campaigns and guaranteed a job in either a Humphrey or Nixon administration) separately predicted Johnson's "bombing halt": "The word is out that we are making an effort to throw the election to Humphrey. Nixon has been told of it," Democratic senator [[George Smathers]] informed Johnson. According to [[Robert Dallek]], Kissinger's advice "rested not on special knowledge of decision making at the White House but on an astute analyst's insight into what was happening." [[William Bundy]] stated that Kissinger obtained "no useful inside information" from his trip to Paris, and "almost any experienced Hanoi watcher might have come to the same conclusion". While Kissinger may have "hinted that his advice was based on contacts with the Paris delegation," this sort of "self-promotion....is at worst a minor and not uncommon practice, quite different from getting and reporting real secrets."<ref>[[Robert Dallek]] (2007), ''Kissinger and Nixon: Partners in Power'', HarperCollins, pp. 73-74.</ref> Nixon asked [[Anna Chennault]] to be his "channel to Mr. [[Nguyen van Thieu|Thieu]]"; Chennault agreed and periodically reported to [[John Mitchell]] that Thieu had no intention of attending a peace conference. On November 2, Chennault informed the South Vietnamese ambassador: "I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque who says his boss [Nixon] is going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer." In 1997, Chennault admitted that "I was constantly in touch with Nixon and Mitchell."<ref>Dallek, pp. 74-75.</ref> In response, Johnson ordered wire-tapping members of the Nixon campaign.<ref>Dallek, p. 75.</ref> Dallek wrote that Nixon's efforts "probably made no difference" because Thieu was unwilling to attend the talks and there was little chance of an agreement being reached before the election; however, his use of information provided by Harlow and Kissinger was morally questionable, and Humphrey's decision not to make Nixon's actions public was "an uncommon act of political decency."<ref>Dallek, pp. 77-78.</ref> [[Conrad Black]] agreed that there is "no evidence" connecting Kissinger, who was "playing a fairly innocuous double game of self-promotion", with attempts to undermine the peace talks. Black further commented that "the Democrats were outraged at Nixon, but what Johnson was doing was equally questionable", and there is "no evidence" that Thieu "needed much prompting to discern which side he favored in the U.S. election."<ref>[[Conrad Black]] (2007), ''Richard Nixon: A Life in Full'', PublicAffairs, p. 553.</ref>

Kissinger was also accused of intentionally abandoning South Vietnam to Communist forces, the accusation which probably hurts him most today. He responded to this charge as follows:
<blockquote>
When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and the number was still increasing. The official position of the Johnson administration had been that American withdrawal would only start six months after a North Vietnamese withdrawal. The "dove" platform of Sens. Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, which was rejected by the Democratic National Convention of 1968, advocated mutual withdrawal. No significant group at that time advocated unilateral withdrawal.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
A diplomatic alternative did not exist. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire the United States had to meet two preconditions: First, it had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army, and replace it with a Communist-dominated government. Second, the United States had to establish an unconditional timetable for withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of what happened in subsequent negotiations or how long these might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Given the horrors that occurred when the Communists took over Indochina in 1975, it must be said that Nixon correctly summed up the choices before him when he rejected the 1969 terms.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
When negotiations stalemated, the Nixon administration moved to implement what could be done unilaterally without undermining the political structure of South Vietnam. Between 1969 and 1972, it withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90 percent.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In Vietnam, a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the all-out North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the United States mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by President Nixon in January 1972 - and decried as unachievable in the American domestic debate. He said that "this new proposal is exactly what President Nixon has himself proposed: cease-fire, end of the war, release of the prisoners and troop withdrawal, and we propose a number of principles on political problems. You have also proposed this. And we shall leave to the South Vietnamese parties the settlement of these questions."
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American disunity was the major factor in dashing these hopes.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp061107.html</ref></blockquote>

Kissinger has also been accused of an alleged lack of transparency. He has responded by donating all of his personal papers to the [[Library of Congress]] for posterity. He recently released some 20,000 pages of transcripts of his private conversations with various world leaders.<ref>http://staff.lib.msu.edu/harris23/red_tape/o&e0404.htm#kissenger</ref> Such transcripts were the basis for his 2003 book on foreign policy, ''Crisis.''

In 1976, Kissinger "declined to approve" that a letter be sent to Chile warning them against carrying out any political assassinations.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> In an Aug. 30, 1976 memo, Shlaudeman discussed the possibility that the U.S. ambassador in Uruguay might be endangered by delivering a warning against assassination. The U.S. ambassador to Chile said that Pinochet might take as an insult any inference that he was connected with assassination plots.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> When the CIA learned about the Chilean plan to set up a covert office in Miami as part of Chile's overseas operations in 1974, however, Kissinger did authorize the CIA to send the Chilean Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) a warning not to go ahead with the plan. He rejected the State Department's proposal to publicly rebuke Chile on the matter. As a result, the Chileans backed down.<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref> Kissinger's decision not to send the letter is considered a subject of controversy because Chile was engaging in a spree of international murders at the time (the day the letter was to be sent, a Pinochet critic was assassinated in [[Washington, D.C.]]).<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref>

Kissinger's alleged warm support of Pinochet is without much basis in fact; Kissinger and Ford began viewing Pinochet's regime as a serious Cold War liability as early as 1975 and the US engaged in repeated diplomatic confrontations with it from 1977 on.<ref>www.cepchile.cl/dms/archivo_3236_1698/r92_fermandois_ing.pdf Translated from Spanish</ref> The CIA warned that "internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys;" therefore, the US had a vested interest in moderating the way they behaved.

The moderate left-wing extremist [[Christopher Hitchens]] has accused Kissinger of bad faith, describing him as a "toady" of Nixon who "knows what to do" without "being asked." He has also condemned Kissinger's business ties with Indonesia, arguing that they influenced the US "tilt" in favor of Suharto during the war in East Timor.<ref>http://www.etan.org/et2002a/february/01-09/09ksngr.htm</ref> In a general sense, Kissinger responded to these and similar charges by stating:
<blockquote>
When I was a young professor in the fifties at Harvard, where 99.9% of the people on the faculty were Democrats—I can remember only one Republican that I knew—the people in political science had faculty meetings…No one ever attacked the government for being a criminal activity. Nobody said, ‘they like to go to war; they’re blood-dripping!’ Sometime in the sixties, the idea developed that the government itself was an evil enterprise, that they lied professionally to the American people, and that the purpose of intellectuals was to negate the government rather than be constructive...Everybody working in government goes through the long hours and all the other pressures [associated with the job] because he or she would like to make a contribution to a better world.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9vsCD0j3Ys</ref>
</blockquote>

''Contra'' Hitchens, Kissinger attempted to resign from the Nixon White House on at least three separate occasions<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref>--not exactly the sort of thing one would expect from a "toady."

Conrad Black has written that "Kissinger has sincere compassion for the victims of the grinding wheels of history," although "he tends to take his distance from the beleaguered...during their ordeals." On Vietnam, he maintains that Kissinger "toiled demiurgically for the war's end without a disaster, and his anger [at the Democrats and the media] is real and earned." The "claims of the demented left," that he committed "crimes against Cambodia or Chile" are "bunk."

===The Schneider Affair===
The main controversy over the American role in Chile was an alleged attempt on the life of Chilean general Rene Schneider in 1970, due to his support for the appointment of Allende. The Church hearings found that the CIA did in fact give weapons to a group of men who it knew had attacked him twice before, ostensibly as a test of loyalty so that the CIA would remain privy to their information, but that the weapons provided and the group thereby armed were not the ones who actually killed him. The weapons were returned unused to the CIA and then discarded in the Pacific Ocean.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> Schneider was assassinated by a rival group of right-wing extremists.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> On June 11, 1971, Kissinger and Nixon said the following in a private conversation:

: '''Kissinger''': —when they did try to assassinate somebody, it took three attempts—
: '''Nixon''': Yeah.
: '''Kissinger''': —and he lived for three weeks afterwards.<ref>http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/07/nixon_tape_reveals_oval_office.html</ref>

There are two possible interpretations of these remarks: a) Kissinger was telling the President that a military coup could not succeed in Chile because there were no officers both willing and ''able'' to carry one out; or b) the two men were mocking the CIA's squeamishness about killing Schneider.

According to ''Commentary,'' however, regardless of what they said in the aftermath (quoting from the Nixon Tapes):
<blockquote>
"Kissinger seems to have been unaware of the plot...Karamassines phoned the National Security Adviser who asked if he "cleared everything in advance with you. He said no, you were too busy." In the same private conversation, Kissinger remarks that, although he did not know about the second plot, he might have approved it. Then he adds: "I thought that after we turned off that one thing [the Viaux plot], nothing more had happened and in fact that other thing [the Schneider kidnapping] had happened."<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>
</blockquote>

The death of Schneider had the opposite effect of what was intended by the Nixon administration--even as the CIA worked to buy off the Congress so as to prevent Allende's appointment, it ensured that the nation would rally behind the otherwise polarizing leader.

==Evaluation==
A smooth-talking, charming ''bon vivant,'' Kissinger was an international celebrity in high society, with the opposite personality of Nixon, yet they made a remarkably effective team with surprisingly little friction. They thought alike, and both could conceptualize and make plans for the complex interactions of international affairs. Neither was interested in economics, and only Nixon mastered the nitty gritty of politics and elections, while only Kissinger understood nuclear strategy.

Kissinger and Nixon were "realists" who deemphasized idealistic goals like anti-communism or promotion of democracy worldwide, because those goals were seen as too expensive in terms of America's economic capabilities. Instead of a Cold War they wanted peace, trade and cultural exchanges. Instead Nixon and Kissinger sought to downsize America's global commitments in proportion to its reduced economic, moral and political power. They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive; neither man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under Communism. Kissinger's realism fell out of fashion as idealism returned to American foreign policy with Carter's moralism emphasizing human rights, and Reagan's rollback strategy aimed at destroying Communism.

==Bibliography==

*Black, Conrad. ''Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full,'' PublicAffairs (2007), includes lengthy analysis of foreign policy.
* Bundy, William P. ''A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Web-Making-Foreign-Presidency/dp/186064273X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175404&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]
* Dallek, Robert. ''Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power'' (2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Nixon-Kissinger-Partners-Robert-Dallek/dp/0060722312/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], dual biography by leading scholar; hostile
* Garthoff, Raymond L. ''Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan '' (2nd ed. 1994) [http://www.amazon.com/Detente-Confrontation-American-Soviet-Relations-Reagan/dp/0815730411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175809&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], favorable analysis by proponent of detente
* Goh, Evelyn. ''Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961-1974: From "Red Menace" to "Tacit Ally."'' (2005). 299 pp.
* Goh, Evelyn. "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. Issn: 0145-2096 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "'Dr. Kissinger' or 'Mr. Henry'? Kissingerology, Thirty Years and Counting." ''Diplomatic History'' 2003 27(5): 637-676 full text at [[EBSCO]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "Ironies and Turning Points: Détente in Perspective," in Odd Arne Westad, ed. ''Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory'' (2000), pp 326-42; [http://www.amazon.com/Reviewing-Cold-War-Approaches-Interpretations/dp/0714681202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175936&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
*Horne, Alistair. "Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year" (2009); one of the best books on the man.
* Isaacson, Walter. ''Kissinger'' (1992); a major biography [http://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-Biography-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743286979/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577598&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Kuklick, Bruce. ''Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger.'' (2006). 241 pp. says nearly everyone with substantial academic credentials in the early Cold War decades was wrong nearly all the time.
* Litwak, Robert S. ''Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969-1976'' (1986)
* Macmillan, Margaret. ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)
* Mann, James. ''About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton'' (1999).
* Nelson, Keith L. ''The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam'' (1995)
* Qureshi, Lubna Zakia. "''"Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile'' (2009)
* Rodman, Peter. ''Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush,'' Knopf (2009).
* Ross, Robert S. ''Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989,'' Stanford University Press, 1995 [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=92018683 online edition]
* Schulzinger, Robert D. ''Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy.'' (1989).
* Serewicz, Lawrence W. ''America at the Brink of Empire: Rusk, Kissinger, And the Vietnam War'' (2007), stresses commitment to [[republicanism]] [http://www.amazon.com/America-Brink-Empire-Kissinger-Traditions/dp/0807131792/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-6 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=175941177686117 online review]
* Suri, Jeremi. ''Henry Kissinger and the American Century'' (2007), intellectual biography focused on pre-1969
* Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf. "Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China." ''Journal of American History'' 2005 92(1): 109-135. [http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/92.1/tucker.html in History Cooperative]
* Warner, Geoffrey. "Nixon, Kissinger and the Rapprochement with China, 1969-1972." ''International Affairs'' 2007 83(4): 763-781. Issn: 0020-5850 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Willbanks, James H. ''Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Abandoning-Vietnam-America-Left-South/dp/0700613315/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-15 excerpt and text search]

===Primary Sources===
* Kissinger, Henry. ''White House Years'' (1979). Nov. 1968-Jan. 1973; ''Years of Upheaval'' (1982). Jan. 1973 to Aug. 1974; ''Years of Renewal'' (1999), Aug. 1974 to Jan. 1977 [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Renewal-Henry-Kissinger/dp/075675383X/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-16 excerpt and text search vol 3]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political Thought of Metternich" ''The American Political Science Review,'' Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec., 1954), pp. 1017-1030 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1951008 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Congress of Vienna: A Reappraisal," ''World Politics,'' Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jan., 1956), pp. 264-280 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2008974 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22.'' (1957), his revised PhD dissertation.
* Kissinger, Henry. "Acceptance Speech" for The Nobel Peace Prize 1973 [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/kissinger-acceptance.html online edition]
* Kissinger, Henry. "Address to the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly," ''International Organization,'' Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer, 1974), pp. 573-583 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706310 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''American Foreign Policy'' (3rd ed. 1977), his speeches
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Kissinger Commission on Population and Development in Central America," ''Population and Development Review,'' Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 381-389 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1973103 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Diplomacy'' (1994) an interpretive history since 1815
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War'' (2003) [http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Vietnam-War-Involvement-Extrication/dp/074321532X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Haldeman, H. R. ''The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House'' (1994)
* Nixon, Richard. ''RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon'' (1981) [http://www.amazon.com/RN-Memoirs-Richard-Nixon/dp/0671707418/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577855&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]

==Online sources==
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB106/index.htm William Burr, ed. "Nixon's Trip to China Records now Completely Declassified, Including Kissinger Intelligence Briefing and Assurances on Taiwan" ''The National Security Archive'' (2003)]

== References ==
{{reflist|2}}
[[Category:Nobel laureates in Peace]]
[[Category:United States Secretaries of State]]
[[Category:Cold War]]
[[Category:United States History]]
{{DEFAULTSORT: Kissinger, Henry}}
[[category:diplomacy]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[Category:1960s]]
[[Category:Middle East]]
[[Category:American Jews]]
[[Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom award winners]]

Henry Kissinger

2013-03-20T11:50:57Z

JakeRMurrin: Trim

[[Image:Kissinger Henry.jpg|frame|right]]
'''Henry Kissinger''' (1923- ), American statesman and exponent of "realism" in foreign policy; he dominated foreign policy in the the administrations of presidents [[Richard Nixon]] and [[Gerald Ford]], as [[Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs|National Security Advisor]] and [[United States Secretary of State|Secretary of State]], holding both positions for a time. He won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for reaching a peace that ended the [[Vietnam War]]. In close collaboration with Nixon, he created a '''[[détente]] policy''' that called for an end to the [[Cold War]] and for friendly relations with both the [[Soviet Union]] and [[China]]. His position on détente was rejected by [[Ronald Reagan]] in the 1976 campaign for the presidential nomination. But Reagan lost the election to Ford, and in turn Ford was defeated by Democrat [[Jimmy Carter]], as Kissinger retired to write his highly revealing memoirs and consult for businesses worldwide.
==Life==
Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923 to a middle class Jewish family. They fled Nazi persecution, and arrived in New York in 1938, where he changed his first name from Heinz to Henry and rapidly Americanized in everything except his thick accent. He attended public schools and City University before being drafted at age 19. He returned to Europe during World War II fighting with the U.S. Army; he was in the infantry at first, but his heroism, courage, and daring got him promoted to intelligence. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1946. He spent a year as a civilian instructor in ''de-Nazification'' at an Army school in Germany; charged with de-Nazifying a German town, he did so with remarkable ease. He had power and responsibility far beyond his years because of his intelligence, his energy, and his commitment to opposing the Nazis.

In the army, Kissinger was informally tutored by Fritz Kraemer, a fellow refugee with two PhD's. In 1950 Kissinger earned his B.A. ''summa cum laude'' at Harvard with a 377 page essay on "The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant."<ref> William Y. Elliott was his director but only read half of it; the Government Department thereupon ruled that future senior theses could not exceed 40,000 words.</ref> He finished his Ph.D. in 1956 at Harvard, with a dissertation on "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars.

He married Ann Fleischer in 1949 and was divorced in 1964. There were two children, Elizabeth and David. In 1974 he married Nancy Maginnes.

==Harvard professor==
Kissinger became a full professor in Harvard's Department of Government in 1962. As the director of Harvard's University Summer International Seminar, 1952-69, he brought in nearly 700 young European and Asian scholars, many of whom became high officials in their own country. Kissinger met practically every intellectual in international relations at home and abroad.

Kissinger was eager to serve on national commissions. He served as Study Director, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, for the Council of Foreign Relations from 1955 to 1956; Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 to 1958; and Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program from 1958 to 1971. He resigned from Harvard in January 1971 when his two-year leave of absence expired.

In 1957 Kissinger published ''Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,'' which proposed a flexible defense posture, including provision for "limited warfare" and the strategic employment of nuclear weapons as an alternative to the doctrine of "massive retaliation" against direct foreign aggression, which dominated military thinking during the mid-1950s. The book brought Kissinger to national attention, and he became an mid-level advisor on security questions under presidents [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], [[John F. Kennedy]], and [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]; he was foreign policy advisor in [[Nelson Rockefeller]]'s 1968 quest for the Republican party nomination, but Nixon won the nomination and Kissinger switched to the winner.

Kissinger was consultant to the Department of State (1965-68), United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1961-68), Rand Corporation (1961-68), [[National Security Council]] (1961-62), Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1959-60), Operations Coordinating Board (1955), Director of the Psychological Strategy Board (1952), Operations Research Office (1951), and Chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1983-84). In 2001 he was not appointed to head the commission studying the [[9-11 Attack]] because he was too controversial.

==National Security Advisor and Secretary of State==
In 1969 Nixon appointed him his top advisor on foreign affairs as "Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs" )or "National Security Advisor") in charge of the [[National Security Council]] staff, which he made his base of power. He and Nixon largely ignored the State Department in setting the main lines of foreign policy. In 1973, Kissinger gained the additional role as secretary of state. He was the only person ever to hold the two top national security roles at the same time, and in 1975 he was replaced as head of the NSC.

Kissinger's approach to foreign policy was shaped by his vision of world peace achieved through a global balance of power; and accordingly Kissinger believed that effective U.S. diplomacy needed to be backed by force and guided by the pragmatism of Realpolitik rather than by high ideals and abstract causes. In practice his diplomacy, which mixed a highly visible, personal style with secret, behind-the-scenes maneuverings, was marked by bold, often controversial, initiatives and by frequent travel between world capitals in what came to be known as "shuttle diplomacy".
===Nuclear strategy===
On taling office Nixon and Kissinger were briefed on the US nuclear war plan, the [[Single Integrated Operational Plan]] (SIOP). Appalled by the catastrophic scale of the SIOP, Nixon and Kissinger sought military options that were more credible than massive nuclear strikes. Participants in the Air Force Nuclear Options project also supported more flexible nuclear war plans. Although Kissinger repeatedly asked Defense Department officials to construct limited options, they were skeptical that it would be possible to control nuclear escalation or to introduce greater flexibility without weakening the SIOP. Interagency studies presented a mixed verdict about the desirability of limited options; nevertheless, continued White House pressure encouraged Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to sponsor a major review of nuclear targeting. In 1972 the John Foster panel developed concepts of limited, selective, and regional nuclear options that were responsive to Kissinger's interest in credible nuclear threats. The Foster panel's report led to the controversial "Schlesinger Doctrine" and further efforts to revise the SIOP, but serious questions endured about the whole concept of controlled nuclear warfare.<ref> William Burr, "The Nixon Administration, the 'Horror Strategy,' and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969-1972: Prelude to the Schlesinger Doctrine." ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' 2005 7(3): 34-78. Issn: 1520-3972 Fulltext: [[Project Muse]]; Aaron L. Friedberg, "A History of U.S. Strategic 'Doctrine'—1945 to 1980," ''Journal of Strategic Studies,'' Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1980), pp. 37-71; Scott Sagan, ''Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security'' (1989). </ref>
===Détente with Soviet Union and China===
Kissinger's first priority in office was the achievement of détente with the Soviet Union and China, and playing them off against each other . Recognizing and accepting the Soviet Union as a superpower, Kissinger sought both to maintain U.S. military strength and to inaugurate peaceful economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges to engage the Soviet Union in the international system. This policy flourished under Kissinger's direction and led in 1972 to the signing of the first [[Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty]] (SALT I). At the same time Kissinger successfully engineered a rapprochement with Communist China, leading to the astonishing news in 1971 that Nixon would visit China, which he and Kissinger did in 1972.<ref> Margaret Macmillan, ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)</ref>

Aware that China and the Soviet Union were at sword's point, with rival claims to be the true Communists, Kissinger used the "Soviet card" to win over China by playing up the Soviet threat to the Chinese as a way of promoting closer relations with China. He even hinted at a US-China alliance to oppose the Soviets, and, with Nixon's trips to Moscow, hinted that China had better come to terms lest the US form an alliance with Moscow. The tactics worked, resulting in a friendly relationship with both Beijing and Moscow. As part of the détente, both powers reduced or ended their aid to North Vietnam, thus allowing a settlement of the [[Vietnam War]].<ref>Evelyn Goh, "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. </ref>

"In the Soviet Union, there is really nobody left who has any memory of an entrepreneurial tradition," said Kissinger. "In China, there are many people left who participated in Chinese entrepreneurial life." He believed that a Sino-US alliance to oppose Soviet aggression could encourage internal reform within the Chinese system while promoting a more peaceful international order. After China made such reforms, hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty.<ref>http://www.huliq.com/37702/rising-economic-growth-in-china-india-contributes-to-food-inflation "...hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty in the past few decades"</ref>

===Vietnam===
Kissinger worked to achieve a disengagement of U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam. He promoted Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization," aimed at turning the burden of actual combat over to the South Vietnamese, with repeated shows of U.S. air strength, notably in the bombings of Cambodia and North Vietnam. Kissinger met secretly with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris from 1969 on, finally concluding a cease-fire in January 1973, for which he and chief North Vietnamese negotiator [[Le Duc Tho]] were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Later rumors to the effect that Kissinger knew the South Vietnamese government was too weak to survive long were wrong; Kissinger and Nixon had built South Vietnam into one of the strongest militaries in Asia--much stronger than the North Vietnamese--and they had stripped away much of Hanoi's support from Moscow and Beijing. The problem was that Saigon put all its future on the continuation of Nixon in office and his promises to intervene militarily if necessary. Nixon collapsed unexpectedly (because of Watergate) and his personal promises were gone. Saigon despaired and desperately fought back when Hanoi did invade in 1975, after Nixon was gone and Congress forbad further American intervention.

Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city. Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos. President Ford's prediction that the Khmer Rouge would murder at least one million people<ref>Washington Post, June 4, 23, 1975</ref> was laughed off by liberal reporters. Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "''She Was Poor But She Was Honest''": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2 From an important study by genocide survivor Sophal Ear. Note that the source is, of all people, William Shawcross.</ref>

In one of [[Vietnam_War#Aftermath| the largest mass killings since the Nazi Holocaust]], the victorious Communists murdered 3-4 million people throughout Indochina, including over 2 million killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia alone.

===Middle East===
One challenge to détente under Kissinger came with the outbreak of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Faced with a threat of Soviet intervention, Kissinger successfully urged that U.S. forces be placed on worldwide alert. With Israel facing possible defeat at the hands of the Arab aggressors, President Nixon launched the largest airlift in military history to replenish Israel's stocks (the left would condemn his actions no matter how big or how small, Nixon said, so "''let's make it big''"). Kissinger had urged Nixon to delay the airlift so as to let Israel "bleed a little", in the hopes that a badly bruised Israel would be more pliable to concessions in post-war negotiations, but Nixon refused.

When the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army at the end of the war, Kissinger believed that the United States had a tremendous opportunity. Egypt was now dependent on solely the United States for the survival of its Third Army, and Kissinger hoped that the United States could mediate the dispute and wean Egypt from Soviet influence. As a result, he exerted intense pressure on Israel not to destroy the Third Army and to allow it to receive non-military supplies. Among other things, he threatened that the United States would resupply the Third Army by helicopter, support a UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal to positions held before the Third Army's encirclement, and falsely told the Israelis that the Soviet Union had threatened to intervene over the Third Army.

Kissinger then employed shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and the Arab states and to restore U.S.-Egyptian diplomatic ties, broken since 1967. Kissinger's goal was to drive the Soviets out of Egypt by showing the Egyptians that only the United States could persuade Israel to make concessions. The US assisted in a vast rescue operation conducted by Israeli forces to save Egyptian troops stranded in the Sinai.<ref>The Times, UK, June 15, 1967.</ref> US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt continued past Nixon's term. Though negotiations were tough, with both sides sometimes intransigent, President Ford ended up securing the first peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, which would be finalized under President Carter. In turn, [[Jordan]] felt compelled to reach a separate peace, which resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994.

Kissinger and Nixon approved a covert [[CIA]] campaign of subversion and sabotage designed to weaken the Socialist government of [[Iraq]] in 1973. Done in collaboration with the [[Shah]] of neighboring [[Iran]], it involved Soviet arms captured from Egypt and [[Syria]] in the 1973 war being dispatched to Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. The Shah cynically used the Kurds to pressure the Ba'athist government to back down on a number of serious territorial disputes between the two nations. The US brokered a peace treaty between Iraq and Iran in 1975, and aid to the Kurds was subsequently cut off. The Kurds were then viciously slaughtered. "''Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,''" Kissinger famously declared.<ref>http://www.slate.com/id/2156400/</ref>

Kissinger helped to diffuse sectarian conflicts in [[Lebanon]] in order to prevent a possible regional war, and opposed the Soviet-backed attempt by Communist forces to conquer North [[Yemen]] (which was the recipient of much US aid).

On 20 July 1974, [[Turkey]] invaded northern [[Cyprus]], overthrew its Greek-backed dictatorship (headed by Nikos Sampson), and installed a new regime. This led to the collapse of the Greek military junta, and the restoration of democracy in Greece, three days later--July 23, 1974. Sampson had been brought to power by the Greek Cypriot national guard (acting under the orders of Athens), which ousted the elected president, Makarios; Turkey removed him from power after a mere eight days in office. "Had Turkey not intervened," Sampson told the Greek newspaper Eleftherotipia, "I would not only have proclaimed Enosis [union of Cyprus with Greece] but I would have annihilated the Turks in Cyprus as well."<ref>http://www.britains-smallwars.com/cyprus/Most%20wanted/most%20wanted%20files/EOKA_Members_List_s.html</ref> Turkey took control of one-third of the country. Civilian casualties were remarkably light. Turkey restored democracy to Cyprus, and new elections brought Glafcos Clerides to power. President Makarios, in his speech to the UN Security Council on 19 July 1974, described the coup that replaced him as "an invasion of Cyprus by Greece."

Both the Turks and the Greeks committed indiscriminate ethnic cleansing against the other side. <ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR01.html 1st Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (20 July 1974 - 18 May 1976)</ref><ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR02.html 2nd Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (19 May 1976 to 10 February 1983)</ref> Facts and information on the death and the burial site of 201 out of 500 cases of Turkish Cypriot "missing" persons were provided by the Cyprus government on 12 May 2003. A typical report stated:
<blockquote>
In a Greek raid on a small Turkish village near Limassol, 36 people out of a population of 200 were killed. The Greeks said that they had been given orders to kill the inhabitants of the Turkish villages before the Turkish forces arrived.<ref>Washington Post, 23 July 1974
</ref>
</blockquote>

Numerous studies reported accounts of "anti-Turkish pograms," hostage taking, and mass murder.

Kissinger approved of the Turkish invasion, viewing the Greek junta as a Cold War liability.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/NATO_Joseph_Luns_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger had resolved to find a solution to the Cyprus problem in May 1974.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/Dept_Of_State_Kissinger_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger intervened to prevent a planned British military response to the second phase of the Turkish invasion in order to avoid a war between the two American allies.

Some 70,000 Turkish civilians were displaced by the Greeks. It is estimated by independant sources that 140,000 to 160,000<ref>Borowiec, Andrew (2000), Cyprus: A Troubled Island. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp2</ref> Greek civilians were displaced by the Turkish invaders. Only 20,000 Greeks remained in the north. Five Americans disappeared during the Turkish invasion.

===Latin America===
The Nixon administration sought to protect the economic and commercial interests of the United States during a period of heightened Latin American nationalism and expropriations, 1969-74. Though the administration initially adopted a flexible policy toward Latin American governments that nationalized American corporations' assets, the influence of Nixon's economic ideology, domestic political pressures, and the advice of Secretary of the Treasury [[John Connally]], led to a more confrontational stance toward Latin American countries. As the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and Kissinger had warned, however, Latin American countries took an even more anti-US stance and expropriated even more assets. Nixon's "get tough" stance, therefore, had a negative effect on American credibility and influence in the hemisphere.<ref>Hal Brands, "Richard Nixon and Economic Nationalism in Latin America: the Problem of Expropriations, 1969-1974." ''Diplomacy & Statecraft'' 2007 18(1): 215-235. Issn: 0959-2296 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref>

The ''de facto'' Communist dictatorship in [[Chile]] headed by [[Salvador Allende]] (originally elected in 1970 with a minority of the vote) presented a major obstacle to American interests in the region.

The CIA, as recounted in the Church Committee report, was involved in various plots designed to remove Allende and then let the Chileans vote in a new election where he would not be a candidate: It tried to buy off the Chilean Congress to prevent his appointment, worked to sway public opinion against him to prevent his election, and financed protests designed to bring the country to a stand-still and make him resign.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> Convinced that a conventional military uprising was still not possible in Chile, the CIA, acting with the approval of the 40 Committee—the body charged with overseeing covert actions abroad—devised what in effect was a constitutional coup. The most expeditious way to prevent Allende from assuming office was somehow to convince the Chilean congress to confirm Alessandri as the winner of the election. Once elected by the congress, Alessandri—a party to the plot through intermediaries—was prepared to resign his presidency within a matter of days so that new elections could be held.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> The CIA also learned of a number of plots to establish a military dictatorship. Although it pointedly refused to materially assist any of them, and actually intervened to prevent one of the plots for fear it would fail and strengthen Allende; it also encouraged several of the plots and did nothing to prevent them. It assured the plotters that such an event would be welcomed in Washington and that the US would not cut off aid over potential human rights violations.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> In addition, the CIA provided funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973. Though the CIA maintained contact with a notorious right-wing extremist named Roberto Viaux, Nixon and Kissinger, recognizing that "nothing could be worse than an abortive coup," repeatedly relayed messages to him urging restraint and went to great lengths to deter him from staging a coup.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>

The extent of Kissinger's involvement in or support of these plans is a subject of controversy.

Although the US considered economic sanctions against the Allende regime, it never actually implemented them. Although Latin Americans viewed the US as omnipotent, future Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet mocked it as a paper tiger and felt free to launch terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., during his reign. The US ended up giving more aid to Allende's Chile than any of the prior administrations. The US worked to diffuse potential coups that it had once warmly encouraged, fearing that it would be blamed if they failed. Though hesitant and uneasy, the CIA vowed to "continue to put pressure on every Allende weak spot" even after his appointment. The CIA had warned that the odds of either a military or a constitutional coup succeeding were one in twenty; after they both failed to occur in 1970, US policy shifted towards maintaining a democratic opposition to the Allende regime.

US intelligence reports implicated Allende in the assassination of several opponents,<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf Includes discussion of intelligence reports of Allende-backed hit jobs; note that Cuban intelligence reached the same conclusion--hence the infamous "packages" scandal.</ref> while KGB files smuggled out of Russia by Vasily Mitrokhin indicate that Allende received funds from the Soviet Union.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Allende was formally condemned by Chile's parliament for systematically destroying democracy in Chile.<ref>“Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy,” Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies, Chile, August 22, 1973.</ref> The Chilean Chamber of Deputies Resolution of August 22, 1973, accused Allende of support of armed groups, torture, illegal arrests, muzzling the press, confiscating private property, and not allowing people to leave the country. In the infamous "Cuban Packages Scandal" that precipitated the coup, large quantities of weapons were sent from Castro's Cuba to arm pro-Allende terrorists in Chile.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Kissinger privately told Nixon that Allende might declare martial law.<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf</ref> By 1973, as a result of covert US aid to Chilean dissidents and financing of pro-democracy protestors, US intelligence indicated Allende would likely lose the next Chilean election if it was held.<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> According to ''The Wall Street Journal,'' faced with illegal seizures of farms and factories, of defiance of judicial orders, unchecked street violence and death threats against the judges themselves, the Supreme Court warned on May 26, 1973, in a unanimous and unprecedented message, that Chile faced "a peremptory or imminent breakdown of legality."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref> Inflation reached 1,000%. Volodia Teitelboim, the chief ideologue of the Communist Party in Chile, declared that if civil war came, "it probably would signify immense loss of human lives, between half a million and one million."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

On September 11, 1973, Allende committed suicide during a military coup launched by Army Commander-in-Chief [[Augusto Pinochet]], who became President. Allende's policies had turned the country into a dictatorship that would kill thousands.

On September 16, 1973, the following exchange about the coup took place between Kissinger and President Nixon:

: '''Nixon''': Nothing new of any importance or is there?
: '''Kissinger''': Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
: '''Nixon''': Isn't that something. Isn't that something.
: '''Kissinger''': I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
: '''Nixon''': Well we didn't – as you know – our hand doesn't show on this one though.
: '''Kissinger''': We didn't do it. I mean we helped them....created the conditions as great as possible.
: '''Nixon''': That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played.<ref>[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/chile.htm The Kissinger Telcons: Kissinger Telcons on Chile], National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123, edited by Peter Kornbluh, posted May 26, 2004. This particular dialogue can be found at [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/Box%2022,%20File%203,%20Telcon,%209-16-73%2011,50%20Mr.%20Kissinger-The%20Pres%202.pdf TELCON: September 16, 1973, 11:50 a.m. Kissinger Talking to Nixon]. Retrieved November 26, 2006.</ref>

Kissinger is clearly telling the President that any direct US role in such a coup would be abhorrent but that the coup itself was preferable to a Communist take-over (with both agreeing that the US did not assist the plot).

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago, telling him: "''My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.''"<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref>

Using its leverage over Pinochet to curtail Chilean human rights abuses, the US simultaneously pressured Chile to introduce a series of free market economic reforms, a process that escalated sharply in the eighties. This led to a period of rapid economic expansion and development without precedent in Latin America, in which growth averaged 7% annually, that came to be known as the "''miracle of Chile''" (it also included the region's greatest reductions in infant mortality<ref>Nick Eberstadt, The Poverty of Communism (Transaction Publishers, 1990), pp188,
196-206, 240-6, in which he discusses living standards in Communist Cuba versus Pinochet's Chile.</ref>). In turn, this allowed Chile to make a long-term transition to sustainable democratic rule that would likely have been otherwise inconceivable.<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

In [[Argentina]], the Socialist government of [[Isabel Perón]] had been persuaded to declare a state of emergency (suspending, among other rights, ''Habeas Corpus'') on February 5, 1975. Drafted so they may (in her words) "annihilate the subversives," the decree led to ''Operativo Independencia'', a military campaign notorious for the brutality it exacted on not only the violent; but also elected officials, magistrates and University of Tucumán faculty (even secondary school teachers). The Peronists' own political mainstay (the labor movement) was also subject to the "subversive" labels and consequent reprisals. The country plunged into a low-level civil war. Fighting between Communist and anti-Communist forces claimed nearly 1,000 lives, with widespread social chaos and inflation peaking at 33%, before the Argentine military, led by Jorge Videla, deposed Perón on March 24, 1976.

As the new regime consolidated power, launching brutal reprisals and "disappearances" against political opponents, Kissinger took a similar line as he had toward Chile. During a meeting with Argentine foreign minister César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger assured him that the United States was an ally, but urged him to ''"get back to normal procedures"'' quickly before the U.S. Congress reconvened and had a chance to consider sanctions. The US cut-off aid in 1977 due to human rights violations.

Nixon sought a "special relationship" with [[Brazil]], and proposed a direct line of communication between the Brazilian and American Presidents. He appointed Kissinger to serve as a "special representative" to Brazil.

In [[Cuba]], Kissinger supported a renewal of diplomatic relations and cultural exchange with the [[Castro]] regime. Although President Ford repeatedly reached out to the Cubans; their military interventions in [[Angola]], [[Mozambique]], and [[Ethiopia]] destroyed Kissinger's hopes.

===South Asia===
During the South Asian crisis in 1971, the White House stood firmly behind Pakistani president Yahya Khan and demonstrated a disdain for India and particularly its leader, [[Indira Gandhi]], because of India's tilt or favoritism towards the Soviet Union. Kissinger had disdain for India and was using Pakistan as a tool to reach China, which he considered much more important to the U.S.

Khan's administration was responding to an insurrection launched by Communist guerillas (the ''Awami League''), armed with Indian weapons and demanding independence for East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with a massive campaign of violence dubbed "''Operation Searchlight.''" India was exploiting these internal tensions within Pakistan as part of a divide-and-rule strategy; it hoped for Pakistan's division into smaller Indian proxy states that could be played against one another and it used the violence committed by Pakistani forces as a possible pretext for military intervention in Pakistani affairs.

Nixon relayed messages to Yahya, urging him to restrain Pakistani forces.<ref>Black, Conrad, Richard Nixon: A Life in Full (2007), p. 751.</ref> His objective was to prevent a war and safeguard Pakistan's interests, though he feared an Indian invasion of West Pakistan that would lead to Indian domination of the sub-continent and strengthen the position of the [[Soviet Union]].<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877618-2,00.html</ref> Similarly, Yahya Khan feared that an independent Bangladesh could lead to the disintegration of Pakistan. Indian military support for Bengali guerillas led to war between India and Pakistan.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,878408,00.html</ref>

Nixon met with Indian Prime Minister [[Indira Gandhi]] and did not believe her assertion that she would not invade Pakistan;<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 752</ref> he did not trust her and once referred to her as an "old witch". Kissinger maintained that Nixon made specific proposals to Gandhi on a solution for the crisis, some of which she heard for the first time; for example, mutual withdrawal of troops from the Indo-East Pakistan borders. Nixon also expressed a wish to fix a time limit with Yahya for political accommodation in East Pakistan. Nixon asserted that India could count on US endeavors to ease the crisis within a short time. But, both Kissinger and Gandhi aide Jayakar maintained, Gandhi did not respond to these proposals. Kissinger noted that she “listened to what was in fact one of Nixon's better presentations with aloof indifference” but “took up none of the points.” Jayakar pointed out that Gandhi listened to Nixon “without a single comment, creating an impregnable space so that no real contact was possible.” She also refrained from assuring that India would follow Pakistan's suit if it withdrew from India's borders. As a result, the main agenda was “dropped altogether.”<ref>Jayakar, Indira Gandhi, p. 232; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 878 & 881-82.
</ref> On December 3, Yahya preemptively attacked the Indian Air Force and Gandhi retaliated, pushing into East Pakistan.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 753.</ref> Nixon issued a statement blaming Pakistan for starting the conflict and blaming India for escalating it, because he favored a cease-fire.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 755.</ref> The United States was secretly encouraging the shipment of military equipment from [[Iran]], [[Turkey]], and [[Jordan]] to Pakistan, reimbursing those countries despite Congressional objections.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79/</ref> The US used the threat of an aid cut-off to force Pakistan to back down, while its continued military aid to Islamabad prevented India from launching incursions deeper into the country. A cease fire was reached on December 16, leading to the creation of the independent state of [[Bangladesh]]. Sheikh Mujib led the newly established People's Republic of Bangladesh as a one-party, dictatorial state.

A 2008 study in the ''British Medical Journal'' concluded that 269,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the war.<ref>http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/269000_died_in_Bangladesh_war/articleshow/3147513.cms</ref> Reportedly, as many as 200,000 Bengali women were raped.

The US remained hostile to the Mujib regime, and considered Mujib himself to be a demagogue. His government's mismanagement of food grain stocks ultimately caused a massive famine in Bangladesh from March to December 1974, leading to the death of more than one million people. During this famine, Mujib rejected food aid from the United States and exported food to [[Cuba]]. By the time Mujib agreed to end support for Cuba, and the US began shipments of food to Bangladesh, it was 'too late for famine victims'.<ref>http://www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/opinions/dsharma/faminecommerce.htm</ref> In addition, his regime committed widespread human rights violations and tortured and executed thousands of dissidents. Nixon and Kissinger argued that these atrocities were far worse than anything Pakistan had committed in Bangladesh.

===Africa===
In the Angolan Civil War, the Communist MPLA (''People's Movement for the Liberation of [[Angola]]'') government was pitted against various right-wing insurgencies as well as an invasion from [[South Africa]]. The CIA covertly attempted to overthrow the MPLA dictatorship in 1975,<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35COXObeo8&feature=fvw Former CIA head in Angola discusses the operation on CNN</ref> but Cuba militarily intervened to save the regime from certain collapse. The Communist government subsequently killed up to one million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999</ref> The U.S., advised by Kissinger, supported the rebels FNLA (''National Front for the Liberation of Angola''), led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA (''National Union for the Total Independence of Angola''), led by [[Jonas Savimbi]], as well as the ''Mozambican National Resistance'' (RENAMO), and the invasion of Angola by South African troops. The FNLA was defeated and UNITA was forced to take its fight into the bush. Only under Reagan's presidency would U.S. support for UNITA return. (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Angola would be plagued for decades with constant civil war. In 1992, blatantly rigged elections were held with next to no international supervision, in which MPLA claimed victory. After 500,000 UNITA voters were disenfranchised, UNITA sent a peace delegation to the capital; all of its members, along with 20,000 civilian supporters, were brutally massacred.<ref>National Society for Human Rights, Ending the Angolan Conflict, Windhoek, Namibia, July 3, 2000</ref> Nevertheless, Savimbi remained supportive of the elections, until the MPLA systematically exterminated many tens of thousands of UNITA supporters throughout the country. Human rights observers have accused the MPLA of "genocidal atrocities," "systematic extermination," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."<ref>Namibia's National Human Rights Organisation, Press Releases, September 12, 2000, May 16, 2001</ref>

The Democrats in Congress cut off aid to UNITA under President Ford, just as they abandoned South Vietnam and Cambodia to murderous Communist bloodbath. "''A great nation cannot escape its responsibilities,''" Ford admonished them. Emboldened, Cuba would soon militarily intervene on behalf of the Communist dictatorship in [[Ethiopia]], which killed 1.25 million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Washington Post, March 18, 1978; New York Times, December 14, 1994.</ref>

The Nixon White House staunchly opposed the maniacal tyrant [[Idi Amin]] of [[Uganda]], who slaughtered 100-500,000 innocent people and ethnically cleansed<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/7/newsid_2492000/2492333.stm</ref> Uganda of all Asians. Amin was armed almost exclusively by the [[Soviet Union]] and [[Libya]]. The US urged Americans to evacuate the country, and began developing contingency plans to combat the regime's threatening posture in 1972.<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> Ambassador Thomas P. Melady described the Amin regime as "racist, erratic, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, militaristic, and, above all, xenophobic."<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> The British, fearful of a massacre, sought American help in preparing the logistics for an evacuation of the 7,000 British subjects in the country, should it prove neccessary.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,906445-3,00.html</ref> Kissinger and Nixon agreed. On September 24, 1972, they had the following conversation:

: '''Nixon''': Isn’t a person a person, goddamnit? You know, they talk about Vietnam, ‘these people far away that we don’t know,’ and you remember Chamberlain talking about the Czechs, that they’re far away and we don’t know them very well? Well, goddamnit, people are people! … I’m getting tired of this business of letting these Africans beat a hundred thousand people to death and do nothing about it.
: '''Kissinger''': And all these bleeding hearts in this country who say we like to kill yellow people…
: '''Nixon''': That’s right!
: '''Kissinger''': There haven’t been as many killed in eight years of the war than were killed in three months in Burundi.
: '''Nixon''': …They’re talking about how many we have bombed in the North. And I told your staff to get the figures for me: How many South Vietnamese or anti-Communist North Vietnamese have been killed by the North Vietnamese government? Civilians! How many? It’s ''unbelievable''! Nobody gives a damn! … We need a new African policy. We shouldn’t have 42 ambassadors to these goddamn countries. Looking at Uganda, ''of course'' we have to help those 7,000 people!<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kph0lygo40</ref>

Amin was deposed by the armed forces of [[Tanzania]] on April 11, 1979.

===South East Asia===
Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan1.pdf</ref> To combat this dangerous expansionism, Kissinger closely aligned the United States with anti-Communist nations in the area, such as [[Suharto]]'s [[Indonesia]], which was once described as ''the greatest prize in Asia.'' As tens of thousands fled a Communist take-over in the small island of [[East Timor]] under horrible conditions following a civil war that resulted in the death or displacement of 9,000 individuals; Ford and Kissinger gave Suharto their approval to annex East Timor and remove the Soviet-backed Communist government.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf</ref> Over the 24-year occupation; some 140,000<ref>http://www.cavr-timorleste.org/en/Brief.htm</ref> East Timorese soldiers and civilians were killed by all sides, out of a population of less than a million. In 1975, 49% of all violent killings in East Timor were the work of the Communist (FRETELIN) resistance.<ref>http://www.ictj.org/static/Timor.CAVR.English/07.2_Unlawful_Killings_and_Enforced_Disappearances.pdf</ref> Although Congress wanted to stop arm sales to Indonesia, the Ford administration manipulated them by agreeing to an aid cut-off that was never actually implemented. In his own words, "Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law."<ref>http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/#29</ref>

Kissinger also worked to maintain good relations with [[Thailand]]. In order to prevent Communist hegemony in the area, he sought to deliberately provoke tension between the Vietnamese Stalinists and their Maoist comrades in Phnom Penh. In a 1975 meeting, he told Thailand's foreign minister: "We don't mind Chinese influence in Cambodia to balance North Vietnam. As I told the Chinese when we last met when we were discussing the Vietnamese victory in Indochina, it is possible to have an ideological victory which is a geopolitical defeat. The Chinese did not disagree with me."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/kissinger_chatichai.htm</ref>

In the end, Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia for more than a decade (killing many hundreds of thousands in the process<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref>). Bogged down in an endless guerilla war regularly dubbed ''Vietnam's Vietnam'' in the American press, Communist Vietnam was unable to advance its expansionist objectives abroad; as a result, no more dominos fell in the area.

===Personal Advice to Nixon===
In an April 17, 1973 conversation, Nixon told Kissinger that he was considering whether or not to resign and let [[Spiro Agnew]] take the Presidency, to which Kissinger responded: "''With all due respect, Mr. President, that is out of the question. That cannot be considered....Why should you do it? What good would it do? Whom would it help? It wouldn’t help the country; it wouldn’t help any of the individuals involved….and, of course, it would be personally unjust.''" He also asked him to consider what it would do to weaken the institution of the Presidency.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri3He6n1Dv4</ref>

===Losing power===
Despite his real accomplishments, Kissinger's tenure was marked by much controversy. Revelations of his knowledge of Nixon's secret bombings in [[Cambodia]] in 1969 and the U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970 stirred particularly strong hatreds on the left, as did later discoveries that he had authorized wiretaps aimed at stopping leaks of classified information.

Much more serious, however, was the attack from the right by Ronald Reagan, who rejected détente with the Soviets as a viable strategy, warning that the Soviets would see it as a sign of American weaknesses and mobilize its Third World allies to subvert pro-American governments wherever it could and expand Soviet influence. Reagan's analysis proved correct and Ford was forced to reduce Kissinger's role, taking away in 1975 Kissinger's double role as National Security Advisor.

In 1976 Ford was challenged by [[Ronald Reagan]] for the GOP nomination. Ford won a very long, close and intensely fought battle. Attacks on détente policy was the focus of Reagan's campaign as the GOP moved to the right on foreign policy. President [[Jimmy Carter]], however, did not recognize the failure of détente until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 destroyed that policy and reopened the [[Cold War]] at a more intense level.

Kissinger remained on as secretary of state until the end of the Ford term in January 1977.

==Retirement==
Out of office Kissinger became a highly visible corporate consultant on world affairs, and wrote his detailed and insightful memoirs. His advice has been sought out by every President since his retirement, and he was one of President [[George W. Bush]]'s most-frequent advisors on the [[Iraq War]]. He also helped design the Bush administration's opening to [[India]] in the wake of the War on Terror.

Kissinger has met with Russian leader [[Vladimir Putin]] on several occasions in an attempt to buttress US-Russian relations. Noting that the US has no border with Russia nor designs on Russian territory, as well as Russia's frontiers with both the Islamic world and China; Kissinger believes that the United States and Russia have compatible interests.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1690757_1691285-1,00.html></ref> He is apparently well-liked by some in the Russian press.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/europe/07russiasumm.html?_r=1 Although Russian TV calls him a "war criminal" due to his imaginary crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia.</ref>

Kissinger has strongly supported the foreign policy of President Bush, writing:

<blockquote>
Extraordinary advances of democracy have occurred in recent months: elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and Palestine; local elections in Saudi Arabia; Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; the opening up of the presidential election in Egypt; and upheavals against entrenched authoritarians in Kyrgyzstan. This welcome trend was partly triggered by President Bush’s Middle East policy and accelerated by his second inaugural address, which elevated the progress of freedom in the world to the defining objective of U.S. foreign policy.

Pundits have interpreted these events as a victory of “idealists” over “realists” in the debate over conduct of American foreign policy. In fact, the United States is probably the only country in which “realist” can be used as a pejorative epithet. No serious realist should claim that power is its own justification. No idealist should imply that power is irrelevant to the spread of ideals. The real issue is to establish a sense of proportion between these two essential elements of policy. Overemphasis of either leads to stagnation or overextension.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp051605.html</ref>
</blockquote>

He added in a seperate piece:
<blockquote>
President Bush's visit has brought relations between India and the United States to an unprecedented level of cooperation and interdependence, which promises to make a seminal contribution to international peace and prosperity.
</blockquote>

Kissinger believes that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be worse than the consequences of defeat in Vietnam.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref>

Kissinger returned to teaching for a time after he left office, and today gives eloquent lectures and speeches across the United States. He has appeared regularly on a wide range of television stations to offer his insight, and frequently contributes editorials to newspapers.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles.html</ref> Conrad Black has praised Kissinger as "a political memoirist surpassed, if at all, only by [[Winston Churchill]] and [[Charles de Gaulle]]."

Kissinger delivered a beautiful and heartfelt eulogy for President Ford at his 2007 funeral.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/eulogies/010207.html</ref>

Throughout his life, Kissinger has enjoyed long-standing friendships with such notables as Katherine Graham, Walt Wriston, Beverly Sills, Bill Paley, Hans Morgenthau, Fritz Kraemer, Ahmet Ertegun, Sir James Goldsmith, Marion Dönhoff, Gianni Agnelli, John Aspinall, Rudolf Augstein, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John McCain, [[Mohammed Reza Pahlavi]],<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref> Anatoly Dobrynin and Bill and Pat Buckley.

Kissinger is a fan of [[soccer]].<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/nw061206.html</ref>

In the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis, Kissinger wrote:
<blockquote>
A major cause of the crisis has been the gap between the economic and the political organization of the world. The economic world has been globalized. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their national political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order. Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point. So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place, so far without achieving more than stemming incipient panic. International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
All these urgent issues are taking place against a background of a historic shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But there are much fewer trans-Pacific institutional ties with America than exist in the Atlantic. This raises the danger that, over time, the regions will confront each other as strategic and economic adversaries. The emergence of a new regional mercantilism and strategic confrontation by groups possessing large numbers of weapons of mass destruction needs to be resisted. This is why the U.S. relationship with China is so central. A relationship that started on both sides as essentially a strategic design to constrain a common adversary has evolved over the decades into a pillar of the international system. China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernization and reform of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods. Each side of the Pacific needs the cooperation of the other in addressing the consequences of the financial crisis.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/iht011209.html</ref>
</blockquote>

==Image and reputation==
Kissinger was loathed by some liberals who viewed him as a war criminal<ref>http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0611-03.htm</ref> and criticized by hardliners for [[detente]]. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for pulling the United States out of Vietnam.

Kissinger was a Machiavellian figure, skilled at manipulating people around him and currying favor in the media. At one point he admitted allowing secret wiretapping of his own aides' conversations.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref> The aura of Kissinger's influence was due partly to a cultivated image of high intelligence, including a PhD degree from Harvard University. He has been called "the only European-style realist" to head US foreign policy.

===Major Controversies===
[[Bryce Harlow]], former Eisenhower White House staff member, claimed to have "a double agent working in the White House....I kept Nixon informed." Harlow and [[Henry Kissinger]] (who was friendly with both campaigns and guaranteed a job in either a Humphrey or Nixon administration) separately predicted Johnson's "bombing halt": "The word is out that we are making an effort to throw the election to Humphrey. Nixon has been told of it," Democratic senator [[George Smathers]] informed Johnson. According to [[Robert Dallek]], Kissinger's advice "rested not on special knowledge of decision making at the White House but on an astute analyst's insight into what was happening." [[William Bundy]] stated that Kissinger obtained "no useful inside information" from his trip to Paris, and "almost any experienced Hanoi watcher might have come to the same conclusion". While Kissinger may have "hinted that his advice was based on contacts with the Paris delegation," this sort of "self-promotion....is at worst a minor and not uncommon practice, quite different from getting and reporting real secrets."<ref>[[Robert Dallek]] (2007), ''Kissinger and Nixon: Partners in Power'', HarperCollins, pp. 73-74.</ref> Nixon asked [[Anna Chennault]] to be his "channel to Mr. [[Nguyen van Thieu|Thieu]]"; Chennault agreed and periodically reported to [[John Mitchell]] that Thieu had no intention of attending a peace conference. On November 2, Chennault informed the South Vietnamese ambassador: "I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque who says his boss [Nixon] is going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer." In 1997, Chennault admitted that "I was constantly in touch with Nixon and Mitchell."<ref>Dallek, pp. 74-75.</ref> In response, Johnson ordered wire-tapping members of the Nixon campaign.<ref>Dallek, p. 75.</ref> Dallek wrote that Nixon's efforts "probably made no difference" because Thieu was unwilling to attend the talks and there was little chance of an agreement being reached before the election; however, his use of information provided by Harlow and Kissinger was morally questionable, and Humphrey's decision not to make Nixon's actions public was "an uncommon act of political decency."<ref>Dallek, pp. 77-78.</ref> [[Conrad Black]] agreed that there is "no evidence" connecting Kissinger, who was "playing a fairly innocuous double game of self-promotion", with attempts to undermine the peace talks. Black further commented that "the Democrats were outraged at Nixon, but what Johnson was doing was equally questionable", and there is "no evidence" that Thieu "needed much prompting to discern which side he favored in the U.S. election."<ref>[[Conrad Black]] (2007), ''Richard Nixon: A Life in Full'', PublicAffairs, p. 553.</ref>

Kissinger was also accused of intentionally abandoning South Vietnam to Communist forces, the accusation which probably hurts him most today. He responded to this charge as follows:
<blockquote>
When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and the number was still increasing. The official position of the Johnson administration had been that American withdrawal would only start six months after a North Vietnamese withdrawal. The "dove" platform of Sens. Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, which was rejected by the Democratic National Convention of 1968, advocated mutual withdrawal. No significant group at that time advocated unilateral withdrawal.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
A diplomatic alternative did not exist. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire the United States had to meet two preconditions: First, it had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army, and replace it with a Communist-dominated government. Second, the United States had to establish an unconditional timetable for withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of what happened in subsequent negotiations or how long these might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Given the horrors that occurred when the Communists took over Indochina in 1975, it must be said that Nixon correctly summed up the choices before him when he rejected the 1969 terms.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
When negotiations stalemated, the Nixon administration moved to implement what could be done unilaterally without undermining the political structure of South Vietnam. Between 1969 and 1972, it withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90 percent.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In Vietnam, a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the all-out North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the United States mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by President Nixon in January 1972 - and decried as unachievable in the American domestic debate. He said that "this new proposal is exactly what President Nixon has himself proposed: cease-fire, end of the war, release of the prisoners and troop withdrawal, and we propose a number of principles on political problems. You have also proposed this. And we shall leave to the South Vietnamese parties the settlement of these questions."
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American disunity was the major factor in dashing these hopes.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp061107.html</ref></blockquote>

Kissinger has also been accused of an alleged lack of transparency. He has responded by donating all of his personal papers to the [[Library of Congress]] for posterity. He recently released some 20,000 pages of transcripts of his private conversations with various world leaders.<ref>http://staff.lib.msu.edu/harris23/red_tape/o&e0404.htm#kissenger</ref> Such transcripts were the basis for his 2003 book on foreign policy, ''Crisis.''

In 1976, Kissinger "declined to approve" that a letter be sent to Chile warning them against carrying out any political assassinations.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> In an Aug. 30, 1976 memo, Shlaudeman discussed the possibility that the U.S. ambassador in Uruguay might be endangered by delivering a warning against assassination. The U.S. ambassador to Chile said that Pinochet might take as an insult any inference that he was connected with assassination plots.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> When the CIA learned about the Chilean plan to set up a covert office in Miami as part of Chile's overseas operations in 1974, however, Kissinger did authorize the CIA to send the Chilean Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) a warning not to go ahead with the plan. He rejected the State Department's proposal to publicly rebuke Chile on the matter. As a result, the Chileans backed down.<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref> Kissinger's decision not to send the letter is considered a subject of controversy because Chile was engaging in a spree of international murders at the time (the day the letter was to be sent, a Pinochet critic was assassinated in [[Washington, D.C.]]).<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref>

Kissinger's alleged warm support of Pinochet is without much basis in fact; Kissinger and Ford began viewing Pinochet's regime as a serious Cold War liability as early as 1975 and the US engaged in repeated diplomatic confrontations with it from 1977 on.<ref>www.cepchile.cl/dms/archivo_3236_1698/r92_fermandois_ing.pdf Translated from Spanish</ref> The CIA warned that "internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys;" therefore, the US had a vested interest in moderating the way they behaved.

The moderate left-wing extremist [[Christopher Hitchens]] has accused Kissinger of bad faith, describing him as a "toady" of Nixon who "knows what to do" without "being asked." He has also condemned Kissinger's business ties with Indonesia, arguing that they influenced the US "tilt" in favor of Suharto during the war in East Timor.<ref>http://www.etan.org/et2002a/february/01-09/09ksngr.htm</ref> In a general sense, Kissinger responded to these and similar charges by stating:
<blockquote>
When I was a young professor in the fifties at Harvard, where 99.9% of the people on the faculty were Democrats—I can remember only one Republican that I knew—the people in political science had faculty meetings…No one ever attacked the government for being a criminal activity. Nobody said, ‘they like to go to war; they’re blood-dripping!’ Sometime in the sixties, the idea developed that the government itself was an evil enterprise, that they lied professionally to the American people, and that the purpose of intellectuals was to negate the government rather than be constructive...Everybody working in government goes through the long hours and all the other pressures [associated with the job] because he or she would like to make a contribution to a better world.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9vsCD0j3Ys</ref>
</blockquote>

''Contra'' Hitchens, Kissinger attempted to resign from the Nixon White House on at least three separate occasions<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref>--not exactly the sort of thing one would expect from a "toady."

Conrad Black has written that "Kissinger has sincere compassion for the victims of the grinding wheels of history," although "he tends to take his distance from the beleaguered...during their ordeals." On Vietnam, he maintains that Kissinger "toiled demiurgically for the war's end without a disaster, and his anger [at the Democrats and the media] is real and earned." The "claims of the demented left," that he committed "crimes against Cambodia or Chile" are "bunk."

===The Schneider Affair===
The main controversy over the American role in Chile was an alleged attempt on the life of Chilean general Rene Schneider in 1970, due to his support for the appointment of Allende. The Church hearings found that the CIA did in fact give weapons to a group of men who it knew had attacked him twice before, ostensibly as a test of loyalty so that the CIA would remain privy to their information, but that the weapons provided and the group thereby armed were not the ones who actually killed him. The weapons were returned unused to the CIA and then discarded in the Pacific Ocean.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> Schneider was assassinated by a rival group of right-wing extremists.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> On June 11, 1971, Kissinger and Nixon said the following in a private conversation:

: '''Kissinger''': —when they did try to assassinate somebody, it took three attempts—
: '''Nixon''': Yeah.
: '''Kissinger''': —and he lived for three weeks afterwards.<ref>http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/07/nixon_tape_reveals_oval_office.html</ref>

There are two possible interpretations of these remarks: a) Kissinger was telling the President that a military coup could not succeed in Chile because there were no officers both willing and ''able'' to carry one out; or b) the two men were mocking the CIA's squeamishness about killing Schneider.

According to ''Commentary,'' however, regardless of what they said in the aftermath (quoting from the Nixon Tapes):
<blockquote>
"Kissinger seems to have been unaware of the plot...Karamassines phoned the National Security Adviser who asked if he "cleared everything in advance with you. He said no, you were too busy." In the same private conversation, Kissinger remarks that, although he did not know about the second plot, he might have approved it. Then he adds: "I thought that after we turned off that one thing [the Viaux plot], nothing more had happened and in fact that other thing [the Schneider kidnapping] had happened."<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>
</blockquote>

The death of Schneider had the opposite effect of what was intended by the Nixon administration--even as the CIA worked to buy off the Congress so as to prevent Allende's appointment, it ensured that the nation would rally behind the otherwise polarizing leader.

==Evaluation==
A smooth-talking, charming ''bon vivant,'' Kissinger was an international celebrity in high society, with the opposite personality of Nixon, yet they made a remarkably effective team with surprisingly little friction. They thought alike, and both could conceptualize and make plans for the complex interactions of international affairs. Neither was interested in economics, and only Nixon mastered the nitty gritty of politics and elections, while only Kissinger understood nuclear strategy.

Kissinger and Nixon were "realists" who deemphasized idealistic goals like anti-communism or promotion of democracy worldwide, because those goals were seen as too expensive in terms of America's economic capabilities. Instead of a Cold War they wanted peace, trade and cultural exchanges. Instead Nixon and Kissinger sought to downsize America's global commitments in proportion to its reduced economic, moral and political power. They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive; neither man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under Communism. Kissinger's realism fell out of fashion as idealism returned to American foreign policy with Carter's moralism emphasizing human rights, and Reagan's rollback strategy aimed at destroying Communism.

==Bibliography==

*Black, Conrad. ''Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full,'' PublicAffairs (2007), includes lengthy analysis of foreign policy.
* Bundy, William P. ''A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Web-Making-Foreign-Presidency/dp/186064273X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175404&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]
* Dallek, Robert. ''Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power'' (2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Nixon-Kissinger-Partners-Robert-Dallek/dp/0060722312/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], dual biography by leading scholar; hostile
* Garthoff, Raymond L. ''Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan '' (2nd ed. 1994) [http://www.amazon.com/Detente-Confrontation-American-Soviet-Relations-Reagan/dp/0815730411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175809&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], favorable analysis by proponent of detente
* Goh, Evelyn. ''Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961-1974: From "Red Menace" to "Tacit Ally."'' (2005). 299 pp.
* Goh, Evelyn. "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. Issn: 0145-2096 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "'Dr. Kissinger' or 'Mr. Henry'? Kissingerology, Thirty Years and Counting." ''Diplomatic History'' 2003 27(5): 637-676 full text at [[EBSCO]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "Ironies and Turning Points: Détente in Perspective," in Odd Arne Westad, ed. ''Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory'' (2000), pp 326-42; [http://www.amazon.com/Reviewing-Cold-War-Approaches-Interpretations/dp/0714681202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175936&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
*Horne, Alistair. "Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year" (2009); one of the best books on the man.
* Isaacson, Walter. ''Kissinger'' (1992); a major biography [http://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-Biography-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743286979/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577598&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Kuklick, Bruce. ''Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger.'' (2006). 241 pp. says nearly everyone with substantial academic credentials in the early Cold War decades was wrong nearly all the time.
* Litwak, Robert S. ''Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969-1976'' (1986)
* Macmillan, Margaret. ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)
* Mann, James. ''About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton'' (1999).
* Nelson, Keith L. ''The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam'' (1995)
* Qureshi, Lubna Zakia. "''"Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile'' (2009)
* Rodman, Peter. ''Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush,'' Knopf (2009).
* Ross, Robert S. ''Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989,'' Stanford University Press, 1995 [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=92018683 online edition]
* Schulzinger, Robert D. ''Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy.'' (1989).
* Serewicz, Lawrence W. ''America at the Brink of Empire: Rusk, Kissinger, And the Vietnam War'' (2007), stresses commitment to [[republicanism]] [http://www.amazon.com/America-Brink-Empire-Kissinger-Traditions/dp/0807131792/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-6 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=175941177686117 online review]
* Suri, Jeremi. ''Henry Kissinger and the American Century'' (2007), intellectual biography focused on pre-1969
* Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf. "Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China." ''Journal of American History'' 2005 92(1): 109-135. [http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/92.1/tucker.html in History Cooperative]
* Warner, Geoffrey. "Nixon, Kissinger and the Rapprochement with China, 1969-1972." ''International Affairs'' 2007 83(4): 763-781. Issn: 0020-5850 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Willbanks, James H. ''Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Abandoning-Vietnam-America-Left-South/dp/0700613315/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-15 excerpt and text search]

===Primary Sources===
* Kissinger, Henry. ''White House Years'' (1979). Nov. 1968-Jan. 1973; ''Years of Upheaval'' (1982). Jan. 1973 to Aug. 1974; ''Years of Renewal'' (1999), Aug. 1974 to Jan. 1977 [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Renewal-Henry-Kissinger/dp/075675383X/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-16 excerpt and text search vol 3]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political Thought of Metternich" ''The American Political Science Review,'' Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec., 1954), pp. 1017-1030 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1951008 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Congress of Vienna: A Reappraisal," ''World Politics,'' Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jan., 1956), pp. 264-280 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2008974 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22.'' (1957), his revised PhD dissertation.
* Kissinger, Henry. "Acceptance Speech" for The Nobel Peace Prize 1973 [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/kissinger-acceptance.html online edition]
* Kissinger, Henry. "Address to the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly," ''International Organization,'' Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer, 1974), pp. 573-583 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706310 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''American Foreign Policy'' (3rd ed. 1977), his speeches
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Kissinger Commission on Population and Development in Central America," ''Population and Development Review,'' Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 381-389 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1973103 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Diplomacy'' (1994) an interpretive history since 1815
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War'' (2003) [http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Vietnam-War-Involvement-Extrication/dp/074321532X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Haldeman, H. R. ''The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House'' (1994)
* Nixon, Richard. ''RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon'' (1981) [http://www.amazon.com/RN-Memoirs-Richard-Nixon/dp/0671707418/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577855&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]

==Online sources==
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB106/index.htm William Burr, ed. "Nixon's Trip to China Records now Completely Declassified, Including Kissinger Intelligence Briefing and Assurances on Taiwan" ''The National Security Archive'' (2003)]

== References ==
{{reflist|2}}
[[Category:Nobel laureates in Peace]]
[[Category:United States Secretaries of State]]
[[Category:Cold War]]
[[Category:United States History]]
{{DEFAULTSORT: Kissinger, Henry}}
[[category:diplomacy]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[Category:1960s]]
[[Category:Middle East]]
[[Category:American Jews]]
[[Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom award winners]]

Henry Kissinger

2013-03-20T11:48:20Z

JakeRMurrin: Remove editor's personal note

[[Image:Kissinger Henry.jpg|frame|right]]
'''Henry Kissinger''' (1923- ), American statesman and exponent of "realism" in foreign policy; he dominated foreign policy in the the administrations of presidents [[Richard Nixon]] and [[Gerald Ford]], as [[Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs|National Security Advisor]] and [[United States Secretary of State|Secretary of State]], holding both positions for a time. He won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for reaching a peace that ended the [[Vietnam War]]. In close collaboration with Nixon, he created a '''[[détente]] policy''' that called for an end to the [[Cold War]] and for friendly relations with both the [[Soviet Union]] and [[China]]. His position on détente was rejected by [[Ronald Reagan]] in the 1976 campaign for the presidential nomination. But Reagan lost the election to Ford, and in turn Ford was defeated by Democrat [[Jimmy Carter]], as Kissinger retired to write his highly revealing memoirs and consult for businesses worldwide.
==Life==
Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923 to a middle class Jewish family. They fled Nazi persecution, and arrived in New York in 1938, where he changed his first name from Heinz to Henry and rapidly Americanized in everything except his thick accent. He attended public schools and City University before being drafted at age 19. He returned to Europe during World War II fighting with the U.S. Army; he was in the infantry at first, but his heroism, courage, and daring got him promoted to intelligence. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1946. He spent a year as a civilian instructor in ''de-Nazification'' at an Army school in Germany; charged with de-Nazifying a German town, he did so with remarkable ease. He had power and responsibility far beyond his years because of his intelligence, his energy, and his commitment to opposing the Nazis.

In the army, Kissinger was informally tutored by Fritz Kraemer, a fellow refugee with two PhD's. In 1950 Kissinger earned his B.A. ''summa cum laude'' at Harvard with a 377 page essay on "The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant."<ref> William Y. Elliott was his director but only read half of it; the Government Department thereupon ruled that future senior theses could not exceed 40,000 words.</ref> He finished his Ph.D. in 1956 at Harvard, with a dissertation on "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars.

He married Ann Fleischer in 1949 and was divorced in 1964. There were two children, Elizabeth and David. In 1974 he married Nancy Maginnes.

==Harvard professor==
Kissinger became a full professor in Harvard's Department of Government in 1962. As the director of Harvard's University Summer International Seminar, 1952-69, he brought in nearly 700 young European and Asian scholars, many of whom became high officials in their own country. Kissinger met practically every intellectual in international relations at home and abroad.

Kissinger was eager to serve on national commissions. He served as Study Director, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, for the Council of Foreign Relations from 1955 to 1956; Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 to 1958; and Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program from 1958 to 1971. He resigned from Harvard in January 1971 when his two-year leave of absence expired.

In 1957 Kissinger published ''Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,'' which proposed a flexible defense posture, including provision for "limited warfare" and the strategic employment of nuclear weapons as an alternative to the doctrine of "massive retaliation" against direct foreign aggression, which dominated military thinking during the mid-1950s. The book brought Kissinger to national attention, and he became an mid-level advisor on security questions under presidents [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], [[John F. Kennedy]], and [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]; he was foreign policy advisor in [[Nelson Rockefeller]]'s 1968 quest for the Republican party nomination, but Nixon won the nomination and Kissinger switched to the winner.

Kissinger was consultant to the Department of State (1965-68), United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1961-68), Rand Corporation (1961-68), [[National Security Council]] (1961-62), Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1959-60), Operations Coordinating Board (1955), Director of the Psychological Strategy Board (1952), Operations Research Office (1951), and Chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1983-84). In 2001 he was not appointed to head the commission studying the [[9-11 Attack]] because he was too controversial.

==National Security Advisor and Secretary of State==
In 1969 Nixon appointed him his top advisor on foreign affairs as "Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs" )or "National Security Advisor") in charge of the [[National Security Council]] staff, which he made his base of power. He and Nixon largely ignored the State Department in setting the main lines of foreign policy. In 1973, Kissinger gained the additional role as secretary of state. He was the only person ever to hold the two top national security roles at the same time, and in 1975 he was replaced as head of the NSC.

Kissinger's approach to foreign policy was shaped by his vision of world peace achieved through a global balance of power; and accordingly Kissinger believed that effective U.S. diplomacy needed to be backed by force and guided by the pragmatism of Realpolitik rather than by high ideals and abstract causes. In practice his diplomacy, which mixed a highly visible, personal style with secret, behind-the-scenes maneuverings, was marked by bold, often controversial, initiatives and by frequent travel between world capitals in what came to be known as "shuttle diplomacy".
===Nuclear strategy===
On taling office Nixon and Kissinger were briefed on the US nuclear war plan, the [[Single Integrated Operational Plan]] (SIOP). Appalled by the catastrophic scale of the SIOP, Nixon and Kissinger sought military options that were more credible than massive nuclear strikes. Participants in the Air Force Nuclear Options project also supported more flexible nuclear war plans. Although Kissinger repeatedly asked Defense Department officials to construct limited options, they were skeptical that it would be possible to control nuclear escalation or to introduce greater flexibility without weakening the SIOP. Interagency studies presented a mixed verdict about the desirability of limited options; nevertheless, continued White House pressure encouraged Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to sponsor a major review of nuclear targeting. In 1972 the John Foster panel developed concepts of limited, selective, and regional nuclear options that were responsive to Kissinger's interest in credible nuclear threats. The Foster panel's report led to the controversial "Schlesinger Doctrine" and further efforts to revise the SIOP, but serious questions endured about the whole concept of controlled nuclear warfare.<ref> William Burr, "The Nixon Administration, the 'Horror Strategy,' and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969-1972: Prelude to the Schlesinger Doctrine." ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' 2005 7(3): 34-78. Issn: 1520-3972 Fulltext: [[Project Muse]]; Aaron L. Friedberg, "A History of U.S. Strategic 'Doctrine'—1945 to 1980," ''Journal of Strategic Studies,'' Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1980), pp. 37-71; Scott Sagan, ''Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security'' (1989). </ref>
===Détente with Soviet Union and China===
Kissinger's first priority in office was the achievement of détente with the Soviet Union and China, and playing them off against each other . Recognizing and accepting the Soviet Union as a superpower, Kissinger sought both to maintain U.S. military strength and to inaugurate peaceful economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges to engage the Soviet Union in the international system. This policy flourished under Kissinger's direction and led in 1972 to the signing of the first [[Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty]] (SALT I). At the same time Kissinger successfully engineered a rapprochement with Communist China, leading to the astonishing news in 1971 that Nixon would visit China, which he and Kissinger did in 1972.<ref> Margaret Macmillan, ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)</ref>

Aware that China and the Soviet Union were at sword's point, with rival claims to be the true Communists, Kissinger used the "Soviet card" to win over China by playing up the Soviet threat to the Chinese as a way of promoting closer relations with China. He even hinted at a US-China alliance to oppose the Soviets, and, with Nixon's trips to Moscow, hinted that China had better come to terms lest the US form an alliance with Moscow. The tactics worked, resulting in a friendly relationship with both Beijing and Moscow. As part of the détente, both powers reduced or ended their aid to North Vietnam, thus allowing a settlement of the [[Vietnam War]].<ref>Evelyn Goh, "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. </ref>

"In the Soviet Union, there is really nobody left who has any memory of an entrepreneurial tradition," said Kissinger. "In China, there are many people left who participated in Chinese entrepreneurial life." He believed that a Sino-US alliance to oppose Soviet aggression could encourage internal reform within the Chinese system while promoting a more peaceful international order. After China made such reforms, hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty.<ref>http://www.huliq.com/37702/rising-economic-growth-in-china-india-contributes-to-food-inflation "...hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty in the past few decades"</ref>

===Vietnam===
Kissinger worked to achieve a disengagement of U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam. He promoted Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization," aimed at turning the burden of actual combat over to the South Vietnamese, with repeated shows of U.S. air strength, notably in the bombings of Cambodia and North Vietnam. Kissinger met secretly with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris from 1969 on, finally concluding a cease-fire in January 1973, for which he and chief North Vietnamese negotiator [[Le Duc Tho]] were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Later rumors to the effect that Kissinger knew the South Vietnamese government was too weak to survive long were wrong; Kissinger and Nixon had built South Vietnam into one of the strongest militaries in Asia--much stronger than the North Vietnamese--and they had stripped away much of Hanoi's support from Moscow and Beijing. The problem was that Saigon put all its future on the continuation of Nixon in office and his promises to intervene militarily if necessary. Nixon collapsed unexpectedly (because of Watergate) and his personal promises were gone. Saigon despaired and desperately fought back when Hanoi did invade in 1975, after Nixon was gone and Congress forbad further American intervention.

Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city. Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos. President Ford's prediction that the Khmer Rouge would murder at least one million people<ref>Washington Post, June 4, 23, 1975</ref> was laughed off by liberal reporters. Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "''She Was Poor But She Was Honest''": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2 From an important study by genocide survivor Sophal Ear. Note that the source is, of all people, William Shawcross.</ref>

In one of [[Vietnam_War#Aftermath| the largest mass killings since the Nazi Holocaust]], the victorious Communists murdered 3-4 million people throughout Indochina, including over 2 million killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia alone.

===Middle East===
One challenge to détente under Kissinger came with the outbreak of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Faced with a threat of Soviet intervention, Kissinger successfully urged that U.S. forces be placed on worldwide alert. With Israel facing possible defeat at the hands of the Arab aggressors, President Nixon launched the largest airlift in military history to replenish Israel's stocks (the left would condemn his actions no matter how big or how small, Nixon said, so "''let's make it big''"). Kissinger had urged Nixon to delay the airlift so as to let Israel "bleed a little", in the hopes that a badly bruised Israel would be more pliable to concessions in post-war negotiations, but Nixon refused.

When the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army at the end of the war, Kissinger believed that the United States had a tremendous opportunity. Egypt was now dependent on solely the United States for the survival of its Third Army, and Kissinger hoped that the United States could mediate the dispute and wean Egypt from Soviet influence. As a result, he exerted intense pressure on Israel not to destroy the Third Army and to allow it to receive non-military supplies. Among other things, he threatened that the United States would resupply the Third Army by helicopter, support a UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal to positions held before the Third Army's encirclement, and falsely told the Israelis that the Soviet Union had threatened to intervene over the Third Army.

Kissinger then employed shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and the Arab states and to restore U.S.-Egyptian diplomatic ties, broken since 1967. Kissinger's goal was to drive the Soviets out of Egypt by showing the Egyptians that only the United States could persuade Israel to make concessions. The US assisted in a vast rescue operation conducted by Israeli forces to save Egyptian troops stranded in the Sinai.<ref>The Times, UK, June 15, 1967.</ref> US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt continued past Nixon's term. Though negotiations were tough, with both sides sometimes intransigent, President Ford ended up securing the first peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, which would be finalized under President Carter. In turn, [[Jordan]] felt compelled to reach a separate peace, which resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994.

Kissinger and Nixon approved a covert [[CIA]] campaign of subversion and sabotage designed to weaken the Socialist government of [[Iraq]] in 1973. Done in collaboration with the [[Shah]] of neighboring [[Iran]], it involved Soviet arms captured from Egypt and [[Syria]] in the 1973 war being dispatched to Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. The Shah cynically used the Kurds to pressure the Ba'athist government to back down on a number of serious territorial disputes between the two nations. The US brokered a peace treaty between Iraq and Iran in 1975, and aid to the Kurds was subsequently cut off. The Kurds were then viciously slaughtered. "''Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,''" Kissinger famously declared.<ref>http://www.slate.com/id/2156400/</ref>

Kissinger helped to diffuse sectarian conflicts in [[Lebanon]] in order to prevent a possible regional war, and opposed the Soviet-backed attempt by Communist forces to conquer North [[Yemen]] (which was the recipient of much US aid).

On 20 July 1974, [[Turkey]] invaded northern [[Cyprus]], overthrew its Greek-backed dictatorship (headed by Nikos Sampson), and installed a new regime. This led to the collapse of the Greek military junta, and the restoration of democracy in Greece, three days later--July 23, 1974. Sampson had been brought to power by the Greek Cypriot national guard (acting under the orders of Athens), which ousted the elected president, Makarios; Turkey removed him from power after a mere eight days in office. "Had Turkey not intervened," Sampson told the Greek newspaper Eleftherotipia, "I would not only have proclaimed Enosis [union of Cyprus with Greece] but I would have annihilated the Turks in Cyprus as well."<ref>http://www.britains-smallwars.com/cyprus/Most%20wanted/most%20wanted%20files/EOKA_Members_List_s.html</ref> Turkey took control of one-third of the country. Civilian casualties were remarkably light. Turkey restored democracy to Cyprus, and new elections brought Glafcos Clerides to power. President Makarios, in his speech to the UN Security Council on 19 July 1974, described the coup that replaced him as "an invasion of Cyprus by Greece."

Both the Turks and the Greeks committed indiscriminate ethnic cleansing against the other side. <ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR01.html 1st Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (20 July 1974 - 18 May 1976)</ref><ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR02.html 2nd Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (19 May 1976 to 10 February 1983)</ref> Facts and information on the death and the burial site of 201 out of 500 cases of Turkish Cypriot "missing" persons were provided by the Cyprus government on 12 May 2003. A typical report stated:
<blockquote>
In a Greek raid on a small Turkish village near Limassol, 36 people out of a population of 200 were killed. The Greeks said that they had been given orders to kill the inhabitants of the Turkish villages before the Turkish forces arrived.<ref>Washington Post, 23 July 1974
</ref>
</blockquote>

Numerous studies reported accounts of "anti-Turkish pograms," hostage taking, and mass murder.

Kissinger approved of the Turkish invasion, viewing the Greek junta as a Cold War liability.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/NATO_Joseph_Luns_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger had resolved to find a solution to the Cyprus problem in May 1974.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/Dept_Of_State_Kissinger_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger intervened to prevent a planned British military response to the second phase of the Turkish invasion in order to avoid a war between the two American allies.

Some 70,000 Turkish civilians were displaced by the Greeks. It is estimated by independant sources that 140,000 to 160,000<ref>Borowiec, Andrew (2000), Cyprus: A Troubled Island. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp2</ref> Greek civilians were displaced by the Turkish invaders. Only 20,000 Greeks remained in the north. Five Americans disappeared during the Turkish invasion.

===Latin America===
The Nixon administration sought to protect the economic and commercial interests of the United States during a period of heightened Latin American nationalism and expropriations, 1969-74. Though the administration initially adopted a flexible policy toward Latin American governments that nationalized American corporations' assets, the influence of Nixon's economic ideology, domestic political pressures, and the advice of Secretary of the Treasury [[John Connally]], led to a more confrontational stance toward Latin American countries. As the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and Kissinger had warned, however, Latin American countries took an even more anti-US stance and expropriated even more assets. Nixon's "get tough" stance, therefore, had a negative effect on American credibility and influence in the hemisphere.<ref>Hal Brands, "Richard Nixon and Economic Nationalism in Latin America: the Problem of Expropriations, 1969-1974." ''Diplomacy & Statecraft'' 2007 18(1): 215-235. Issn: 0959-2296 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref>

The ''de facto'' Communist dictatorship in [[Chile]] headed by [[Salvador Allende]] (originally elected in 1970 with a minority of the vote) presented a major obstacle to American interests in the region.

The CIA, as recounted in the Church Committee report, was involved in various plots designed to remove Allende and then let the Chileans vote in a new election where he would not be a candidate: It tried to buy off the Chilean Congress to prevent his appointment, worked to sway public opinion against him to prevent his election, and financed protests designed to bring the country to a stand-still and make him resign.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> Convinced that a conventional military uprising was still not possible in Chile, the CIA, acting with the approval of the 40 Committee—the body charged with overseeing covert actions abroad—devised what in effect was a constitutional coup. The most expeditious way to prevent Allende from assuming office was somehow to convince the Chilean congress to confirm Alessandri as the winner of the election. Once elected by the congress, Alessandri—a party to the plot through intermediaries—was prepared to resign his presidency within a matter of days so that new elections could be held.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> The CIA also learned of a number of plots to establish a military dictatorship. Although it pointedly refused to materially assist any of them, and actually intervened to prevent one of the plots for fear it would fail and strengthen Allende; it also encouraged several of the plots and did nothing to prevent them. It assured the plotters that such an event would be welcomed in Washington and that the US would not cut off aid over potential human rights violations.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> In addition, the CIA provided funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973. Though the CIA maintained contact with a notorious right-wing extremist named Roberto Viaux, Nixon and Kissinger, recognizing that "nothing could be worse than an abortive coup," repeatedly relayed messages to him urging restraint and went to great lengths to deter him from staging a coup.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>

The extent of Kissinger's involvement in or support of these plans is a subject of controversy.

Although the US considered economic sanctions against the Allende regime, it never actually implemented them. Although Latin Americans viewed the US as omnipotent, future Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet mocked it as a paper tiger and felt free to launch terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., during his reign. The US ended up giving more aid to Allende's Chile than any of the prior administrations. The US worked to diffuse potential coups that it had once warmly encouraged, fearing that it would be blamed if they failed. Though hesitant and uneasy, the CIA vowed to "continue to put pressure on every Allende weak spot" even after his appointment. The CIA had warned that the odds of either a military or a constitutional coup succeeding were one in twenty; after they both failed to occur in 1970, US policy shifted towards maintaining a democratic opposition to the Allende regime.

US intelligence reports implicated Allende in the assassination of several opponents,<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf Includes discussion of intelligence reports of Allende-backed hit jobs; note that Cuban intelligence reached the same conclusion--hence the infamous "packages" scandal.</ref> while KGB files smuggled out of Russia by Vasily Mitrokhin indicate that Allende received funds from the Soviet Union.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Allende was formally condemned by Chile's parliament for systematically destroying democracy in Chile.<ref>“Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy,” Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies, Chile, August 22, 1973.</ref> The Chilean Chamber of Deputies Resolution of August 22, 1973, accused Allende of support of armed groups, torture, illegal arrests, muzzling the press, confiscating private property, and not allowing people to leave the country. In the infamous "Cuban Packages Scandal" that precipitated the coup, large quantities of weapons were sent from Castro's Cuba to arm pro-Allende terrorists in Chile.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Kissinger privately told Nixon that Allende might declare martial law.<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf</ref> By 1973, as a result of covert US aid to Chilean dissidents and financing of pro-democracy protestors, US intelligence indicated Allende would likely lose the next Chilean election if it was held.<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> According to ''The Wall Street Journal,'' faced with illegal seizures of farms and factories, of defiance of judicial orders, unchecked street violence and death threats against the judges themselves, the Supreme Court warned on May 26, 1973, in a unanimous and unprecedented message, that Chile faced "a peremptory or imminent breakdown of legality."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref> Inflation reached 1,000%. Volodia Teitelboim, the chief ideologue of the Communist Party in Chile, declared that if civil war came, "it probably would signify immense loss of human lives, between half a million and one million."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

On September 11, 1973, Allende committed suicide during a military coup launched by Army Commander-in-Chief [[Augusto Pinochet]], who became President. Allende's policies had turned the country into a dictatorship that would kill thousands.

On September 16, 1973, the following exchange about the coup took place between Kissinger and President Nixon:

: '''Nixon''': Nothing new of any importance or is there?
: '''Kissinger''': Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
: '''Nixon''': Isn't that something. Isn't that something.
: '''Kissinger''': I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
: '''Nixon''': Well we didn't – as you know – our hand doesn't show on this one though.
: '''Kissinger''': We didn't do it. I mean we helped them....created the conditions as great as possible.
: '''Nixon''': That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played.<ref>[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/chile.htm The Kissinger Telcons: Kissinger Telcons on Chile], National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123, edited by Peter Kornbluh, posted May 26, 2004. This particular dialogue can be found at [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/Box%2022,%20File%203,%20Telcon,%209-16-73%2011,50%20Mr.%20Kissinger-The%20Pres%202.pdf TELCON: September 16, 1973, 11:50 a.m. Kissinger Talking to Nixon]. Retrieved November 26, 2006.</ref>

Kissinger is clearly telling the President that any direct US role in such a coup would be abhorrent but that the coup itself was preferable to a Communist take-over (with both agreeing that the US did not assist the plot).

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago, telling him: "''My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.''"<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref>

Using its leverage over Pinochet to curtail Chilean human rights abuses, the US simultaneously pressured Chile to introduce a series of free market economic reforms, a process that escalated sharply in the eighties. This led to a period of rapid economic expansion and development without precedent in Latin America, in which growth averaged 7% annually, that came to be known as the "''miracle of Chile''" (it also included the region's greatest reductions in infant mortality<ref>Nick Eberstadt, The Poverty of Communism (Transaction Publishers, 1990), pp188,
196-206, 240-6, in which he discusses living standards in Communist Cuba versus Pinochet's Chile.</ref>). In turn, this allowed Chile to make a long-term transition to sustainable democratic rule that would likely have been otherwise inconceivable.<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

In [[Argentina]], the Socialist government of [[Isabel Perón]] had been persuaded to declare a state of emergency (suspending, among other rights, ''Habeas Corpus'') on February 5, 1975. Drafted so they may (in her words) "annihilate the subversives," the decree led to ''Operativo Independencia'', a military campaign notorious for the brutality it exacted on not only the violent; but also elected officials, magistrates and University of Tucumán faculty (even secondary school teachers). The Peronists' own political mainstay (the labor movement) was also subject to the "subversive" labels and consequent reprisals. The country plunged into a low-level civil war. Fighting between Communist and anti-Communist forces claimed nearly 1,000 lives, with widespread social chaos and inflation peaking at 33%, before the Argentine military, led by Jorge Videla, deposed Perón on March 24, 1976.

As the new regime consolidated power, launching brutal reprisals and "disappearances" against political opponents, Kissinger took a similar line as he had toward Chile. During a meeting with Argentine foreign minister César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger assured him that the United States was an ally, but urged him to ''"get back to normal procedures"'' quickly before the U.S. Congress reconvened and had a chance to consider sanctions. The US cut-off aid in 1977 due to human rights violations.

Nixon sought a "special relationship" with [[Brazil]], and proposed a direct line of communication between the Brazilian and American Presidents. He appointed Kissinger to serve as a "special representative" to Brazil.

In [[Cuba]], Kissinger supported a renewal of diplomatic relations and cultural exchange with the [[Castro]] regime. Although President Ford repeatedly reached out to the Cubans; their military interventions in [[Angola]], [[Mozambique]], and [[Ethiopia]] destroyed Kissinger's hopes.

===South Asia===
During the South Asian crisis in 1971, the White House stood firmly behind Pakistani president Yahya Khan and demonstrated a disdain for India and particularly its leader, [[Indira Gandhi]], because of India's tilt or favoritism towards the Soviet Union. Kissinger had disdain for India and was using Pakistan as a tool to reach China, which he considered much more important to the U.S.

Khan's administration was responding to an insurrection launched by Communist guerillas (the ''Awami League''), armed with Indian weapons and demanding independence for East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with a massive campaign of violence dubbed "''Operation Searchlight.''" India was exploiting these internal tensions within Pakistan as part of a divide-and-rule strategy; it hoped for Pakistan's division into smaller Indian proxy states that could be played against one another and it used the violence committed by Pakistani forces as a possible pretext for military intervention in Pakistani affairs.

Nixon relayed messages to Yahya, urging him to restrain Pakistani forces.<ref>Black, Conrad, Richard Nixon: A Life in Full (2007), p. 751.</ref> His objective was to prevent a war and safeguard Pakistan's interests, though he feared an Indian invasion of West Pakistan that would lead to Indian domination of the sub-continent and strengthen the position of the [[Soviet Union]].<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877618-2,00.html</ref> Similarly, Yahya Khan feared that an independent Bangladesh could lead to the disintegration of Pakistan. Indian military support for Bengali guerillas led to war between India and Pakistan.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,878408,00.html</ref>

Nixon met with Indian Prime Minister [[Indira Gandhi]] and did not believe her assertion that she would not invade Pakistan;<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 752</ref> he did not trust her and once referred to her as an "old witch". Kissinger maintained that Nixon made specific proposals to Gandhi on a solution for the crisis, some of which she heard for the first time; for example, mutual withdrawal of troops from the Indo-East Pakistan borders. Nixon also expressed a wish to fix a time limit with Yahya for political accommodation in East Pakistan. Nixon asserted that India could count on US endeavors to ease the crisis within a short time. But, both Kissinger and Gandhi aide Jayakar maintained, Gandhi did not respond to these proposals. Kissinger noted that she “listened to what was in fact one of Nixon's better presentations with aloof indifference” but “took up none of the points.” Jayakar pointed out that Gandhi listened to Nixon “without a single comment, creating an impregnable space so that no real contact was possible.” She also refrained from assuring that India would follow Pakistan's suit if it withdrew from India's borders. As a result, the main agenda was “dropped altogether.”<ref>Jayakar, Indira Gandhi, p. 232; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 878 & 881-82.
</ref> On December 3, Yahya preemptively attacked the Indian Air Force and Gandhi retaliated, pushing into East Pakistan.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 753.</ref> Nixon issued a statement blaming Pakistan for starting the conflict and blaming India for escalating it, because he favored a cease-fire.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 755.</ref> The United States was secretly encouraging the shipment of military equipment from [[Iran]], [[Turkey]], and [[Jordan]] to Pakistan, reimbursing those countries despite Congressional objections.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79/</ref> The US used the threat of an aid cut-off to force Pakistan to back down, while its continued military aid to Islamabad prevented India from launching incursions deeper into the country. A cease fire was reached on December 16, leading to the creation of the independent state of [[Bangladesh]]. Sheikh Mujib led the newly established People's Republic of Bangladesh as a one-party, dictatorial state.

A 2008 study in the ''British Medical Journal'' concluded that 269,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the war.<ref>http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/269000_died_in_Bangladesh_war/articleshow/3147513.cms</ref> Reportedly, as many as 200,000 Bengali women were raped.

The US remained hostile to the Mujib regime, and considered Mujib himself to be a demagogue. His government's mismanagement of food grain stocks ultimately caused a massive famine in Bangladesh from March to December 1974, leading to the death of more than one million people. During this famine, Mujib rejected food aid from the United States and exported food to [[Cuba]]. By the time Mujib agreed to end support for Cuba, and the US began shipments of food to Bangladesh, it was 'too late for famine victims'.<ref>http://www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/opinions/dsharma/faminecommerce.htm</ref> In addition, his regime committed widespread human rights violations and tortured and executed thousands of dissidents. Nixon and Kissinger argued that these atrocities were far worse than anything Pakistan had committed in Bangladesh.

===Africa===
In the Angolan Civil War, the Communist MPLA (''People's Movement for the Liberation of [[Angola]]'') government was pitted against various right-wing insurgencies as well as an invasion from [[South Africa]]. The CIA covertly attempted to overthrow the MPLA dictatorship in 1975,<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35COXObeo8&feature=fvw Former CIA head in Angola discusses the operation on CNN</ref> but Cuba militarily intervened to save the regime from certain collapse. The Communist government subsequently killed up to one million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999</ref> The U.S., advised by Kissinger, supported the rebels FNLA (''National Front for the Liberation of Angola''), led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA (''National Union for the Total Independence of Angola''), led by [[Jonas Savimbi]], as well as the ''Mozambican National Resistance'' (RENAMO), and the invasion of Angola by South African troops. The FNLA was defeated and UNITA was forced to take its fight into the bush. Only under Reagan's presidency would U.S. support for UNITA return. (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Angola would be plagued for decades with constant civil war. In 1992, blatantly rigged elections were held with next to no international supervision, in which MPLA claimed victory. After 500,000 UNITA voters were disenfranchised, UNITA sent a peace delegation to the capital; all of its members, along with 20,000 civilian supporters, were brutally massacred.<ref>National Society for Human Rights, Ending the Angolan Conflict, Windhoek, Namibia, July 3, 2000</ref> Nevertheless, Savimbi remained supportive of the elections, until the MPLA systematically exterminated many tens of thousands of UNITA supporters throughout the country. Human rights observers have accused the MPLA of "genocidal atrocities," "systematic extermination," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."<ref>Namibia's National Human Rights Organisation, Press Releases, September 12, 2000, May 16, 2001</ref>

The Democrats in Congress cut off aid to UNITA under President Ford, just as they abandoned South Vietnam and Cambodia to murderous Communist bloodbath. "''A great nation cannot escape its responsibilities,''" Ford admonished them. Emboldened, Cuba would soon militarily intervene on behalf of the Communist dictatorship in [[Ethiopia]], which killed 1.25 million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Washington Post, March 18, 1978; New York Times, December 14, 1994.</ref>

The Nixon White House staunchly opposed the maniacal tyrant [[Idi Amin]] of [[Uganda]], who slaughtered 100-500,000 innocent people and ethnically cleansed<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/7/newsid_2492000/2492333.stm</ref> Uganda of all Asians. Amin was armed almost exclusively by the [[Soviet Union]] and [[Libya]]. The US urged Americans to evacuate the country, and began developing contingency plans to combat the regime's threatening posture in 1972.<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> Ambassador Thomas P. Melady described the Amin regime as "racist, erratic, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, militaristic, and, above all, xenophobic."<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> The British, fearful of a massacre, sought American help in preparing the logistics for an evacuation of the 7,000 British subjects in the country, should it prove neccessary.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,906445-3,00.html</ref> Kissinger and Nixon agreed. On September 24, 1972, they had the following conversation:

: '''Nixon''': Isn’t a person a person, goddamnit? You know, they talk about Vietnam, ‘these people far away that we don’t know,’ and you remember Chamberlain talking about the Czechs, that they’re far away and we don’t know them very well? Well, goddamnit, people are people! … I’m getting tired of this business of letting these Africans beat a hundred thousand people to death and do nothing about it.
: '''Kissinger''': And all these bleeding hearts in this country who say we like to kill yellow people…
: '''Nixon''': That’s right!
: '''Kissinger''': There haven’t been as many killed in eight years of the war than were killed in three months in Burundi.
: '''Nixon''': …They’re talking about how many we have bombed in the North. And I told your staff to get the figures for me: How many South Vietnamese or anti-Communist North Vietnamese have been killed by the North Vietnamese government? Civilians! How many? It’s ''unbelievable''! Nobody gives a damn! … We need a new African policy. We shouldn’t have 42 ambassadors to these goddamn countries. Looking at Uganda, ''of course'' we have to help those 7,000 people!<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kph0lygo40</ref>

Amin was deposed by the armed forces of [[Tanzania]] on April 11, 1979.

===South East Asia===
Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan1.pdf</ref> To combat this dangerous expansionism, Kissinger closely aligned the United States with anti-Communist nations in the area, such as [[Suharto]]'s [[Indonesia]], which was once described as ''the greatest prize in Asia.'' As tens of thousands fled a Communist take-over in the small island of [[East Timor]] under horrible conditions following a civil war that resulted in the death or displacement of 9,000 individuals; Ford and Kissinger gave Suharto their approval to annex East Timor and remove the Soviet-backed Communist government.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf</ref> Over the 24-year occupation; some 140,000<ref>http://www.cavr-timorleste.org/en/Brief.htm</ref> East Timorese soldiers and civilians were killed by all sides, out of a population of less than a million. In 1975, 49% of all violent killings in East Timor were the work of the Communist (FRETELIN) resistance.<ref>http://www.ictj.org/static/Timor.CAVR.English/07.2_Unlawful_Killings_and_Enforced_Disappearances.pdf</ref> Although Congress wanted to stop arm sales to Indonesia, the Ford administration manipulated them by agreeing to an aid cut-off that was never actually implemented. In his own words, "Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law."<ref>http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/#29</ref>

Kissinger also worked to maintain good relations with [[Thailand]]. In order to prevent Communist hegemony in the area, he sought to deliberately provoke tension between the Vietnamese Stalinists and their Maoist comrades in Phnom Penh. In a 1975 meeting, he told Thailand's foreign minister: "We don't mind Chinese influence in Cambodia to balance North Vietnam. As I told the Chinese when we last met when we were discussing the Vietnamese victory in Indochina, it is possible to have an ideological victory which is a geopolitical defeat. The Chinese did not disagree with me."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/kissinger_chatichai.htm</ref>

In the end, Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia for more than a decade (killing many hundreds of thousands in the process<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref>). Bogged down in an endless guerilla war regularly dubbed ''Vietnam's Vietnam'' in the American press, Communist Vietnam was unable to advance its expansionist objectives abroad; as a result, no more dominos fell in the area.

===Personal Advice to Nixon===
In an April 17, 1973 conversation, Nixon told Kissinger that he was considering whether or not to resign and let [[Spiro Agnew]] take the Presidency, to which Kissinger responded: "''With all due respect, Mr. President, that is out of the question. That cannot be considered....Why should you do it? What good would it do? Whom would it help? It wouldn’t help the country; it wouldn’t help any of the individuals involved….and, of course, it would be personally unjust.''" He also asked him to consider what it would do to weaken the institution of the Presidency.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri3He6n1Dv4</ref>

===Losing power===
Despite his real accomplishments, Kissinger's tenure was marked by much controversy. Revelations of his knowledge of Nixon's secret bombings in [[Cambodia]] in 1969 and the U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970 stirred particularly strong hatreds on the left, as did later discoveries that he had authorized wiretaps aimed at stopping leaks of classified information.

Much more serious, however, was the attack from the right by Ronald Reagan, who rejected détente with the Soviets as a viable strategy, warning that the Soviets would see it as a sign of American weaknesses and mobilize its Third World allies to subvert pro-American governments wherever it could and expand Soviet influence. Reagan's analysis proved correct and Ford was forced to reduce Kissinger's role, taking away in 1975 Kissinger's double role as National Security Advisor.

In 1976 Ford was challenged by [[Ronald Reagan]] for the GOP nomination. Ford won a very long, close and intensely fought battle. Attacks on détente policy was the focus of Reagan's campaign as the GOP moved to the right on foreign policy. President [[Jimmy Carter]], however, did not recognize the failure of détente until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 destroyed that policy and reopened the [[Cold War]] at a more intense level.

Kissinger remained on as secretary of state until the end of the Ford term in January 1977.

==Retirement==
Out of office Kissinger became a highly visible corporate consultant on world affairs, and wrote his detailed and insightful memoirs. His advice has been sought out by every President since his retirement, and he was one of President [[George W. Bush]]'s most-frequent advisors on the [[Iraq War]]. He also helped design the Bush administration's opening to [[India]] in the wake of the War on Terror.

Kissinger has met with Russian leader [[Vladimir Putin]] on several occasions in an attempt to buttress US-Russian relations. Noting that the US has no border with Russia nor designs on Russian territory, as well as Russia's frontiers with both the Islamic world and China; Kissinger believes that the United States and Russia have compatible interests.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1690757_1691285-1,00.html></ref> He is apparently well-liked by some in the Russian press.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/europe/07russiasumm.html?_r=1 Although Russian TV calls him a "war criminal" due to his imaginary crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia.</ref>

Kissinger has strongly supported the foreign policy of President Bush, writing:

<blockquote>
Extraordinary advances of democracy have occurred in recent months: elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and Palestine; local elections in Saudi Arabia; Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; the opening up of the presidential election in Egypt; and upheavals against entrenched authoritarians in Kyrgyzstan. This welcome trend was partly triggered by President Bush’s Middle East policy and accelerated by his second inaugural address, which elevated the progress of freedom in the world to the defining objective of U.S. foreign policy.

Pundits have interpreted these events as a victory of “idealists” over “realists” in the debate over conduct of American foreign policy. In fact, the United States is probably the only country in which “realist” can be used as a pejorative epithet. No serious realist should claim that power is its own justification. No idealist should imply that power is irrelevant to the spread of ideals. The real issue is to establish a sense of proportion between these two essential elements of policy. Overemphasis of either leads to stagnation or overextension.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp051605.html</ref>
</blockquote>

He added in a seperate piece:
<blockquote>
President Bush's visit has brought relations between India and the United States to an unprecedented level of cooperation and interdependence, which promises to make a seminal contribution to international peace and prosperity.
</blockquote>

Kissinger believes that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be worse than the consequences of defeat in Vietnam.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref>

Kissinger returned to teaching for a time after he left office, and today gives eloquent lectures and speeches across the United States. He has appeared regularly on a wide range of television stations to offer his insight, and frequently contributes editorials to newspapers.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles.html</ref> Conrad Black has praised Kissinger as "a political memoirist surpassed, if at all, only by [[Winston Churchill]] and [[Charles de Gaulle]]."

Kissinger delivered a beautiful and heartfelt eulogy for President Ford at his 2007 funeral.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/eulogies/010207.html</ref>

Throughout his life, Kissinger has enjoyed long-standing friendships with such notables as Katherine Graham, Walt Wriston, Beverly Sills, Bill Paley, Hans Morgenthau, Fritz Kraemer, Ahmet Ertegun, Sir James Goldsmith, Marion Dönhoff, Gianni Agnelli, John Aspinall, Rudolf Augstein, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John McCain, [[Mohammed Reza Pahlavi]],<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref> Anatoly Dobrynin and Bill and Pat Buckley.

Kissinger is a fan of [[soccer]].<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/nw061206.html</ref>

In the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis, Kissinger wrote:
<blockquote>
A major cause of the crisis has been the gap between the economic and the political organization of the world. The economic world has been globalized. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their national political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order. Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point. So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place, so far without achieving more than stemming incipient panic. International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
All these urgent issues are taking place against a background of a historic shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But there are much fewer trans-Pacific institutional ties with America than exist in the Atlantic. This raises the danger that, over time, the regions will confront each other as strategic and economic adversaries. The emergence of a new regional mercantilism and strategic confrontation by groups possessing large numbers of weapons of mass destruction needs to be resisted. This is why the U.S. relationship with China is so central. A relationship that started on both sides as essentially a strategic design to constrain a common adversary has evolved over the decades into a pillar of the international system. China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernization and reform of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods. Each side of the Pacific needs the cooperation of the other in addressing the consequences of the financial crisis.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/iht011209.html</ref>
</blockquote>

==Image and reputation==
Kissinger was loathed by some liberals who viewed him as a war criminal<ref>http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0611-03.htm</ref> and criticized by hardliners for [[detente]]. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for pulling the United States out of Vietnam.

Kissinger was a Machiavellian figure, skilled at manipulating people around him and currying favor in the media. At one point he admitted allowing secret wiretapping of his own aides' conversations.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref> The aura of Kissinger's influence was due partly to a cultivated image of high intelligence, including a PhD degree from Harvard University. He has been called "the only European-style realist" to head US foreign policy.

===Major Controversies===
[[Bryce Harlow]], former Eisenhower White House staff member, claimed to have "a double agent working in the White House....I kept Nixon informed." Harlow and [[Henry Kissinger]] (who was friendly with both campaigns and guaranteed a job in either a Humphrey or Nixon administration) separately predicted Johnson's "bombing halt": "The word is out that we are making an effort to throw the election to Humphrey. Nixon has been told of it," Democratic senator [[George Smathers]] informed Johnson. According to [[Robert Dallek]], Kissinger's advice "rested not on special knowledge of decision making at the White House but on an astute analyst's insight into what was happening." [[William Bundy]] stated that Kissinger obtained "no useful inside information" from his trip to Paris, and "almost any experienced Hanoi watcher might have come to the same conclusion". While Kissinger may have "hinted that his advice was based on contacts with the Paris delegation," this sort of "self-promotion....is at worst a minor and not uncommon practice, quite different from getting and reporting real secrets."<ref>[[Robert Dallek]] (2007), ''Kissinger and Nixon: Partners in Power'', HarperCollins, pp. 73-74.</ref> Nixon asked [[Anna Chennault]] to be his "channel to Mr. [[Nguyen van Thieu|Thieu]]"; Chennault agreed and periodically reported to [[John Mitchell]] that Thieu had no intention of attending a peace conference. On November 2, Chennault informed the South Vietnamese ambassador: "I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque who says his boss [Nixon] is going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer." In 1997, Chennault admitted that "I was constantly in touch with Nixon and Mitchell."<ref>Dallek, pp. 74-75.</ref> In response, Johnson ordered wire-tapping members of the Nixon campaign.<ref>Dallek, p. 75.</ref> Dallek wrote that Nixon's efforts "probably made no difference" because Thieu was unwilling to attend the talks and there was little chance of an agreement being reached before the election; however, his use of information provided by Harlow and Kissinger was morally questionable, and Humphrey's decision not to make Nixon's actions public was "an uncommon act of political decency."<ref>Dallek, pp. 77-78.</ref> [[Conrad Black]] agreed that there is "no evidence" connecting Kissinger, who was "playing a fairly innocuous double game of self-promotion", with attempts to undermine the peace talks. Black further commented that "the Democrats were outraged at Nixon, but what Johnson was doing was equally questionable", and there is "no evidence" that Thieu "needed much prompting to discern which side he favored in the U.S. election."<ref>[[Conrad Black]] (2007), ''Richard Nixon: A Life in Full'', PublicAffairs, p. 553.</ref>

Kissinger was also accused of intentionally abandoning South Vietnam to Communist forces, the accusation which probably hurts him most today. He responded to this charge as follows:
<blockquote>
When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and the number was still increasing. The official position of the Johnson administration had been that American withdrawal would only start six months after a North Vietnamese withdrawal. The "dove" platform of Sens. Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, which was rejected by the Democratic National Convention of 1968, advocated mutual withdrawal. No significant group at that time advocated unilateral withdrawal.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
A diplomatic alternative did not exist. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire the United States had to meet two preconditions: First, it had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army, and replace it with a Communist-dominated government. Second, the United States had to establish an unconditional timetable for withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of what happened in subsequent negotiations or how long these might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Given the horrors that occurred when the Communists took over Indochina in 1975, it must be said that Nixon correctly summed up the choices before him when he rejected the 1969 terms.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
When negotiations stalemated, the Nixon administration moved to implement what could be done unilaterally without undermining the political structure of South Vietnam. Between 1969 and 1972, it withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90 percent.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In Vietnam, a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the all-out North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the United States mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by President Nixon in January 1972 - and decried as unachievable in the American domestic debate. He said that "this new proposal is exactly what President Nixon has himself proposed: cease-fire, end of the war, release of the prisoners and troop withdrawal, and we propose a number of principles on political problems. You have also proposed this. And we shall leave to the South Vietnamese parties the settlement of these questions."
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American disunity was the major factor in dashing these hopes.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp061107.html</ref></blockquote>

Kissinger has also been accused of an alleged lack of transparency. He has responded by donating all of his personal papers to the [[Library of Congress]] for posterity. He recently released some 20,000 pages of transcripts of his private conversations with various world leaders.<ref>http://staff.lib.msu.edu/harris23/red_tape/o&e0404.htm#kissenger</ref> Such transcripts were the basis for his 2003 book on foreign policy, ''Crisis.''

In 1976, Kissinger "declined to approve" that a letter be sent to Chile warning them against carrying out any political assassinations.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> In an Aug. 30, 1976 memo, Shlaudeman discussed the possibility that the U.S. ambassador in Uruguay might be endangered by delivering a warning against assassination. The U.S. ambassador to Chile said that Pinochet might take as an insult any inference that he was connected with assassination plots.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> When the CIA learned about the Chilean plan to set up a covert office in Miami as part of Chile's overseas operations in 1974, however, Kissinger did authorize the CIA to send the Chilean Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) a warning not to go ahead with the plan. He rejected the State Department's proposal to publicly rebuke Chile on the matter. As a result, the Chileans backed down.<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref> Kissinger's decision not to send the letter is considered a subject of controversy because Chile was engaging in a spree of international murders at the time (the day the letter was to be sent, a Pinochet critic was assassinated in [[Washington, D.C.]]).<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref>

Kissinger's alleged warm support of Pinochet is without much basis in fact; Kissinger and Ford began viewing Pinochet's regime as a serious Cold War liability as early as 1975 and the US engaged in repeated diplomatic confrontations with it from 1977 on.<ref>www.cepchile.cl/dms/archivo_3236_1698/r92_fermandois_ing.pdf Translated from Spanish</ref> The CIA warned that "internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys;" therefore, the US had a vested interest in moderating the way they behaved.

The moderate left-wing extremist [[Christopher Hitchens]] has accused Kissinger of bad faith, describing him as a "toady" of Nixon who "knows what to do" without "being asked." He has also condemned Kissinger's business ties with Indonesia, arguing that they influenced the US "tilt" in favor of Suharto during the war in East Timor.<ref>http://www.etan.org/et2002a/february/01-09/09ksngr.htm</ref> In a general sense, Kissinger responded to these and similar charges by stating:
<blockquote>
When I was a young professor in the fifties at Harvard, where 99.9% of the people on the faculty were Democrats—I can remember only one Republican that I knew—the people in political science had faculty meetings…No one ever attacked the government for being a criminal activity. Nobody said, ‘they like to go to war; they’re blood-dripping!’ Sometime in the sixties, the idea developed that the government itself was an evil enterprise, that they lied professionally to the American people, and that the purpose of intellectuals was to negate the government rather than be constructive...Everybody working in government goes through the long hours and all the other pressures [associated with the job] because he or she would like to make a contribution to a better world.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9vsCD0j3Ys</ref>
</blockquote>

''Contra'' Hitchens, Kissinger attempted to resign from the Nixon White House on at least three separate occasions<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref>--not exactly the sort of thing one would expect from a "toady."

Conrad Black has written that "Kissinger has sincere compassion for the victims of the grinding wheels of history," although "he tends to take his distance from the beleaguered...during their ordeals." On Vietnam, he maintains that Kissinger "toiled demiurgically for the war's end without a disaster, and his anger [at the Democrats and the media] is real and earned." The "claims of the demented left," that he committed "crimes against Cambodia or Chile" are "bunk."

===The Schneider Affair===
The main controversy over the American role in Chile was an alleged attempt on the life of Chilean general Rene Schneider in 1970, due to his support for the appointment of Allende. The Church hearings found that the CIA did in fact give weapons to a group of men who it knew had attacked him twice before, ostensibly as a test of loyalty so that the CIA would remain privy to their information, but that the weapons provided and the group thereby armed were not the ones who actually killed him. The weapons were returned unused to the CIA and then discarded in the Pacific Ocean.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> Schneider was assassinated by a rival group of right-wing extremists.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> On June 11, 1971, Kissinger and Nixon said the following in a private conversation:

: '''Kissinger''': —when they did try to assassinate somebody, it took three attempts—
: '''Nixon''': Yeah.
: '''Kissinger''': —and he lived for three weeks afterwards.<ref>http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/07/nixon_tape_reveals_oval_office.html</ref>

There are two possible interpretations of these remarks: a) Kissinger was telling the President that a military coup could not succeed in Chile because there were no officers both willing and ''able'' to carry one out; or b) the two men were mocking the CIA's squeamishness about killing Schneider.

According to ''Commentary,'' however, regardless of what they said in the aftermath (quoting from the Nixon Tapes):
<blockquote>
"Kissinger seems to have been unaware of the plot...Karamassines phoned the National Security Adviser who asked if he "cleared everything in advance with you. He said no, you were too busy." In the same private conversation, Kissinger remarks that, although he did not know about the second plot, he might have approved it. Then he adds: "I thought that after we turned off that one thing [the Viaux plot], nothing more had happened and in fact that other thing [the Schneider kidnapping] had happened."<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>
</blockquote>

Fermandois argues that not only did the CIA not play a role in his death, it never intended to. He argues that the CIA was quite shocked and caught completely by surprise at the news of Schneider's death: "We can see the desperation in the comments of the agents in Chile because they cannot control events. The history of those sixty days is an example of North American impotence, at least if we understand it as Washington manipulating events. All this has a somewhat macabre colophon. When Schneider was wounded in the kidnapping attempt (he died three days later), the agents in Chile believed that the coup was unfolding, since in the new state of affairs General Valenzuela was effectively the new head."<ref>www.cepchile.cl/dms/archivo_3236_1698/r92_fermandois_ing.pdf</ref>

Hitchens, (who has praised the "valiant guerillas" of the Viet Cong and who openly admires [[Vladimir Lenin]]) has gone further than most in his condemnation of Kissinger (he is renowned for his use of hyperbole). Although he acknowledges that the US refused to directly assist any military coup against Allende and instead sought to influence the Chilean Congress; he nevertheless asserts that Kissinger attempted to ''orchestrate'' a military coup against the Chilean government in 1970. He generates this conclusion by stating that the CIA attempted to kill Schneider in 1970; it planned to make his death appear to be the work of left-wing terrorists; it hoped that this would "inspire" the Chilean military to intervene against Allende; and Kissinger was directly and personally involved in approving all of these operations.<ref>http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/feb/24/pinochet.bookextracts Hitchens' citation-free rants contain many distortions, such as the idea that the CIA put a $50,000 tag on Schneider's head (this is not supported by the Church hearings) or the absolutely ridiculous claims he makes on Cyprus by delibrately misquoting Kissinger--so read at your own peril.</ref> Kissinger has refused to debate with Hitchens, saying "''I'm not going to deal with Christopher Hitchens,''" while his colleague [[Alexander Haig]] has called Hitchens "''a sewer pipe-sucker.''"

The death of Schneider had the opposite effect of what was intended by the Nixon administration--even as the CIA worked to buy off the Congress so as to prevent Allende's appointment, it ensured that the nation would rally behind the otherwise polarizing leader.

==Evaluation==
A smooth-talking, charming ''bon vivant,'' Kissinger was an international celebrity in high society, with the opposite personality of Nixon, yet they made a remarkably effective team with surprisingly little friction. They thought alike, and both could conceptualize and make plans for the complex interactions of international affairs. Neither was interested in economics, and only Nixon mastered the nitty gritty of politics and elections, while only Kissinger understood nuclear strategy.

Kissinger and Nixon were "realists" who deemphasized idealistic goals like anti-communism or promotion of democracy worldwide, because those goals were seen as too expensive in terms of America's economic capabilities. Instead of a Cold War they wanted peace, trade and cultural exchanges. Instead Nixon and Kissinger sought to downsize America's global commitments in proportion to its reduced economic, moral and political power. They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive; neither man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under Communism. Kissinger's realism fell out of fashion as idealism returned to American foreign policy with Carter's moralism emphasizing human rights, and Reagan's rollback strategy aimed at destroying Communism.

==Bibliography==

*Black, Conrad. ''Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full,'' PublicAffairs (2007), includes lengthy analysis of foreign policy.
* Bundy, William P. ''A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Web-Making-Foreign-Presidency/dp/186064273X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175404&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]
* Dallek, Robert. ''Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power'' (2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Nixon-Kissinger-Partners-Robert-Dallek/dp/0060722312/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], dual biography by leading scholar; hostile
* Garthoff, Raymond L. ''Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan '' (2nd ed. 1994) [http://www.amazon.com/Detente-Confrontation-American-Soviet-Relations-Reagan/dp/0815730411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175809&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], favorable analysis by proponent of detente
* Goh, Evelyn. ''Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961-1974: From "Red Menace" to "Tacit Ally."'' (2005). 299 pp.
* Goh, Evelyn. "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. Issn: 0145-2096 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "'Dr. Kissinger' or 'Mr. Henry'? Kissingerology, Thirty Years and Counting." ''Diplomatic History'' 2003 27(5): 637-676 full text at [[EBSCO]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "Ironies and Turning Points: Détente in Perspective," in Odd Arne Westad, ed. ''Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory'' (2000), pp 326-42; [http://www.amazon.com/Reviewing-Cold-War-Approaches-Interpretations/dp/0714681202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175936&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
*Horne, Alistair. "Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year" (2009); one of the best books on the man.
* Isaacson, Walter. ''Kissinger'' (1992); a major biography [http://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-Biography-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743286979/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577598&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Kuklick, Bruce. ''Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger.'' (2006). 241 pp. says nearly everyone with substantial academic credentials in the early Cold War decades was wrong nearly all the time.
* Litwak, Robert S. ''Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969-1976'' (1986)
* Macmillan, Margaret. ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)
* Mann, James. ''About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton'' (1999).
* Nelson, Keith L. ''The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam'' (1995)
* Qureshi, Lubna Zakia. "''"Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile'' (2009)
* Rodman, Peter. ''Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush,'' Knopf (2009).
* Ross, Robert S. ''Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989,'' Stanford University Press, 1995 [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=92018683 online edition]
* Schulzinger, Robert D. ''Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy.'' (1989).
* Serewicz, Lawrence W. ''America at the Brink of Empire: Rusk, Kissinger, And the Vietnam War'' (2007), stresses commitment to [[republicanism]] [http://www.amazon.com/America-Brink-Empire-Kissinger-Traditions/dp/0807131792/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-6 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=175941177686117 online review]
* Suri, Jeremi. ''Henry Kissinger and the American Century'' (2007), intellectual biography focused on pre-1969
* Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf. "Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China." ''Journal of American History'' 2005 92(1): 109-135. [http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/92.1/tucker.html in History Cooperative]
* Warner, Geoffrey. "Nixon, Kissinger and the Rapprochement with China, 1969-1972." ''International Affairs'' 2007 83(4): 763-781. Issn: 0020-5850 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Willbanks, James H. ''Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Abandoning-Vietnam-America-Left-South/dp/0700613315/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-15 excerpt and text search]

===Primary Sources===
* Kissinger, Henry. ''White House Years'' (1979). Nov. 1968-Jan. 1973; ''Years of Upheaval'' (1982). Jan. 1973 to Aug. 1974; ''Years of Renewal'' (1999), Aug. 1974 to Jan. 1977 [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Renewal-Henry-Kissinger/dp/075675383X/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-16 excerpt and text search vol 3]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political Thought of Metternich" ''The American Political Science Review,'' Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec., 1954), pp. 1017-1030 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1951008 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Congress of Vienna: A Reappraisal," ''World Politics,'' Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jan., 1956), pp. 264-280 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2008974 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22.'' (1957), his revised PhD dissertation.
* Kissinger, Henry. "Acceptance Speech" for The Nobel Peace Prize 1973 [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/kissinger-acceptance.html online edition]
* Kissinger, Henry. "Address to the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly," ''International Organization,'' Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer, 1974), pp. 573-583 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706310 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''American Foreign Policy'' (3rd ed. 1977), his speeches
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Kissinger Commission on Population and Development in Central America," ''Population and Development Review,'' Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 381-389 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1973103 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Diplomacy'' (1994) an interpretive history since 1815
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War'' (2003) [http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Vietnam-War-Involvement-Extrication/dp/074321532X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Haldeman, H. R. ''The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House'' (1994)
* Nixon, Richard. ''RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon'' (1981) [http://www.amazon.com/RN-Memoirs-Richard-Nixon/dp/0671707418/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577855&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]

==Online sources==
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB106/index.htm William Burr, ed. "Nixon's Trip to China Records now Completely Declassified, Including Kissinger Intelligence Briefing and Assurances on Taiwan" ''The National Security Archive'' (2003)]

== References ==
{{reflist|2}}
[[Category:Nobel laureates in Peace]]
[[Category:United States Secretaries of State]]
[[Category:Cold War]]
[[Category:United States History]]
{{DEFAULTSORT: Kissinger, Henry}}
[[category:diplomacy]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[Category:1960s]]
[[Category:Middle East]]
[[Category:American Jews]]
[[Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom award winners]]

Henry Kissinger

2013-03-20T11:47:08Z

JakeRMurrin: Untrue

[[Image:Kissinger Henry.jpg|frame|right]]
'''Henry Kissinger''' (1923- ), American statesman and exponent of "realism" in foreign policy; he dominated foreign policy in the the administrations of presidents [[Richard Nixon]] and [[Gerald Ford]], as [[Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs|National Security Advisor]] and [[United States Secretary of State|Secretary of State]], holding both positions for a time. He won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for reaching a peace that ended the [[Vietnam War]]. In close collaboration with Nixon, he created a '''[[détente]] policy''' that called for an end to the [[Cold War]] and for friendly relations with both the [[Soviet Union]] and [[China]]. His position on détente was rejected by [[Ronald Reagan]] in the 1976 campaign for the presidential nomination. But Reagan lost the election to Ford, and in turn Ford was defeated by Democrat [[Jimmy Carter]], as Kissinger retired to write his highly revealing memoirs and consult for businesses worldwide.
==Life==
Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923 to a middle class Jewish family. They fled Nazi persecution, and arrived in New York in 1938, where he changed his first name from Heinz to Henry and rapidly Americanized in everything except his thick accent. He attended public schools and City University before being drafted at age 19. He returned to Europe during World War II fighting with the U.S. Army; he was in the infantry at first, but his heroism, courage, and daring got him promoted to intelligence. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1946. He spent a year as a civilian instructor in ''de-Nazification'' at an Army school in Germany; charged with de-Nazifying a German town, he did so with remarkable ease. He had power and responsibility far beyond his years because of his intelligence, his energy, and his commitment to opposing the Nazis.

In the army, Kissinger was informally tutored by Fritz Kraemer, a fellow refugee with two PhD's. In 1950 Kissinger earned his B.A. ''summa cum laude'' at Harvard with a 377 page essay on "The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant."<ref> William Y. Elliott was his director but only read half of it; the Government Department thereupon ruled that future senior theses could not exceed 40,000 words.</ref> He finished his Ph.D. in 1956 at Harvard, with a dissertation on "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars.

He married Ann Fleischer in 1949 and was divorced in 1964. There were two children, Elizabeth and David. In 1974 he married Nancy Maginnes.

==Harvard professor==
Kissinger became a full professor in Harvard's Department of Government in 1962. As the director of Harvard's University Summer International Seminar, 1952-69, he brought in nearly 700 young European and Asian scholars, many of whom became high officials in their own country. Kissinger met practically every intellectual in international relations at home and abroad.

Kissinger was eager to serve on national commissions. He served as Study Director, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, for the Council of Foreign Relations from 1955 to 1956; Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 to 1958; and Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program from 1958 to 1971. He resigned from Harvard in January 1971 when his two-year leave of absence expired.

In 1957 Kissinger published ''Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,'' which proposed a flexible defense posture, including provision for "limited warfare" and the strategic employment of nuclear weapons as an alternative to the doctrine of "massive retaliation" against direct foreign aggression, which dominated military thinking during the mid-1950s. The book brought Kissinger to national attention, and he became an mid-level advisor on security questions under presidents [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], [[John F. Kennedy]], and [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]; he was foreign policy advisor in [[Nelson Rockefeller]]'s 1968 quest for the Republican party nomination, but Nixon won the nomination and Kissinger switched to the winner.

Kissinger was consultant to the Department of State (1965-68), United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1961-68), Rand Corporation (1961-68), [[National Security Council]] (1961-62), Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1959-60), Operations Coordinating Board (1955), Director of the Psychological Strategy Board (1952), Operations Research Office (1951), and Chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1983-84). In 2001 he was not appointed to head the commission studying the [[9-11 Attack]] because he was too controversial.

==National Security Advisor and Secretary of State==
In 1969 Nixon appointed him his top advisor on foreign affairs as "Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs" )or "National Security Advisor") in charge of the [[National Security Council]] staff, which he made his base of power. He and Nixon largely ignored the State Department in setting the main lines of foreign policy. In 1973, Kissinger gained the additional role as secretary of state. He was the only person ever to hold the two top national security roles at the same time, and in 1975 he was replaced as head of the NSC.

Kissinger's approach to foreign policy was shaped by his vision of world peace achieved through a global balance of power; and accordingly Kissinger believed that effective U.S. diplomacy needed to be backed by force and guided by the pragmatism of Realpolitik rather than by high ideals and abstract causes. In practice his diplomacy, which mixed a highly visible, personal style with secret, behind-the-scenes maneuverings, was marked by bold, often controversial, initiatives and by frequent travel between world capitals in what came to be known as "shuttle diplomacy".
===Nuclear strategy===
On taling office Nixon and Kissinger were briefed on the US nuclear war plan, the [[Single Integrated Operational Plan]] (SIOP). Appalled by the catastrophic scale of the SIOP, Nixon and Kissinger sought military options that were more credible than massive nuclear strikes. Participants in the Air Force Nuclear Options project also supported more flexible nuclear war plans. Although Kissinger repeatedly asked Defense Department officials to construct limited options, they were skeptical that it would be possible to control nuclear escalation or to introduce greater flexibility without weakening the SIOP. Interagency studies presented a mixed verdict about the desirability of limited options; nevertheless, continued White House pressure encouraged Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to sponsor a major review of nuclear targeting. In 1972 the John Foster panel developed concepts of limited, selective, and regional nuclear options that were responsive to Kissinger's interest in credible nuclear threats. The Foster panel's report led to the controversial "Schlesinger Doctrine" and further efforts to revise the SIOP, but serious questions endured about the whole concept of controlled nuclear warfare.<ref> William Burr, "The Nixon Administration, the 'Horror Strategy,' and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969-1972: Prelude to the Schlesinger Doctrine." ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' 2005 7(3): 34-78. Issn: 1520-3972 Fulltext: [[Project Muse]]; Aaron L. Friedberg, "A History of U.S. Strategic 'Doctrine'—1945 to 1980," ''Journal of Strategic Studies,'' Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1980), pp. 37-71; Scott Sagan, ''Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security'' (1989). </ref>
===Détente with Soviet Union and China===
Kissinger's first priority in office was the achievement of détente with the Soviet Union and China, and playing them off against each other . Recognizing and accepting the Soviet Union as a superpower, Kissinger sought both to maintain U.S. military strength and to inaugurate peaceful economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges to engage the Soviet Union in the international system. This policy flourished under Kissinger's direction and led in 1972 to the signing of the first [[Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty]] (SALT I). At the same time Kissinger successfully engineered a rapprochement with Communist China, leading to the astonishing news in 1971 that Nixon would visit China, which he and Kissinger did in 1972.<ref> Margaret Macmillan, ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)</ref>

Aware that China and the Soviet Union were at sword's point, with rival claims to be the true Communists, Kissinger used the "Soviet card" to win over China by playing up the Soviet threat to the Chinese as a way of promoting closer relations with China. He even hinted at a US-China alliance to oppose the Soviets, and, with Nixon's trips to Moscow, hinted that China had better come to terms lest the US form an alliance with Moscow. The tactics worked, resulting in a friendly relationship with both Beijing and Moscow. As part of the détente, both powers reduced or ended their aid to North Vietnam, thus allowing a settlement of the [[Vietnam War]].<ref>Evelyn Goh, "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. </ref>

"In the Soviet Union, there is really nobody left who has any memory of an entrepreneurial tradition," said Kissinger. "In China, there are many people left who participated in Chinese entrepreneurial life." He believed that a Sino-US alliance to oppose Soviet aggression could encourage internal reform within the Chinese system while promoting a more peaceful international order. After China made such reforms, hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty.<ref>http://www.huliq.com/37702/rising-economic-growth-in-china-india-contributes-to-food-inflation "...hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty in the past few decades"</ref>

===Vietnam===
Kissinger worked to achieve a disengagement of U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam. He promoted Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization," aimed at turning the burden of actual combat over to the South Vietnamese, with repeated shows of U.S. air strength, notably in the bombings of Cambodia and North Vietnam. Kissinger met secretly with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris from 1969 on, finally concluding a cease-fire in January 1973, for which he and chief North Vietnamese negotiator [[Le Duc Tho]] were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Later rumors to the effect that Kissinger knew the South Vietnamese government was too weak to survive long were wrong; Kissinger and Nixon had built South Vietnam into one of the strongest militaries in Asia--much stronger than the North Vietnamese--and they had stripped away much of Hanoi's support from Moscow and Beijing. The problem was that Saigon put all its future on the continuation of Nixon in office and his promises to intervene militarily if necessary. Nixon collapsed unexpectedly (because of Watergate) and his personal promises were gone. Saigon despaired and desperately fought back when Hanoi did invade in 1975, after Nixon was gone and Congress forbad further American intervention.

Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city. Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos. President Ford's prediction that the Khmer Rouge would murder at least one million people<ref>Washington Post, June 4, 23, 1975</ref> was laughed off by liberal reporters. Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "''She Was Poor But She Was Honest''": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2 From an important study by genocide survivor Sophal Ear. Note that the source is, of all people, William Shawcross.</ref>

In one of [[Vietnam_War#Aftermath| the largest mass killings since the Nazi Holocaust]], the victorious Communists murdered 3-4 million people throughout Indochina, including over 2 million killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia alone.

===Middle East===
One challenge to détente under Kissinger came with the outbreak of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Faced with a threat of Soviet intervention, Kissinger successfully urged that U.S. forces be placed on worldwide alert. With Israel facing possible defeat at the hands of the Arab aggressors, President Nixon launched the largest airlift in military history to replenish Israel's stocks (the left would condemn his actions no matter how big or how small, Nixon said, so "''let's make it big''"). Kissinger had urged Nixon to delay the airlift so as to let Israel "bleed a little", in the hopes that a badly bruised Israel would be more pliable to concessions in post-war negotiations, but Nixon refused.

When the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army at the end of the war, Kissinger believed that the United States had a tremendous opportunity. Egypt was now dependent on solely the United States for the survival of its Third Army, and Kissinger hoped that the United States could mediate the dispute and wean Egypt from Soviet influence. As a result, he exerted intense pressure on Israel not to destroy the Third Army and to allow it to receive non-military supplies. Among other things, he threatened that the United States would resupply the Third Army by helicopter, support a UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal to positions held before the Third Army's encirclement, and falsely told the Israelis that the Soviet Union had threatened to intervene over the Third Army.

Kissinger then employed shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and the Arab states and to restore U.S.-Egyptian diplomatic ties, broken since 1967. Kissinger's goal was to drive the Soviets out of Egypt by showing the Egyptians that only the United States could persuade Israel to make concessions. The US assisted in a vast rescue operation conducted by Israeli forces to save Egyptian troops stranded in the Sinai.<ref>The Times, UK, June 15, 1967.</ref> US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt continued past Nixon's term. Though negotiations were tough, with both sides sometimes intransigent, President Ford ended up securing the first peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, which would be finalized under President Carter. In turn, [[Jordan]] felt compelled to reach a separate peace, which resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994.

Kissinger and Nixon approved a covert [[CIA]] campaign of subversion and sabotage designed to weaken the Socialist government of [[Iraq]] in 1973. Done in collaboration with the [[Shah]] of neighboring [[Iran]], it involved Soviet arms captured from Egypt and [[Syria]] in the 1973 war being dispatched to Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. The Shah cynically used the Kurds to pressure the Ba'athist government to back down on a number of serious territorial disputes between the two nations. The US brokered a peace treaty between Iraq and Iran in 1975, and aid to the Kurds was subsequently cut off. The Kurds were then viciously slaughtered. "''Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,''" Kissinger famously declared.<ref>http://www.slate.com/id/2156400/</ref>

Kissinger helped to diffuse sectarian conflicts in [[Lebanon]] in order to prevent a possible regional war, and opposed the Soviet-backed attempt by Communist forces to conquer North [[Yemen]] (which was the recipient of much US aid).

On 20 July 1974, [[Turkey]] invaded northern [[Cyprus]], overthrew its Greek-backed dictatorship (headed by Nikos Sampson), and installed a new regime. This led to the collapse of the Greek military junta, and the restoration of democracy in Greece, three days later--July 23, 1974. Sampson had been brought to power by the Greek Cypriot national guard (acting under the orders of Athens), which ousted the elected president, Makarios; Turkey removed him from power after a mere eight days in office. "Had Turkey not intervened," Sampson told the Greek newspaper Eleftherotipia, "I would not only have proclaimed Enosis [union of Cyprus with Greece] but I would have annihilated the Turks in Cyprus as well."<ref>http://www.britains-smallwars.com/cyprus/Most%20wanted/most%20wanted%20files/EOKA_Members_List_s.html</ref> Turkey took control of one-third of the country. Civilian casualties were remarkably light. Turkey restored democracy to Cyprus, and new elections brought Glafcos Clerides to power. President Makarios, in his speech to the UN Security Council on 19 July 1974, described the coup that replaced him as "an invasion of Cyprus by Greece."

Both the Turks and the Greeks committed indiscriminate ethnic cleansing against the other side. <ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR01.html 1st Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (20 July 1974 - 18 May 1976)</ref><ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR02.html 2nd Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (19 May 1976 to 10 February 1983)</ref> Facts and information on the death and the burial site of 201 out of 500 cases of Turkish Cypriot "missing" persons were provided by the Cyprus government on 12 May 2003. A typical report stated:
<blockquote>
In a Greek raid on a small Turkish village near Limassol, 36 people out of a population of 200 were killed. The Greeks said that they had been given orders to kill the inhabitants of the Turkish villages before the Turkish forces arrived.<ref>Washington Post, 23 July 1974
</ref>
</blockquote>

Numerous studies reported accounts of "anti-Turkish pograms," hostage taking, and mass murder.

Kissinger approved of the Turkish invasion, viewing the Greek junta as a Cold War liability.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/NATO_Joseph_Luns_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger had resolved to find a solution to the Cyprus problem in May 1974.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/Dept_Of_State_Kissinger_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger intervened to prevent a planned British military response to the second phase of the Turkish invasion in order to avoid a war between the two American allies.

Some 70,000 Turkish civilians were displaced by the Greeks. It is estimated by independant sources that 140,000 to 160,000<ref>Borowiec, Andrew (2000), Cyprus: A Troubled Island. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp2</ref> Greek civilians were displaced by the Turkish invaders. Only 20,000 Greeks remained in the north. Five Americans disappeared during the Turkish invasion.

===Latin America===
The Nixon administration sought to protect the economic and commercial interests of the United States during a period of heightened Latin American nationalism and expropriations, 1969-74. Though the administration initially adopted a flexible policy toward Latin American governments that nationalized American corporations' assets, the influence of Nixon's economic ideology, domestic political pressures, and the advice of Secretary of the Treasury [[John Connally]], led to a more confrontational stance toward Latin American countries. As the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and Kissinger had warned, however, Latin American countries took an even more anti-US stance and expropriated even more assets. Nixon's "get tough" stance, therefore, had a negative effect on American credibility and influence in the hemisphere.<ref>Hal Brands, "Richard Nixon and Economic Nationalism in Latin America: the Problem of Expropriations, 1969-1974." ''Diplomacy & Statecraft'' 2007 18(1): 215-235. Issn: 0959-2296 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref>

The ''de facto'' Communist dictatorship in [[Chile]] headed by [[Salvador Allende]] (originally elected in 1970 with a minority of the vote) presented a major obstacle to American interests in the region.

The CIA, as recounted in the Church Committee report, was involved in various plots designed to remove Allende and then let the Chileans vote in a new election where he would not be a candidate: It tried to buy off the Chilean Congress to prevent his appointment, worked to sway public opinion against him to prevent his election, and financed protests designed to bring the country to a stand-still and make him resign.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> Convinced that a conventional military uprising was still not possible in Chile, the CIA, acting with the approval of the 40 Committee—the body charged with overseeing covert actions abroad—devised what in effect was a constitutional coup. The most expeditious way to prevent Allende from assuming office was somehow to convince the Chilean congress to confirm Alessandri as the winner of the election. Once elected by the congress, Alessandri—a party to the plot through intermediaries—was prepared to resign his presidency within a matter of days so that new elections could be held.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> The CIA also learned of a number of plots to establish a military dictatorship. Although it pointedly refused to materially assist any of them, and actually intervened to prevent one of the plots for fear it would fail and strengthen Allende; it also encouraged several of the plots and did nothing to prevent them. It assured the plotters that such an event would be welcomed in Washington and that the US would not cut off aid over potential human rights violations.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> In addition, the CIA provided funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973. Though the CIA maintained contact with a notorious right-wing extremist named Roberto Viaux, Nixon and Kissinger, recognizing that "nothing could be worse than an abortive coup," repeatedly relayed messages to him urging restraint and went to great lengths to deter him from staging a coup.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>

The extent of Kissinger's involvement in or support of these plans is a subject of controversy.

Although the US considered economic sanctions against the Allende regime, it never actually implemented them. Although Latin Americans viewed the US as omnipotent, future Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet mocked it as a paper tiger and felt free to launch terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., during his reign. The US ended up giving more aid to Allende's Chile than any of the prior administrations. The US worked to diffuse potential coups that it had once warmly encouraged, fearing that it would be blamed if they failed. Though hesitant and uneasy, the CIA vowed to "continue to put pressure on every Allende weak spot" even after his appointment. The CIA had warned that the odds of either a military or a constitutional coup succeeding were one in twenty; after they both failed to occur in 1970, US policy shifted towards maintaining a democratic opposition to the Allende regime.

US intelligence reports implicated Allende in the assassination of several opponents,<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf Includes discussion of intelligence reports of Allende-backed hit jobs; note that Cuban intelligence reached the same conclusion--hence the infamous "packages" scandal.</ref> while KGB files smuggled out of Russia by Vasily Mitrokhin indicate that Allende received funds from the Soviet Union.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Allende was formally condemned by Chile's parliament for systematically destroying democracy in Chile.<ref>“Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy,” Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies, Chile, August 22, 1973.</ref> The Chilean Chamber of Deputies Resolution of August 22, 1973, accused Allende of support of armed groups, torture, illegal arrests, muzzling the press, confiscating private property, and not allowing people to leave the country. In the infamous "Cuban Packages Scandal" that precipitated the coup, large quantities of weapons were sent from Castro's Cuba to arm pro-Allende terrorists in Chile.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Kissinger privately told Nixon that Allende might declare martial law.<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf</ref> By 1973, as a result of covert US aid to Chilean dissidents and financing of pro-democracy protestors, US intelligence indicated Allende would likely lose the next Chilean election if it was held.<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> According to ''The Wall Street Journal,'' faced with illegal seizures of farms and factories, of defiance of judicial orders, unchecked street violence and death threats against the judges themselves, the Supreme Court warned on May 26, 1973, in a unanimous and unprecedented message, that Chile faced "a peremptory or imminent breakdown of legality."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref> Inflation reached 1,000%. Volodia Teitelboim, the chief ideologue of the Communist Party in Chile, declared that if civil war came, "it probably would signify immense loss of human lives, between half a million and one million."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

On September 11, 1973, Allende committed suicide during a military coup launched by Army Commander-in-Chief [[Augusto Pinochet]], who became President. Allende's policies had turned the country into a dictatorship that would kill thousands.

On September 16, 1973, the following exchange about the coup took place between Kissinger and President Nixon:

: '''Nixon''': Nothing new of any importance or is there?
: '''Kissinger''': Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
: '''Nixon''': Isn't that something. Isn't that something.
: '''Kissinger''': I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
: '''Nixon''': Well we didn't – as you know – our hand doesn't show on this one though.
: '''Kissinger''': We didn't do it. I mean we helped them....created the conditions as great as possible.
: '''Nixon''': That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played.<ref>[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/chile.htm The Kissinger Telcons: Kissinger Telcons on Chile], National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123, edited by Peter Kornbluh, posted May 26, 2004. This particular dialogue can be found at [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/Box%2022,%20File%203,%20Telcon,%209-16-73%2011,50%20Mr.%20Kissinger-The%20Pres%202.pdf TELCON: September 16, 1973, 11:50 a.m. Kissinger Talking to Nixon]. Retrieved November 26, 2006.</ref>

Kissinger is clearly telling the President that any direct US role in such a coup would be abhorrent but that the coup itself was preferable to a Communist take-over (with both agreeing that the US did not assist the plot).

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago, telling him: "''My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.''"<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref>

Using its leverage over Pinochet to curtail Chilean human rights abuses, the US simultaneously pressured Chile to introduce a series of free market economic reforms, a process that escalated sharply in the eighties. This led to a period of rapid economic expansion and development without precedent in Latin America, in which growth averaged 7% annually, that came to be known as the "''miracle of Chile''" (it also included the region's greatest reductions in infant mortality<ref>Nick Eberstadt, The Poverty of Communism (Transaction Publishers, 1990), pp188,
196-206, 240-6, in which he discusses living standards in Communist Cuba versus Pinochet's Chile.</ref>). In turn, this allowed Chile to make a long-term transition to sustainable democratic rule that would likely have been otherwise inconceivable.<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

In [[Argentina]], the Socialist government of [[Isabel Perón]] had been persuaded to declare a state of emergency (suspending, among other rights, ''Habeas Corpus'') on February 5, 1975. Drafted so they may (in her words) "annihilate the subversives," the decree led to ''Operativo Independencia'', a military campaign notorious for the brutality it exacted on not only the violent; but also elected officials, magistrates and University of Tucumán faculty (even secondary school teachers). The Peronists' own political mainstay (the labor movement) was also subject to the "subversive" labels and consequent reprisals. The country plunged into a low-level civil war. Fighting between Communist and anti-Communist forces claimed nearly 1,000 lives, with widespread social chaos and inflation peaking at 33%, before the Argentine military, led by Jorge Videla, deposed Perón on March 24, 1976.

As the new regime consolidated power, launching brutal reprisals and "disappearances" against political opponents, Kissinger took a similar line as he had toward Chile. During a meeting with Argentine foreign minister César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger assured him that the United States was an ally, but urged him to ''"get back to normal procedures"'' quickly before the U.S. Congress reconvened and had a chance to consider sanctions. The US cut-off aid in 1977 due to human rights violations.

Nixon sought a "special relationship" with [[Brazil]], and proposed a direct line of communication between the Brazilian and American Presidents. He appointed Kissinger to serve as a "special representative" to Brazil.

In [[Cuba]], Kissinger supported a renewal of diplomatic relations and cultural exchange with the [[Castro]] regime. Although President Ford repeatedly reached out to the Cubans; their military interventions in [[Angola]], [[Mozambique]], and [[Ethiopia]] destroyed Kissinger's hopes.

===South Asia===
During the South Asian crisis in 1971, the White House stood firmly behind Pakistani president Yahya Khan and demonstrated a disdain for India and particularly its leader, [[Indira Gandhi]], because of India's tilt or favoritism towards the Soviet Union. Kissinger had disdain for India and was using Pakistan as a tool to reach China, which he considered much more important to the U.S.

Khan's administration was responding to an insurrection launched by Communist guerillas (the ''Awami League''), armed with Indian weapons and demanding independence for East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with a massive campaign of violence dubbed "''Operation Searchlight.''" India was exploiting these internal tensions within Pakistan as part of a divide-and-rule strategy; it hoped for Pakistan's division into smaller Indian proxy states that could be played against one another and it used the violence committed by Pakistani forces as a possible pretext for military intervention in Pakistani affairs.

Nixon relayed messages to Yahya, urging him to restrain Pakistani forces.<ref>Black, Conrad, Richard Nixon: A Life in Full (2007), p. 751.</ref> His objective was to prevent a war and safeguard Pakistan's interests, though he feared an Indian invasion of West Pakistan that would lead to Indian domination of the sub-continent and strengthen the position of the [[Soviet Union]].<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877618-2,00.html</ref> Similarly, Yahya Khan feared that an independent Bangladesh could lead to the disintegration of Pakistan. Indian military support for Bengali guerillas led to war between India and Pakistan.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,878408,00.html</ref>

Nixon met with Indian Prime Minister [[Indira Gandhi]] and did not believe her assertion that she would not invade Pakistan;<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 752</ref> he did not trust her and once referred to her as an "old witch". Kissinger maintained that Nixon made specific proposals to Gandhi on a solution for the crisis, some of which she heard for the first time; for example, mutual withdrawal of troops from the Indo-East Pakistan borders. Nixon also expressed a wish to fix a time limit with Yahya for political accommodation in East Pakistan. Nixon asserted that India could count on US endeavors to ease the crisis within a short time. But, both Kissinger and Gandhi aide Jayakar maintained, Gandhi did not respond to these proposals. Kissinger noted that she “listened to what was in fact one of Nixon's better presentations with aloof indifference” but “took up none of the points.” Jayakar pointed out that Gandhi listened to Nixon “without a single comment, creating an impregnable space so that no real contact was possible.” She also refrained from assuring that India would follow Pakistan's suit if it withdrew from India's borders. As a result, the main agenda was “dropped altogether.”<ref>Jayakar, Indira Gandhi, p. 232; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 878 & 881-82.
</ref> On December 3, Yahya preemptively attacked the Indian Air Force and Gandhi retaliated, pushing into East Pakistan.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 753.</ref> Nixon issued a statement blaming Pakistan for starting the conflict and blaming India for escalating it, because he favored a cease-fire.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 755.</ref> The United States was secretly encouraging the shipment of military equipment from [[Iran]], [[Turkey]], and [[Jordan]] to Pakistan, reimbursing those countries despite Congressional objections.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79/</ref> The US used the threat of an aid cut-off to force Pakistan to back down, while its continued military aid to Islamabad prevented India from launching incursions deeper into the country. A cease fire was reached on December 16, leading to the creation of the independent state of [[Bangladesh]]. Sheikh Mujib led the newly established People's Republic of Bangladesh as a one-party, dictatorial state.

A 2008 study in the ''British Medical Journal'' concluded that 269,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the war.<ref>http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/269000_died_in_Bangladesh_war/articleshow/3147513.cms</ref> Reportedly, as many as 200,000 Bengali women were raped.

The US remained hostile to the Mujib regime, and considered Mujib himself to be a demagogue. His government's mismanagement of food grain stocks ultimately caused a massive famine in Bangladesh from March to December 1974, leading to the death of more than one million people. During this famine, Mujib rejected food aid from the United States and exported food to [[Cuba]]. By the time Mujib agreed to end support for Cuba, and the US began shipments of food to Bangladesh, it was 'too late for famine victims'.<ref>http://www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/opinions/dsharma/faminecommerce.htm</ref> In addition, his regime committed widespread human rights violations and tortured and executed thousands of dissidents. Nixon and Kissinger argued that these atrocities were far worse than anything Pakistan had committed in Bangladesh.

===Africa===
In the Angolan Civil War, the Communist MPLA (''People's Movement for the Liberation of [[Angola]]'') government was pitted against various right-wing insurgencies as well as an invasion from [[South Africa]]. The CIA covertly attempted to overthrow the MPLA dictatorship in 1975,<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35COXObeo8&feature=fvw Former CIA head in Angola discusses the operation on CNN</ref> but Cuba militarily intervened to save the regime from certain collapse. The Communist government subsequently killed up to one million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999</ref> The U.S., advised by Kissinger, supported the rebels FNLA (''National Front for the Liberation of Angola''), led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA (''National Union for the Total Independence of Angola''), led by [[Jonas Savimbi]], as well as the ''Mozambican National Resistance'' (RENAMO), and the invasion of Angola by South African troops. The FNLA was defeated and UNITA was forced to take its fight into the bush. Only under Reagan's presidency would U.S. support for UNITA return. (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Angola would be plagued for decades with constant civil war. In 1992, blatantly rigged elections were held with next to no international supervision, in which MPLA claimed victory. After 500,000 UNITA voters were disenfranchised, UNITA sent a peace delegation to the capital; all of its members, along with 20,000 civilian supporters, were brutally massacred.<ref>National Society for Human Rights, Ending the Angolan Conflict, Windhoek, Namibia, July 3, 2000</ref> Nevertheless, Savimbi remained supportive of the elections, until the MPLA systematically exterminated many tens of thousands of UNITA supporters throughout the country. Human rights observers have accused the MPLA of "genocidal atrocities," "systematic extermination," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."<ref>Namibia's National Human Rights Organisation, Press Releases, September 12, 2000, May 16, 2001</ref>

The Democrats in Congress cut off aid to UNITA under President Ford, just as they abandoned South Vietnam and Cambodia to murderous Communist bloodbath. "''A great nation cannot escape its responsibilities,''" Ford admonished them. Emboldened, Cuba would soon militarily intervene on behalf of the Communist dictatorship in [[Ethiopia]], which killed 1.25 million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Washington Post, March 18, 1978; New York Times, December 14, 1994.</ref>

The Nixon White House staunchly opposed the maniacal tyrant [[Idi Amin]] of [[Uganda]], who slaughtered 100-500,000 innocent people and ethnically cleansed<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/7/newsid_2492000/2492333.stm</ref> Uganda of all Asians. Amin was armed almost exclusively by the [[Soviet Union]] and [[Libya]]. The US urged Americans to evacuate the country, and began developing contingency plans to combat the regime's threatening posture in 1972.<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> Ambassador Thomas P. Melady described the Amin regime as "racist, erratic, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, militaristic, and, above all, xenophobic."<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> The British, fearful of a massacre, sought American help in preparing the logistics for an evacuation of the 7,000 British subjects in the country, should it prove neccessary.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,906445-3,00.html</ref> Kissinger and Nixon agreed. On September 24, 1972, they had the following conversation:

: '''Nixon''': Isn’t a person a person, goddamnit? You know, they talk about Vietnam, ‘these people far away that we don’t know,’ and you remember Chamberlain talking about the Czechs, that they’re far away and we don’t know them very well? Well, goddamnit, people are people! … I’m getting tired of this business of letting these Africans beat a hundred thousand people to death and do nothing about it.
: '''Kissinger''': And all these bleeding hearts in this country who say we like to kill yellow people…
: '''Nixon''': That’s right!
: '''Kissinger''': There haven’t been as many killed [by the US military] in eight years of the war than were killed in three months in Burundi.
: '''Nixon''': …They’re talking about how many we have bombed in the North. And I told your staff to get the figures for me: How many South Vietnamese or anti-Communist North Vietnamese have been killed by the North Vietnamese government? Civilians! How many? It’s ''unbelievable''! Nobody gives a damn! … We need a new African policy. We shouldn’t have 42 ambassadors to these goddamn countries. Looking at Uganda, ''of course'' we have to help those 7,000 people!<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kph0lygo40</ref>

Amin was deposed by the armed forces of [[Tanzania]] on April 11, 1979.

===South East Asia===
Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan1.pdf</ref> To combat this dangerous expansionism, Kissinger closely aligned the United States with anti-Communist nations in the area, such as [[Suharto]]'s [[Indonesia]], which was once described as ''the greatest prize in Asia.'' As tens of thousands fled a Communist take-over in the small island of [[East Timor]] under horrible conditions following a civil war that resulted in the death or displacement of 9,000 individuals; Ford and Kissinger gave Suharto their approval to annex East Timor and remove the Soviet-backed Communist government.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf</ref> Over the 24-year occupation; some 140,000<ref>http://www.cavr-timorleste.org/en/Brief.htm</ref> East Timorese soldiers and civilians were killed by all sides, out of a population of less than a million. In 1975, 49% of all violent killings in East Timor were the work of the Communist (FRETELIN) resistance.<ref>http://www.ictj.org/static/Timor.CAVR.English/07.2_Unlawful_Killings_and_Enforced_Disappearances.pdf</ref> Although Congress wanted to stop arm sales to Indonesia, the Ford administration manipulated them by agreeing to an aid cut-off that was never actually implemented. In his own words, "Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law."<ref>http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/#29</ref>

Kissinger also worked to maintain good relations with [[Thailand]]. In order to prevent Communist hegemony in the area, he sought to deliberately provoke tension between the Vietnamese Stalinists and their Maoist comrades in Phnom Penh. In a 1975 meeting, he told Thailand's foreign minister: "We don't mind Chinese influence in Cambodia to balance North Vietnam. As I told the Chinese when we last met when we were discussing the Vietnamese victory in Indochina, it is possible to have an ideological victory which is a geopolitical defeat. The Chinese did not disagree with me."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/kissinger_chatichai.htm</ref>

In the end, Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia for more than a decade (killing many hundreds of thousands in the process<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref>). Bogged down in an endless guerilla war regularly dubbed ''Vietnam's Vietnam'' in the American press, Communist Vietnam was unable to advance its expansionist objectives abroad; as a result, no more dominos fell in the area.

===Personal Advice to Nixon===
In an April 17, 1973 conversation, Nixon told Kissinger that he was considering whether or not to resign and let [[Spiro Agnew]] take the Presidency, to which Kissinger responded: "''With all due respect, Mr. President, that is out of the question. That cannot be considered....Why should you do it? What good would it do? Whom would it help? It wouldn’t help the country; it wouldn’t help any of the individuals involved….and, of course, it would be personally unjust.''" He also asked him to consider what it would do to weaken the institution of the Presidency.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri3He6n1Dv4</ref>

===Losing power===
Despite his real accomplishments, Kissinger's tenure was marked by much controversy. Revelations of his knowledge of Nixon's secret bombings in [[Cambodia]] in 1969 and the U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970 stirred particularly strong hatreds on the left, as did later discoveries that he had authorized wiretaps aimed at stopping leaks of classified information.

Much more serious, however, was the attack from the right by Ronald Reagan, who rejected détente with the Soviets as a viable strategy, warning that the Soviets would see it as a sign of American weaknesses and mobilize its Third World allies to subvert pro-American governments wherever it could and expand Soviet influence. Reagan's analysis proved correct and Ford was forced to reduce Kissinger's role, taking away in 1975 Kissinger's double role as National Security Advisor.

In 1976 Ford was challenged by [[Ronald Reagan]] for the GOP nomination. Ford won a very long, close and intensely fought battle. Attacks on détente policy was the focus of Reagan's campaign as the GOP moved to the right on foreign policy. President [[Jimmy Carter]], however, did not recognize the failure of détente until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 destroyed that policy and reopened the [[Cold War]] at a more intense level.

Kissinger remained on as secretary of state until the end of the Ford term in January 1977.

==Retirement==
Out of office Kissinger became a highly visible corporate consultant on world affairs, and wrote his detailed and insightful memoirs. His advice has been sought out by every President since his retirement, and he was one of President [[George W. Bush]]'s most-frequent advisors on the [[Iraq War]]. He also helped design the Bush administration's opening to [[India]] in the wake of the War on Terror.

Kissinger has met with Russian leader [[Vladimir Putin]] on several occasions in an attempt to buttress US-Russian relations. Noting that the US has no border with Russia nor designs on Russian territory, as well as Russia's frontiers with both the Islamic world and China; Kissinger believes that the United States and Russia have compatible interests.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1690757_1691285-1,00.html></ref> He is apparently well-liked by some in the Russian press.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/europe/07russiasumm.html?_r=1 Although Russian TV calls him a "war criminal" due to his imaginary crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia.</ref>

Kissinger has strongly supported the foreign policy of President Bush, writing:

<blockquote>
Extraordinary advances of democracy have occurred in recent months: elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and Palestine; local elections in Saudi Arabia; Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; the opening up of the presidential election in Egypt; and upheavals against entrenched authoritarians in Kyrgyzstan. This welcome trend was partly triggered by President Bush’s Middle East policy and accelerated by his second inaugural address, which elevated the progress of freedom in the world to the defining objective of U.S. foreign policy.

Pundits have interpreted these events as a victory of “idealists” over “realists” in the debate over conduct of American foreign policy. In fact, the United States is probably the only country in which “realist” can be used as a pejorative epithet. No serious realist should claim that power is its own justification. No idealist should imply that power is irrelevant to the spread of ideals. The real issue is to establish a sense of proportion between these two essential elements of policy. Overemphasis of either leads to stagnation or overextension.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp051605.html</ref>
</blockquote>

He added in a seperate piece:
<blockquote>
President Bush's visit has brought relations between India and the United States to an unprecedented level of cooperation and interdependence, which promises to make a seminal contribution to international peace and prosperity.
</blockquote>

Kissinger believes that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be worse than the consequences of defeat in Vietnam.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref>

Kissinger returned to teaching for a time after he left office, and today gives eloquent lectures and speeches across the United States. He has appeared regularly on a wide range of television stations to offer his insight, and frequently contributes editorials to newspapers.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles.html</ref> Conrad Black has praised Kissinger as "a political memoirist surpassed, if at all, only by [[Winston Churchill]] and [[Charles de Gaulle]]."

Kissinger delivered a beautiful and heartfelt eulogy for President Ford at his 2007 funeral.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/eulogies/010207.html</ref>

Throughout his life, Kissinger has enjoyed long-standing friendships with such notables as Katherine Graham, Walt Wriston, Beverly Sills, Bill Paley, Hans Morgenthau, Fritz Kraemer, Ahmet Ertegun, Sir James Goldsmith, Marion Dönhoff, Gianni Agnelli, John Aspinall, Rudolf Augstein, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John McCain, [[Mohammed Reza Pahlavi]],<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref> Anatoly Dobrynin and Bill and Pat Buckley.

Kissinger is a fan of [[soccer]].<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/nw061206.html</ref>

In the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis, Kissinger wrote:
<blockquote>
A major cause of the crisis has been the gap between the economic and the political organization of the world. The economic world has been globalized. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their national political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order. Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point. So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place, so far without achieving more than stemming incipient panic. International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
All these urgent issues are taking place against a background of a historic shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But there are much fewer trans-Pacific institutional ties with America than exist in the Atlantic. This raises the danger that, over time, the regions will confront each other as strategic and economic adversaries. The emergence of a new regional mercantilism and strategic confrontation by groups possessing large numbers of weapons of mass destruction needs to be resisted. This is why the U.S. relationship with China is so central. A relationship that started on both sides as essentially a strategic design to constrain a common adversary has evolved over the decades into a pillar of the international system. China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernization and reform of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods. Each side of the Pacific needs the cooperation of the other in addressing the consequences of the financial crisis.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/iht011209.html</ref>
</blockquote>

==Image and reputation==
Kissinger was loathed by some liberals who viewed him as a war criminal<ref>http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0611-03.htm</ref> and criticized by hardliners for [[detente]]. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for pulling the United States out of Vietnam.

Kissinger was a Machiavellian figure, skilled at manipulating people around him and currying favor in the media. At one point he admitted allowing secret wiretapping of his own aides' conversations.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref> The aura of Kissinger's influence was due partly to a cultivated image of high intelligence, including a PhD degree from Harvard University. He has been called "the only European-style realist" to head US foreign policy.

===Major Controversies===
[[Bryce Harlow]], former Eisenhower White House staff member, claimed to have "a double agent working in the White House....I kept Nixon informed." Harlow and [[Henry Kissinger]] (who was friendly with both campaigns and guaranteed a job in either a Humphrey or Nixon administration) separately predicted Johnson's "bombing halt": "The word is out that we are making an effort to throw the election to Humphrey. Nixon has been told of it," Democratic senator [[George Smathers]] informed Johnson. According to [[Robert Dallek]], Kissinger's advice "rested not on special knowledge of decision making at the White House but on an astute analyst's insight into what was happening." [[William Bundy]] stated that Kissinger obtained "no useful inside information" from his trip to Paris, and "almost any experienced Hanoi watcher might have come to the same conclusion". While Kissinger may have "hinted that his advice was based on contacts with the Paris delegation," this sort of "self-promotion....is at worst a minor and not uncommon practice, quite different from getting and reporting real secrets."<ref>[[Robert Dallek]] (2007), ''Kissinger and Nixon: Partners in Power'', HarperCollins, pp. 73-74.</ref> Nixon asked [[Anna Chennault]] to be his "channel to Mr. [[Nguyen van Thieu|Thieu]]"; Chennault agreed and periodically reported to [[John Mitchell]] that Thieu had no intention of attending a peace conference. On November 2, Chennault informed the South Vietnamese ambassador: "I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque who says his boss [Nixon] is going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer." In 1997, Chennault admitted that "I was constantly in touch with Nixon and Mitchell."<ref>Dallek, pp. 74-75.</ref> In response, Johnson ordered wire-tapping members of the Nixon campaign.<ref>Dallek, p. 75.</ref> Dallek wrote that Nixon's efforts "probably made no difference" because Thieu was unwilling to attend the talks and there was little chance of an agreement being reached before the election; however, his use of information provided by Harlow and Kissinger was morally questionable, and Humphrey's decision not to make Nixon's actions public was "an uncommon act of political decency."<ref>Dallek, pp. 77-78.</ref> [[Conrad Black]] agreed that there is "no evidence" connecting Kissinger, who was "playing a fairly innocuous double game of self-promotion", with attempts to undermine the peace talks. Black further commented that "the Democrats were outraged at Nixon, but what Johnson was doing was equally questionable", and there is "no evidence" that Thieu "needed much prompting to discern which side he favored in the U.S. election."<ref>[[Conrad Black]] (2007), ''Richard Nixon: A Life in Full'', PublicAffairs, p. 553.</ref>

Kissinger was also accused of intentionally abandoning South Vietnam to Communist forces, the accusation which probably hurts him most today. He responded to this charge as follows:
<blockquote>
When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and the number was still increasing. The official position of the Johnson administration had been that American withdrawal would only start six months after a North Vietnamese withdrawal. The "dove" platform of Sens. Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, which was rejected by the Democratic National Convention of 1968, advocated mutual withdrawal. No significant group at that time advocated unilateral withdrawal.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
A diplomatic alternative did not exist. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire the United States had to meet two preconditions: First, it had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army, and replace it with a Communist-dominated government. Second, the United States had to establish an unconditional timetable for withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of what happened in subsequent negotiations or how long these might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Given the horrors that occurred when the Communists took over Indochina in 1975, it must be said that Nixon correctly summed up the choices before him when he rejected the 1969 terms.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
When negotiations stalemated, the Nixon administration moved to implement what could be done unilaterally without undermining the political structure of South Vietnam. Between 1969 and 1972, it withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90 percent.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In Vietnam, a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the all-out North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the United States mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by President Nixon in January 1972 - and decried as unachievable in the American domestic debate. He said that "this new proposal is exactly what President Nixon has himself proposed: cease-fire, end of the war, release of the prisoners and troop withdrawal, and we propose a number of principles on political problems. You have also proposed this. And we shall leave to the South Vietnamese parties the settlement of these questions."
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American disunity was the major factor in dashing these hopes.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp061107.html</ref></blockquote>

Kissinger has also been accused of an alleged lack of transparency. He has responded by donating all of his personal papers to the [[Library of Congress]] for posterity. He recently released some 20,000 pages of transcripts of his private conversations with various world leaders.<ref>http://staff.lib.msu.edu/harris23/red_tape/o&e0404.htm#kissenger</ref> Such transcripts were the basis for his 2003 book on foreign policy, ''Crisis.''

In 1976, Kissinger "declined to approve" that a letter be sent to Chile warning them against carrying out any political assassinations.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> In an Aug. 30, 1976 memo, Shlaudeman discussed the possibility that the U.S. ambassador in Uruguay might be endangered by delivering a warning against assassination. The U.S. ambassador to Chile said that Pinochet might take as an insult any inference that he was connected with assassination plots.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> When the CIA learned about the Chilean plan to set up a covert office in Miami as part of Chile's overseas operations in 1974, however, Kissinger did authorize the CIA to send the Chilean Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) a warning not to go ahead with the plan. He rejected the State Department's proposal to publicly rebuke Chile on the matter. As a result, the Chileans backed down.<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref> Kissinger's decision not to send the letter is considered a subject of controversy because Chile was engaging in a spree of international murders at the time (the day the letter was to be sent, a Pinochet critic was assassinated in [[Washington, D.C.]]).<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref>

Kissinger's alleged warm support of Pinochet is without much basis in fact; Kissinger and Ford began viewing Pinochet's regime as a serious Cold War liability as early as 1975 and the US engaged in repeated diplomatic confrontations with it from 1977 on.<ref>www.cepchile.cl/dms/archivo_3236_1698/r92_fermandois_ing.pdf Translated from Spanish</ref> The CIA warned that "internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys;" therefore, the US had a vested interest in moderating the way they behaved.

The moderate left-wing extremist [[Christopher Hitchens]] has accused Kissinger of bad faith, describing him as a "toady" of Nixon who "knows what to do" without "being asked." He has also condemned Kissinger's business ties with Indonesia, arguing that they influenced the US "tilt" in favor of Suharto during the war in East Timor.<ref>http://www.etan.org/et2002a/february/01-09/09ksngr.htm</ref> In a general sense, Kissinger responded to these and similar charges by stating:
<blockquote>
When I was a young professor in the fifties at Harvard, where 99.9% of the people on the faculty were Democrats—I can remember only one Republican that I knew—the people in political science had faculty meetings…No one ever attacked the government for being a criminal activity. Nobody said, ‘they like to go to war; they’re blood-dripping!’ Sometime in the sixties, the idea developed that the government itself was an evil enterprise, that they lied professionally to the American people, and that the purpose of intellectuals was to negate the government rather than be constructive...Everybody working in government goes through the long hours and all the other pressures [associated with the job] because he or she would like to make a contribution to a better world.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9vsCD0j3Ys</ref>
</blockquote>

''Contra'' Hitchens, Kissinger attempted to resign from the Nixon White House on at least three separate occasions<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref>--not exactly the sort of thing one would expect from a "toady."

Conrad Black has written that "Kissinger has sincere compassion for the victims of the grinding wheels of history," although "he tends to take his distance from the beleaguered...during their ordeals." On Vietnam, he maintains that Kissinger "toiled demiurgically for the war's end without a disaster, and his anger [at the Democrats and the media] is real and earned." The "claims of the demented left," that he committed "crimes against Cambodia or Chile" are "bunk."

===The Schneider Affair===
The main controversy over the American role in Chile was an alleged attempt on the life of Chilean general Rene Schneider in 1970, due to his support for the appointment of Allende. The Church hearings found that the CIA did in fact give weapons to a group of men who it knew had attacked him twice before, ostensibly as a test of loyalty so that the CIA would remain privy to their information, but that the weapons provided and the group thereby armed were not the ones who actually killed him. The weapons were returned unused to the CIA and then discarded in the Pacific Ocean.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> Schneider was assassinated by a rival group of right-wing extremists.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> On June 11, 1971, Kissinger and Nixon said the following in a private conversation:

: '''Kissinger''': —when they did try to assassinate somebody, it took three attempts—
: '''Nixon''': Yeah.
: '''Kissinger''': —and he lived for three weeks afterwards.<ref>http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/07/nixon_tape_reveals_oval_office.html</ref>

There are two possible interpretations of these remarks: a) Kissinger was telling the President that a military coup could not succeed in Chile because there were no officers both willing and ''able'' to carry one out; or b) the two men were mocking the CIA's squeamishness about killing Schneider.

According to ''Commentary,'' however, regardless of what they said in the aftermath (quoting from the Nixon Tapes):
<blockquote>
"Kissinger seems to have been unaware of the plot...Karamassines phoned the National Security Adviser who asked if he "cleared everything in advance with you. He said no, you were too busy." In the same private conversation, Kissinger remarks that, although he did not know about the second plot, he might have approved it. Then he adds: "I thought that after we turned off that one thing [the Viaux plot], nothing more had happened and in fact that other thing [the Schneider kidnapping] had happened."<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>
</blockquote>

Fermandois argues that not only did the CIA not play a role in his death, it never intended to. He argues that the CIA was quite shocked and caught completely by surprise at the news of Schneider's death: "We can see the desperation in the comments of the agents in Chile because they cannot control events. The history of those sixty days is an example of North American impotence, at least if we understand it as Washington manipulating events. All this has a somewhat macabre colophon. When Schneider was wounded in the kidnapping attempt (he died three days later), the agents in Chile believed that the coup was unfolding, since in the new state of affairs General Valenzuela was effectively the new head."<ref>www.cepchile.cl/dms/archivo_3236_1698/r92_fermandois_ing.pdf</ref>

Hitchens, (who has praised the "valiant guerillas" of the Viet Cong and who openly admires [[Vladimir Lenin]]) has gone further than most in his condemnation of Kissinger (he is renowned for his use of hyperbole). Although he acknowledges that the US refused to directly assist any military coup against Allende and instead sought to influence the Chilean Congress; he nevertheless asserts that Kissinger attempted to ''orchestrate'' a military coup against the Chilean government in 1970. He generates this conclusion by stating that the CIA attempted to kill Schneider in 1970; it planned to make his death appear to be the work of left-wing terrorists; it hoped that this would "inspire" the Chilean military to intervene against Allende; and Kissinger was directly and personally involved in approving all of these operations.<ref>http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/feb/24/pinochet.bookextracts Hitchens' citation-free rants contain many distortions, such as the idea that the CIA put a $50,000 tag on Schneider's head (this is not supported by the Church hearings) or the absolutely ridiculous claims he makes on Cyprus by delibrately misquoting Kissinger--so read at your own peril.</ref> Kissinger has refused to debate with Hitchens, saying "''I'm not going to deal with Christopher Hitchens,''" while his colleague [[Alexander Haig]] has called Hitchens "''a sewer pipe-sucker.''"

The death of Schneider had the opposite effect of what was intended by the Nixon administration--even as the CIA worked to buy off the Congress so as to prevent Allende's appointment, it ensured that the nation would rally behind the otherwise polarizing leader.

==Evaluation==
A smooth-talking, charming ''bon vivant,'' Kissinger was an international celebrity in high society, with the opposite personality of Nixon, yet they made a remarkably effective team with surprisingly little friction. They thought alike, and both could conceptualize and make plans for the complex interactions of international affairs. Neither was interested in economics, and only Nixon mastered the nitty gritty of politics and elections, while only Kissinger understood nuclear strategy.

Kissinger and Nixon were "realists" who deemphasized idealistic goals like anti-communism or promotion of democracy worldwide, because those goals were seen as too expensive in terms of America's economic capabilities. Instead of a Cold War they wanted peace, trade and cultural exchanges. Instead Nixon and Kissinger sought to downsize America's global commitments in proportion to its reduced economic, moral and political power. They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive; neither man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under Communism. Kissinger's realism fell out of fashion as idealism returned to American foreign policy with Carter's moralism emphasizing human rights, and Reagan's rollback strategy aimed at destroying Communism.

==Bibliography==

*Black, Conrad. ''Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full,'' PublicAffairs (2007), includes lengthy analysis of foreign policy.
* Bundy, William P. ''A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Web-Making-Foreign-Presidency/dp/186064273X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175404&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]
* Dallek, Robert. ''Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power'' (2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Nixon-Kissinger-Partners-Robert-Dallek/dp/0060722312/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], dual biography by leading scholar; hostile
* Garthoff, Raymond L. ''Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan '' (2nd ed. 1994) [http://www.amazon.com/Detente-Confrontation-American-Soviet-Relations-Reagan/dp/0815730411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175809&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], favorable analysis by proponent of detente
* Goh, Evelyn. ''Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961-1974: From "Red Menace" to "Tacit Ally."'' (2005). 299 pp.
* Goh, Evelyn. "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. Issn: 0145-2096 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "'Dr. Kissinger' or 'Mr. Henry'? Kissingerology, Thirty Years and Counting." ''Diplomatic History'' 2003 27(5): 637-676 full text at [[EBSCO]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "Ironies and Turning Points: Détente in Perspective," in Odd Arne Westad, ed. ''Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory'' (2000), pp 326-42; [http://www.amazon.com/Reviewing-Cold-War-Approaches-Interpretations/dp/0714681202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175936&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
*Horne, Alistair. "Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year" (2009); one of the best books on the man.
* Isaacson, Walter. ''Kissinger'' (1992); a major biography [http://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-Biography-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743286979/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577598&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Kuklick, Bruce. ''Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger.'' (2006). 241 pp. says nearly everyone with substantial academic credentials in the early Cold War decades was wrong nearly all the time.
* Litwak, Robert S. ''Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969-1976'' (1986)
* Macmillan, Margaret. ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)
* Mann, James. ''About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton'' (1999).
* Nelson, Keith L. ''The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam'' (1995)
* Qureshi, Lubna Zakia. "''"Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile'' (2009)
* Rodman, Peter. ''Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush,'' Knopf (2009).
* Ross, Robert S. ''Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989,'' Stanford University Press, 1995 [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=92018683 online edition]
* Schulzinger, Robert D. ''Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy.'' (1989).
* Serewicz, Lawrence W. ''America at the Brink of Empire: Rusk, Kissinger, And the Vietnam War'' (2007), stresses commitment to [[republicanism]] [http://www.amazon.com/America-Brink-Empire-Kissinger-Traditions/dp/0807131792/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-6 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=175941177686117 online review]
* Suri, Jeremi. ''Henry Kissinger and the American Century'' (2007), intellectual biography focused on pre-1969
* Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf. "Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China." ''Journal of American History'' 2005 92(1): 109-135. [http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/92.1/tucker.html in History Cooperative]
* Warner, Geoffrey. "Nixon, Kissinger and the Rapprochement with China, 1969-1972." ''International Affairs'' 2007 83(4): 763-781. Issn: 0020-5850 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Willbanks, James H. ''Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Abandoning-Vietnam-America-Left-South/dp/0700613315/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-15 excerpt and text search]

===Primary Sources===
* Kissinger, Henry. ''White House Years'' (1979). Nov. 1968-Jan. 1973; ''Years of Upheaval'' (1982). Jan. 1973 to Aug. 1974; ''Years of Renewal'' (1999), Aug. 1974 to Jan. 1977 [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Renewal-Henry-Kissinger/dp/075675383X/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-16 excerpt and text search vol 3]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political Thought of Metternich" ''The American Political Science Review,'' Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec., 1954), pp. 1017-1030 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1951008 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Congress of Vienna: A Reappraisal," ''World Politics,'' Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jan., 1956), pp. 264-280 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2008974 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22.'' (1957), his revised PhD dissertation.
* Kissinger, Henry. "Acceptance Speech" for The Nobel Peace Prize 1973 [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/kissinger-acceptance.html online edition]
* Kissinger, Henry. "Address to the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly," ''International Organization,'' Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer, 1974), pp. 573-583 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706310 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''American Foreign Policy'' (3rd ed. 1977), his speeches
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Kissinger Commission on Population and Development in Central America," ''Population and Development Review,'' Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 381-389 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1973103 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Diplomacy'' (1994) an interpretive history since 1815
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War'' (2003) [http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Vietnam-War-Involvement-Extrication/dp/074321532X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Haldeman, H. R. ''The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House'' (1994)
* Nixon, Richard. ''RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon'' (1981) [http://www.amazon.com/RN-Memoirs-Richard-Nixon/dp/0671707418/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577855&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]

==Online sources==
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB106/index.htm William Burr, ed. "Nixon's Trip to China Records now Completely Declassified, Including Kissinger Intelligence Briefing and Assurances on Taiwan" ''The National Security Archive'' (2003)]

== References ==
{{reflist|2}}
[[Category:Nobel laureates in Peace]]
[[Category:United States Secretaries of State]]
[[Category:Cold War]]
[[Category:United States History]]
{{DEFAULTSORT: Kissinger, Henry}}
[[category:diplomacy]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[Category:1960s]]
[[Category:Middle East]]
[[Category:American Jews]]
[[Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom award winners]]

Henry Kissinger

2013-03-20T11:43:38Z

JakeRMurrin: Improve sourcing and remove irrelevant commentary

[[Image:Kissinger Henry.jpg|frame|right]]
'''Henry Kissinger''' (1923- ), American statesman and exponent of "realism" in foreign policy; he dominated foreign policy in the the administrations of presidents [[Richard Nixon]] and [[Gerald Ford]], as [[Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs|National Security Advisor]] and [[United States Secretary of State|Secretary of State]], holding both positions for a time. He won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for reaching a peace that ended the [[Vietnam War]]. In close collaboration with Nixon, he created a '''[[détente]] policy''' that called for an end to the [[Cold War]] and for friendly relations with both the [[Soviet Union]] and [[China]]. His position on détente was rejected by [[Ronald Reagan]] in the 1976 campaign for the presidential nomination. But Reagan lost the election to Ford, and in turn Ford was defeated by Democrat [[Jimmy Carter]], as Kissinger retired to write his highly revealing memoirs and consult for businesses worldwide.
==Life==
Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923 to a middle class Jewish family. They fled Nazi persecution, and arrived in New York in 1938, where he changed his first name from Heinz to Henry and rapidly Americanized in everything except his thick accent. He attended public schools and City University before being drafted at age 19. He returned to Europe during World War II fighting with the U.S. Army; he was in the infantry at first, but his heroism, courage, and daring got him promoted to intelligence. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1946. He spent a year as a civilian instructor in ''de-Nazification'' at an Army school in Germany; charged with de-Nazifying a German town, he did so with remarkable ease. He had power and responsibility far beyond his years because of his intelligence, his energy, and his commitment to opposing the Nazis.

In the army, Kissinger was informally tutored by Fritz Kraemer, a fellow refugee with two PhD's. In 1950 Kissinger earned his B.A. ''summa cum laude'' at Harvard with a 377 page essay on "The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant."<ref> William Y. Elliott was his director but only read half of it; the Government Department thereupon ruled that future senior theses could not exceed 40,000 words.</ref> He finished his Ph.D. in 1956 at Harvard, with a dissertation on "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars.

He married Ann Fleischer in 1949 and was divorced in 1964. There were two children, Elizabeth and David. In 1974 he married Nancy Maginnes.

==Harvard professor==
Kissinger became a full professor in Harvard's Department of Government in 1962. As the director of Harvard's University Summer International Seminar, 1952-69, he brought in nearly 700 young European and Asian scholars, many of whom became high officials in their own country. Kissinger met practically every intellectual in international relations at home and abroad.

Kissinger was eager to serve on national commissions. He served as Study Director, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, for the Council of Foreign Relations from 1955 to 1956; Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 to 1958; and Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program from 1958 to 1971. He resigned from Harvard in January 1971 when his two-year leave of absence expired.

In 1957 Kissinger published ''Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,'' which proposed a flexible defense posture, including provision for "limited warfare" and the strategic employment of nuclear weapons as an alternative to the doctrine of "massive retaliation" against direct foreign aggression, which dominated military thinking during the mid-1950s. The book brought Kissinger to national attention, and he became an mid-level advisor on security questions under presidents [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]], [[John F. Kennedy]], and [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]; he was foreign policy advisor in [[Nelson Rockefeller]]'s 1968 quest for the Republican party nomination, but Nixon won the nomination and Kissinger switched to the winner.

Kissinger was consultant to the Department of State (1965-68), United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1961-68), Rand Corporation (1961-68), [[National Security Council]] (1961-62), Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1959-60), Operations Coordinating Board (1955), Director of the Psychological Strategy Board (1952), Operations Research Office (1951), and Chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1983-84). In 2001 he was not appointed to head the commission studying the [[9-11 Attack]] because he was too controversial.

==National Security Advisor and Secretary of State==
In 1969 Nixon appointed him his top advisor on foreign affairs as "Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs" )or "National Security Advisor") in charge of the [[National Security Council]] staff, which he made his base of power. He and Nixon largely ignored the State Department in setting the main lines of foreign policy. In 1973, Kissinger gained the additional role as secretary of state. He was the only person ever to hold the two top national security roles at the same time, and in 1975 he was replaced as head of the NSC.

Kissinger's approach to foreign policy was shaped by his vision of world peace achieved through a global balance of power; and accordingly Kissinger believed that effective U.S. diplomacy needed to be backed by force and guided by the pragmatism of Realpolitik rather than by high ideals and abstract causes. In practice his diplomacy, which mixed a highly visible, personal style with secret, behind-the-scenes maneuverings, was marked by bold, often controversial, initiatives and by frequent travel between world capitals in what came to be known as "shuttle diplomacy".
===Nuclear strategy===
On taling office Nixon and Kissinger were briefed on the US nuclear war plan, the [[Single Integrated Operational Plan]] (SIOP). Appalled by the catastrophic scale of the SIOP, Nixon and Kissinger sought military options that were more credible than massive nuclear strikes. Participants in the Air Force Nuclear Options project also supported more flexible nuclear war plans. Although Kissinger repeatedly asked Defense Department officials to construct limited options, they were skeptical that it would be possible to control nuclear escalation or to introduce greater flexibility without weakening the SIOP. Interagency studies presented a mixed verdict about the desirability of limited options; nevertheless, continued White House pressure encouraged Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to sponsor a major review of nuclear targeting. In 1972 the John Foster panel developed concepts of limited, selective, and regional nuclear options that were responsive to Kissinger's interest in credible nuclear threats. The Foster panel's report led to the controversial "Schlesinger Doctrine" and further efforts to revise the SIOP, but serious questions endured about the whole concept of controlled nuclear warfare.<ref> William Burr, "The Nixon Administration, the 'Horror Strategy,' and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969-1972: Prelude to the Schlesinger Doctrine." ''Journal of Cold War Studies'' 2005 7(3): 34-78. Issn: 1520-3972 Fulltext: [[Project Muse]]; Aaron L. Friedberg, "A History of U.S. Strategic 'Doctrine'—1945 to 1980," ''Journal of Strategic Studies,'' Vol. 3, No. 4 (December 1980), pp. 37-71; Scott Sagan, ''Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security'' (1989). </ref>
===Détente with Soviet Union and China===
Kissinger's first priority in office was the achievement of détente with the Soviet Union and China, and playing them off against each other . Recognizing and accepting the Soviet Union as a superpower, Kissinger sought both to maintain U.S. military strength and to inaugurate peaceful economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges to engage the Soviet Union in the international system. This policy flourished under Kissinger's direction and led in 1972 to the signing of the first [[Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty]] (SALT I). At the same time Kissinger successfully engineered a rapprochement with Communist China, leading to the astonishing news in 1971 that Nixon would visit China, which he and Kissinger did in 1972.<ref> Margaret Macmillan, ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)</ref>

Aware that China and the Soviet Union were at sword's point, with rival claims to be the true Communists, Kissinger used the "Soviet card" to win over China by playing up the Soviet threat to the Chinese as a way of promoting closer relations with China. He even hinted at a US-China alliance to oppose the Soviets, and, with Nixon's trips to Moscow, hinted that China had better come to terms lest the US form an alliance with Moscow. The tactics worked, resulting in a friendly relationship with both Beijing and Moscow. As part of the détente, both powers reduced or ended their aid to North Vietnam, thus allowing a settlement of the [[Vietnam War]].<ref>Evelyn Goh, "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. </ref>

"In the Soviet Union, there is really nobody left who has any memory of an entrepreneurial tradition," said Kissinger. "In China, there are many people left who participated in Chinese entrepreneurial life." He believed that a Sino-US alliance to oppose Soviet aggression could encourage internal reform within the Chinese system while promoting a more peaceful international order. After China made such reforms, hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty.<ref>http://www.huliq.com/37702/rising-economic-growth-in-china-india-contributes-to-food-inflation "...hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty in the past few decades"</ref>

===Vietnam===
Kissinger worked to achieve a disengagement of U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam. He promoted Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization," aimed at turning the burden of actual combat over to the South Vietnamese, with repeated shows of U.S. air strength, notably in the bombings of Cambodia and North Vietnam. Kissinger met secretly with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris from 1969 on, finally concluding a cease-fire in January 1973, for which he and chief North Vietnamese negotiator [[Le Duc Tho]] were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Later rumors to the effect that Kissinger knew the South Vietnamese government was too weak to survive long were wrong; Kissinger and Nixon had built South Vietnam into one of the strongest militaries in Asia--much stronger than the North Vietnamese--and they had stripped away much of Hanoi's support from Moscow and Beijing. The problem was that Saigon put all its future on the continuation of Nixon in office and his promises to intervene militarily if necessary. Nixon collapsed unexpectedly (because of Watergate) and his personal promises were gone. Saigon despaired and desperately fought back when Hanoi did invade in 1975, after Nixon was gone and Congress forbad further American intervention.

Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city. Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos. President Ford's prediction that the Khmer Rouge would murder at least one million people<ref>Washington Post, June 4, 23, 1975</ref> was laughed off by liberal reporters. Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "''She Was Poor But She Was Honest''": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2 From an important study by genocide survivor Sophal Ear. Note that the source is, of all people, William Shawcross.</ref>

In one of [[Vietnam_War#Aftermath| the largest mass killings since the Nazi Holocaust]], the victorious Communists murdered 3-4 million people throughout Indochina, including over 2 million killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia alone.

===Middle East===
One challenge to détente under Kissinger came with the outbreak of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Faced with a threat of Soviet intervention, Kissinger successfully urged that U.S. forces be placed on worldwide alert. With Israel facing possible defeat at the hands of the Arab aggressors, President Nixon launched the largest airlift in military history to replenish Israel's stocks (the left would condemn his actions no matter how big or how small, Nixon said, so "''let's make it big''"). Kissinger had urged Nixon to delay the airlift so as to let Israel "bleed a little", in the hopes that a badly bruised Israel would be more pliable to concessions in post-war negotiations, but Nixon refused.

When the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army at the end of the war, Kissinger believed that the United States had a tremendous opportunity. Egypt was now dependent on solely the United States for the survival of its Third Army, and Kissinger hoped that the United States could mediate the dispute and wean Egypt from Soviet influence. As a result, he exerted intense pressure on Israel not to destroy the Third Army and to allow it to receive non-military supplies. Among other things, he threatened that the United States would resupply the Third Army by helicopter, support a UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal to positions held before the Third Army's encirclement, and falsely told the Israelis that the Soviet Union had threatened to intervene over the Third Army.

Kissinger then employed shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and the Arab states and to restore U.S.-Egyptian diplomatic ties, broken since 1967. Kissinger's goal was to drive the Soviets out of Egypt by showing the Egyptians that only the United States could persuade Israel to make concessions. The US assisted in a vast rescue operation conducted by Israeli forces to save Egyptian troops stranded in the Sinai.<ref>The Times, UK, June 15, 1967.</ref> US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt continued past Nixon's term. Though negotiations were tough, with both sides sometimes intransigent, President Ford ended up securing the first peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, which would be finalized under President Carter. In turn, [[Jordan]] felt compelled to reach a separate peace, which resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994.

Kissinger and Nixon approved a covert [[CIA]] campaign of subversion and sabotage designed to bring down the Socialist government of [[Iraq]] in 1973. Done in collaboration with the [[Shah]] of neighboring [[Iran]], it involved Soviet arms captured from Egypt and [[Syria]] in the 1973 war being dispatched to Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. The Shah cynically used the Kurds to pressure the Ba'athist government to back down on a number of serious territorial disputes between the two nations. The US brokered a peace treaty between Iraq and Iran in 1975, and aid to the Kurds was subsequently cut off. The Kurds were then viciously slaughtered. "''Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,''" Kissinger famously declared.<ref>http://www.slate.com/id/2156400/</ref>

Kissinger helped to diffuse sectarian conflicts in [[Lebanon]] in order to prevent a possible regional war, and opposed the Soviet-backed attempt by Communist forces to conquer North [[Yemen]] (which was the recipient of much US aid).

On 20 July 1974, [[Turkey]] invaded northern [[Cyprus]], overthrew its Greek-backed dictatorship (headed by Nikos Sampson), and installed a new regime. This led to the collapse of the Greek military junta, and the restoration of democracy in Greece, three days later--July 23, 1974. Sampson had been brought to power by the Greek Cypriot national guard (acting under the orders of Athens), which ousted the elected president, Makarios; Turkey removed him from power after a mere eight days in office. "Had Turkey not intervened," Sampson told the Greek newspaper Eleftherotipia, "I would not only have proclaimed Enosis [union of Cyprus with Greece] but I would have annihilated the Turks in Cyprus as well."<ref>http://www.britains-smallwars.com/cyprus/Most%20wanted/most%20wanted%20files/EOKA_Members_List_s.html</ref> Turkey took control of one-third of the country. Civilian casualties were remarkably light. Turkey restored democracy to Cyprus, and new elections brought Glafcos Clerides to power. President Makarios, in his speech to the UN Security Council on 19 July 1974, described the coup that replaced him as "an invasion of Cyprus by Greece."

Both the Turks and the Greeks committed indiscriminate ethnic cleansing against the other side. <ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR01.html 1st Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (20 July 1974 - 18 May 1976)</ref><ref>http://www.hr-action.org/chr/ECHR02.html 2nd Report of the European Commission of Human Rights; Turkey's intervention in Cyprus and aftermath (19 May 1976 to 10 February 1983)</ref> Facts and information on the death and the burial site of 201 out of 500 cases of Turkish Cypriot "missing" persons were provided by the Cyprus government on 12 May 2003. A typical report stated:
<blockquote>
In a Greek raid on a small Turkish village near Limassol, 36 people out of a population of 200 were killed. The Greeks said that they had been given orders to kill the inhabitants of the Turkish villages before the Turkish forces arrived.<ref>Washington Post, 23 July 1974
</ref>
</blockquote>

Numerous studies reported accounts of "anti-Turkish pograms," hostage taking, and mass murder.

Kissinger approved of the Turkish invasion, viewing the Greek junta as a Cold War liability.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/NATO_Joseph_Luns_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger had resolved to find a solution to the Cyprus problem in May 1974.<ref>http://www.kypros.org/Occupied_Cyprus/cyprus1974/images/Dept_Of_State_Kissinger_700_bg.jpg</ref> Kissinger intervened to prevent a planned British military response to the second phase of the Turkish invasion in order to avoid a war between the two American allies.

Some 70,000 Turkish civilians were displaced by the Greeks. It is estimated by independant sources that 140,000 to 160,000<ref>Borowiec, Andrew (2000), Cyprus: A Troubled Island. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp2</ref> Greek civilians were displaced by the Turkish invaders. Only 20,000 Greeks remained in the north. Five Americans disappeared during the Turkish invasion.

===Latin America===
The Nixon administration sought to protect the economic and commercial interests of the United States during a period of heightened Latin American nationalism and expropriations, 1969-74. Though the administration initially adopted a flexible policy toward Latin American governments that nationalized American corporations' assets, the influence of Nixon's economic ideology, domestic political pressures, and the advice of Secretary of the Treasury [[John Connally]], led to a more confrontational stance toward Latin American countries. As the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and Kissinger had warned, however, Latin American countries took an even more anti-US stance and expropriated even more assets. Nixon's "get tough" stance, therefore, had a negative effect on American credibility and influence in the hemisphere.<ref>Hal Brands, "Richard Nixon and Economic Nationalism in Latin America: the Problem of Expropriations, 1969-1974." ''Diplomacy & Statecraft'' 2007 18(1): 215-235. Issn: 0959-2296 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref>

The ''de facto'' Communist dictatorship in [[Chile]] headed by [[Salvador Allende]] (originally elected in 1970 with a minority of the vote) presented a major obstacle to American interests in the region.

The CIA, as recounted in the Church Committee report, was involved in various plots designed to remove Allende and then let the Chileans vote in a new election where he would not be a candidate: It tried to buy off the Chilean Congress to prevent his appointment, worked to sway public opinion against him to prevent his election, and financed protests designed to bring the country to a stand-still and make him resign.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> Convinced that a conventional military uprising was still not possible in Chile, the CIA, acting with the approval of the 40 Committee—the body charged with overseeing covert actions abroad—devised what in effect was a constitutional coup. The most expeditious way to prevent Allende from assuming office was somehow to convince the Chilean congress to confirm Alessandri as the winner of the election. Once elected by the congress, Alessandri—a party to the plot through intermediaries—was prepared to resign his presidency within a matter of days so that new elections could be held.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> The CIA also learned of a number of plots to establish a military dictatorship. Although it pointedly refused to materially assist any of them, and actually intervened to prevent one of the plots for fear it would fail and strengthen Allende; it also encouraged several of the plots and did nothing to prevent them. It assured the plotters that such an event would be welcomed in Washington and that the US would not cut off aid over potential human rights violations.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> In addition, the CIA provided funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973. Though the CIA maintained contact with a notorious right-wing extremist named Roberto Viaux, Nixon and Kissinger, recognizing that "nothing could be worse than an abortive coup," repeatedly relayed messages to him urging restraint and went to great lengths to deter him from staging a coup.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>

The extent of Kissinger's involvement in or support of these plans is a subject of controversy.

Although the US considered economic sanctions against the Allende regime, it never actually implemented them. Although Latin Americans viewed the US as omnipotent, future Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet mocked it as a paper tiger and felt free to launch terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., during his reign. The US ended up giving more aid to Allende's Chile than any of the prior administrations. The US worked to diffuse potential coups that it had once warmly encouraged, fearing that it would be blamed if they failed. Though hesitant and uneasy, the CIA vowed to "continue to put pressure on every Allende weak spot" even after his appointment. The CIA had warned that the odds of either a military or a constitutional coup succeeding were one in twenty; after they both failed to occur in 1970, US policy shifted towards maintaining a democratic opposition to the Allende regime.

US intelligence reports implicated Allende in the assassination of several opponents,<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf Includes discussion of intelligence reports of Allende-backed hit jobs; note that Cuban intelligence reached the same conclusion--hence the infamous "packages" scandal.</ref> while KGB files smuggled out of Russia by Vasily Mitrokhin indicate that Allende received funds from the Soviet Union.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Allende was formally condemned by Chile's parliament for systematically destroying democracy in Chile.<ref>“Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy,” Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies, Chile, August 22, 1973.</ref> The Chilean Chamber of Deputies Resolution of August 22, 1973, accused Allende of support of armed groups, torture, illegal arrests, muzzling the press, confiscating private property, and not allowing people to leave the country. In the infamous "Cuban Packages Scandal" that precipitated the coup, large quantities of weapons were sent from Castro's Cuba to arm pro-Allende terrorists in Chile.<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/219461/pinochet-history/nro-symposium</ref> Kissinger privately told Nixon that Allende might declare martial law.<ref>http://nixontapeaudio.org/chile/517-004.pdf</ref> By 1973, as a result of covert US aid to Chilean dissidents and financing of pro-democracy protestors, US intelligence indicated Allende would likely lose the next Chilean election if it was held.<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> According to ''The Wall Street Journal,'' faced with illegal seizures of farms and factories, of defiance of judicial orders, unchecked street violence and death threats against the judges themselves, the Supreme Court warned on May 26, 1973, in a unanimous and unprecedented message, that Chile faced "a peremptory or imminent breakdown of legality."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref> Inflation reached 1,000%. Volodia Teitelboim, the chief ideologue of the Communist Party in Chile, declared that if civil war came, "it probably would signify immense loss of human lives, between half a million and one million."<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

On September 11, 1973, Allende committed suicide during a military coup launched by Army Commander-in-Chief [[Augusto Pinochet]], who became President. Allende's policies had turned the country into a dictatorship that would kill thousands.

On September 16, 1973, the following exchange about the coup took place between Kissinger and President Nixon:

: '''Nixon''': Nothing new of any importance or is there?
: '''Kissinger''': Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
: '''Nixon''': Isn't that something. Isn't that something.
: '''Kissinger''': I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
: '''Nixon''': Well we didn't – as you know – our hand doesn't show on this one though.
: '''Kissinger''': We didn't do it. I mean we helped them....created the conditions as great as possible.
: '''Nixon''': That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played.<ref>[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/chile.htm The Kissinger Telcons: Kissinger Telcons on Chile], National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123, edited by Peter Kornbluh, posted May 26, 2004. This particular dialogue can be found at [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB123/Box%2022,%20File%203,%20Telcon,%209-16-73%2011,50%20Mr.%20Kissinger-The%20Pres%202.pdf TELCON: September 16, 1973, 11:50 a.m. Kissinger Talking to Nixon]. Retrieved November 26, 2006.</ref>

Kissinger is clearly telling the President that any direct US role in such a coup would be abhorrent but that the coup itself was preferable to a Communist take-over (with both agreeing that the US did not assist the plot).

On June 8, 1976, Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago, telling him: "''My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.''"<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref>

Using its leverage over Pinochet to curtail Chilean human rights abuses, the US simultaneously pressured Chile to introduce a series of free market economic reforms, a process that escalated sharply in the eighties. This led to a period of rapid economic expansion and development without precedent in Latin America, in which growth averaged 7% annually, that came to be known as the "''miracle of Chile''" (it also included the region's greatest reductions in infant mortality<ref>Nick Eberstadt, The Poverty of Communism (Transaction Publishers, 1990), pp188,
196-206, 240-6, in which he discusses living standards in Communist Cuba versus Pinochet's Chile.</ref>). In turn, this allowed Chile to make a long-term transition to sustainable democratic rule that would likely have been otherwise inconceivable.<ref>http://www.lyd.com/noticias/violencia/what_really.html</ref>

In [[Argentina]], the Socialist government of [[Isabel Perón]] had been persuaded to declare a state of emergency (suspending, among other rights, ''Habeas Corpus'') on February 5, 1975. Drafted so they may (in her words) "annihilate the subversives," the decree led to ''Operativo Independencia'', a military campaign notorious for the brutality it exacted on not only the violent; but also elected officials, magistrates and University of Tucumán faculty (even secondary school teachers). The Peronists' own political mainstay (the labor movement) was also subject to the "subversive" labels and consequent reprisals. The country plunged into a low-level civil war. Fighting between Communist and anti-Communist forces claimed nearly 1,000 lives, with widespread social chaos and inflation peaking at 33%, before the Argentine military, led by Jorge Videla, deposed Perón on March 24, 1976.

As the new regime consolidated power, launching brutal reprisals and "disappearances" against political opponents, Kissinger took a similar line as he had toward Chile. During a meeting with Argentine foreign minister César Augusto Guzzetti, Kissinger assured him that the United States was an ally, but urged him to ''"get back to normal procedures"'' quickly before the U.S. Congress reconvened and had a chance to consider sanctions. The US cut-off aid in 1977 due to human rights violations.

Nixon sought a "special relationship" with [[Brazil]], and proposed a direct line of communication between the Brazilian and American Presidents. He appointed Kissinger to serve as a "special representative" to Brazil.

In [[Cuba]], Kissinger supported a renewal of diplomatic relations and cultural exchange with the [[Castro]] regime. Although President Ford repeatedly reached out to the Cubans; their military interventions in [[Angola]], [[Mozambique]], and [[Ethiopia]] destroyed Kissinger's hopes.

===South Asia===
During the South Asian crisis in 1971, the White House stood firmly behind Pakistani president Yahya Khan and demonstrated a disdain for India and particularly its leader, [[Indira Gandhi]], because of India's tilt or favoritism towards the Soviet Union. Kissinger had disdain for India and was using Pakistan as a tool to reach China, which he considered much more important to the U.S.

Khan's administration was responding to an insurrection launched by Communist guerillas (the ''Awami League''), armed with Indian weapons and demanding independence for East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), with a massive campaign of violence dubbed "''Operation Searchlight.''" India was exploiting these internal tensions within Pakistan as part of a divide-and-rule strategy; it hoped for Pakistan's division into smaller Indian proxy states that could be played against one another and it used the violence committed by Pakistani forces as a possible pretext for military intervention in Pakistani affairs.

Nixon relayed messages to Yahya, urging him to restrain Pakistani forces.<ref>Black, Conrad, Richard Nixon: A Life in Full (2007), p. 751.</ref> His objective was to prevent a war and safeguard Pakistan's interests, though he feared an Indian invasion of West Pakistan that would lead to Indian domination of the sub-continent and strengthen the position of the [[Soviet Union]].<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,877618-2,00.html</ref> Similarly, Yahya Khan feared that an independent Bangladesh could lead to the disintegration of Pakistan. Indian military support for Bengali guerillas led to war between India and Pakistan.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,878408,00.html</ref>

Nixon met with Indian Prime Minister [[Indira Gandhi]] and did not believe her assertion that she would not invade Pakistan;<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 752</ref> he did not trust her and once referred to her as an "old witch". Kissinger maintained that Nixon made specific proposals to Gandhi on a solution for the crisis, some of which she heard for the first time; for example, mutual withdrawal of troops from the Indo-East Pakistan borders. Nixon also expressed a wish to fix a time limit with Yahya for political accommodation in East Pakistan. Nixon asserted that India could count on US endeavors to ease the crisis within a short time. But, both Kissinger and Gandhi aide Jayakar maintained, Gandhi did not respond to these proposals. Kissinger noted that she “listened to what was in fact one of Nixon's better presentations with aloof indifference” but “took up none of the points.” Jayakar pointed out that Gandhi listened to Nixon “without a single comment, creating an impregnable space so that no real contact was possible.” She also refrained from assuring that India would follow Pakistan's suit if it withdrew from India's borders. As a result, the main agenda was “dropped altogether.”<ref>Jayakar, Indira Gandhi, p. 232; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 878 & 881-82.
</ref> On December 3, Yahya preemptively attacked the Indian Air Force and Gandhi retaliated, pushing into East Pakistan.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 753.</ref> Nixon issued a statement blaming Pakistan for starting the conflict and blaming India for escalating it, because he favored a cease-fire.<ref>Black, Conrad (2007), p. 755.</ref> The United States was secretly encouraging the shipment of military equipment from [[Iran]], [[Turkey]], and [[Jordan]] to Pakistan, reimbursing those countries despite Congressional objections.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB79/</ref> The US used the threat of an aid cut-off to force Pakistan to back down, while its continued military aid to Islamabad prevented India from launching incursions deeper into the country. A cease fire was reached on December 16, leading to the creation of the independent state of [[Bangladesh]]. Sheikh Mujib led the newly established People's Republic of Bangladesh as a one-party, dictatorial state.

A 2008 study in the ''British Medical Journal'' concluded that 269,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the war.<ref>http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/269000_died_in_Bangladesh_war/articleshow/3147513.cms</ref> Reportedly, as many as 200,000 Bengali women were raped.

The US remained hostile to the Mujib regime, and considered Mujib himself to be a demagogue. His government's mismanagement of food grain stocks ultimately caused a massive famine in Bangladesh from March to December 1974, leading to the death of more than one million people. During this famine, Mujib rejected food aid from the United States and exported food to [[Cuba]]. By the time Mujib agreed to end support for Cuba, and the US began shipments of food to Bangladesh, it was 'too late for famine victims'.<ref>http://www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/opinions/dsharma/faminecommerce.htm</ref> In addition, his regime committed widespread human rights violations and tortured and executed thousands of dissidents. Nixon and Kissinger argued that these atrocities were far worse than anything Pakistan had committed in Bangladesh.

===Africa===
In the Angolan Civil War, the Communist MPLA (''People's Movement for the Liberation of [[Angola]]'') government was pitted against various right-wing insurgencies as well as an invasion from [[South Africa]]. The CIA covertly attempted to overthrow the MPLA dictatorship in 1975,<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c35COXObeo8&feature=fvw Former CIA head in Angola discusses the operation on CNN</ref> but Cuba militarily intervened to save the regime from certain collapse. The Communist government subsequently killed up to one million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999</ref> The U.S., advised by Kissinger, supported the rebels FNLA (''National Front for the Liberation of Angola''), led by Holden Roberto, and UNITA (''National Union for the Total Independence of Angola''), led by [[Jonas Savimbi]], as well as the ''Mozambican National Resistance'' (RENAMO), and the invasion of Angola by South African troops. The FNLA was defeated and UNITA was forced to take its fight into the bush. Only under Reagan's presidency would U.S. support for UNITA return. (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Angola would be plagued for decades with constant civil war. In 1992, blatantly rigged elections were held with next to no international supervision, in which MPLA claimed victory. After 500,000 UNITA voters were disenfranchised, UNITA sent a peace delegation to the capital; all of its members, along with 20,000 civilian supporters, were brutally massacred.<ref>National Society for Human Rights, Ending the Angolan Conflict, Windhoek, Namibia, July 3, 2000</ref> Nevertheless, Savimbi remained supportive of the elections, until the MPLA systematically exterminated many tens of thousands of UNITA supporters throughout the country. Human rights observers have accused the MPLA of "genocidal atrocities," "systematic extermination," "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity."<ref>Namibia's National Human Rights Organisation, Press Releases, September 12, 2000, May 16, 2001</ref>

The Democrats in Congress cut off aid to UNITA under President Ford, just as they abandoned South Vietnam and Cambodia to murderous Communist bloodbath. "''A great nation cannot escape its responsibilities,''" Ford admonished them. Emboldened, Cuba would soon militarily intervene on behalf of the Communist dictatorship in [[Ethiopia]], which killed 1.25 million people through massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Washington Post, March 18, 1978; New York Times, December 14, 1994.</ref>

The Nixon White House staunchly opposed the maniacal tyrant [[Idi Amin]] of [[Uganda]], who slaughtered 100-500,000 innocent people and ethnically cleansed<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/7/newsid_2492000/2492333.stm</ref> Uganda of all Asians. Amin was armed almost exclusively by the [[Soviet Union]] and [[Libya]]. The US urged Americans to evacuate the country, and began developing contingency plans to combat the regime's threatening posture in 1972.<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> Ambassador Thomas P. Melady described the Amin regime as "racist, erratic, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, militaristic, and, above all, xenophobic."<ref>http://www.paperlessarchives.com/idi_amin.html</ref> The British, fearful of a massacre, sought American help in preparing the logistics for an evacuation of the 7,000 British subjects in the country, should it prove neccessary.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,906445-3,00.html</ref> Kissinger and Nixon agreed. On September 24, 1972, they had the following conversation:

: '''Nixon''': Isn’t a person a person, goddamnit? You know, they talk about Vietnam, ‘these people far away that we don’t know,’ and you remember Chamberlain talking about the Czechs, that they’re far away and we don’t know them very well? Well, goddamnit, people are people! … I’m getting tired of this business of letting these Africans beat a hundred thousand people to death and do nothing about it.
: '''Kissinger''': And all these bleeding hearts in this country who say we like to kill yellow people…
: '''Nixon''': That’s right!
: '''Kissinger''': There haven’t been as many killed [by the US military] in eight years of the war than were killed in three months in Burundi.
: '''Nixon''': …They’re talking about how many we have bombed in the North. And I told your staff to get the figures for me: How many South Vietnamese or anti-Communist North Vietnamese have been killed by the North Vietnamese government? Civilians! How many? It’s ''unbelievable''! Nobody gives a damn! … We need a new African policy. We shouldn’t have 42 ambassadors to these goddamn countries. Looking at Uganda, ''of course'' we have to help those 7,000 people!<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kph0lygo40</ref>

Amin was deposed by the armed forces of [[Tanzania]] on April 11, 1979.

===South East Asia===
Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan1.pdf</ref> To combat this dangerous expansionism, Kissinger closely aligned the United States with anti-Communist nations in the area, such as [[Suharto]]'s [[Indonesia]], which was once described as ''the greatest prize in Asia.'' As tens of thousands fled a Communist take-over in the small island of [[East Timor]] under horrible conditions following a civil war that resulted in the death or displacement of 9,000 individuals; Ford and Kissinger gave Suharto their approval to annex East Timor and remove the Soviet-backed Communist government.<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf</ref> Over the 24-year occupation; some 140,000<ref>http://www.cavr-timorleste.org/en/Brief.htm</ref> East Timorese soldiers and civilians were killed by all sides, out of a population of less than a million. In 1975, 49% of all violent killings in East Timor were the work of the Communist (FRETELIN) resistance.<ref>http://www.ictj.org/static/Timor.CAVR.English/07.2_Unlawful_Killings_and_Enforced_Disappearances.pdf</ref> Although Congress wanted to stop arm sales to Indonesia, the Ford administration manipulated them by agreeing to an aid cut-off that was never actually implemented. In his own words, "Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law."<ref>http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/#29</ref>

Kissinger also worked to maintain good relations with [[Thailand]]. In order to prevent Communist hegemony in the area, he sought to deliberately provoke tension between the Vietnamese Stalinists and their Maoist comrades in Phnom Penh. In a 1975 meeting, he told Thailand's foreign minister: "We don't mind Chinese influence in Cambodia to balance North Vietnam. As I told the Chinese when we last met when we were discussing the Vietnamese victory in Indochina, it is possible to have an ideological victory which is a geopolitical defeat. The Chinese did not disagree with me."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/kissinger_chatichai.htm</ref>

In the end, Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia for more than a decade (killing many hundreds of thousands in the process<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref>). Bogged down in an endless guerilla war regularly dubbed ''Vietnam's Vietnam'' in the American press, Communist Vietnam was unable to advance its expansionist objectives abroad; as a result, no more dominos fell in the area.

===Personal Advice to Nixon===
In an April 17, 1973 conversation, Nixon told Kissinger that he was considering whether or not to resign and let [[Spiro Agnew]] take the Presidency, to which Kissinger responded: "''With all due respect, Mr. President, that is out of the question. That cannot be considered....Why should you do it? What good would it do? Whom would it help? It wouldn’t help the country; it wouldn’t help any of the individuals involved….and, of course, it would be personally unjust.''" He also asked him to consider what it would do to weaken the institution of the Presidency.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri3He6n1Dv4</ref>

===Losing power===
Despite his real accomplishments, Kissinger's tenure was marked by much controversy. Revelations of his knowledge of Nixon's secret bombings in [[Cambodia]] in 1969 and the U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970 stirred particularly strong hatreds on the left, as did later discoveries that he had authorized wiretaps aimed at stopping leaks of classified information.

Much more serious, however, was the attack from the right by Ronald Reagan, who rejected détente with the Soviets as a viable strategy, warning that the Soviets would see it as a sign of American weaknesses and mobilize its Third World allies to subvert pro-American governments wherever it could and expand Soviet influence. Reagan's analysis proved correct and Ford was forced to reduce Kissinger's role, taking away in 1975 Kissinger's double role as National Security Advisor.

In 1976 Ford was challenged by [[Ronald Reagan]] for the GOP nomination. Ford won a very long, close and intensely fought battle. Attacks on détente policy was the focus of Reagan's campaign as the GOP moved to the right on foreign policy. President [[Jimmy Carter]], however, did not recognize the failure of détente until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 destroyed that policy and reopened the [[Cold War]] at a more intense level.

Kissinger remained on as secretary of state until the end of the Ford term in January 1977.

==Retirement==
Out of office Kissinger became a highly visible corporate consultant on world affairs, and wrote his detailed and insightful memoirs. His advice has been sought out by every President since his retirement, and he was one of President [[George W. Bush]]'s most-frequent advisors on the [[Iraq War]]. He also helped design the Bush administration's opening to [[India]] in the wake of the War on Terror.

Kissinger has met with Russian leader [[Vladimir Putin]] on several occasions in an attempt to buttress US-Russian relations. Noting that the US has no border with Russia nor designs on Russian territory, as well as Russia's frontiers with both the Islamic world and China; Kissinger believes that the United States and Russia have compatible interests.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/0,28804,1690753_1690757_1691285-1,00.html></ref> He is apparently well-liked by some in the Russian press.<ref>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/europe/07russiasumm.html?_r=1 Although Russian TV calls him a "war criminal" due to his imaginary crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia.</ref>

Kissinger has strongly supported the foreign policy of President Bush, writing:

<blockquote>
Extraordinary advances of democracy have occurred in recent months: elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and Palestine; local elections in Saudi Arabia; Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; the opening up of the presidential election in Egypt; and upheavals against entrenched authoritarians in Kyrgyzstan. This welcome trend was partly triggered by President Bush’s Middle East policy and accelerated by his second inaugural address, which elevated the progress of freedom in the world to the defining objective of U.S. foreign policy.

Pundits have interpreted these events as a victory of “idealists” over “realists” in the debate over conduct of American foreign policy. In fact, the United States is probably the only country in which “realist” can be used as a pejorative epithet. No serious realist should claim that power is its own justification. No idealist should imply that power is irrelevant to the spread of ideals. The real issue is to establish a sense of proportion between these two essential elements of policy. Overemphasis of either leads to stagnation or overextension.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp051605.html</ref>
</blockquote>

He added in a seperate piece:
<blockquote>
President Bush's visit has brought relations between India and the United States to an unprecedented level of cooperation and interdependence, which promises to make a seminal contribution to international peace and prosperity.
</blockquote>

Kissinger believes that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be worse than the consequences of defeat in Vietnam.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref>

Kissinger returned to teaching for a time after he left office, and today gives eloquent lectures and speeches across the United States. He has appeared regularly on a wide range of television stations to offer his insight, and frequently contributes editorials to newspapers.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles.html</ref> Conrad Black has praised Kissinger as "a political memoirist surpassed, if at all, only by [[Winston Churchill]] and [[Charles de Gaulle]]."

Kissinger delivered a beautiful and heartfelt eulogy for President Ford at his 2007 funeral.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/eulogies/010207.html</ref>

Throughout his life, Kissinger has enjoyed long-standing friendships with such notables as Katherine Graham, Walt Wriston, Beverly Sills, Bill Paley, Hans Morgenthau, Fritz Kraemer, Ahmet Ertegun, Sir James Goldsmith, Marion Dönhoff, Gianni Agnelli, John Aspinall, Rudolf Augstein, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John McCain, [[Mohammed Reza Pahlavi]],<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/FinancialTimes240508.html</ref> Anatoly Dobrynin and Bill and Pat Buckley.

Kissinger is a fan of [[soccer]].<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/nw061206.html</ref>

In the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis, Kissinger wrote:
<blockquote>
A major cause of the crisis has been the gap between the economic and the political organization of the world. The economic world has been globalized. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their national political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order. Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point. So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place, so far without achieving more than stemming incipient panic. International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
All these urgent issues are taking place against a background of a historic shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But there are much fewer trans-Pacific institutional ties with America than exist in the Atlantic. This raises the danger that, over time, the regions will confront each other as strategic and economic adversaries. The emergence of a new regional mercantilism and strategic confrontation by groups possessing large numbers of weapons of mass destruction needs to be resisted. This is why the U.S. relationship with China is so central. A relationship that started on both sides as essentially a strategic design to constrain a common adversary has evolved over the decades into a pillar of the international system. China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernization and reform of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods. Each side of the Pacific needs the cooperation of the other in addressing the consequences of the financial crisis.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/iht011209.html</ref>
</blockquote>

==Image and reputation==
Kissinger was loathed by some liberals who viewed him as a war criminal<ref>http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0611-03.htm</ref> and criticized by hardliners for [[detente]]. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for pulling the United States out of Vietnam.

Kissinger was a Machiavellian figure, skilled at manipulating people around him and currying favor in the media. At one point he admitted allowing secret wiretapping of his own aides' conversations.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref> The aura of Kissinger's influence was due partly to a cultivated image of high intelligence, including a PhD degree from Harvard University. He has been called "the only European-style realist" to head US foreign policy.

===Major Controversies===
[[Bryce Harlow]], former Eisenhower White House staff member, claimed to have "a double agent working in the White House....I kept Nixon informed." Harlow and [[Henry Kissinger]] (who was friendly with both campaigns and guaranteed a job in either a Humphrey or Nixon administration) separately predicted Johnson's "bombing halt": "The word is out that we are making an effort to throw the election to Humphrey. Nixon has been told of it," Democratic senator [[George Smathers]] informed Johnson. According to [[Robert Dallek]], Kissinger's advice "rested not on special knowledge of decision making at the White House but on an astute analyst's insight into what was happening." [[William Bundy]] stated that Kissinger obtained "no useful inside information" from his trip to Paris, and "almost any experienced Hanoi watcher might have come to the same conclusion". While Kissinger may have "hinted that his advice was based on contacts with the Paris delegation," this sort of "self-promotion....is at worst a minor and not uncommon practice, quite different from getting and reporting real secrets."<ref>[[Robert Dallek]] (2007), ''Kissinger and Nixon: Partners in Power'', HarperCollins, pp. 73-74.</ref> Nixon asked [[Anna Chennault]] to be his "channel to Mr. [[Nguyen van Thieu|Thieu]]"; Chennault agreed and periodically reported to [[John Mitchell]] that Thieu had no intention of attending a peace conference. On November 2, Chennault informed the South Vietnamese ambassador: "I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque who says his boss [Nixon] is going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer." In 1997, Chennault admitted that "I was constantly in touch with Nixon and Mitchell."<ref>Dallek, pp. 74-75.</ref> In response, Johnson ordered wire-tapping members of the Nixon campaign.<ref>Dallek, p. 75.</ref> Dallek wrote that Nixon's efforts "probably made no difference" because Thieu was unwilling to attend the talks and there was little chance of an agreement being reached before the election; however, his use of information provided by Harlow and Kissinger was morally questionable, and Humphrey's decision not to make Nixon's actions public was "an uncommon act of political decency."<ref>Dallek, pp. 77-78.</ref> [[Conrad Black]] agreed that there is "no evidence" connecting Kissinger, who was "playing a fairly innocuous double game of self-promotion", with attempts to undermine the peace talks. Black further commented that "the Democrats were outraged at Nixon, but what Johnson was doing was equally questionable", and there is "no evidence" that Thieu "needed much prompting to discern which side he favored in the U.S. election."<ref>[[Conrad Black]] (2007), ''Richard Nixon: A Life in Full'', PublicAffairs, p. 553.</ref>

Kissinger was also accused of intentionally abandoning South Vietnam to Communist forces, the accusation which probably hurts him most today. He responded to this charge as follows:
<blockquote>
When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and the number was still increasing. The official position of the Johnson administration had been that American withdrawal would only start six months after a North Vietnamese withdrawal. The "dove" platform of Sens. Robert Kennedy and George McGovern, which was rejected by the Democratic National Convention of 1968, advocated mutual withdrawal. No significant group at that time advocated unilateral withdrawal.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
A diplomatic alternative did not exist. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire the United States had to meet two preconditions: First, it had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army, and replace it with a Communist-dominated government. Second, the United States had to establish an unconditional timetable for withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of what happened in subsequent negotiations or how long these might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Given the horrors that occurred when the Communists took over Indochina in 1975, it must be said that Nixon correctly summed up the choices before him when he rejected the 1969 terms.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
When negotiations stalemated, the Nixon administration moved to implement what could be done unilaterally without undermining the political structure of South Vietnam. Between 1969 and 1972, it withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90 percent.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In Vietnam, a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the all-out North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the United States mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by President Nixon in January 1972 - and decried as unachievable in the American domestic debate. He said that "this new proposal is exactly what President Nixon has himself proposed: cease-fire, end of the war, release of the prisoners and troop withdrawal, and we propose a number of principles on political problems. You have also proposed this. And we shall leave to the South Vietnamese parties the settlement of these questions."
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American disunity was the major factor in dashing these hopes.<ref>http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/wp061107.html</ref></blockquote>

Kissinger has also been accused of an alleged lack of transparency. He has responded by donating all of his personal papers to the [[Library of Congress]] for posterity. He recently released some 20,000 pages of transcripts of his private conversations with various world leaders.<ref>http://staff.lib.msu.edu/harris23/red_tape/o&e0404.htm#kissenger</ref> Such transcripts were the basis for his 2003 book on foreign policy, ''Crisis.''

In 1976, Kissinger "declined to approve" that a letter be sent to Chile warning them against carrying out any political assassinations.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> In an Aug. 30, 1976 memo, Shlaudeman discussed the possibility that the U.S. ambassador in Uruguay might be endangered by delivering a warning against assassination. The U.S. ambassador to Chile said that Pinochet might take as an insult any inference that he was connected with assassination plots.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref> When the CIA learned about the Chilean plan to set up a covert office in Miami as part of Chile's overseas operations in 1974, however, Kissinger did authorize the CIA to send the Chilean Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) a warning not to go ahead with the plan. He rejected the State Department's proposal to publicly rebuke Chile on the matter. As a result, the Chileans backed down.<ref>http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Kissinger+DECLASSIFIED.(document+shows+Secretary+of+State+supported...-a054468923</ref> Kissinger's decision not to send the letter is considered a subject of controversy because Chile was engaging in a spree of international murders at the time (the day the letter was to be sent, a Pinochet critic was assassinated in [[Washington, D.C.]]).<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/04/10/cable_ties_kissinger_to_chile_controversy/</ref>

Kissinger's alleged warm support of Pinochet is without much basis in fact; Kissinger and Ford began viewing Pinochet's regime as a serious Cold War liability as early as 1975 and the US engaged in repeated diplomatic confrontations with it from 1977 on.<ref>www.cepchile.cl/dms/archivo_3236_1698/r92_fermandois_ing.pdf Translated from Spanish</ref> The CIA warned that "internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys;" therefore, the US had a vested interest in moderating the way they behaved.

The moderate left-wing extremist [[Christopher Hitchens]] has accused Kissinger of bad faith, describing him as a "toady" of Nixon who "knows what to do" without "being asked." He has also condemned Kissinger's business ties with Indonesia, arguing that they influenced the US "tilt" in favor of Suharto during the war in East Timor.<ref>http://www.etan.org/et2002a/february/01-09/09ksngr.htm</ref> In a general sense, Kissinger responded to these and similar charges by stating:
<blockquote>
When I was a young professor in the fifties at Harvard, where 99.9% of the people on the faculty were Democrats—I can remember only one Republican that I knew—the people in political science had faculty meetings…No one ever attacked the government for being a criminal activity. Nobody said, ‘they like to go to war; they’re blood-dripping!’ Sometime in the sixties, the idea developed that the government itself was an evil enterprise, that they lied professionally to the American people, and that the purpose of intellectuals was to negate the government rather than be constructive...Everybody working in government goes through the long hours and all the other pressures [associated with the job] because he or she would like to make a contribution to a better world.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9vsCD0j3Ys</ref>
</blockquote>

''Contra'' Hitchens, Kissinger attempted to resign from the Nixon White House on at least three separate occasions<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907332,00.html?promoid=googlep</ref>--not exactly the sort of thing one would expect from a "toady."

Conrad Black has written that "Kissinger has sincere compassion for the victims of the grinding wheels of history," although "he tends to take his distance from the beleaguered...during their ordeals." On Vietnam, he maintains that Kissinger "toiled demiurgically for the war's end without a disaster, and his anger [at the Democrats and the media] is real and earned." The "claims of the demented left," that he committed "crimes against Cambodia or Chile" are "bunk."

===The Schneider Affair===
The main controversy over the American role in Chile was an alleged attempt on the life of Chilean general Rene Schneider in 1970, due to his support for the appointment of Allende. The Church hearings found that the CIA did in fact give weapons to a group of men who it knew had attacked him twice before, ostensibly as a test of loyalty so that the CIA would remain privy to their information, but that the weapons provided and the group thereby armed were not the ones who actually killed him. The weapons were returned unused to the CIA and then discarded in the Pacific Ocean.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref> Schneider was assassinated by a rival group of right-wing extremists.<ref>http://www.history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/html/ChurchIR_0120a.htm</ref> On June 11, 1971, Kissinger and Nixon said the following in a private conversation:

: '''Kissinger''': —when they did try to assassinate somebody, it took three attempts—
: '''Nixon''': Yeah.
: '''Kissinger''': —and he lived for three weeks afterwards.<ref>http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/07/nixon_tape_reveals_oval_office.html</ref>

There are two possible interpretations of these remarks: a) Kissinger was telling the President that a military coup could not succeed in Chile because there were no officers both willing and ''able'' to carry one out; or b) the two men were mocking the CIA's squeamishness about killing Schneider.

According to ''Commentary,'' however, regardless of what they said in the aftermath (quoting from the Nixon Tapes):
<blockquote>
"Kissinger seems to have been unaware of the plot...Karamassines phoned the National Security Adviser who asked if he "cleared everything in advance with you. He said no, you were too busy." In the same private conversation, Kissinger remarks that, although he did not know about the second plot, he might have approved it. Then he adds: "I thought that after we turned off that one thing [the Viaux plot], nothing more had happened and in fact that other thing [the Schneider kidnapping] had happened."<ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=15648</ref>
</blockquote>

Fermandois argues that not only did the CIA not play a role in his death, it never intended to. He argues that the CIA was quite shocked and caught completely by surprise at the news of Schneider's death: "We can see the desperation in the comments of the agents in Chile because they cannot control events. The history of those sixty days is an example of North American impotence, at least if we understand it as Washington manipulating events. All this has a somewhat macabre colophon. When Schneider was wounded in the kidnapping attempt (he died three days later), the agents in Chile believed that the coup was unfolding, since in the new state of affairs General Valenzuela was effectively the new head."<ref>www.cepchile.cl/dms/archivo_3236_1698/r92_fermandois_ing.pdf</ref>

Hitchens, (who has praised the "valiant guerillas" of the Viet Cong and who openly admires [[Vladimir Lenin]]) has gone further than most in his condemnation of Kissinger (he is renowned for his use of hyperbole). Although he acknowledges that the US refused to directly assist any military coup against Allende and instead sought to influence the Chilean Congress; he nevertheless asserts that Kissinger attempted to ''orchestrate'' a military coup against the Chilean government in 1970. He generates this conclusion by stating that the CIA attempted to kill Schneider in 1970; it planned to make his death appear to be the work of left-wing terrorists; it hoped that this would "inspire" the Chilean military to intervene against Allende; and Kissinger was directly and personally involved in approving all of these operations.<ref>http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/feb/24/pinochet.bookextracts Hitchens' citation-free rants contain many distortions, such as the idea that the CIA put a $50,000 tag on Schneider's head (this is not supported by the Church hearings) or the absolutely ridiculous claims he makes on Cyprus by delibrately misquoting Kissinger--so read at your own peril.</ref> Kissinger has refused to debate with Hitchens, saying "''I'm not going to deal with Christopher Hitchens,''" while his colleague [[Alexander Haig]] has called Hitchens "''a sewer pipe-sucker.''"

The death of Schneider had the opposite effect of what was intended by the Nixon administration--even as the CIA worked to buy off the Congress so as to prevent Allende's appointment, it ensured that the nation would rally behind the otherwise polarizing leader.

==Evaluation==
A smooth-talking, charming ''bon vivant,'' Kissinger was an international celebrity in high society, with the opposite personality of Nixon, yet they made a remarkably effective team with surprisingly little friction. They thought alike, and both could conceptualize and make plans for the complex interactions of international affairs. Neither was interested in economics, and only Nixon mastered the nitty gritty of politics and elections, while only Kissinger understood nuclear strategy.

Kissinger and Nixon were "realists" who deemphasized idealistic goals like anti-communism or promotion of democracy worldwide, because those goals were seen as too expensive in terms of America's economic capabilities. Instead of a Cold War they wanted peace, trade and cultural exchanges. Instead Nixon and Kissinger sought to downsize America's global commitments in proportion to its reduced economic, moral and political power. They rejected "idealism" as impractical and too expensive; neither man showed much sensitivity to the plight of people living under Communism. Kissinger's realism fell out of fashion as idealism returned to American foreign policy with Carter's moralism emphasizing human rights, and Reagan's rollback strategy aimed at destroying Communism.

==Bibliography==

*Black, Conrad. ''Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full,'' PublicAffairs (2007), includes lengthy analysis of foreign policy.
* Bundy, William P. ''A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency'' (1998) [http://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Web-Making-Foreign-Presidency/dp/186064273X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175404&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]
* Dallek, Robert. ''Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power'' (2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Nixon-Kissinger-Partners-Robert-Dallek/dp/0060722312/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], dual biography by leading scholar; hostile
* Garthoff, Raymond L. ''Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan '' (2nd ed. 1994) [http://www.amazon.com/Detente-Confrontation-American-Soviet-Relations-Reagan/dp/0815730411/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175809&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search], favorable analysis by proponent of detente
* Goh, Evelyn. ''Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China, 1961-1974: From "Red Menace" to "Tacit Ally."'' (2005). 299 pp.
* Goh, Evelyn. "Nixon, Kissinger, and the 'Soviet Card' in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971-1974." ''Diplomatic History'' 2005 29(3): 475-502. Issn: 0145-2096 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "'Dr. Kissinger' or 'Mr. Henry'? Kissingerology, Thirty Years and Counting." ''Diplomatic History'' 2003 27(5): 637-676 full text at [[EBSCO]]
* Hanhimäki, Jussi M. "Ironies and Turning Points: Détente in Perspective," in Odd Arne Westad, ed. ''Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory'' (2000), pp 326-42; [http://www.amazon.com/Reviewing-Cold-War-Approaches-Interpretations/dp/0714681202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215175936&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
*Horne, Alistair. "Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year" (2009); one of the best books on the man.
* Isaacson, Walter. ''Kissinger'' (1992); a major biography [http://www.amazon.com/Kissinger-Biography-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743286979/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577598&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Kuklick, Bruce. ''Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger.'' (2006). 241 pp. says nearly everyone with substantial academic credentials in the early Cold War decades was wrong nearly all the time.
* Litwak, Robert S. ''Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969-1976'' (1986)
* Macmillan, Margaret. ''Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' (2008)
* Mann, James. ''About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton'' (1999).
* Nelson, Keith L. ''The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam'' (1995)
* Qureshi, Lubna Zakia. "''"Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile'' (2009)
* Rodman, Peter. ''Presidential Command: Power, Leadership, and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush,'' Knopf (2009).
* Ross, Robert S. ''Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989,'' Stanford University Press, 1995 [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=92018683 online edition]
* Schulzinger, Robert D. ''Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy.'' (1989).
* Serewicz, Lawrence W. ''America at the Brink of Empire: Rusk, Kissinger, And the Vietnam War'' (2007), stresses commitment to [[republicanism]] [http://www.amazon.com/America-Brink-Empire-Kissinger-Traditions/dp/0807131792/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-6 excerpt and text search]; [http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=175941177686117 online review]
* Suri, Jeremi. ''Henry Kissinger and the American Century'' (2007), intellectual biography focused on pre-1969
* Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf. "Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China." ''Journal of American History'' 2005 92(1): 109-135. [http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/92.1/tucker.html in History Cooperative]
* Warner, Geoffrey. "Nixon, Kissinger and the Rapprochement with China, 1969-1972." ''International Affairs'' 2007 83(4): 763-781. Issn: 0020-5850 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Willbanks, James H. ''Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Abandoning-Vietnam-America-Left-South/dp/0700613315/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-15 excerpt and text search]

===Primary Sources===
* Kissinger, Henry. ''White House Years'' (1979). Nov. 1968-Jan. 1973; ''Years of Upheaval'' (1982). Jan. 1973 to Aug. 1974; ''Years of Renewal'' (1999), Aug. 1974 to Jan. 1977 [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Renewal-Henry-Kissinger/dp/075675383X/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577632&sr=8-16 excerpt and text search vol 3]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political Thought of Metternich" ''The American Political Science Review,'' Vol. 48, No. 4 (Dec., 1954), pp. 1017-1030 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1951008 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Congress of Vienna: A Reappraisal," ''World Politics,'' Vol. 8, No. 2 (Jan., 1956), pp. 264-280 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2008974 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22.'' (1957), his revised PhD dissertation.
* Kissinger, Henry. "Acceptance Speech" for The Nobel Peace Prize 1973 [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/kissinger-acceptance.html online edition]
* Kissinger, Henry. "Address to the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly," ''International Organization,'' Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer, 1974), pp. 573-583 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706310 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''American Foreign Policy'' (3rd ed. 1977), his speeches
* Kissinger, Henry. "The Kissinger Commission on Population and Development in Central America," ''Population and Development Review,'' Vol. 10, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 381-389 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1973103 in JSTOR]
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Diplomacy'' (1994) an interpretive history since 1815
* Kissinger, Henry. ''Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War'' (2003) [http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Vietnam-War-Involvement-Extrication/dp/074321532X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211741669&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Haldeman, H. R. ''The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House'' (1994)
* Nixon, Richard. ''RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon'' (1981) [http://www.amazon.com/RN-Memoirs-Richard-Nixon/dp/0671707418/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211577855&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]

==Online sources==
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB106/index.htm William Burr, ed. "Nixon's Trip to China Records now Completely Declassified, Including Kissinger Intelligence Briefing and Assurances on Taiwan" ''The National Security Archive'' (2003)]

== References ==
{{reflist|2}}
[[Category:Nobel laureates in Peace]]
[[Category:United States Secretaries of State]]
[[Category:Cold War]]
[[Category:United States History]]
{{DEFAULTSORT: Kissinger, Henry}}
[[category:diplomacy]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[Category:1960s]]
[[Category:Middle East]]
[[Category:American Jews]]
[[Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom award winners]]

Vietnam War

2013-03-15T18:40:23Z

JakeRMurrin: Revise again

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and murdering hundreds of thousands of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1953, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref>

From mid 1953 to early 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> Declassified Politburo documents confirm that 1 in 1,000 North Vietnamese (i.e., about 14,000 people) were the minimum quota targeted for execution during the earlier "rent reduction" campaign; the number killed during the multiple stages of the considerably more radical "land reform" was probably many times greater.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.225?uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672298091 Complete Collection of Party Documents] (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 communist cadre during the "land reform", and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were party members; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13, says they were given a proper burial.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref><ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340, quotes comparable figures for communist cadre executed.</ref> Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the "land reform", of whom 123,266 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences. Landlords were classified as 5.68% of the population, but only a fraction of them were killed. These figures are proportionally comparable to those for China's land reform, in which millions of "landlords" were slaughtered.</ref> The full death toll was even greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an exaggerated confrontation between North Vietnamese P4 torpedo boats and the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack by North Vietnam on August 4, 1964 which involved both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy; the events became known as the "[[Gulf of Tonkin incident]]". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "[[Gulf of Tonkin Resolution]]". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The Vietnamese Communists, led by Le Duan, perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of World War II, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
195,000-430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref name="Lewy">Lewy, Guenter (1978). ''America in Vietnam''. New York: Oxford University Press. Appendix 1, pp.450-453</ref><ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. Ch. 12. </ref> 50,000-65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>Wiesner, Louis A. (1988). ''Victims and Survivors Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam''. New York: Greenwood Press. p.310</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost between 171,331 and 220,357 men during the war.<ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. p.106.</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. In addition, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of communist military forces was probably closer to 444,000.<ref name="Lewy"/> During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref> Between 200,000 and 300,000 Cambodians died in the war,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref> as well as 20,000 Laotians.<ref>Small, Melvin & Joel David Singer, ''Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816–1980''.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The death toll from US defeat far surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]
*[http://www.viet-myths.net/Turner.htm Myths and Realities in the Vietnam Debate]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Nation (magazine)

2013-03-14T14:39:58Z

JakeRMurrin: Date/author

'''''The Nation''''' is a weekly [[magazine]] of opinion and reviews, first published in 1865. It was founded by [[E. L. Godkin]], the editor from 1865 to 1899. It has gone through several distinct changes. It was founded by abolitionists and in the 1865-1875 period supported Republican programs of [[Reconstruction]] in the South. In the Godkin years it was [[Libertarian]], and supported conservative [[Bourbon Democrats]] such as [[Grover Cleveland]]. At that time ''The Nation'' was the most sophisticated intellectual magazine in the U.S., and published many serious articles in politics.

It faded in importance after 1900 but was strongly revived under Oswald Garrison Villard, who assumed the editorship in 1918.
Since then it has represented the left in American politics.

The current Editor and Publisher is [[Katrina vanden Heuvel]], succeeding the now "Publisher Emeritus" [[Victor Navasky]].

''The Nation'' publishes 48 weeks a year, printing letters to the editor (including responses by article writers), editorial positions, columns by regular commentators, book reviews, and the ''Nation'' cryptic crossword, which has been set by cryptographer Frank W. Lewis since just after the [[World War 2|Second World War]].

==Communism==
''The Nation'' has had writers identified as Soviet spies in the [[Venona project]].

Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of ''The Nation'', has criticised the Venona analysis, claiming the material is being used to "distort our understanding of the cold war". He has also referred to the files as potential "time bombs of misinformation."<ref>Navasky, Victor (July 16, 2001). [http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20010716&s=navasky ''Cold War Ghosts'']]. The Nation. </ref>

The Nation infamously supported [[Pol Pot]], [[Vladimir Lenin]], [[Ho Chi Minh]], and [[Josef Stalin]]:

===Denying Cambodian genocide===
"…The evidence is that in Cambodia the much-heralded blood bath that was supposed to follow the fall of Phnom Penh has not taken place. As for Vietnam, reports from Saigon indicate exemplary behavior, considering the situation. ‘There has been no evidence of a blood bath…as [was] so freely predicted abroad,’ writes George Esper of the A.P." – The Nation, "Blood-bath Talk", June 14, 1975<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/cambodia/nation.pdf</ref>

"If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as he believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier." - [[Noam Chomsky]] and Edward Herman, "Distortions at Fourth Hand," The Nation, June 6, 1977<ref>http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19770625.htm</ref>

===Denying Soviet genocide===
"In a 1946 article…Walter Duranty explained to The Nation’s progressive readers that ‘purge’ meant ‘to cleanse’ in Russian, and that a house cleaning was all Stalin intended. In Duranty’s memorable words, Stalin had launched ‘a general '''cleaning out of the cobwebs''' and mess which accumulate in any house when its occupants are so deeply preoccupied with something else that they have no time to keep it in order.’... At the height of this house cleaning, Stalin was killing 20,000 Russian citizens a month. But according to The Nation (in 1946 as today) the main danger facing humanity was the incipient fascism of the West.”<ref>[http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/22/fear-and-loathing-of-reality-at-the-nation/print/ Fear and Loathing of Reality at ‘The Nation’]</ref>

"Stalin did not plan or seek to accomplish genocide. Professor Charles Tilly of The New School in New York counts total deaths in the Revolution, including the Teror, famine and war, at no more than 100,000." - The Nation, March 6, 1989<ref>https://groups.google.com/group/alt.activism/msg/429e9d74df7d2624?&hl=en</ref>

"To me Lenin is the hero of a legend, a man who had torn the burning heart out of his breast in order to light up for mankind the path which shall lead it out of the shameful chaos of the present, out of the rotting bog of stupid current politics....His hero-character has almost no outward adornment. His heroism is of a type not rare in Russia--the modest, ascetic martyrdom of an honorable, intellectual revolutionary who honestly believes in the possibility of justice on earth; the heroism of a man who has renounced all the pleasures of life to do hard work for the happiness of mankind." - The Nation's Obiturary for Lenin<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/lenin-man?page=0,0</ref>

===Further denials===
The Nation has also advertised for [[Holocaust denial]],<ref>http://www.adl.org/media_watch/magazines/20040421-The+Nation.htm</ref> expressed skepticism that [[Saddam Hussein]] killed even 300,000 people,<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/consequences-killing-saddam</ref> published writings by [[Fidel Castro]]<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/castro-helps-chaacutevez-avert-coup</ref> and expressed admiration for [[Hugo Chávez]].<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/conversations-chaacutevez-and-castro</ref> It has been accused of genocide denial and [[anti-semitism]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers.html</ref>

The [[Senate Internal Security Subcommittee]] (SISS) wrote in its Report on the ''Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States'',
{{Cquote|''[[The Nation]]'' and the ''New Republic'' have long records as [[liberal]] publications. They cannot be described as Communist, but they are so [[infiltration|infiltrated]] with the [[Communist Party]] [[policy]] that they serve the interests of the Communists and [[Deceit|confuse]] liberals on many issues, much more so than some of the Communist publications.<ref>[http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Scope_of_Soviet_Activity.pdf ''Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States''] excerpted, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act, Committee of the Judiciary United States Senate, GPO, Washington, D.C. 1957, p. 2822. (p.9 pdf). </ref>}}

==Obscenity and perversion==
In 1989 ''The Nation'' published a lighthearted and positive portrayal of child sex slavery in Haiti. The author "was friendly with a charming and cultivated American priest who educated lads for export. The image of Father Martin in his robes--with his company of smiling acolytes, in uniform white cotton shorts, serving in the garden--stayed in my mind." The author reports that one [[pedophile]] "was beaming at the fun that was preceding the orgy ... maybe foreplay wasn't so bad when it just happened naturally." However, the author felt "embarrassed" and claims that he himself did not partake in any pederasty.<ref>http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-8180313.html</ref>

==Further reading==
*Beito, David T., and Linda Royster Beito, [http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?issueID=22&articleID=261 "Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896-1900,"] ''Independent Review'' 4 (Spring 2000), 555-75, by two libertarian historians
* McWilliams, Carey. "One Hundred Years of 'The Nation'," ''Journalism Quarterly'' 1965 42(2): 189-197,
* Christman, Henry M. et al, eds. ''One hundred years of the Nation: a centennial anthology'' (1964)
*[http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/i-f--stone--soviet-agent-case-closed-15120 I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent—Case Closed], ''Commentary'', Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev, May 2009.

==See also==
*[[I.F. Stone]]
*[[Anna Louise Strong]]
*[[Progressives for Obama]]
*[[List of Communist publications]]

==References==
{{Reflist}}

[[category:Magazines]]
[[category:Liberals]]
[[category:Libertarians]]

Nation (magazine)

2013-03-14T14:38:23Z

JakeRMurrin: Title of article

'''''The Nation''''' is a weekly [[magazine]] of opinion and reviews, first published in 1865. It was founded by [[E. L. Godkin]], the editor from 1865 to 1899. It has gone through several distinct changes. It was founded by abolitionists and in the 1865-1875 period supported Republican programs of [[Reconstruction]] in the South. In the Godkin years it was [[Libertarian]], and supported conservative [[Bourbon Democrats]] such as [[Grover Cleveland]]. At that time ''The Nation'' was the most sophisticated intellectual magazine in the U.S., and published many serious articles in politics.

It faded in importance after 1900 but was strongly revived under Oswald Garrison Villard, who assumed the editorship in 1918.
Since then it has represented the left in American politics.

The current Editor and Publisher is [[Katrina vanden Heuvel]], succeeding the now "Publisher Emeritus" [[Victor Navasky]].

''The Nation'' publishes 48 weeks a year, printing letters to the editor (including responses by article writers), editorial positions, columns by regular commentators, book reviews, and the ''Nation'' cryptic crossword, which has been set by cryptographer Frank W. Lewis since just after the [[World War 2|Second World War]].

==Communism==
''The Nation'' has had writers identified as Soviet spies in the [[Venona project]].

Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of ''The Nation'', has criticised the Venona analysis, claiming the material is being used to "distort our understanding of the cold war". He has also referred to the files as potential "time bombs of misinformation."<ref>Navasky, Victor (July 16, 2001). [http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20010716&s=navasky ''Cold War Ghosts'']]. The Nation. </ref>

The Nation infamously supported [[Pol Pot]], [[Vladimir Lenin]], [[Ho Chi Minh]], and [[Josef Stalin]]:

===Denying Cambodian genocide===
"…The evidence is that in Cambodia the much-heralded blood bath that was supposed to follow the fall of Phnom Penh has not taken place. As for Vietnam, reports from Saigon indicate exemplary behavior, considering the situation. ‘There has been no evidence of a blood bath…as [was] so freely predicted abroad,’ writes George Esper of the A.P." – The Nation, "Blood-bath Talk", June 14, 1975<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/cambodia/nation.pdf</ref>

"If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as he believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier." - The Nation, "Distortions at Fourth Hand," 1977<ref>http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19770625.htm</ref>
===Denying Soviet genocide===
"In a 1946 article…Walter Duranty explained to The Nation’s progressive readers that ‘purge’ meant ‘to cleanse’ in Russian, and that a house cleaning was all Stalin intended. In Duranty’s memorable words, Stalin had launched ‘a general '''cleaning out of the cobwebs''' and mess which accumulate in any house when its occupants are so deeply preoccupied with something else that they have no time to keep it in order.’... At the height of this house cleaning, Stalin was killing 20,000 Russian citizens a month. But according to The Nation (in 1946 as today) the main danger facing humanity was the incipient fascism of the West.”<ref>[http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/22/fear-and-loathing-of-reality-at-the-nation/print/ Fear and Loathing of Reality at ‘The Nation’]</ref>

"Stalin did not plan or seek to accomplish genocide. Professor Charles Tilly of The New School in New York counts total deaths in the Revolution, including the Teror, famine and war, at no more than 100,000." - The Nation, March 6, 1989<ref>https://groups.google.com/group/alt.activism/msg/429e9d74df7d2624?&hl=en</ref>

"To me Lenin is the hero of a legend, a man who had torn the burning heart out of his breast in order to light up for mankind the path which shall lead it out of the shameful chaos of the present, out of the rotting bog of stupid current politics....His hero-character has almost no outward adornment. His heroism is of a type not rare in Russia--the modest, ascetic martyrdom of an honorable, intellectual revolutionary who honestly believes in the possibility of justice on earth; the heroism of a man who has renounced all the pleasures of life to do hard work for the happiness of mankind." - The Nation's Obiturary for Lenin<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/lenin-man?page=0,0</ref>

===Further denials===
The Nation has also advertised for [[Holocaust denial]],<ref>http://www.adl.org/media_watch/magazines/20040421-The+Nation.htm</ref> expressed skepticism that [[Saddam Hussein]] killed even 300,000 people,<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/consequences-killing-saddam</ref> published writings by [[Fidel Castro]]<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/castro-helps-chaacutevez-avert-coup</ref> and expressed admiration for [[Hugo Chávez]].<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/conversations-chaacutevez-and-castro</ref> It has been accused of genocide denial and [[anti-semitism]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers.html</ref>

The [[Senate Internal Security Subcommittee]] (SISS) wrote in its Report on the ''Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States'',
{{Cquote|''[[The Nation]]'' and the ''New Republic'' have long records as [[liberal]] publications. They cannot be described as Communist, but they are so [[infiltration|infiltrated]] with the [[Communist Party]] [[policy]] that they serve the interests of the Communists and [[Deceit|confuse]] liberals on many issues, much more so than some of the Communist publications.<ref>[http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Scope_of_Soviet_Activity.pdf ''Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States''] excerpted, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act, Committee of the Judiciary United States Senate, GPO, Washington, D.C. 1957, p. 2822. (p.9 pdf). </ref>}}

==Obscenity and perversion==
In 1989 ''The Nation'' published a lighthearted and positive portrayal of child sex slavery in Haiti. The author "was friendly with a charming and cultivated American priest who educated lads for export. The image of Father Martin in his robes--with his company of smiling acolytes, in uniform white cotton shorts, serving in the garden--stayed in my mind." The author reports that one [[pedophile]] "was beaming at the fun that was preceding the orgy ... maybe foreplay wasn't so bad when it just happened naturally." However, the author felt "embarrassed" and claims that he himself did not partake in any pederasty.<ref>http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-8180313.html</ref>

==Further reading==
*Beito, David T., and Linda Royster Beito, [http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?issueID=22&articleID=261 "Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896-1900,"] ''Independent Review'' 4 (Spring 2000), 555-75, by two libertarian historians
* McWilliams, Carey. "One Hundred Years of 'The Nation'," ''Journalism Quarterly'' 1965 42(2): 189-197,
* Christman, Henry M. et al, eds. ''One hundred years of the Nation: a centennial anthology'' (1964)
*[http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/i-f--stone--soviet-agent-case-closed-15120 I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent—Case Closed], ''Commentary'', Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev, May 2009.

==See also==
*[[I.F. Stone]]
*[[Anna Louise Strong]]
*[[Progressives for Obama]]
*[[List of Communist publications]]

==References==
{{Reflist}}

[[category:Magazines]]
[[category:Liberals]]
[[category:Libertarians]]

Nation (magazine)

2013-03-14T14:35:36Z

JakeRMurrin: Not published in the Nation

'''''The Nation''''' is a weekly [[magazine]] of opinion and reviews, first published in 1865. It was founded by [[E. L. Godkin]], the editor from 1865 to 1899. It has gone through several distinct changes. It was founded by abolitionists and in the 1865-1875 period supported Republican programs of [[Reconstruction]] in the South. In the Godkin years it was [[Libertarian]], and supported conservative [[Bourbon Democrats]] such as [[Grover Cleveland]]. At that time ''The Nation'' was the most sophisticated intellectual magazine in the U.S., and published many serious articles in politics.

It faded in importance after 1900 but was strongly revived under Oswald Garrison Villard, who assumed the editorship in 1918.
Since then it has represented the left in American politics.

The current Editor and Publisher is [[Katrina vanden Heuvel]], succeeding the now "Publisher Emeritus" [[Victor Navasky]].

''The Nation'' publishes 48 weeks a year, printing letters to the editor (including responses by article writers), editorial positions, columns by regular commentators, book reviews, and the ''Nation'' cryptic crossword, which has been set by cryptographer Frank W. Lewis since just after the [[World War 2|Second World War]].

==Communism==
''The Nation'' has had writers identified as Soviet spies in the [[Venona project]].

Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of ''The Nation'', has criticised the Venona analysis, claiming the material is being used to "distort our understanding of the cold war". He has also referred to the files as potential "time bombs of misinformation."<ref>Navasky, Victor (July 16, 2001). [http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20010716&s=navasky ''Cold War Ghosts'']]. The Nation. </ref>

The Nation infamously supported [[Pol Pot]], [[Vladimir Lenin]], [[Ho Chi Minh]], and [[Josef Stalin]]:

===Denying Cambodian genocide===
"…The evidence is that in Cambodia the much-heralded blood bath that was supposed to follow the fall of Phnom Penh has not taken place. As for Vietnam, reports from Saigon indicate exemplary behavior, considering the situation. ‘There has been no evidence of a blood bath…as [was] so freely predicted abroad,’ writes George Esper of the A.P." – The Nation, editorial, June 14, 1975<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/cambodia/nation.pdf</ref>

"If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as he believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier." - The Nation, "Distortions at Fourth Hand," 1977<ref>http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19770625.htm</ref>
===Denying Soviet genocide===
"In a 1946 article…Walter Duranty explained to The Nation’s progressive readers that ‘purge’ meant ‘to cleanse’ in Russian, and that a house cleaning was all Stalin intended. In Duranty’s memorable words, Stalin had launched ‘a general '''cleaning out of the cobwebs''' and mess which accumulate in any house when its occupants are so deeply preoccupied with something else that they have no time to keep it in order.’... At the height of this house cleaning, Stalin was killing 20,000 Russian citizens a month. But according to The Nation (in 1946 as today) the main danger facing humanity was the incipient fascism of the West.”<ref>[http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/22/fear-and-loathing-of-reality-at-the-nation/print/ Fear and Loathing of Reality at ‘The Nation’]</ref>

"Stalin did not plan or seek to accomplish genocide. Professor Charles Tilly of The New School in New York counts total deaths in the Revolution, including the Teror, famine and war, at no more than 100,000." - The Nation, March 6, 1989<ref>https://groups.google.com/group/alt.activism/msg/429e9d74df7d2624?&hl=en</ref>

"To me Lenin is the hero of a legend, a man who had torn the burning heart out of his breast in order to light up for mankind the path which shall lead it out of the shameful chaos of the present, out of the rotting bog of stupid current politics....His hero-character has almost no outward adornment. His heroism is of a type not rare in Russia--the modest, ascetic martyrdom of an honorable, intellectual revolutionary who honestly believes in the possibility of justice on earth; the heroism of a man who has renounced all the pleasures of life to do hard work for the happiness of mankind." - The Nation's Obiturary for Lenin<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/lenin-man?page=0,0</ref>

===Further denials===
The Nation has also advertised for [[Holocaust denial]],<ref>http://www.adl.org/media_watch/magazines/20040421-The+Nation.htm</ref> expressed skepticism that [[Saddam Hussein]] killed even 300,000 people,<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/consequences-killing-saddam</ref> published writings by [[Fidel Castro]]<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/castro-helps-chaacutevez-avert-coup</ref> and expressed admiration for [[Hugo Chávez]].<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/conversations-chaacutevez-and-castro</ref> It has been accused of genocide denial and [[anti-semitism]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers.html</ref>

The [[Senate Internal Security Subcommittee]] (SISS) wrote in its Report on the ''Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States'',
{{Cquote|''[[The Nation]]'' and the ''New Republic'' have long records as [[liberal]] publications. They cannot be described as Communist, but they are so [[infiltration|infiltrated]] with the [[Communist Party]] [[policy]] that they serve the interests of the Communists and [[Deceit|confuse]] liberals on many issues, much more so than some of the Communist publications.<ref>[http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Scope_of_Soviet_Activity.pdf ''Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States''] excerpted, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act, Committee of the Judiciary United States Senate, GPO, Washington, D.C. 1957, p. 2822. (p.9 pdf). </ref>}}

==Obscenity and perversion==
In 1989 ''The Nation'' published a lighthearted and positive portrayal of child sex slavery in Haiti. The author "was friendly with a charming and cultivated American priest who educated lads for export. The image of Father Martin in his robes--with his company of smiling acolytes, in uniform white cotton shorts, serving in the garden--stayed in my mind." The author reports that one [[pedophile]] "was beaming at the fun that was preceding the orgy ... maybe foreplay wasn't so bad when it just happened naturally." However, the author felt "embarrassed" and claims that he himself did not partake in any pederasty.<ref>http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-8180313.html</ref>

==Further reading==
*Beito, David T., and Linda Royster Beito, [http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?issueID=22&articleID=261 "Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896-1900,"] ''Independent Review'' 4 (Spring 2000), 555-75, by two libertarian historians
* McWilliams, Carey. "One Hundred Years of 'The Nation'," ''Journalism Quarterly'' 1965 42(2): 189-197,
* Christman, Henry M. et al, eds. ''One hundred years of the Nation: a centennial anthology'' (1964)
*[http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/i-f--stone--soviet-agent-case-closed-15120 I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent—Case Closed], ''Commentary'', Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev, May 2009.

==See also==
*[[I.F. Stone]]
*[[Anna Louise Strong]]
*[[Progressives for Obama]]
*[[List of Communist publications]]

==References==
{{Reflist}}

[[category:Magazines]]
[[category:Liberals]]
[[category:Libertarians]]

Nation (magazine)

2013-03-14T14:34:30Z

JakeRMurrin: Per source

'''''The Nation''''' is a weekly [[magazine]] of opinion and reviews, first published in 1865. It was founded by [[E. L. Godkin]], the editor from 1865 to 1899. It has gone through several distinct changes. It was founded by abolitionists and in the 1865-1875 period supported Republican programs of [[Reconstruction]] in the South. In the Godkin years it was [[Libertarian]], and supported conservative [[Bourbon Democrats]] such as [[Grover Cleveland]]. At that time ''The Nation'' was the most sophisticated intellectual magazine in the U.S., and published many serious articles in politics.

It faded in importance after 1900 but was strongly revived under Oswald Garrison Villard, who assumed the editorship in 1918.
Since then it has represented the left in American politics.

The current Editor and Publisher is [[Katrina vanden Heuvel]], succeeding the now "Publisher Emeritus" [[Victor Navasky]].

''The Nation'' publishes 48 weeks a year, printing letters to the editor (including responses by article writers), editorial positions, columns by regular commentators, book reviews, and the ''Nation'' cryptic crossword, which has been set by cryptographer Frank W. Lewis since just after the [[World War 2|Second World War]].

==Communism==
''The Nation'' has had writers identified as Soviet spies in the [[Venona project]].

Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of ''The Nation'', has criticised the Venona analysis, claiming the material is being used to "distort our understanding of the cold war". He has also referred to the files as potential "time bombs of misinformation."<ref>Navasky, Victor (July 16, 2001). [http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20010716&s=navasky ''Cold War Ghosts'']]. The Nation. </ref>

The Nation infamously supported [[Pol Pot]], [[Vladimir Lenin]], [[Ho Chi Minh]], and [[Josef Stalin]]:

===Denying Cambodian genocide===
"…The evidence is that in Cambodia the much-heralded blood bath that was supposed to follow the fall of Phnom Penh has not taken place. As for Vietnam, reports from Saigon indicate exemplary behavior, considering the situation. ‘There has been no evidence of a blood bath…as [was] so freely predicted abroad,’ writes George Esper of the A.P." – The Nation, editorial, June 14, 1975<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/cambodia/nation.pdf</ref>

"If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as he believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier." - The Nation, "Distortions at Fourth Hand," 1977<ref>http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19770625.htm</ref>
===Denying Soviet genocide===
"In a 1946 article…Walter Duranty explained to The Nation’s progressive readers that ‘purge’ meant ‘to cleanse’ in Russian, and that a house cleaning was all Stalin intended. In Duranty’s memorable words, Stalin had launched ‘a general '''cleaning out of the cobwebs''' and mess which accumulate in any house when its occupants are so deeply preoccupied with something else that they have no time to keep it in order.’... At the height of this house cleaning, Stalin was killing 20,000 Russian citizens a month. But according to The Nation (in 1946 as today) the main danger facing humanity was the incipient fascism of the West.”<ref>[http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/22/fear-and-loathing-of-reality-at-the-nation/print/ Fear and Loathing of Reality at ‘The Nation’]</ref>

"Stalin did not plan or seek to accomplish genocide. Professor Charles Tilly of The New School in New York counts total deaths in the Revolution, including the Teror, famine and war, at no more than 100,000." - The Nation, March 6, 1989<ref>https://groups.google.com/group/alt.activism/msg/429e9d74df7d2624?&hl=en</ref>

"To me Lenin is the hero of a legend, a man who had torn the burning heart out of his breast in order to light up for mankind the path which shall lead it out of the shameful chaos of the present, out of the rotting bog of stupid current politics....His hero-character has almost no outward adornment. His heroism is of a type not rare in Russia--the modest, ascetic martyrdom of an honorable, intellectual revolutionary who honestly believes in the possibility of justice on earth; the heroism of a man who has renounced all the pleasures of life to do hard work for the happiness of mankind." - The Nation's Obiturary for Lenin<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/lenin-man?page=0,0</ref>

===Further denials===
The Nation has also advertised for [[Holocaust denial]],<ref>http://www.adl.org/media_watch/magazines/20040421-The+Nation.htm</ref> expressed skepticism that [[Saddam Hussein]] killed even 300,000 people,<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/consequences-killing-saddam</ref> published writings by [[Fidel Castro]]<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/castro-helps-chaacutevez-avert-coup</ref> and expressed admiration for [[Hugo Chávez]].<ref>http://www.thenation.com/article/conversations-chaacutevez-and-castro</ref> It has been accused of genocide denial and [[anti-semitism]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers.html</ref> It published denial tracts by [[Noam Chomsky]] revealing the astonishing fact that one million Cambodians had been predicted to die due to the conditions left by "the US war," hence Pol Pot had not really killed anyone<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/manufacturing.html</ref> (the prediction actually referred to the likely death toll from the Communist take-over<ref>Washington Post, June 4, 23, 1975.</ref>).

The [[Senate Internal Security Subcommittee]] (SISS) wrote in its Report on the ''Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States'',
{{Cquote|''[[The Nation]]'' and the ''New Republic'' have long records as [[liberal]] publications. They cannot be described as Communist, but they are so [[infiltration|infiltrated]] with the [[Communist Party]] [[policy]] that they serve the interests of the Communists and [[Deceit|confuse]] liberals on many issues, much more so than some of the Communist publications.<ref>[http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Scope_of_Soviet_Activity.pdf ''Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States''] excerpted, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act, Committee of the Judiciary United States Senate, GPO, Washington, D.C. 1957, p. 2822. (p.9 pdf). </ref>}}

==Obscenity and perversion==
In 1989 ''The Nation'' published a lighthearted and positive portrayal of child sex slavery in Haiti. The author "was friendly with a charming and cultivated American priest who educated lads for export. The image of Father Martin in his robes--with his company of smiling acolytes, in uniform white cotton shorts, serving in the garden--stayed in my mind." The author reports that one [[pedophile]] "was beaming at the fun that was preceding the orgy ... maybe foreplay wasn't so bad when it just happened naturally." However, the author felt "embarrassed" and claims that he himself did not partake in any pederasty.<ref>http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-8180313.html</ref>

==Further reading==
*Beito, David T., and Linda Royster Beito, [http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?issueID=22&articleID=261 "Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896-1900,"] ''Independent Review'' 4 (Spring 2000), 555-75, by two libertarian historians
* McWilliams, Carey. "One Hundred Years of 'The Nation'," ''Journalism Quarterly'' 1965 42(2): 189-197,
* Christman, Henry M. et al, eds. ''One hundred years of the Nation: a centennial anthology'' (1964)
*[http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/i-f--stone--soviet-agent-case-closed-15120 I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent—Case Closed], ''Commentary'', Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev, May 2009.

==See also==
*[[I.F. Stone]]
*[[Anna Louise Strong]]
*[[Progressives for Obama]]
*[[List of Communist publications]]

==References==
{{Reflist}}

[[category:Magazines]]
[[category:Liberals]]
[[category:Libertarians]]

Vietnam War

2013-03-01T22:02:07Z

JakeRMurrin: /* External links */

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and murdering hundreds of thousands of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1953, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref>

From mid 1953 to early 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> 5.68% of the population was targeted for persecution, a ratio the party later admitted was "too high". Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 71.66% were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, p85, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The Vietnamese Communists, led by Le Duan, perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of World War II, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
195,000-430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref name="Lewy">Lewy, Guenter (1978). ''America in Vietnam''. New York: Oxford University Press. Appendix 1, pp.450-453</ref><ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. Ch. 12. </ref> 50,000-65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>Wiesner, Louis A. (1988). ''Victims and Survivors Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam''. New York: Greenwood Press. p.310</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost between 171,331 and 220,357 men during the war.<ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. p.106.</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. In addition, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of communist military forces was probably closer to 444,000.<ref name="Lewy"/> During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref> Between 200,000 and 300,000 Cambodians died in the war,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref> as well as 20,000 Laotians.<ref>Small, Melvin & Joel David Singer, ''Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816–1980''.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The death toll from US defeat far surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]
*[http://www.viet-myths.net/Turner.htm Myths and Realities in the Vietnam Debate]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Noam Chomsky

2013-02-26T20:34:52Z

JakeRMurrin: /* Controversies */

[[Image:Chomsky3.gif|right|130px]]
'''Noam Chomsky''' (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist who was a pioneer in [[Chomsky hierarchy|generative grammar]]. Later he became an extreme left-wing propagandist. He advocates holding America to an absolute standard of ethics in foreign relations, but has not held such a standard elsewhere. He tends to ignore such violations by other countries, even when they have been far worse. Fellow liberal academic, [[Arthur Schlesinger]], once referred to Chomsky as "an intellectual crook." <ref>"He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook." -- [[Arthur Schlesinger]] - ''Commentary'' magazine, December 1969</ref>

He is an institute professor of [[linguistics]] (Emeritus) at the [[MIT|Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT) <ref>http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/index.html</ref>.
Chomsky is very critical of [[America]]n and [[Israel]]i foreign policy, sympathizes with [[Palestine|Palestinians]] and has shown support for the terrorist organization [[Hezbollah]]<ref>http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1151</ref>. He has also been criticized for [[anti-Semitism]], despite having come from a Jewish family and having once spoken and written Hebrew.<ref>http://books.google.com/books?id=RKUbyYPG4mcC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=noam+chomsky+%22jewish+heritage%22&source=bl&ots=_DSi5cwxKc&sig=xHoUkX3zV4_dFwO2Gb-xrIxMJbw&hl=en&ei=Bf8iS7-DB5CXlAeXx8zzCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CBoQ6AEwBQ#v=snippet&q=chomsky%20jewish%20family&f=false</ref>

== Background ==
Chomsky was born '''Avram Noam Chomsky''' in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Chomsky, a [[Russia]]n immigrant, and Elsie Simonofsky Chomsky. His parents both practiced Judaism. His father taught [[Hebrew]], and published a scholarly edition of a medieval Hebrew grammar.<ref>http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/chomsky_noam.html</ref>. He received his education at the [[University of Pennsylvania]] where he studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy, and eventually earned his [[Ph. D.]] in 1955. Since then, he has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He previously held the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics, and is now an Institute Professor.

==Linguistic Works==
Chomsky's work is considered to be the spark of modern linguistic thought. His research deals with questions including the critical analysis of language and grammar, the role of biology in language and language acquisition, and the importance (or lack there of) of structural grammar and formal grammar in language function and development.

Chomsky has argued that the primary role the linguist should play is to decipher a language's grammatical structure. Chomsky has provided the field of linguistics path and policy in describing language as a concept and particular languages, as well as core functions of any particular language.

===Generative Grammar===
Noam Chomsky advocates the view that the human mind has innate ability to generate grammatical sentences, thus, all utterances deemed sensible to the speaker are necessarily grammatical. All humans, he argues, share a core of grammar that explodes into the thousands and thousands of distinct languages spoken by humans over time and place. Generative grammar ultimately suggests that the brain is like an unlabeled map, and a child's role is to assign different "paths" with particular labels.

===Universal Grammar===
Noam Chomsky also proposed the theory that a kind of universal grammar, a grammar that underlies all human languages, is hard-wired in the human brain. Thus all human languages are fundamentally the same, with only superficial differences.

===Criticism===
Both the theory of universal grammar as well as generative grammar have been criticized over time. A primary argument is that the majority of Chomsky's studies are based in English, and do not represent "human language" as a whole. Linguist Geoffrey Sampson suggests that the core of his arguments are not scientifically falsifiable, and therefore hold no more weight than mere opinion or conjecture. Sampson follows that Chomsky does not seem to be able to make predictions of what is possible in a language.
Finally, many of his critics claim that Chomsky's books are riddled with factual inaccuracies <ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>.

===Challenges===
In 2005 former [[missionary]] Daniel Everett published a controversial article titled "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã" which challeneged the notion that [[recursion]] is inherent in universal grammar. Since this oublication Everett has experienced academic and (stemming from this) political bullying and Chomsky himself labelled him a charlatan.

==Political Views==
Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in The Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised libertarian socialism.

His opponents accuse him of expressing admiration for governmental systems such as the Soviet Union, Chinese and Cambodian governments which are characterized by central control, xenophobia, and rejection of free expression, though he has openly expressed opposition to the Soviet Union and other regimes characterized by authoritarianism, arguing that they are not legitimate forms of socialism.<ref>http://chomsky.info/articles/1986----.htm</ref> He also counters that he is merely pointing out the West's own crimes and not condoning authoritarian governments that the West opposes. His stated justification for this is that criticism of other authoritarian governments will do nothing except give the United States ammunition against other countries, while being able to freely ignore their own crimes, whereas criticism of his own country may bring about what he considers to be positive reform. Chomsky identifies himself as a libertarian socialist who is opposed to both neoliberalism and authoritarianism. <ref>http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19446</ref>
=== Anti-Semitism ===
Chomsky has been accused for [[anti-Semitism]].<ref>http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Dershowitz.htm</ref><ref>http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15381</ref>. In addition to his support for Hezbollah, He has stated that Jews are "the most privileged and influential part of the population", and that "Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control"<ref>http://www.variant.randomstate.org/16texts/Chomsky.html</ref>.

Chomsky has supported controversial author [[Norman Finkelstein]], author of ''The Holocaust Industry'', who has argued that claims of anti-Semitism are used to silence critics of Israel and that the Holocaust is exploited by some Jewish institutions for their own gain.<ref>[http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=311000&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news University denies tenure to Holocaust academic], ''Mail & Guardian'', 12 June 2007.</ref> Noam Chomsky has also supported the right of Holocaust deniers, among them the notorious Robert Faurisson, to express their views. Chomsky has claimed he sees this as a free-speech issue and does not himself support Holocaust deniers.<ref>[http://frontpagemag.com/2011/02/15/chomsky-calls-elie-wiesel-%E2%80%9Cone-of-the-major-frauds-of-our-time%E2%80%9D/ Chomsky Calls Elie Wiesel “One of The Major Frauds of Our Time”] - [[FrontPage Magazine]]</ref>

It should be noted that both Finkelstein and Chomsky are from Jewish-American backgrounds <ref>[http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=150]</ref><ref>http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/noamchomsky2005</ref>, and that both Chomsky's parents were devout and involved in Jewish scholarship. It is unclear whether Chomsky still practices Judaism.

===Controversies===
#Chomsky denied the Cambodian Genocide, claiming that the killing had been inflated "by a factor of 100."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/encounter.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/labedz.pdf</ref> He further asserted that the (in reality) 2 to 3 million Cambodians slaughtered by the [[Khmer Rouge]] from 1975 to 1978 were morally comparable to Nazi collaborators during WW2, and that [[Pol Pot]]'s Cambodia was "comparable to France after liberation [from the Nazis]."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm</ref>
#Chomsky recently (1995) claimed, in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated "by a factor of a ''thousand''."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm#fn61</ref> Since he was responding to an estimate of two million dead, his words would imply that the real toll was on the order of two thousand. (Note: Investigators have uncovered and examined the remains of 1,386,734 Cambodians found in mass graves near Khmer Rouge execution centers whose cause of death has been determined by the investigators to have been virtually exclusively execution by the former Khmer Rouge regime.<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/toll.htm</ref><ref>http://welcome.to/dccam</ref> Because no ''more'' than roughly ''half'' of those who died during the Khmer Rouge years were executed (the rest having died from other causes like state-created famine, the deliberate withholding of basic necessities by the state, the refusal by the state to allow foreign aid, the abolishing of medicine and hospitals by the state, systematic overwork and slave labor by the state, and normal mortality), the Documentation Center of Cambodia estimates that the former regime killed or otherwise caused the unnecessary deaths of, between 2 and 2.5 million Cambodians (with 2.5 to 3 million dying and half a million of these representing normal mortality for the period).<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref> A UN investigation reported 2-3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million dead.<ref>William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref>
#Chomsky has claimed that [[Pearl Harbor]] saved millions of lives and that America and Britain used Nazi armies to attack the [[Soviet Union]] and prolong the [[Holocaust]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/newyorker1.html</ref>
#Chomsky has stated: “Of course, no one supposed that Mao literally murdered tens of millions of people, or that he ‘intended’ that any die at all.”<ref>“Second Reply to Casey,” ZNet, September 2001: http://www.zmag.org/chomreply2.htm</ref> In fact, a comprehensive analysis by Professor R.J. Rummel concluded that Mao was responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM</ref>
#Chomsky regularly compares the "alleged" genocide in Cambodia to the 24-year occupation of [[East Timor]] by [[Indonesia]]. He wrote: “The harshest critics claim that perhaps 100,000 people have been slaughtered [in Cambodia]… Comparing East Timor with Cambodia, we see that the time frame of alleged atrocities is the same, the numbers allegedly slaughtered are roughly comparable in absolute terms, and five to ten times as high in East Timor relative to population… my own conclusion is that the sources in the [case of] East Timor are more credible…”<ref>Radical Priorities (rev. ed., AK Press, 2003), p80.</ref> Based on the findings of genocide investigators, as mentioned above; about 2.2 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in less than 4 years. A Truth Commission found that 89-214,000 Timorese out of more than 700,000 were killed during the 24-year occupation, about 3/4 of them by Indonesia.<ref>Final Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR), January 30, 2006, part 6, paras. 47, 56-7: http://www.ictj.org/en/news/features/846.html</ref> [[Suharto]] killed far less people in absolute terms over decades in one of the world's most populous countries than Pol Pot killed in three years in a country with 8 million people, and exponentially less relative to the size of the population.
#Chomsky denied any genocide or mass reprisals in [[Laos]] after the Communist victory, stating that the Pathet Lao "have made some efforts to achieve a reconciliation with the mountain tribesmen who had been organized in the CIA clandestine army."<ref>After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), p122.</ref> Some 100,000 tribespeople had been exterminated in a campaign of genocide at the time.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989), p8 (estimate); Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 (Indiana Uniersity Press, 1999), pp337-460 (atrocities).</ref>
#Chomsky once wrote: “At the end of 1978 Cambodia [under the Khmer Rouge] was the only country in Indochina that had succeeded at all in overcoming the agricultural crisis that was left by the American destruction.”<ref>Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), pp245-6. Cf.: “it was a condition of survival to turn (or return) the populations to productive work. The victors in Cambodia undertook drastic and often brutal measures to accomplish this task… At a heavy cost, these measures appear to have overcome the dire and destructive consequences of the US war by 1978,” After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), pviii.</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to “the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,”<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid. The Cambodian communists' economic plans were, at times, utterly surreal. Scholar David Chandler notes that, in a Democratic Kampuchea report on General Political Tasks of 1976, there are three lines devoted to education, and six devoted to urine. The document states that, regarding human urine, "We collect thirty per cent. That leaves a surplus of 70%." These were indicative of the types of policies that Chomsky and his co-writer, Edward Herman, claimed had lifted Cambodia out of the ashes of war.
#Chomsky openly claimed in 1977 that Pol Pot had saved up to one million lives.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/cambodiacomments.pdf</ref> He did so by citing a Ford administration prediction that the Khmer Rouge would likely kill more than one million people, and then falsely restating it to imply that more than one million Cambodians would starve to death if US aid was cut off. At the time of this essay, the Khmer Rouge had probably already killed more than one million people, but Chomsky was still claiming that "executions numbered at most in the thousands," that Khmer Rouge atrocities had been "inflated by a factor of 100" and that those the Khmer Rouge had allegedly refrained from killing were actually ''saved'' by the Khmer Rouge. One million people had not died since aid was terminated, he said, therefore one million lives had been saved from starvation by the Khmer Rouge's ingenious economic policies. Thus did Chomsky praise Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge for "saving" the lives of dead people ''who they had murdered''. (Chomsky is also implying that the US cut off aid to Cambodia, when it actually had an unconditional offer to supply aid to it. Aid was terminated ''by the Khmer Rouge'').
#Chomsky has praised Imperial Japan for allegedly "saving maybe tens of millions of lives."<ref>Interview, International Socialist Review, September-October 2002.</ref>
#Chomsky has expressed support for the former Communist dictatorship of [[Angola]]: “The defense of Angola was one of Cuba’s most significant contributions to the liberation of Africa.”<ref>Hegemony or Survival (Penguin, 2004), p94.</ref> Cuban military intervention in support of the communist MPLA dictatorship in Angola led to decades of civil war that cost 1 million lives. Other Cuban “contributions to the liberation of Africa” include fighting for the communist dictatorship in Ethiopia, which killed 1.25 million people by massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999 (Angola death toll); Washington Post, March 18, 1978 (Ethiopia intervention); New York Times, December 14, 1994(Ethiopia death toll).</ref>
#Chomsky has repeatedly denied that the former Sandinista regime in [[Nicaragua]] committed any human rights violations at all.<ref>The Culture of Terrorism (South End Press, 1988), p137.</ref> According to the Nicaraguan Commission of Jurists, the regime carried out some 8,000 political murders within its first three years in power.
#Chomsky also strongly approved of the Sandinista's economic policies, writing that “the crime of the Sandinistas was to carry out successful development… they immediately began to divert resources to the poor part of the population.”<ref>Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization (Ocean Press, 1999), p57.</ref> Within a few years of Sandinista rule, wages had been fixed below poverty level and there was mass unemployment. There were shortages of nearly all basic goods, with inflation at 30,000%. Government studies found that three-quarters of schoolchildren suffered from malnutrition, while living standards were lower than Haiti. The World Bank found that Nicaragua was on the economic level of Somalia.<ref>Roger Miranda and William Ratliff, The Civil War in Nicaragua (Transaction, 1993), pp183-4.</ref>
#Chomsky referred to 22 Israeli schoolchildren murdered by Palestinian terrorists as "members of a paramilitary youth group."<ref>Pirates and Emperors, Old and New (rev. ed., Pluto Press, 2002), p65.</ref> He falsely claimed there had been "an exchange of fire" between the schoolchildren and the terrorists.
#Chomsky claimed after the [[9/11]] attacks that “Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that [in Afghanistan]… Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide… we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people…”<ref>“The New War Against Terror,” Lecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 18, 2001.</ref> Far from killing millions, the American intervention saved lives. UNICEF figures indicate that the deaths of 112,000 children and 7,500 pregnant women have been prevented every year since as a result.<ref>New York Times, February 1, 2002.</ref> The US invasion ''saved'' millions of Afghans from starvation.<ref>http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42858-2001Dec30?language=printer</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24019</ref> Chomsky responded by claiming in 2002 that it was still possible that millions might starve to death, but that the Americans and the media could cover it up: "What the effects will be, we will never know. Starvation is not something that kills people instantly. People eat roots and leaves and they drag on for a while. And the effects of starvation may be the death of children born from malnourished mothers a year or two from now, and all sorts of consequences. Furthermore, nobody’s going to look because the West is not interested in such things and others don’t have the resources."<ref>http://www.leftwatch.com/articles/2004/chomsky-backpedals-on-silent-genocide-in-afghanistan/</ref>
#Chomsky believes that there are “no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.”<ref>Quoted in W.D. Rubinstein, “Chomsky and the Neo-Nazis,” Quadrant, October 1981.</ref>
#Chomsky has repeatedly claimed that there has never been so much as a misplaced comma in any of his writings and that no valid criticism of any of his statements or ideas has ever been published by anyone.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKPtwYzehYM</ref>
#Chomsky has lied about the views of Holocaust deniers (Faurisson, Serge Thion) by praising them as "libertarian Socialists with a long-standing record of opposition to all forms of totalitarianism."<ref>“His Right to Say It,” The Nation, February 28, 1981.</ref> He also published one of his books (The Political Economy of Human Rights, a book filled with more noble efforts to disprove the bloodbath in Cambodia) in a series directed by a Holocaust denier (Pierre Guillaume). He has praised Holocaust deniers, endorsed their political and academic credentials, collaborated in their propaganda campaigns, and whitewashed their antisemitic and neo-Nazi agenda.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> He signed a petition in support of Faurisson's denials of the Holocaust; although he claimed that he was only expressing solidarity with his right to free speech, the petition that Chomsky signed dignified Faurisson’s writings by affirming his scholarly credentials (“a respected professor” of “document criticism”); describing his lies as “extensive historical research”; placing the term “Holocaust” in derisory quotation marks; and portraying his lies as "findings" (a very typical Chomsky propaganda technique).<ref>The text of the petition is reproduced in Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (Avukah Press, 1995), pp53-4.</ref> More obscenely, Chomsky added that "I sign innumerable petitions of this nature, and do not recall ever having refused to sign one."<ref>Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), p290.</ref> At the time of this controversy, Chomsky had just finished publicly bragging about his outspoken refusual to sign petitions calling for human rights in Communist Vietnam--even as it massacred many hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children en masse and drowned at sea hundreds of thousands more. On that occasion, he had explained that “public protest is a political act, to be judged in terms of its likely human consequences,” which included the likelihood that the American media “would distort and exploit it for their propagandistic purposes.”<ref>Unpublished interview, March 28, 1977; Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), p176.</ref>
#More recently, Chomsky has promoted a conspiracy theory (now popularized in Oliver Stone's ''Untold History of the United States'') that Zbigniew Brzezinski (national security advisor under president [[Jimmy Carter]]) secretly armed the Afghan mujahideen prior to 1979 in an elaborate plot to "trap" the Soviets. Brzezinski, however, has strongly denied anything of the kind,<ref>Interview, ''The Real News'', January 15, 2010.</ref> while Cyrus Vance's close aide Marshall Shulman "insists that the State Department worked hard to ''dissuade'' the Soviets from invading and would never have undertaken a program to encourage it."<ref>''The Nation'', November 12, 2001.</ref> Needless to say, declassified records from the time are at variance with Chomsky's fantasy. (It is likely, given the crucial Soviet role in initiating the Korean and Vietnam wars, that this claim is the product of projection.)

===Chomsky's Criticisms of the West===
Chomsky is one of the most vocal critics of the [[United States]] foreign policy. Some of his criticisms are:
#The overthrow of [[Mohammed Mossadegh]] in Iran and replacement with the Shah in 1953 (Done by the US and the UK)
#The overthrow of communist dictator Jacobo Arbenz in [[Guatemala]] in 1954
#The alleged US support for the overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende in Chile on 9/11 in 1973
#The Contra war against the Sandinista dictatorship in [[Nicaragua]] in the 1980s
#The backing of a brutal military dictatorship in [[El Salvador]] during the same time period
#Selling weapons to a terror-state ([[Iran]]) to fund the Contras. (See [[Iran-Contra Affair]])
#Supporting [[Saddam Hussein]] during the Iran-Iraq war.
#Supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s
#Invading [[Iraq]] in 2003 despite lack of support from the [[UN]]
#Blatant Support of [[Israel]] which Chomsky believes is a terror state despite his [[Jew]]ish ethnicity
(Source: Hegemony or Survival)

== External links ==
*[http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/publications.html List of Chomsky's Publications]
*[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk8pxyAWTBk Chomsky Speaks about American Politics] Chomsky believes the Democrats and Republicans are a single entity
*[http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1136# Video of Noam Chomsky with Hezbollah Leaders in Lebanon]
*[http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomskyhoax.html The Chomsky Hoax] by Paul Bogdanor
*[http://www.grsampson.net/AGwg.html Grammar Without Grammaticality] by Geoffrey Sampson
*[http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23543 Chomsky's New Blood Libel] by Alan Dershowitz
*[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXMZZCvFtlw Chomsky on Middle East Television] Chomsky speaks about American "imperialism."

==References==
<references/>
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chomsky, Noam}}
[[category:Scientists]]
[[Category:Linguists]]
[[category:Authors]]
[[Category:Socialists]]

Noam Chomsky

2013-02-26T20:34:16Z

JakeRMurrin: Correct

[[Image:Chomsky3.gif|right|130px]]
'''Noam Chomsky''' (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist who was a pioneer in [[Chomsky hierarchy|generative grammar]]. Later he became an extreme left-wing propagandist. He advocates holding America to an absolute standard of ethics in foreign relations, but has not held such a standard elsewhere. He tends to ignore such violations by other countries, even when they have been far worse. Fellow liberal academic, [[Arthur Schlesinger]], once referred to Chomsky as "an intellectual crook." <ref>"He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook." -- [[Arthur Schlesinger]] - ''Commentary'' magazine, December 1969</ref>

He is an institute professor of [[linguistics]] (Emeritus) at the [[MIT|Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT) <ref>http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/index.html</ref>.
Chomsky is very critical of [[America]]n and [[Israel]]i foreign policy, sympathizes with [[Palestine|Palestinians]] and has shown support for the terrorist organization [[Hezbollah]]<ref>http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1151</ref>. He has also been criticized for [[anti-Semitism]], despite having come from a Jewish family and having once spoken and written Hebrew.<ref>http://books.google.com/books?id=RKUbyYPG4mcC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=noam+chomsky+%22jewish+heritage%22&source=bl&ots=_DSi5cwxKc&sig=xHoUkX3zV4_dFwO2Gb-xrIxMJbw&hl=en&ei=Bf8iS7-DB5CXlAeXx8zzCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CBoQ6AEwBQ#v=snippet&q=chomsky%20jewish%20family&f=false</ref>

== Background ==
Chomsky was born '''Avram Noam Chomsky''' in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Chomsky, a [[Russia]]n immigrant, and Elsie Simonofsky Chomsky. His parents both practiced Judaism. His father taught [[Hebrew]], and published a scholarly edition of a medieval Hebrew grammar.<ref>http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/chomsky_noam.html</ref>. He received his education at the [[University of Pennsylvania]] where he studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy, and eventually earned his [[Ph. D.]] in 1955. Since then, he has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He previously held the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics, and is now an Institute Professor.

==Linguistic Works==
Chomsky's work is considered to be the spark of modern linguistic thought. His research deals with questions including the critical analysis of language and grammar, the role of biology in language and language acquisition, and the importance (or lack there of) of structural grammar and formal grammar in language function and development.

Chomsky has argued that the primary role the linguist should play is to decipher a language's grammatical structure. Chomsky has provided the field of linguistics path and policy in describing language as a concept and particular languages, as well as core functions of any particular language.

===Generative Grammar===
Noam Chomsky advocates the view that the human mind has innate ability to generate grammatical sentences, thus, all utterances deemed sensible to the speaker are necessarily grammatical. All humans, he argues, share a core of grammar that explodes into the thousands and thousands of distinct languages spoken by humans over time and place. Generative grammar ultimately suggests that the brain is like an unlabeled map, and a child's role is to assign different "paths" with particular labels.

===Universal Grammar===
Noam Chomsky also proposed the theory that a kind of universal grammar, a grammar that underlies all human languages, is hard-wired in the human brain. Thus all human languages are fundamentally the same, with only superficial differences.

===Criticism===
Both the theory of universal grammar as well as generative grammar have been criticized over time. A primary argument is that the majority of Chomsky's studies are based in English, and do not represent "human language" as a whole. Linguist Geoffrey Sampson suggests that the core of his arguments are not scientifically falsifiable, and therefore hold no more weight than mere opinion or conjecture. Sampson follows that Chomsky does not seem to be able to make predictions of what is possible in a language.
Finally, many of his critics claim that Chomsky's books are riddled with factual inaccuracies <ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>.

===Challenges===
In 2005 former [[missionary]] Daniel Everett published a controversial article titled "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã" which challeneged the notion that [[recursion]] is inherent in universal grammar. Since this oublication Everett has experienced academic and (stemming from this) political bullying and Chomsky himself labelled him a charlatan.

==Political Views==
Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in The Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised libertarian socialism.

His opponents accuse him of expressing admiration for governmental systems such as the Soviet Union, Chinese and Cambodian governments which are characterized by central control, xenophobia, and rejection of free expression, though he has openly expressed opposition to the Soviet Union and other regimes characterized by authoritarianism, arguing that they are not legitimate forms of socialism.<ref>http://chomsky.info/articles/1986----.htm</ref> He also counters that he is merely pointing out the West's own crimes and not condoning authoritarian governments that the West opposes. His stated justification for this is that criticism of other authoritarian governments will do nothing except give the United States ammunition against other countries, while being able to freely ignore their own crimes, whereas criticism of his own country may bring about what he considers to be positive reform. Chomsky identifies himself as a libertarian socialist who is opposed to both neoliberalism and authoritarianism. <ref>http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19446</ref>
=== Anti-Semitism ===
Chomsky has been accused for [[anti-Semitism]].<ref>http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Dershowitz.htm</ref><ref>http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15381</ref>. In addition to his support for Hezbollah, He has stated that Jews are "the most privileged and influential part of the population", and that "Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control"<ref>http://www.variant.randomstate.org/16texts/Chomsky.html</ref>.

Chomsky has supported controversial author [[Norman Finkelstein]], author of ''The Holocaust Industry'', who has argued that claims of anti-Semitism are used to silence critics of Israel and that the Holocaust is exploited by some Jewish institutions for their own gain.<ref>[http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=311000&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news University denies tenure to Holocaust academic], ''Mail & Guardian'', 12 June 2007.</ref> Noam Chomsky has also supported the right of Holocaust deniers, among them the notorious Robert Faurisson, to express their views. Chomsky has claimed he sees this as a free-speech issue and does not himself support Holocaust deniers.<ref>[http://frontpagemag.com/2011/02/15/chomsky-calls-elie-wiesel-%E2%80%9Cone-of-the-major-frauds-of-our-time%E2%80%9D/ Chomsky Calls Elie Wiesel “One of The Major Frauds of Our Time”] - [[FrontPage Magazine]]</ref>

It should be noted that both Finkelstein and Chomsky are from Jewish-American backgrounds <ref>[http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=150]</ref><ref>http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/noamchomsky2005</ref>, and that both Chomsky's parents were devout and involved in Jewish scholarship. It is unclear whether Chomsky still practices Judaism.

===Controversies===
#Chomsky denied the Cambodian Genocide, claiming that the killing had been inflated "by a factor of 100."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/encounter.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/labedz.pdf</ref> He further asserted that the (in reality) 2 to 3 million Cambodians slaughtered by the [[Khmer Rouge]] from 1975 to 1978 were morally comparable to Nazi collaborators during WW2, and that [[Pol Pot]]'s Cambodia was "comparable to France after liberation [from the Nazis]."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm</ref>
#Chomsky recently (1995) claimed, in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated "by a factor of a ''thousand''."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm#fn61</ref> Since he was responding to an estimate of two million dead, his words would imply that the real toll was on the order of two thousand. (Note: Investigators have uncovered and examined the remains of 1,386,734 Cambodians found in mass graves near Khmer Rouge execution centers whose cause of death has been determined by the investigators to have been virtually exclusively execution by the former Khmer Rouge regime.<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/toll.htm</ref><ref>http://welcome.to/dccam</ref> Because no ''more'' than roughly ''half'' of those who died during the Khmer Rouge years were executed (the rest having died from other causes like state-created famine, the deliberate withholding of basic necessities by the state, the refusal by the state to allow foreign aid, the abolishing of medicine and hospitals by the state, systematic overwork and slave labor by the state, and normal mortality), the Documentation Center of Cambodia estimates that the former regime killed or otherwise caused the unnecessary deaths of, between 2 and 2.5 million Cambodians (with 2.5 to 3 million dying and half a million of these representing normal mortality for the period).<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref> A UN investigation reported 2-3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million dead.<ref>William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref>
#Chomsky has claimed that [[Pearl Harbor]] saved millions of lives and that America and Britain used Nazi armies to attack the [[Soviet Union]] and prolong the [[Holocaust]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/newyorker1.html</ref>
#Chomsky has stated: “Of course, no one supposed that Mao literally murdered tens of millions of people, or that he ‘intended’ that any die at all.”<ref>“Second Reply to Casey,” ZNet, September 2001: http://www.zmag.org/chomreply2.htm</ref> In fact, a comprehensive analysis by Professor R.J. Rummel concluded that Mao was responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM</ref>
#Chomsky regularly compares the "alleged" genocide in Cambodia to the 24-year occupation of [[East Timor]] by [[Indonesia]]. He wrote: “The harshest critics claim that perhaps 100,000 people have been slaughtered [in Cambodia]… Comparing East Timor with Cambodia, we see that the time frame of alleged atrocities is the same, the numbers allegedly slaughtered are roughly comparable in absolute terms, and five to ten times as high in East Timor relative to population… my own conclusion is that the sources in the [case of] East Timor are more credible…”<ref>Radical Priorities (rev. ed., AK Press, 2003), p80.</ref> Based on the findings of genocide investigators, as mentioned above; about 2.2 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in less than 4 years. A Truth Commission found that 89-214,000 Timorese out of more than 700,000 were killed during the 24-year occupation, about 3/4 of them by Indonesia.<ref>Final Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR), January 30, 2006, part 6, paras. 47, 56-7: http://www.ictj.org/en/news/features/846.html</ref> [[Suharto]] killed far less people in absolute terms over decades in one of the world's most populous countries than Pol Pot killed in three years in a country with 8 million people, and exponentially less relative to the size of the population.
#Chomsky denied any genocide or mass reprisals in [[Laos]] after the Communist victory, stating that the Pathet Lao "have made some efforts to achieve a reconciliation with the mountain tribesmen who had been organized in the CIA clandestine army."<ref>After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), p122.</ref> Some 100,000 tribespeople had been exterminated in a campaign of genocide at the time.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989), p8 (estimate); Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 (Indiana Uniersity Press, 1999), pp337-460 (atrocities).</ref>
#Chomsky once wrote: “At the end of 1978 Cambodia [under the Khmer Rouge] was the only country in Indochina that had succeeded at all in overcoming the agricultural crisis that was left by the American destruction.”<ref>Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), pp245-6. Cf.: “it was a condition of survival to turn (or return) the populations to productive work. The victors in Cambodia undertook drastic and often brutal measures to accomplish this task… At a heavy cost, these measures appear to have overcome the dire and destructive consequences of the US war by 1978,” After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), pviii.</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to “the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,”<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid. The Cambodian communists' economic plans were, at times, utterly surreal. Scholar David Chandler notes that, in a Democratic Kampuchea report on General Political Tasks of 1976, there are three lines devoted to education, and six devoted to urine. The document states that, regarding human urine, "We collect thirty per cent. That leaves a surplus of 70%." These were indicative of the types of policies that Chomsky and his co-writer, Edward Herman, claimed had lifted Cambodia out of the ashes of war.
#Chomsky openly claimed in 1977 that Pol Pot had saved up to one million lives.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/cambodiacomments.pdf</ref> He did so by citing a Ford administration prediction that the Khmer Rouge would likely kill more than one million people, and then falsely restating it to imply that more than one million Cambodians would starve to death if US aid was cut off. At the time of this essay, the Khmer Rouge had probably already killed more than one million people, but Chomsky was still claiming that "executions numbered at most in the thousands," that Khmer Rouge atrocities had been "inflated by a factor of 100" and that those the Khmer Rouge had allegedly refrained from killing were actually ''saved'' by the Khmer Rouge. One million people had not died since aid was terminated, he said, therefore one million lives had been saved from starvation by the Khmer Rouge's ingenious economic policies. Thus did Chomsky praise Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge for "saving" the lives of dead people ''who they had murdered''. (Chomsky is also implying that the US cut off aid to Cambodia, when it actually had an unconditional offer to supply aid to it. Aid was terminated ''by the Khmer Rouge'').
#Chomsky has praised Imperial Japan for allegedly "saving maybe tens of millions of lives."<ref>Interview, International Socialist Review, September-October 2002.</ref>
#Chomsky has expressed support for the former Communist dictatorship of [[Angola]]: “The defense of Angola was one of Cuba’s most significant contributions to the liberation of Africa.”<ref>Hegemony or Survival (Penguin, 2004), p94.</ref> Cuban military intervention in support of the communist MPLA dictatorship in Angola led to decades of civil war that cost 1 million lives. Other Cuban “contributions to the liberation of Africa” include fighting for the communist dictatorship in Ethiopia, which killed 1.25 million people by massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999 (Angola death toll); Washington Post, March 18, 1978 (Ethiopia intervention); New York Times, December 14, 1994(Ethiopia death toll).</ref>
#Chomsky has repeatedly denied that the former Sandinista regime in [[Nicaragua]] committed any human rights violations at all.<ref>The Culture of Terrorism (South End Press, 1988), p137.</ref> According to the Nicaraguan Commission of Jurists, the regime carried out some 8,000 political murders within its first three years in power.
#Chomsky also strongly approved of the Sandinista's economic policies, writing that “the crime of the Sandinistas was to carry out successful development… they immediately began to divert resources to the poor part of the population.”<ref>Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization (Ocean Press, 1999), p57.</ref> Within a few years of Sandinista rule, wages had been fixed below poverty level and there was mass unemployment. There were shortages of nearly all basic goods, with inflation at 30,000%. Government studies found that three-quarters of schoolchildren suffered from malnutrition, while living standards were lower than Haiti. The World Bank found that Nicaragua was on the economic level of Somalia.<ref>Roger Miranda and William Ratliff, The Civil War in Nicaragua (Transaction, 1993), pp183-4.</ref>
#Chomsky referred to 22 Israeli schoolchildren murdered by Palestinian terrorists as "members of a paramilitary youth group."<ref>Pirates and Emperors, Old and New (rev. ed., Pluto Press, 2002), p65.</ref> He falsely claimed there had been "an exchange of fire" between the schoolchildren and the terrorists.
#Chomsky claimed after the [[9/11]] attacks that “Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that [in Afghanistan]… Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide… we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people…”<ref>“The New War Against Terror,” Lecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 18, 2001.</ref> Far from killing millions, the American intervention saved lives. UNICEF figures indicate that the deaths of 112,000 children and 7,500 pregnant women have been prevented every year since as a result.<ref>New York Times, February 1, 2002.</ref> The US invasion ''saved'' millions of Afghans from starvation.<ref>http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42858-2001Dec30?language=printer</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24019</ref> Chomsky responded by claiming in 2002 that it was still possible that millions might starve to death, but that the Americans and the media could cover it up: "What the effects will be, we will never know. Starvation is not something that kills people instantly. People eat roots and leaves and they drag on for a while. And the effects of starvation may be the death of children born from malnourished mothers a year or two from now, and all sorts of consequences. Furthermore, nobody’s going to look because the West is not interested in such things and others don’t have the resources."<ref>http://www.leftwatch.com/articles/2004/chomsky-backpedals-on-silent-genocide-in-afghanistan/</ref>
#Chomsky believes that there are “no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.”<ref>Quoted in W.D. Rubinstein, “Chomsky and the Neo-Nazis,” Quadrant, October 1981.</ref>
#Chomsky has repeatedly claimed that there has never been so much as a misplaced comma in any of his writings and that no valid criticism of any of his statements or ideas has ever been published by anyone.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKPtwYzehYM</ref>
#Chomsky has lied about the views of Holocaust deniers (Faurisson, Serge Thion) by praising them as "libertarian Socialists with a long-standing record of opposition to all forms of totalitarianism."<ref>“His Right to Say It,” The Nation, February 28, 1981.</ref> He also published one of his books (The Political Economy of Human Rights, a book filled with more noble efforts to disprove the bloodbath in Cambodia) in a series directed by a Holocaust denier (Pierre Guillaume). He has praised Holocaust deniers, endorsed their political and academic credentials, collaborated in their propaganda campaigns, and whitewashed their antisemitic and neo-Nazi agenda.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> He signed a petition in support of Faurisson's denials of the Holocaust; although he claimed that he was only expressing solidarity with his right to free speech, the petition that Chomsky signed dignified Faurisson’s writings by affirming his scholarly credentials (“a respected professor” of “document criticism”); describing his lies as “extensive historical research”; placing the term “Holocaust” in derisory quotation marks; and portraying his lies as "findings" (a very typical Chomsky propaganda technique).<ref>The text of the petition is reproduced in Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (Avukah Press, 1995), pp53-4.</ref> More obscenely, Chomsky added that "I sign innumerable petitions of this nature, and do not recall ever having refused to sign one."<ref>Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), p290.</ref> At the time of this controversy, Chomsky had just finished publicly bragging about his outspoken refusual to sign petitions calling for human rights in Communist Vietnam--even as it massacred many hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children en masse and drowned at sea hundreds of thousands more. On that occasion, he had explained that “public protest is a political act, to be judged in terms of its likely human consequences,” which included the likelihood that the American media “would distort and exploit it for their propagandistic purposes.”<ref>Unpublished interview, March 28, 1977; Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), p176.</ref>
#More recently, Chomsky has promoted a conspiracy theory (now popularized in Oliver Stone's ''Untold History of the United States'') that Zbigniew Brzezinski (national security advisor under president [[Jimmy Carter]]) secretly armed the Afghan mujahideen prior to 1979 in an elaborate plot to "trap" the Soviets. Brzezinski, however, has strongly denied anything of the kind,<ref>Interview, ''The Real News'', Jan 15, 2010.</ref> while Cyrus Vance's close aide Marshall Shulman "insists that the State Department worked hard to ''dissuade'' the Soviets from invading and would never have undertaken a program to encourage it."<ref>''The Nation'', November 12, 2001.</ref> Needless to say, declassified records from the time are at variance with Chomsky's fantasy. (It is likely, given the crucial Soviet role in initiating the Korean and Vietnam wars, that this claim is the product of projection.)

===Chomsky's Criticisms of the West===
Chomsky is one of the most vocal critics of the [[United States]] foreign policy. Some of his criticisms are:
#The overthrow of [[Mohammed Mossadegh]] in Iran and replacement with the Shah in 1953 (Done by the US and the UK)
#The overthrow of communist dictator Jacobo Arbenz in [[Guatemala]] in 1954
#The alleged US support for the overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende in Chile on 9/11 in 1973
#The Contra war against the Sandinista dictatorship in [[Nicaragua]] in the 1980s
#The backing of a brutal military dictatorship in [[El Salvador]] during the same time period
#Selling weapons to a terror-state ([[Iran]]) to fund the Contras. (See [[Iran-Contra Affair]])
#Supporting [[Saddam Hussein]] during the Iran-Iraq war.
#Supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s
#Invading [[Iraq]] in 2003 despite lack of support from the [[UN]]
#Blatant Support of [[Israel]] which Chomsky believes is a terror state despite his [[Jew]]ish ethnicity
(Source: Hegemony or Survival)

== External links ==
*[http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/publications.html List of Chomsky's Publications]
*[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk8pxyAWTBk Chomsky Speaks about American Politics] Chomsky believes the Democrats and Republicans are a single entity
*[http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1136# Video of Noam Chomsky with Hezbollah Leaders in Lebanon]
*[http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomskyhoax.html The Chomsky Hoax] by Paul Bogdanor
*[http://www.grsampson.net/AGwg.html Grammar Without Grammaticality] by Geoffrey Sampson
*[http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23543 Chomsky's New Blood Libel] by Alan Dershowitz
*[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXMZZCvFtlw Chomsky on Middle East Television] Chomsky speaks about American "imperialism."

==References==
<references/>
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chomsky, Noam}}
[[category:Scientists]]
[[Category:Linguists]]
[[category:Authors]]
[[Category:Socialists]]

Noam Chomsky

2013-02-26T20:29:14Z

JakeRMurrin: Add

[[Image:Chomsky3.gif|right|130px]]
'''Noam Chomsky''' (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist who was a pioneer in [[Chomsky hierarchy|generative grammar]]. Later he became an extreme left-wing propagandist. He advocates holding America to an absolute standard of ethics in foreign relations, but has not held such a standard elsewhere. He tends to ignore such violations by other countries, even when they have been far worse. Fellow liberal academic, [[Arthur Schlesinger]], once referred to Chomsky as "an intellectual crook." <ref>"He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook." -- [[Arthur Schlesinger]] - ''Commentary'' magazine, December 1969</ref>

He is an institute professor of [[linguistics]] (Emeritus) at the [[MIT|Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT) <ref>http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/index.html</ref>.
Chomsky is very critical of [[America]]n and [[Israel]]i foreign policy, sympathizes with [[Palestine|Palestinians]] and has shown support for the terrorist organization [[Hezbollah]]<ref>http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1151</ref>. He has also been criticized for [[anti-Semitism]], despite having come from a Jewish family and having once spoken and written Hebrew.<ref>http://books.google.com/books?id=RKUbyYPG4mcC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=noam+chomsky+%22jewish+heritage%22&source=bl&ots=_DSi5cwxKc&sig=xHoUkX3zV4_dFwO2Gb-xrIxMJbw&hl=en&ei=Bf8iS7-DB5CXlAeXx8zzCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CBoQ6AEwBQ#v=snippet&q=chomsky%20jewish%20family&f=false</ref>

== Background ==
Chomsky was born '''Avram Noam Chomsky''' in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Chomsky, a [[Russia]]n immigrant, and Elsie Simonofsky Chomsky. His parents both practiced Judaism. His father taught [[Hebrew]], and published a scholarly edition of a medieval Hebrew grammar.<ref>http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/chomsky_noam.html</ref>. He received his education at the [[University of Pennsylvania]] where he studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy, and eventually earned his [[Ph. D.]] in 1955. Since then, he has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He previously held the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics, and is now an Institute Professor.

==Linguistic Works==
Chomsky's work is considered to be the spark of modern linguistic thought. His research deals with questions including the critical analysis of language and grammar, the role of biology in language and language acquisition, and the importance (or lack there of) of structural grammar and formal grammar in language function and development.

Chomsky has argued that the primary role the linguist should play is to decipher a language's grammatical structure. Chomsky has provided the field of linguistics path and policy in describing language as a concept and particular languages, as well as core functions of any particular language.

===Generative Grammar===
Noam Chomsky advocates the view that the human mind has innate ability to generate grammatical sentences, thus, all utterances deemed sensible to the speaker are necessarily grammatical. All humans, he argues, share a core of grammar that explodes into the thousands and thousands of distinct languages spoken by humans over time and place. Generative grammar ultimately suggests that the brain is like an unlabeled map, and a child's role is to assign different "paths" with particular labels.

===Universal Grammar===
Noam Chomsky also proposed the theory that a kind of universal grammar, a grammar that underlies all human languages, is hard-wired in the human brain. Thus all human languages are fundamentally the same, with only superficial differences.

===Criticism===
Both the theory of universal grammar as well as generative grammar have been criticized over time. A primary argument is that the majority of Chomsky's studies are based in English, and do not represent "human language" as a whole. Linguist Geoffrey Sampson suggests that the core of his arguments are not scientifically falsifiable, and therefore hold no more weight than mere opinion or conjecture. Sampson follows that Chomsky does not seem to be able to make predictions of what is possible in a language.
Finally, many of his critics claim that Chomsky's books are riddled with factual inaccuracies <ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>.

===Challenges===
In 2005 former [[missionary]] Daniel Everett published a controversial article titled "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã" which challeneged the notion that [[recursion]] is inherent in universal grammar. Since this oublication Everett has experienced academic and (stemming from this) political bullying and Chomsky himself labelled him a charlatan.

==Political Views==
Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in The Enlightenment and classical liberalism" and he has praised libertarian socialism.

His opponents accuse him of expressing admiration for governmental systems such as the Soviet Union, Chinese and Cambodian governments which are characterized by central control, xenophobia, and rejection of free expression, though he has openly expressed opposition to the Soviet Union and other regimes characterized by authoritarianism, arguing that they are not legitimate forms of socialism.<ref>http://chomsky.info/articles/1986----.htm</ref> He also counters that he is merely pointing out the West's own crimes and not condoning authoritarian governments that the West opposes. His stated justification for this is that criticism of other authoritarian governments will do nothing except give the United States ammunition against other countries, while being able to freely ignore their own crimes, whereas criticism of his own country may bring about what he considers to be positive reform. Chomsky identifies himself as a libertarian socialist who is opposed to both neoliberalism and authoritarianism. <ref>http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19446</ref>
=== Anti-Semitism ===
Chomsky has been accused for [[anti-Semitism]].<ref>http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Dershowitz.htm</ref><ref>http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15381</ref>. In addition to his support for Hezbollah, He has stated that Jews are "the most privileged and influential part of the population", and that "Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control"<ref>http://www.variant.randomstate.org/16texts/Chomsky.html</ref>.

Chomsky has supported controversial author [[Norman Finkelstein]], author of ''The Holocaust Industry'', who has argued that claims of anti-Semitism are used to silence critics of Israel and that the Holocaust is exploited by some Jewish institutions for their own gain.<ref>[http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=311000&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news University denies tenure to Holocaust academic], ''Mail & Guardian'', 12 June 2007.</ref> Noam Chomsky has also supported the right of Holocaust deniers, among them the notorious Robert Faurisson, to express their views. Chomsky has claimed he sees this as a free-speech issue and does not himself support Holocaust deniers.<ref>[http://frontpagemag.com/2011/02/15/chomsky-calls-elie-wiesel-%E2%80%9Cone-of-the-major-frauds-of-our-time%E2%80%9D/ Chomsky Calls Elie Wiesel “One of The Major Frauds of Our Time”] - [[FrontPage Magazine]]</ref>

It should be noted that both Finkelstein and Chomsky are from Jewish-American backgrounds <ref>[http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=150]</ref><ref>http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/noamchomsky2005</ref>, and that both Chomsky's parents were devout and involved in Jewish scholarship. It is unclear whether Chomsky still practices Judaism.

===Controversies===
#Chomsky denied the Cambodian Genocide, claiming that the killing had been inflated "by a factor of 100."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/encounter.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/labedz.pdf</ref> He further asserted that the (in reality) 2 to 3 million Cambodians slaughtered by the [[Khmer Rouge]] from 1975 to 1978 were morally comparable to Nazi collaborators during WW2, and that [[Pol Pot]]'s Cambodia was "comparable to France after liberation [from the Nazis]."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm</ref>
#Chomsky recently (1995) claimed, in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated "by a factor of a ''thousand''."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm#fn61</ref> Since he was responding to an estimate of two million dead, his words would imply that the real toll was on the order of two thousand. (Note: Investigators have uncovered and examined the remains of 1,386,734 Cambodians found in mass graves near Khmer Rouge execution centers whose cause of death has been determined by the investigators to have been virtually exclusively execution by the former Khmer Rouge regime.<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/toll.htm</ref><ref>http://welcome.to/dccam</ref> Because no ''more'' than roughly ''half'' of those who died during the Khmer Rouge years were executed (the rest having died from other causes like state-created famine, the deliberate withholding of basic necessities by the state, the refusal by the state to allow foreign aid, the abolishing of medicine and hospitals by the state, systematic overwork and slave labor by the state, and normal mortality), the Documentation Center of Cambodia estimates that the former regime killed or otherwise caused the unnecessary deaths of, between 2 and 2.5 million Cambodians (with 2.5 to 3 million dying and half a million of these representing normal mortality for the period).<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref> A UN investigation reported 2-3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million dead.<ref>William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref>
#Chomsky has claimed that [[Pearl Harbor]] saved millions of lives and that America and Britain used Nazi armies to attack the [[Soviet Union]] and prolong the [[Holocaust]].<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/newyorker1.html</ref>
#Chomsky has stated: “Of course, no one supposed that Mao literally murdered tens of millions of people, or that he ‘intended’ that any die at all.”<ref>“Second Reply to Casey,” ZNet, September 2001: http://www.zmag.org/chomreply2.htm</ref> In fact, a comprehensive analysis by Professor R.J. Rummel concluded that Mao was responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM</ref>
#Chomsky regularly compares the "alleged" genocide in Cambodia to the 24-year occupation of [[East Timor]] by [[Indonesia]]. He wrote: “The harshest critics claim that perhaps 100,000 people have been slaughtered [in Cambodia]… Comparing East Timor with Cambodia, we see that the time frame of alleged atrocities is the same, the numbers allegedly slaughtered are roughly comparable in absolute terms, and five to ten times as high in East Timor relative to population… my own conclusion is that the sources in the [case of] East Timor are more credible…”<ref>Radical Priorities (rev. ed., AK Press, 2003), p80.</ref> Based on the findings of genocide investigators, as mentioned above; about 2.2 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in less than 4 years. A Truth Commission found that 89-214,000 Timorese out of more than 700,000 were killed during the 24-year occupation, about 3/4 of them by Indonesia.<ref>Final Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR), January 30, 2006, part 6, paras. 47, 56-7: http://www.ictj.org/en/news/features/846.html</ref> [[Suharto]] killed far less people in absolute terms over decades in one of the world's most populous countries than Pol Pot killed in three years in a country with 8 million people, and exponentially less relative to the size of the population.
#Chomsky denied any genocide or mass reprisals in [[Laos]] after the Communist victory, stating that the Pathet Lao "have made some efforts to achieve a reconciliation with the mountain tribesmen who had been organized in the CIA clandestine army."<ref>After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), p122.</ref> Some 100,000 tribespeople had been exterminated in a campaign of genocide at the time.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989), p8 (estimate); Jane Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 (Indiana Uniersity Press, 1999), pp337-460 (atrocities).</ref>
#Chomsky once wrote: “At the end of 1978 Cambodia [under the Khmer Rouge] was the only country in Indochina that had succeeded at all in overcoming the agricultural crisis that was left by the American destruction.”<ref>Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), pp245-6. Cf.: “it was a condition of survival to turn (or return) the populations to productive work. The victors in Cambodia undertook drastic and often brutal measures to accomplish this task… At a heavy cost, these measures appear to have overcome the dire and destructive consequences of the US war by 1978,” After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), pviii.</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to “the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,”<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid. The Cambodian communists' economic plans were, at times, utterly surreal. Scholar David Chandler notes that, in a Democratic Kampuchea report on General Political Tasks of 1976, there are three lines devoted to education, and six devoted to urine. The document states that, regarding human urine, "We collect thirty per cent. That leaves a surplus of 70%." These were indicative of the types of policies that Chomsky and his co-writer, Edward Herman, claimed had lifted Cambodia out of the ashes of war.
#Chomsky openly claimed in 1977 that Pol Pot had saved more than one million lives.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/cambodiacomments.pdf</ref> He did so by citing a Nixon administration statement that US aid to Cambodia should continue because the Khmer Rouge would likely kill more than one million people if they took over, and then falsely restating it to imply that more than one million Cambodians would starve to death if aid was cut off. At the time of this essay, the Khmer Rouge had probably already killed more than one million people, but Chomsky was still claiming that "executions numbered at most in the thousands," that Khmer Rouge atrocities had been "inflated by a factor of 100" and that those the Khmer Rouge had allegedly refrained from killing were actually ''saved'' by the Khmer Rouge. One million people had not died since aid was terminated, he said, therefore one million lives had been saved from starvation by the Khmer Rouge's ingenious economic policies. Thus did Chomsky praise Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge for "saving" the lives of dead people ''who they had murdered''. (Chomsky is also implying that the US cut off aid to Cambodia, when it actually had an unconditional offer to supply aid to it. Aid was terminated ''by the Khmer Rouge'').
#Chomsky has praised Imperial Japan for allegedly "saving maybe tens of millions of lives."<ref>Interview, International Socialist Review, September-October 2002.</ref>
#Chomsky has expressed support for the former Communist dictatorship of [[Angola]]: “The defense of Angola was one of Cuba’s most significant contributions to the liberation of Africa.”<ref>Hegemony or Survival (Penguin, 2004), p94.</ref> Cuban military intervention in support of the communist MPLA dictatorship in Angola led to decades of civil war that cost 1 million lives. Other Cuban “contributions to the liberation of Africa” include fighting for the communist dictatorship in Ethiopia, which killed 1.25 million people by massacre and forced starvation.<ref>Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999 (Angola death toll); Washington Post, March 18, 1978 (Ethiopia intervention); New York Times, December 14, 1994(Ethiopia death toll).</ref>
#Chomsky has repeatedly denied that the former Sandinista regime in [[Nicaragua]] committed any human rights violations at all.<ref>The Culture of Terrorism (South End Press, 1988), p137.</ref> According to the Nicaraguan Commission of Jurists, the regime carried out some 8,000 political murders within its first three years in power.
#Chomsky also strongly approved of the Sandinista's economic policies, writing that “the crime of the Sandinistas was to carry out successful development… they immediately began to divert resources to the poor part of the population.”<ref>Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization (Ocean Press, 1999), p57.</ref> Within a few years of Sandinista rule, wages had been fixed below poverty level and there was mass unemployment. There were shortages of nearly all basic goods, with inflation at 30,000%. Government studies found that three-quarters of schoolchildren suffered from malnutrition, while living standards were lower than Haiti. The World Bank found that Nicaragua was on the economic level of Somalia.<ref>Roger Miranda and William Ratliff, The Civil War in Nicaragua (Transaction, 1993), pp183-4.</ref>
#Chomsky referred to 22 Israeli schoolchildren murdered by Palestinian terrorists as "members of a paramilitary youth group."<ref>Pirates and Emperors, Old and New (rev. ed., Pluto Press, 2002), p65.</ref> He falsely claimed there had been "an exchange of fire" between the schoolchildren and the terrorists.
#Chomsky claimed after the [[9/11]] attacks that “Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that [in Afghanistan]… Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide… we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people…”<ref>“The New War Against Terror,” Lecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 18, 2001.</ref> Far from killing millions, the American intervention saved lives. UNICEF figures indicate that the deaths of 112,000 children and 7,500 pregnant women have been prevented every year since as a result.<ref>New York Times, February 1, 2002.</ref> The US invasion ''saved'' millions of Afghans from starvation.<ref>http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42858-2001Dec30?language=printer</ref><ref>http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24019</ref> Chomsky responded by claiming in 2002 that it was still possible that millions might starve to death, but that the Americans and the media could cover it up: "What the effects will be, we will never know. Starvation is not something that kills people instantly. People eat roots and leaves and they drag on for a while. And the effects of starvation may be the death of children born from malnourished mothers a year or two from now, and all sorts of consequences. Furthermore, nobody’s going to look because the West is not interested in such things and others don’t have the resources."<ref>http://www.leftwatch.com/articles/2004/chomsky-backpedals-on-silent-genocide-in-afghanistan/</ref>
#Chomsky believes that there are “no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the Holocaust.”<ref>Quoted in W.D. Rubinstein, “Chomsky and the Neo-Nazis,” Quadrant, October 1981.</ref>
#Chomsky has repeatedly claimed that there has never been so much as a misplaced comma in any of his writings and that no valid criticism of any of his statements or ideas has ever been published by anyone.<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKPtwYzehYM</ref>
#Chomsky has lied about the views of Holocaust deniers (Faurisson, Serge Thion) by praising them as "libertarian Socialists with a long-standing record of opposition to all forms of totalitarianism."<ref>“His Right to Say It,” The Nation, February 28, 1981.</ref> He also published one of his books (The Political Economy of Human Rights, a book filled with more noble efforts to disprove the bloodbath in Cambodia) in a series directed by a Holocaust denier (Pierre Guillaume). He has praised Holocaust deniers, endorsed their political and academic credentials, collaborated in their propaganda campaigns, and whitewashed their antisemitic and neo-Nazi agenda.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> He signed a petition in support of Faurisson's denials of the Holocaust; although he claimed that he was only expressing solidarity with his right to free speech, the petition that Chomsky signed dignified Faurisson’s writings by affirming his scholarly credentials (“a respected professor” of “document criticism”); describing his lies as “extensive historical research”; placing the term “Holocaust” in derisory quotation marks; and portraying his lies as "findings" (a very typical Chomsky propaganda technique).<ref>The text of the petition is reproduced in Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (Avukah Press, 1995), pp53-4.</ref> More obscenely, Chomsky added that "I sign innumerable petitions of this nature, and do not recall ever having refused to sign one."<ref>Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), p290.</ref> At the time of this controversy, Chomsky had just finished publicly bragging about his outspoken refusual to sign petitions calling for human rights in Communist Vietnam--even as it massacred many hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children en masse and drowned at sea hundreds of thousands more. On that occasion, he had explained that “public protest is a political act, to be judged in terms of its likely human consequences,” which included the likelihood that the American media “would distort and exploit it for their propagandistic purposes.”<ref>Unpublished interview, March 28, 1977; Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), p176.</ref>
#More recently, Chomsky has promoted a conspiracy theory (now popularized in Oliver Stone's ''Untold History of the United States'') that Zbigniew Brzezinski (national security advisor under president [[Jimmy Carter]]) secretly armed the Afghan mujahideen prior to 1979 in an elaborate plot to "trap" the Soviets. Brzezinski, however, has strongly denied anything of the kind,<ref>Interview, ''The Real News'', Jan 15, 2010.</ref> while Cyrus Vance's close aide Marshall Shulman "insists that the State Department worked hard to ''dissuade'' the Soviets from invading and would never have undertaken a program to encourage it."<ref>''The Nation'', November 12, 2001.</ref> Needless to say, declassified records from the time are at variance with Chomsky's fantasy. (It is likely, given the crucial Soviet role in initiating the Korean and Vietnam wars, that this claim is the product of projection.)

===Chomsky's Criticisms of the West===
Chomsky is one of the most vocal critics of the [[United States]] foreign policy. Some of his criticisms are:
#The overthrow of [[Mohammed Mossadegh]] in Iran and replacement with the Shah in 1953 (Done by the US and the UK)
#The overthrow of communist dictator Jacobo Arbenz in [[Guatemala]] in 1954
#The alleged US support for the overthrow of democratic socialist Salvador Allende in Chile on 9/11 in 1973
#The Contra war against the Sandinista dictatorship in [[Nicaragua]] in the 1980s
#The backing of a brutal military dictatorship in [[El Salvador]] during the same time period
#Selling weapons to a terror-state ([[Iran]]) to fund the Contras. (See [[Iran-Contra Affair]])
#Supporting [[Saddam Hussein]] during the Iran-Iraq war.
#Supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s
#Invading [[Iraq]] in 2003 despite lack of support from the [[UN]]
#Blatant Support of [[Israel]] which Chomsky believes is a terror state despite his [[Jew]]ish ethnicity
(Source: Hegemony or Survival)

== External links ==
*[http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/chomsky/publications.html List of Chomsky's Publications]
*[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk8pxyAWTBk Chomsky Speaks about American Politics] Chomsky believes the Democrats and Republicans are a single entity
*[http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1136# Video of Noam Chomsky with Hezbollah Leaders in Lebanon]
*[http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomskyhoax.html The Chomsky Hoax] by Paul Bogdanor
*[http://www.grsampson.net/AGwg.html Grammar Without Grammaticality] by Geoffrey Sampson
*[http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23543 Chomsky's New Blood Libel] by Alan Dershowitz
*[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXMZZCvFtlw Chomsky on Middle East Television] Chomsky speaks about American "imperialism."

==References==
<references/>
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chomsky, Noam}}
[[category:Scientists]]
[[Category:Linguists]]
[[category:Authors]]
[[Category:Socialists]]

User:JakeRMurrin

2013-02-21T00:35:04Z

JakeRMurrin: Blanked the page

Vietnam War

2013-02-15T03:51:30Z

JakeRMurrin: Mention Le Duan's name, as he was the real leader of North Vietnam for most of its history, the author of their war effort, and the first dictator of the reunified Socialist Republic.

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and murdering hundreds of thousands of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1953, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref>

From mid 1953 to early 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> 5.68% of the population was targeted for persecution, a ratio the party later admitted was "too high". Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 71.66% were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, p85, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The Vietnamese Communists, led by Le Duan, perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of World War II, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
195,000-430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref name="Lewy">Lewy, Guenter (1978). ''America in Vietnam''. New York: Oxford University Press. Appendix 1, pp.450-453</ref><ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. Ch. 12. </ref> 50,000-65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>Wiesner, Louis A. (1988). ''Victims and Survivors Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam''. New York: Greenwood Press. p.310</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost between 171,331 and 220,357 men during the war.<ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. p.106.</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. In addition, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of communist military forces was probably closer to 444,000.<ref name="Lewy"/> During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref> Between 200,000 and 300,000 Cambodians died in the war,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref> as well as 20,000 Laotians.<ref>Small, Melvin & Joel David Singer, ''Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816–1980''.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The death toll from US defeat far surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-15T03:48:00Z

JakeRMurrin: This is, in fact, a ludicrous myth. The CDC Vietnam Experience Study Mortality Assessment found that after the first few years, Vietnam veterans were less likely to die from suicide than the average.

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and murdering hundreds of thousands of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1953, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref>

From mid 1953 to early 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> 5.68% of the population was targeted for persecution, a ratio the party later admitted was "too high". Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 71.66% were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, p85, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of World War II, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
195,000-430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref name="Lewy">Lewy, Guenter (1978). ''America in Vietnam''. New York: Oxford University Press. Appendix 1, pp.450-453</ref><ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. Ch. 12. </ref> 50,000-65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>Wiesner, Louis A. (1988). ''Victims and Survivors Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam''. New York: Greenwood Press. p.310</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost between 171,331 and 220,357 men during the war.<ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. p.106.</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. In addition, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of communist military forces was probably closer to 444,000.<ref name="Lewy"/> During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref> Between 200,000 and 300,000 Cambodians died in the war,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref> as well as 20,000 Laotians.<ref>Small, Melvin & Joel David Singer, ''Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816–1980''.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The death toll from US defeat far surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Vietnam War Quotes

2013-02-13T23:27:57Z

JakeRMurrin:

This article provide a list of [[quote]]s about the [[Vietnam War]].

==Quotes==
"Better kill ten innocent people than let one enemy escape!"-Vietnamese communist slogan, recorded in Nguyen Manh Tuong, “Concerning Mistakes Committed in Land Reform,” speech to the National Congress of the Fatherland Front, Hanoi, October 30, 1956, in Hoang Van Chi, ed., ''The New Class in North Vietnam'' [Saigon: Cong Dan, 1958]

“... we had to make the people suffer, suffer until they could no longer endure it. Only then would they carry out the Party’s armed policy.”
- Senior Viet Cong defector (Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An [University of California Press, 1972], p. 112)

“We’ve been worse than Pol Pot, but the outside world knows nothing.”
- Vietnamese communist boast (Nguyen Van Canh, Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982 [Hoover Institution Press, 1983], p. 207)

“Ho Chi Minh may have been an evil man; Nixon may have been a great man. The Americans may have had the just cause; we may not have had the just cause. But we won and the Americans were defeated because we convinced the people that Ho Chi Minh is the great man, that Nixon is a murderer, and the Americans are the invaders... The key factor is how to control people and their opinions. Only Marxism-Leninism can do that.”
- Mai Chi Tho, Vietnamese communist politician (New York Times Magazine, March 29, 1981)

“In the new Kampuchea, one million is all we need to continue the revolution. We don’t need the rest. We prefer to kill ten friends rather than keep one enemy alive.”
- Khmer Rouge slogan (Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son [Touchstone, 1987], p. 148)

“[If every soldier kills 25 Vietnamese], we will need only 2 million troops to crush the 50 million Vietnamese; and we still would have 6 million people left.”
- Khmer Rouge broadcast
(Stephen J. Morris, Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia [Stanford University Press, 1999], p. 104)

“I saw the extreme horror, and I wondered what kind of regime this was, that had no other method than to repress and annihilate its people. It took them to 'people’s courts' and shot them on the scene without a fair trial and even without any evidence. The land reform campaign was a crime of genocide like that of Pol Pot."
- North Vietnamese dissident Tran Manh Hao

“Suppose that their [i.e., American] postwar estimates [that more than one million people will be killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia] are correct. Since the situation at the war’s end is squarely the responsibility of the United States, so are the million or so deaths that were predicted as a direct result of that situation.”
- Far-left anti-war activist and genocide-denier [[Noam Chomsky]]
(After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), p162)

"No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much. Never have the consequences of their misunderstanding been so tragic."
- President Richard Nixon in No More Vietnams

“When I was a young professor in the fifties at Harvard, where 99.9% of the people on the faculty were Democrats—I can remember only one Republican that I knew—the people in political science had faculty meetings…No one ever attacked the government for being a criminal activity. Nobody said, ‘they like to go to war; they’re blood-dripping!’ Sometime in the sixties, the idea developed that the government itself was an evil enterprise, that they lied professionally to the American people, and that the purpose of intellectuals was to negate the government rather than be constructive….Everybody working in government goes through the long hours and all the other pressures [associated with the job] because he or she would like to make a contribution to a better world.”
- Secretary of State [[Henry Kissinger]]<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9vsCD0j3Ys</ref>

“Vietnam appears determined to expel virtually all the members of its ethnic Chinese minority.”
- "Hanoi Regime Resolved to Oust Nearly All Ethnic Chinese"<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/boatpeople1.pdf</ref>

"Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at."
- Left-wing "anti-war" terrorist [[Bill Ayers]] in 1969

"I'm not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I'm not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat." - Ayers

“I was very frightened when I saw the Khmer Rouge saw off the neck of a civilian with the sharp edge of sugar palm leaves. They spent three days cutting his head off. They sawed a little one morning, and then in the evening, and finally the following day in the morning and night. They made the victim stand up while they were cutting in front of hundreds of people living in the Khmer Rouge area. Then they held him up when he could stand no longer.”
- Cambodian refugee from the civil war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/kirk2.pdf</ref>

"[This Council condemns Vietnam for] its acts of aggression against Democratic Kampuchea, ... acts which cause serious damage to the lives and property of the Kampuchean people."
- The UN on the "illegal," unilateral Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia

"The atrocities in Cambodia are a direct and understandable response to the violence of the imperial system." - Chomsky, After the Cataclysm, p191

“Once the evidence of Indochinese Communist behavior began to accumulate, there were three possible responses for those in the West who had been helping to give history a push: the first was to admit the facts and hence the error of their past political position, and work to eradicate the evil they had mistakenly contributed to; this has been the response of most of the democratic left in France. The second possible response to the evidence was to admit what was going on, but to try and justify it, usually with some form of bizarre moral relativism. This was the response of America’s new political liberals. The third possible response was to deny evidence of repression, either totally or in part, and thereby retain one’s pride and prejudice. The American radical left, with Professor Noam Chomsky in the vanguard, has taken this third course.”
- Stephen Morris, Harvard International Review, Dec-Jan 1981<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/morris.pdf</ref>

"Just consider how the Khmer Rouge controlled personal relations. They made showing love to a relative or laughing with them dangerous, since they might perceive this as showing less dedication to, or poking fun at, the Great Revolution. It was even dangerous to use some term of endearment, such as "honey," "sweetheart," or "dearest," for a loved one. The doctor Haing Ngor tried to so refer to his wife, for example, and a spy overheard and reported him for this, as well as the fact that he had eaten food he picked in the forest, instead of bringing it into the village for communal eating. The local head cadre interrogated him about these sins, and told him, "The chhlop [informers] say that you call your wife 'sweet.' We have no 'sweethearts' here. That is forbidden." Soldiers then took him to a prison where cadre severally tortured him, cut off his finger, and sliced his ankle with a hatchet. He barely survived. This deadly communist revolution created pitiful human dilemmas. Think about what this same doctor Haing Ngor went through when his wife suffered life-threatening complications during childbirth. To help her deliver her baby would mean death, since the Khmer Rouge forbid husbands from delivering their wive's babies. In any case, to use his medical skills to save her would in effect tell the cadre that he was a doctor, and would result in his death, and possibly that of his wife and newborn child. To do nothing might mean their death anyway; still, if he did nothing, the wife might pull through. He chose to do nothing, and perhaps he could do nothing anyway since he had no proper medical instruments. Mother and baby soon both died, then, leaving a gaping wound in his heart that never healed." - Rummel<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.CHAP6.HTM</ref>

"It was. . . of Tan Samay, a high schoolteacher from Battambang. The Khmer Rouge accused him of incompetence. The only thing taught the children at the village was how to cultivate the soil. Maybe Tan Samay was trying to teach them other things, too, and that was his downfall. His pupils hanged him. A noose was passed around his neck; then the rope was passed over the branch of a tree. Half a dozen children between eight and ten years old held the loose end of the rope, pulling it sharply three or four times, dropping it in between. All the while they were shouting, "Unfit teacher! Unfit teacher!" until Tan Samay was dead. The worst was that the children took obvious pleasure in killing." - Buddhist monk Hem Samluat's description of an execution he witnessed in the village of Do Nauy<ref>John Barron and Anthony Paul, Peace With Horror: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia. London: Hodder and Stoughton, pp. 148-149. American Edition titled Murder of a Gentle Land. New York: Reader's Digest Press--Thomas Y. Crowell.</ref>

"Not only did the Khmer Rouge run amok massacring their people, but also everywhere the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy the very heart of peasant life. Hinayana Buddhism had been a state religion, and the priesthood of monks with their saffron robes was a central part of Cambodian culture. Some 90 percent of Cambodians believed in some form of Buddhism. Many received a rudimentary schooling from the monks, and many young people became monks for part of their lives. The Khmer Rouge could not allow so powerful an institution to stand and therefore set out with vigor to destroy it. They exterminated all leading monks and either murdered or defrocked the lesser ones. One estimate is that out of 40,000 to 60,000 monks only 800 to 1,000 survived to carry on their religion. We do know that of 2,680 monks in eight monasteries, merely seventy were alive in 1979. As for the Buddhist temples that populated the landscape of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge destroyed 95 percent of them, and turned the few remaining into warehouses or allocated them for some other degrading use. Amazingly, in the very short span of a year or so, the small gang of Khmer Rouge wiped out the center of Cambodian culture, its spiritual incarnation, its institutions. This was an act of genocide within the larger Cambodian democide, and it was not the only one. In most if not all the country, simply being of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, or Lao ancestry meant death. As part of a planned genocide campaign, the Khmer Rouge sought out and killed other minorities, such as the Moslem Cham. In the district of Kompong Xiem, for example, they demolished five Cham hamlets and reportedly massacred 20,000 that lived there; in the district of Koong Neas only four Cham apparently survived out of some 20,000. The cadre threw the Cham Grand Mufti, their spiritual leader, into boiling water and then hit him on the head with an iron bar. They beat another leader, the First Mufti, to death, tortured and disemboweled the Second Mufti, and murdered by starvation in prison the Chairman of the Islamic Association of Kampuchea (Cambodia). Overall, the Khmer Rouge annihilated nearly half--about 125,000--of all the Cambodian Cham. As to the other minorities, the Khmer Rouge also slaughtered about 200,000 ethnic Chinese, almost half of those in Cambodia--a calamity for ethnic Chinese in this part of the world unequaled in modern times--additionally, they murdered 3,000 Protestants and 5,000 Catholics; around 150,000 ethnic Vietnamese (over half); and 12,000 ethnic Thai out of 20,000. One Cambodian peasant, Heng Chan, whose wife was of Vietnamese descent, lost not only his wife, but also five sons, three daughters, three grandchildren, and sixteen of his wife's relatives. In this genocide, the Khmer Rouge probably murdered 541,000 Chinese, Chams, Vietnamese, and other minorities." - Rummel<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.CHAP6.HTM#4</ref>

"I questioned this bitch who came back from France...my activity was that I set fire to her ass until it became a burned-out mess. Then I beat her to the point that she was so turned around I couldn't get any answer out of her; she [finally] croaked, ending her answers...." - A Khmer Rouge "interrogator"<ref>Arch Puddington, "The Khmer Rouge File," The American Spectator (July): pp. 18-20.</ref>

"Along with Vickery's theory of a 'peasant revolution', we can now dismiss Thion's assertion that in Democratic Kampuchea, 'The state never stood on its feet.' Despite its underdeveloped economy, the regime probably exerted more power over its citizens than any state in world history. It controlled and directed their public lives more closely than any government had ever done." - Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime (1996)

"The Khmer Rouge were tipping out patients [from the hospitals] like garbage into the streets.... Bandaged men and women hobbled by the embassy. Wives pushed wounded soldier husbands on hospital beds on wheels, some with serum drips still attached. In five years of war, this is the greatest caravan of human misery I have ever seen." – Description of the evacuation of Pnohm Penh

"The Cambodian communists' economic plans were, at times, utterly surreal. Scholar David Chandler notes that, in a Democratic Kampuchea report on General Political Tasks of 1976, there are three lines devoted to education, and six devoted to urine. The document states that, regarding human urine, "We collect thirty per cent. That leaves a surplus of 70%." These were indicative of the types of policies that Chomsky and Herman claimed had lifted Cambodia out of the ashes of war." - Bruce Sharp, "Averaging Wrong Answers"<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm</ref>

"The Khmer Rouge took children away from their parents and made them live and work in labor brigades. If the children died of fatigue or disease, the cadre were good enough to inform their parents; then, what emotion the parents showed could mean their life or death. If they wept or displayed extreme unhappiness, this showed a bourgeois sentimentality--after all, their children had sacrificed themselves for the Great Revolution and the parents should be proud, not unhappy. Similarly, a wife expressing grief over an executed husband--an enemy of the Great Revolution--was explicitly criticizing the Khmer Rouge. This unforgivable act of bourgeois sentimentality could mean her death." - Rummel

"Everyone knows about the war waged by the United States in Cambodia from 1970 to 1975. But very few people know about or understand the war that it is waging today against that country, which now calls itself Democratic Kampuchea. The war is being fought on many fronts. But it is mainly a propaganda war, a consciously organized, well-financed campaign to spread lies and misinformation about Kampuchea since the victory of its revolution in 1975. … The most slanderous of all charges leveled against Kampuchea is that of 'mass genocide,' with figures often cited running into the millions of people. I believe this is a lie, which certain opinion-makers in this country believe can be turned into a 'fact' by repeating it often enough." - The New York Times, November 21, 1978

"In Chomsky's condescending view, if the media was right about the Khmer Rouge, it was only because their "lies" happened to match the truth by pure coincidence." - Sharp, "Averaging Wrong Answers"

"Barron and Paul...rely on 'specialists' at the State and Defense Departments...Elsewhere in the media, similiar figures are bandied about, with equal credibility." - Chomsky, 1977<ref>http://www.jim.com/chomsdis.htm</ref>

"You might recall, perhaps, that we were probably the only commentators to rely on the most knowledgeable source, State Department intelligence." - Chomsky, 2002, on Znet<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm</ref>

"Once, I was in a boat steaming up a narrow river, just off the Great Lake. I was being taken to see a fishery in one of the richest of the fishing areas. Along with rice, fish is a staple food in Cambodia and the most important source of protein. Long before our old boat came around the bend of the river, an extraordinary smell came wafting out to greet us. The river was jammed with hundreds of thousands of dead fish, packed tight as ice floes. What had happened? I asked. 'Pol Pot' came the reply. It turned out that the Khmer Rouge had built a huge dam just upstream from here and the water in this ancient fishing village was now far shallower than it had ever been before. In the heat of the dry-season sun the fish had, quite simply, cooked." - William Shawcross, in The Quality of Mercy, p.283

"... it is not only because I once argued for the victory of this very regime, and feel myself partially guilty for what is happening under it, that I believe I can say: there is a time, when a great crime is taking place, when it is better to speak out, in whatever company, than to remain silent." - Jean Lacouture on Cambodia

"I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm, or a weeping father carrying his ten-year old daughter wrapped in a sheet tied around his neck like a sling, or the man with his foot dangling at the end of a leg to which it was attached by nothing but skin." - Description of the death march from Pnhom Penh (Cambodia Year Zero, pp.6-7)

"The object of this disgraceful exercise cannot be to convince the reader that the arguments offered are actually true. Rather, the goal is to affect the reader’s emotional attitude, by dulling his or her sense of outrage on contemplating millions of tortured and mutilated corpses brought about by the radical movement that campaigned for a communist victory in Indochina. In this task, the book is eminently successful, not unlike the works of Holocaust denial that serve as its echo and mirror image." –Paul Bogdanor, reviewing Chomsky’s After the Cataclysm<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/cataclysm.html</ref>

"On Cambodia, Chomsky and Herman quietly abandon their earlier view that the Khmer Rouge had killed only 25,000, that its crimes had been inflated by “a factor of 100” and that Pol Pot’s brutality had “saved many lives”. Now they try to equate American bombing with communist genocide, arguing that “the responsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for atrocities” in Cambodia is “roughly in the same range”. They generate this conclusion by a remarkable sleight of hand. First, they give estimates of 500,000-600,000 dead in the civil war (1970-5) (p. 263), more than twice the real figure. Second, they attribute the civil war deaths - all deaths, both military and civilian, on all sides - to American bombing (p. 260), in truth only a minor factor. Third, they reduce the toll of Khmer Rouge atrocities (1975-9) to 750,000-1 million (p. 263), only half of the actual number. Finally, they maintain that the starvation component of this toll “must be attributed to the conditions left by the US war” (p. 263), and not to the Khmer Rouge policy of enslaving the whole population while abolishing medicine and hospitals and rejecting food aid in the midst of a government-created famine. Doubtless unfairly, I am reminded of the techniques of Holocaust deniers, who exaggerate the cost of Allied bombing and then attribute Jewish deaths in the camps to starvation and disease caused by the war against the Nazis." – Bogdanor reviewing Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/manufacturing.html</ref>

"After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false. He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake." - Paul Postal on Chomsky (The New Yorker, March 31, 2003)

"Speaking on this occasion, Noam Chomsky, Douglas Dowd and Richard Fernandez vehemently condemned the U.S imperialists' crimes against the Vietnamese people in both zones and demanded that the U.S. authorities bring immediately all U.S. troops home. They paid profound tribute to President Ho Chi Minh and expressed their admiration for the Vietnamese people engaged in a ‘just struggle’ for independence and freedom, and their confidence in the latter’s certain victory." – Official North Vietnamese press release, 1970.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/215/2150806025.pdf</ref>

<blockquote>
Nixon: Isn’t a person a person, ...? You know, they talk about Vietnam, ‘these people far away that we don’t know,’ and you remember Chamberlain talking about the Czechs, that they’re far away and we don’t know them very well? Well,... people are people! … I’m getting tired of this business of letting these Africans beat a hundred thousand people to death and do nothing about it.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Kissinger: And all these bleeding hearts in this country who say we like to kill yellow people…
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Nixon: That’s right!
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Kissinger: There haven’t been as many killed [by the US military] in eight years of the war than were killed in three months in Burundi.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Nixon: …They’re talking about how many we have bombed in the North. And I told your staff to get the figures for me: How many South Vietnamese or anti-Communist North Vietnamese have been killed by the North Vietnamese government? Civilians! How many? It’s unbelievable! Nobody gives a damn! … We need a new African policy. We shouldn’t have 42 ambassadors to these [expletive] countries. Looking at Uganda, ''of course'' we have to help those 7,000 people! – President Nixon and Henry Kissinger discussing current events, September 24, 1972, from The Nixon Tapes<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kph0lygo40</ref>
</blockquote>

"…The evidence is that in Cambodia the much-heralded blood bath that was supposed to follow the fall of Phnom Penh has not taken place. As for Vietnam, reports from Saigon indicate exemplary behavior, considering the situation. ‘There has been no evidence of a blood bath…as [was] so freely predicted abroad,’ writes George Esper of the A.P." – The Nation, editorial, June 14, 1975<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/cambodia/nation.pdf</ref>

"If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as he believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just, though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement. But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier." - The Nation, "Distortions at Fourth Hand," 1977<ref>http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19770625.htm</ref>

"During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, some three million people were terminated with extreme prejudice." - The Nation, movie review of The Killing Fields, 1984

"Even before the fall of Saigon, the Vietnamese had to think about life in South Vietnam under Hanoi's rule and act accordingly. They were the ones who had to pay with their lives and liberties for any error of judgment. If they bet on a "bloodbath" and exiled themselves
and there was "peace" and "reconciliation" they would have lost a home and a homeland for nothing. If they believed in the Communist promise of "reconciliation" and stayed in Vietnam,
they might find themselves in a concentration camp today. It was a matter of life and death for thousands of South Vietnamese, not for comfortable democratic armchair intellectual speculation." - Le Thi Ahn, "Let the Vietnamese Speak for Themselves"<ref>http://worldview.carnegiecouncil.org/archive/worldview/1977/06/2881.html/_res/id=sa_File1/v20_i006_a014.pdf</ref>

"Mr. President, putting it bluntly, wouldn't we just be continuing a bloodbath that already exists in Cambodia if we voted the 222 million [in aid]?" - Reporter to US President Gerald Ford, 1975<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref>

"You know the John Lennon song ‘Imagine’? ‘Imagine no possessions, no religion’? That’s what it was like in Cambodia. The only thing people had was a spoon, for eating the daily pourridge. And that pourridge was grossly insufficient for the work they were made to do in the fields." - Sophal Ear

“Ear reminds us of all the Western intellectuals who loved — loved, loved, loved — the Khmer Rouge. … Ear shows us pictures of the “Kampuchea Conference” that took place in Stockholm, in 1979. The purpose of the conference was to promote the restoration of the Khmer Rouge to power! Jan Myrdal was the keynote speaker — the famous intellectual who is the son of Gunnar and Alva. Ear also quotes Noam Chomsky, and others. Chomsky is still making moral and political pronouncements today, and so is Myrdal. Being on the left means never having to say you’re sorry. They just glide on...” - Jay Nordlinger, National Review Online, 2010<ref>http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/229666/oslo-journal-part-iv/jay-nordlinger</ref>

"The revolution in Kampuchea marks the beginning of the greatest and most necessary change beginning to convulse the world in the latter 20th century to shift it from a disaster-bound course to one holding out the promise of a better future for all." - Malcolm Caldwell, Kampuchea, p.45.

"The forethought, ingenuity, dedication and eventual triumph of the liberation forces in the face of extreme adversity and almost universal foreign skepticism, detachment, hostility and even outright sabotage ought to have been cause for worldwide relief and congratulation rather than the disbelief and execration with which it was in fact greeted. . . But if manipulators have a very good reason to distort and obscure the truth we do not. Indeed we have a clear obligation to establish and propagate it with every resource at out command." - Caldwell, Kampuchea, p.46

"The conclusions which Caldwell draws are so distanced from reality as to make them unrecognizable." - Ear, The Khmer Rouge Canon<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref>

"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." - Ear, ibid.

"To the contrary, if Nixon blamed himself for anything, it was for having left Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge partly because of Watergate." - Ear, ibid.

"If you don't do what they say, you die." - Former Tuol Sleng guard<ref>http://articles.cnn.com/2008-11-13/world/sbm.cambodia.himhuy_1_political-prisoners-choeung-ek-tuol-sleng?_s=PM:WORLD</ref>

"The shame, alone, would have justified that this book be written--which is firstly a cry of horror. The shame of having contributed, even as little as it was, as weak as its influence could have been on the mass media, to the establishment of one of the most oppressive powers history has ever known." - Lacouture, Survive le peuple cambodgien! (1978), p.5

"Nothing could be more natural than that the press should rise up to denounce violations of human rights in Spain, Latin America, and South Africa. But nothing could be less justifiable than that so few voices should be raised in protest against the assassination of a people. How many of those who say that are unreservedly in support of the Khmer revolution would consent to endure one hundredth of the present suffering of the Cambodian people?" - Ponchaud, 1976

"How much blood makes a 'bloodbath'?" - Morton Kondracke, New Republic, October 1, 1977, p.22

"This [deceit] was apparent to anyone listening closely to his [Pol Pot's] speeches and press conferences in 1977 and 1978 and to the unsettling propaganda broadcast every day over Radio Phnom Penh by the Kampuchean Communist Party (meaning Pol Pot himself) from 1975 until January 7, 1979, when Vo Nguyen Giap's blitzkrieg brought down Phnom Penh. Never in the human memory has a leader (be he an emperor or dictator), government, or a political party in power sung its own praises in such a dithyrambic, insolent, deceitful, shameless, and immodest way as the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime did. As Radio Hanoi has since stated, Messers. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary outstripped even their guru, the late Joseph Goebbels, when it came to propaganda!" - King Norodom Sihanouk, 1980

"Le Duc Tho used to tell me that their ambition was all of Indochina after which they would proceed to take over South East Asia." – Kissinger, 1975<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf</ref>

<blockquote>
"[[Suharto]]: At Camp David, we discussed the question of unification of Vietnam. That seems now to be moving ahead. Laos and Cambodia seem already under Vietnamese influence. Does the United States believe the three will be incorporated into one country?
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Ford: The unification of Vietnam has come more quickly than we expected. There is, however, resistance in Cambodia to the influence of Hanoi. We are willing to move slowly in our relations with Cambodia, perhaps to slow down the North Vietnamese influence. ... The situation in Laos is disturbing.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Kissinger: It is interesting that in Laos Souvannavong is now in a subordinate position. The Chinese want to use Cambodia to balance off Vietnam and are keeping troops in connection with road building in the north. We don’t like Cambodia, for in many ways the government is worse than Vietnam, but we would like it to be independent. We don’t discourage Thailand or China from drawing closer to Cambodia." - Ford, Kissinger, and Suharto, 1975<ref>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf</ref>
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
"Kissinger: What is the Cambodian attitude?
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Thai Foreign Minister: The Cambodians want salt and fish. They wanted to barter for these items.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Kissinger: Did Ieng Sary impress you?
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Thai Foreign Minister: He is a nice, quiet man.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Kissinger: How many people did he kill? Tens of thousands?" - Kissinger to Thailand's Foreign Minister, 1975<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/kissinger_chatichai.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

"The North Vietnamese have to be the meanest people in the world. The North Koreans and Albanians are pretty difficult, but the North Vietnamese are by far the worst. They can lie to you effortlessly. ... The Vietnamese in Paris used to make the same speech every morning. They used to say that if we would make a major effort, they would make a major effort. One morning the leader of the Vietnamese delegation said that if we would make a major effort, they would make an effort. At the end of the speech, I asked whether I had understood or whether he had in fact dropped an adjective. He explained that yesterday they had made a major effort, but we had made only an effort. So today we would have to make a major effort and they in turn would only make an effort." - Kissinger, ibid.

"I am, personally, embarrassed by the Vietnam War. I believe that if you to go war, you go to win and not to lose with moderation. ... You must act firmly. That's the only way to deal with the Communists." - Kissinger, ibid.

"We don't mind Chinese influence in Cambodia to balance North Vietnam. As I told the Chinese when we last met when we were discussing the Vietnamese victory in Indochina, it is possible to have an ideological victory which is a geopolitical defeat. The Chinese did not disagree with me." - Kissinger, ibid.

"You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don't tell them what I said before." - Kissinger, ibid.

"The events that followed our withdrawal from Vietnam, including the plight of the boat people and the more than 1 million slaughtered by the new communist rulers of Cambodia, showed that media critics who said we were on the wrong side were mistaken." - Nixon, "I Could See No Reason to Live," Time, April 2, 1990.

"Yes, I wish I'd done it sooner." - Nixon, recounting his response to the question of if he had any regrets about the 1970 invasion of Cambodia; "Paying the Price," Time, April 2, 1990.

"I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person?" - Pol Pot, quoted in "The Top 100 Asians of the Century," Time, August 1999

"He [Ho Chi Minh] has become the Strategist, the Theoretician, the Thinker, the Statesman, the Man of Culture, the Diplomat, the Poet, the Philosopher. All these names are accompanied with adjectives like "legendary" and "unparalleled." He has become Ho the Luminary, Ho the Visionary. Peasants in the South build shrines to him. In the North old women bow before his altar, asking miracles for their suffering children. Others--[such as] anti-communist fanatics...see him in a negative light." -Time, ibid.

"Some typical tortures [in North Vietnam] were:

-The victim was compelled to kneel down, supporting on his head a
basket filled with heavy stones.

-He was forced to hang by his thumbs or feet from a rope thrown
over a rafter. In this position he could be either beaten or, by pulling on the rope, jerked violently up and down.

-His thumbs were wrapped in a cloth soaked in oil which was then
ignited.

These tortures were widely used throughout the whole country." - Former North Vietnamese government official Hoang Van Chi, quoted in US intelligence report, "The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam"<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/239/2390710003A.pdf</ref>

"Two years earlier, in 1951, heavy bombing by the French had annihilated the entire irrigation network in the communist-controlled zone. The party now saw in this military disaster a possible solution to its present problem. Its leaders revealed that the idea of destroying the irrigation system had been suggested to the French by these very traitors whom the angry masses had denounced. It was even said that they had provided the French with accurate maps giving the location of dams and lock-gates. The absurdity of this accusation was immediately apparent to all but the blindest followers of the party, since all Vietnamese knew perfectly well that it was the French who had built the dams, and that all the ordnance maps of Vietnam and of Indochina had been compiled by the French. To suppose that they had forgotten the whereabouts of these gigantic constructions, and needed map references from local spies to locate them again, was patently ridiculous. But communists, in their propaganda, have never considered absurdity to be a serious obstacle to mass persuasion. It was their habit when dealing with peasants constantly to repeat simple statements, and their propagandists knew from past experience that the villagers would believe without question any story, however fanciful, about the French and the Americans; many of them had probably never met a Frenchman or an American in the whole course of their lives. One communist officer, who had valiantly fought at Dien Bien Phu, was heard to enquire whether or not Americans had red skins. Obviously, he had confused Americans with American Indians, the Redskins--a name introduced into the Vietnamese Language by its French equivalent, Peauro Rouges. Clearly, an ignorant man; all the same, he typifies the abysmal ignorance which was so widespread. Thus, the simpler the argument, the more suited it was to the peasants' understanding." –Hoang, ibid.

"I want to be sure...that nothing is done on these veterans. Is that understood?...Is the word out? That they are not to touch 'em, they are not to do a thing?...Get a hold of the district police; they're not to touch them, they're to do nothing: Just let 'em raise Hell." - Nixon, telling John Dean to make sure that anti-war protestors--especially veterans---are left alone by police, from The Nixon Tapes<ref>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7k9Uj7frQ8</ref>

"On September 23, 2001, Cambodians in Chicago celebrated Pchum Ben at Truman College. This year, coming less than two weeks after the attacks which claimed thousands of American lives, the atmosphere was different. There were American flags everywhere: on shirts, on walls, on car windows, on antennas. Toward the end of the ceremony, volunteers began to walk through the crowd. They carried small cardboard boxes, with American flags printed on the sides, ready to accept donations for the victims of the attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The response was instantaneous. Within seconds there were people crowded around every one of the volunteers. Within minutes the boxes were overflowing with currency. I was seeing something that I had never expected to see: Cambodians, rushing to the aid of American victims of war. Few people on Earth understand war and suffering as well as the Cambodians. In the face of insurmountable odds, they have preserved their culture. Now, the strength and resilience that withstood the Khmer Rouge forms another individual thread, woven into the fabric of America. With every new thread, the fabric grows stronger."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/sept11.htm</ref>

"...the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to listen?" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn<ref>http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html</ref>

==References==
<references/>

[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[Category:Quotes]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-13T08:22:19Z

JakeRMurrin:

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and murdering hundreds of thousands of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1953, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref>

From mid 1953 to early 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> 5.68% of the population was targeted for persecution, a ratio the party later admitted was "too high". Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 71.66% were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, p85, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
195,000-430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref name="Lewy">Lewy, Guenter (1978). ''America in Vietnam''. New York: Oxford University Press. Appendix 1, pp.450-453</ref><ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. Ch. 12. </ref> 50,000-65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>Wiesner, Louis A. (1988). ''Victims and Survivors Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam''. New York: Greenwood Press. p.310</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost between 171,331 and 220,357 men during the war.<ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. p.106.</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. In addition, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of communist military forces was probably closer to 444,000.<ref name="Lewy"/> During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref> Between 200,000 and 300,000 Cambodians died in the war,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref> as well as 20,000 Laotians.<ref>Small, Melvin & Joel David Singer, ''Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816–1980''.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. As of 2010, more veterans of the war have died from suicide than killed on the battlefield. <ref>[http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/11/on-veterans-day-some-grim-stat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+beyondblue1+(Beliefnet:+Beyond+Blue) On Veteran's Day: Some Grim Statistic, Beliefnet, November 11, 2010]</ref> This shows a largely unaddressable or poorly administered health issues persist and the U.S. Government has failed in its obligation to care for traumatized Vietnam veterans. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The death toll from US defeat far surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-13T08:10:45Z

JakeRMurrin: Improve sourcing

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1953, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref>

From mid 1953 to early 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> 5.68% of the population was targeted for persecution, a ratio the party later admitted was "too high". Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 71.66% were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, p85, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
195,000-430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref name="Lewy">Lewy, Guenter (1978). ''America in Vietnam''. New York: Oxford University Press. Appendix 1, pp.450-453</ref><ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. Ch. 12. </ref> 50,000-65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>Wiesner, Louis A. (1988). ''Victims and Survivors Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam''. New York: Greenwood Press. p.310</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost between 171,331 and 220,357 men during the war.<ref>Thayer, Thomas C (1985). ''War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam''. Boulder: Westview Press. p.106.</ref><ref name="Lewy"/> The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. In addition, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of communist military forces was probably closer to 444,000.<ref name="Lewy"/> During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref> Between 200,000 and 300,000 Cambodians died in the war,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref> as well as 20,000 Laotians.<ref>Small, Melvin & Joel David Singer, ''Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816–1980''.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. As of 2010, more veterans of the war have died from suicide than killed on the battlefield. <ref>[http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/11/on-veterans-day-some-grim-stat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+beyondblue1+(Beliefnet:+Beyond+Blue) On Veteran's Day: Some Grim Statistic, Beliefnet, November 11, 2010]</ref> This shows a largely unaddressable or poorly administered health issues persist and the U.S. Government has failed in its obligation to care for traumatized Vietnam veterans. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The death toll from US defeat far surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-13T06:45:24Z

JakeRMurrin: /* The North Vietnamese Terror */

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1953, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref>

From mid 1953 to early 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> 5.68% of the population was targeted for persecution, a ratio the party later admitted was "too high". Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 71.66% were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, p85, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese,<ref>http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/index.cfm</ref> 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm The high is supported by UN figures. The Khmer Rouge reduced the expected 1979 population from 8.4 to 6.2 million; the UN estimated an expected 1979 population of 8.7 million in the absence of the war. Cambodia's actual population in 1975 was roughly 8.2 million</ref> and 30-50,000 Laotians.<ref>http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx</ref> The most comprehensive and detailed demographic survey ever conducted on casualties during the war, from ''Population and Development Review'', estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.<ref>Charles Hirschman et al., [http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/brines/vietcasualties.pdf "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate,"] Population and Development Review, December 1995</ref> R.J. Rummel originally put the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WSJ.ART.HTM</ref> Rummel later revised the estimate to over 2 million in all of Indochina, including 1.7 million in North and South Vietnam.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB11.1.GIF</ref>

US intelligence and available demographic evidence suggest that Hanoi's official figure<ref>Associated Press, April 3, 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North"</ref> of 3 million Vietnamese dead in the war was an exaggeration. Its figures for both military and civilian deaths are about double the accepted numbers, and they further claim that 1 million soldiers died and 600,000 were wounded--even though wounded is typically three times the number of dead.<ref>http://web.archive.org/web/20071222122211/http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1995/vp950404/04040331.htm</ref> No other independent sources arrive at such a high number.

During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref>

Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF</ref>

Demographic analysis indicates that the commonly cited figure of 600,000 dead in the Cambodian civil war may have been invented by Pol Pot himself and is more than the twice the real number of war-related deaths.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. As of 2010, more veterans of the war have died from suicide than killed on the battlefield. <ref>[http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/11/on-veterans-day-some-grim-stat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+beyondblue1+(Beliefnet:+Beyond+Blue) On Veteran's Day: Some Grim Statistic, Beliefnet, November 11, 2010]</ref> This shows a largely unaddressable or poorly administered health issues persist and the U.S. Government has failed in its obligation to care for traumatized Vietnam veterans. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia killed 40,000 combatants and civilians, while US forces in Vietnam killed over 70,000 (higher estimates go to over 100,000) Vietnamese.

The death toll from US defeat surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-13T06:24:34Z

JakeRMurrin: /* Prelude */

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1952, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref>

From 1953 to 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> 5.68% of the population was targeted for persecution, a ratio the party later admitted was "too high". Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 71.66% were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, p85, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese,<ref>http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/index.cfm</ref> 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm The high is supported by UN figures. The Khmer Rouge reduced the expected 1979 population from 8.4 to 6.2 million; the UN estimated an expected 1979 population of 8.7 million in the absence of the war. Cambodia's actual population in 1975 was roughly 8.2 million</ref> and 30-50,000 Laotians.<ref>http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx</ref> The most comprehensive and detailed demographic survey ever conducted on casualties during the war, from ''Population and Development Review'', estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.<ref>Charles Hirschman et al., [http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/brines/vietcasualties.pdf "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate,"] Population and Development Review, December 1995</ref> R.J. Rummel originally put the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WSJ.ART.HTM</ref> Rummel later revised the estimate to over 2 million in all of Indochina, including 1.7 million in North and South Vietnam.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB11.1.GIF</ref>

US intelligence and available demographic evidence suggest that Hanoi's official figure<ref>Associated Press, April 3, 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North"</ref> of 3 million Vietnamese dead in the war was an exaggeration. Its figures for both military and civilian deaths are about double the accepted numbers, and they further claim that 1 million soldiers died and 600,000 were wounded--even though wounded is typically three times the number of dead.<ref>http://web.archive.org/web/20071222122211/http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1995/vp950404/04040331.htm</ref> No other independent sources arrive at such a high number.

During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref>

Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF</ref>

Demographic analysis indicates that the commonly cited figure of 600,000 dead in the Cambodian civil war may have been invented by Pol Pot himself and is more than the twice the real number of war-related deaths.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. As of 2010, more veterans of the war have died from suicide than killed on the battlefield. <ref>[http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/11/on-veterans-day-some-grim-stat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+beyondblue1+(Beliefnet:+Beyond+Blue) On Veteran's Day: Some Grim Statistic, Beliefnet, November 11, 2010]</ref> This shows a largely unaddressable or poorly administered health issues persist and the U.S. Government has failed in its obligation to care for traumatized Vietnam veterans. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia killed 40,000 combatants and civilians, while US forces in Vietnam killed over 70,000 (higher estimates go to over 100,000) Vietnamese.

The death toll from US defeat surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-13T06:23:02Z

JakeRMurrin: /* The North Vietnamese Terror */

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1952, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref>

From 1953 to 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> 5.68% of the population was targeted for persecution, a ratio the party later admitted was "too high". Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 71.66% were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, p85, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese,<ref>http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/index.cfm</ref> 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm The high is supported by UN figures. The Khmer Rouge reduced the expected 1979 population from 8.4 to 6.2 million; the UN estimated an expected 1979 population of 8.7 million in the absence of the war. Cambodia's actual population in 1975 was roughly 8.2 million</ref> and 30-50,000 Laotians.<ref>http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx</ref> The most comprehensive and detailed demographic survey ever conducted on casualties during the war, from ''Population and Development Review'', estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.<ref>Charles Hirschman et al., [http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/brines/vietcasualties.pdf "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate,"] Population and Development Review, December 1995</ref> R.J. Rummel originally put the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WSJ.ART.HTM</ref> Rummel later revised the estimate to over 2 million in all of Indochina, including 1.7 million in North and South Vietnam.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB11.1.GIF</ref>

US intelligence and available demographic evidence suggest that Hanoi's official figure<ref>Associated Press, April 3, 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North"</ref> of 3 million Vietnamese dead in the war was an exaggeration. Its figures for both military and civilian deaths are about double the accepted numbers, and they further claim that 1 million soldiers died and 600,000 were wounded--even though wounded is typically three times the number of dead.<ref>http://web.archive.org/web/20071222122211/http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1995/vp950404/04040331.htm</ref> No other independent sources arrive at such a high number.

During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref>

Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF</ref>

Demographic analysis indicates that the commonly cited figure of 600,000 dead in the Cambodian civil war may have been invented by Pol Pot himself and is more than the twice the real number of war-related deaths.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. As of 2010, more veterans of the war have died from suicide than killed on the battlefield. <ref>[http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/11/on-veterans-day-some-grim-stat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+beyondblue1+(Beliefnet:+Beyond+Blue) On Veteran's Day: Some Grim Statistic, Beliefnet, November 11, 2010]</ref> This shows a largely unaddressable or poorly administered health issues persist and the U.S. Government has failed in its obligation to care for traumatized Vietnam veterans. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia killed 40,000 combatants and civilians, while US forces in Vietnam killed over 70,000 (higher estimates go to over 100,000) Vietnamese.

The death toll from US defeat surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Soviet-Afghan War

2013-02-12T21:16:47Z

JakeRMurrin: Add

The '''Soviet-Afghan War (1978-92)''' was a civil war in [[Afghanistan]] that matched the [[Soviet Union]] and its Afghan allies against a coalition of anti-Communist groups called the [[Mujahideen]], supported from the outside by the United States, [[Pakistan]], and [[Saudi Arabia]]. The war ended the [[Détente]] period of the [[Cold War]], and resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Soviets, who pulled out in 1989, and for their clients who were overthrown in 1992.
[[File:Afghan-war.jpg|thumb|460px]]
==Origins==
The world was stunned in 1979 when the Soviets sent their army into Afghanistan, which had always been neutral and uninvolved.<ref> Christian Ostermann, “CWIHP Conference Report: New Evidence on the 1979-1989 War in Afghanistan. “ (May 20 20020 [http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/intelforum/2002-May/006251.html online]</ref>

The old monarchy was replaced by democratization and the rise of the Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The Afghanistan crisis began in April 1978 with a [[coup d'etat]] by Afghan Communists called "the Saur Revolution".<ref> A. Z. Hilali, "The Soviet Penetration into Afghanistan and the Marxist Coup." ''Journal of Slavic Military Studies'' 2005 18(4): 673-716. Issn: 1351-8046 </ref> They tried to impose scientific socialism on a country that did not want to be modernized-- indeed, which was heading in the opposite direction under the lure of Muslim fundamentalism of the sort that had topped the [[Shah]] in next-door [[Iran]]. Disobeying orders from [[Moscow]], the coup leaders systematically executed the leadership of the large [[Parcham clan]], thus guaranteeing a civil war among the country's many feuding ethnic groups. In addition the Communists in Afghanistan were themselves bitterly divided between the Khalq and Parcham factions. Moscow confronted a quandary. Afghanistan had been neutralized for sixty years, and had never been part of the Cold War system. Now it appeared that radical fundamentalist Muslims, supported by Pakistan and Iran, and probably by [[China]] and the United States, were about to seize power. The Communist regime in Kabul had no popular support; its 100,000-man army had fallen apart and was worthless. Only the Soviet army could possibly quell the growing rebellion by Parcham, the fundamentalist "mujahideen", and allied tribes who opposed the anti-religious, feminist modernizers.

The Kremlin fully realized the dangers involved. Foreign Minister [[Andrei Gromyko]] warned the [[Politburo]] in March 1979 that Soviet intervention in an Afghan civil war would violate international law and would be sharply condemned worldwide.<ref> After the intervention the UN General Assembly voted by 104 to 18 with 18 abstentions to "strongly deplore" the "recent armed intervention" and called for the "total withdrawal of foreign troops" from the country. </ref> According to Leninist principles, Afghanistan was not ready for revolution in the first place. Furthermore intervention would destroy détente with the United States and Western Europe. On the other hand, Gromyko insisted, "We cannot surrender Afghanistan to the enemy." Despite urgent calls from Kabul, the Kremlin hesitated. But factions within the Afghan People's Democratic Party (Communist) government that were hostile to Soviet interests gained ascendancy and raised the specter of an independently minded Communist state located on the southern border that might cause future trouble inside the Muslim parts of the USSR.<ref> David N. Gibbs, "Reassessing Soviet Motives for Invading Afghanistan: a Declassified History." ''Critical Asian Studies'' 2006 38(2): 239-263. </ref> At this point Moscow decided not to send troops but instead stepped up shipments of military equipment such as artillery, armored personnel carriers and 48,000 machine guns; they also sent 100,000 tons of wheat (ironically, the latter was purchased from the U.S.) Washington followed events closely, worried about Soviet expansion plans and a possible breakthrough to the south.

Moscow's man in Kabul was prime minister Nur Mohammed Taraki (1913-79), who was murdered and replaced by his deputy Hafizullah Aminin (1929-79) of the Khalq faction in September 1979. Although Amin called himself a loyal Communist, and begged for more Soviet military intervention, Moscow thought Amin was planning to double-cross them and switch over to China and the US. They therefore double crossed him first. Moscow had Amin officially invite the Soviet Army to enter Afghanistan; it did so in December 1979, and immediately executed Amin and installed a Soviet puppet [[Babrak Karmal]] (1929-96), the leader of the more moderate Parcham faction pf the PDPA. Pressure for intervention seems to have come primarily from the KGB (secret police), whose efforts to assassinate Amin had failed, and from the Soviet Army, which perhaps was worried about the danger of a mutiny on the part of its many Muslim soldiers.
==World reaction==
In July, 1979, before the Soviet invasion, President [[Jimmy Carter]] for the first time authorized the [[CIA]] to start assisting the Mujahideen rebels with money and non-military supplies sent via Pakistan. As soon as the Soviets invaded in December, 1979, Carter, disgusted at the collapse of détente and alarmed at the rapid Soviet gains, terminated progress on arms limitations, slapped a grain embargo on Russia, withdrew from the [[1980 Moscow Olympics]], and (with near-unanimous support in Congress) sent the [[CIA]] in to arm, train and finance the Mujahideen rebels. The US had strong support from Britain, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, all of whom feared the Soviet invasion was the first step in a grand move south toward the oil-rich [[Persian Gulf]]. Carter enlarged his position into the "Carter Doctrine," by which the US announced its intention to defend the Gulf. Historians now believe that analysis was faulty and that the Soviets were not planning a grand move, but were concerned with loss of prestige and the possibility of a hostile Muslim regime that might destabilize its largely Muslim southern republics.<ref>David N. Gibbs, "Reassessing Soviet Motives for Invading Afghanistan: a Declassified History." ''Critical Asian Studies'' 2006 38(2): 239-263. </ref> The boycott of the [[Olympics]] humiliated the Soviets, who had hoped the games would validate their claim to moral equality in the world of nations; instead they were pariahs again.
===Iran's role===
The [[Shiite]] community, which constitutes about 20% of the Afghan population, regards Iran as its religious center; however, Afghanistan is predominantly [[Sunni]] and has maintained cordial relations with Iran since 1921. After the PDPA took power in 1978 the Shah of Iran began to support opposition groups fighting the Kabul regime, as did the [[Ruholla Khomeini|Khomeini]] regime and subsequent regimes in Iran. Refugees from Afghanistan fought for Iran during the [[Iran-Iraq War]], and Iran sent nationals to Afghanistan to assist the rebels and to propagate Iranian politics and ideology. Iranian leaders supported the formation of an Islamic state by providing various provisions, including radio and television equipment, but also supported the Hizb-e-Wahdat faction, a traditional ally that opposed Burhanuddin Rabbani and his Afghan Interim Government that ruled 1992-96.<ref> Hafizullah Emadi, "Exporting Iran's Revolution: the Radicalization of the Shiite Movement in Afghanistan." ''Middle Eastern Studies'' 1995 31(1): 1-12. Issn: 0026-3206 </ref>

==Soviet troubles==
Brezhnev by 1980 was sick, incompetent, corrupt and surrounded by satraps and yes-men. Politburo meetings were pro-forma. The critical decision to move militarily into Afghanistan in 1979 had been strongly opposed by most military and diplomatic planners, but their advice may not have reached Brezhnev. The decision to invade Afghanistan was made by [[Yuri Andropov]] (1914-84) (head of the [[KGB]]), and the Soviet Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov (1908-84) (who overruled his generals). They were maneuvering to succeed the ailing Brezhnev, and apparently discounted the risk of failure. The Soviet Union had never lost a war, and they never dreamed that Afghanistan would be as disastrous for them as [[Vietnam War|Vietnam]] had been for the US.<ref> Odd Arne Westad, "Concerning the Situation in 'A': New Russian Evidence on the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan," ''CWIHP Bulletin'' (Winter 1996/97) issue 8-9, pp128-33, with documents on pp 133-184 [http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/ACF193.pdf online edition]</ref>
==War operations==
By 1985 the war was largely stalemated. The Soviet forces were mainly tied up in cities and in defending airfields and bases, leaving only roughly 15% of their troops for operations. There were few pitched battles. The challenge for the Soviets was to maintain control of all the cities, important towns and highways, and to protect the regime from sudden attack by guerrillas who could strike almost anywhere in the rural areas at any time. The Soviet military depended on [[air mobility]] to cover the large, mountainous land, using small airplanes and helicopters. Their tactic failed when the US in 1986 began supplying the rebels with over 500 shoulder-fired [[FIM-92 Stinger]] [[surface-to-air missile]]s that made it extremely difficult for Soviet aircraft to operate.

The CIA effort code-named "Operation Cyclone" began with funding of $25 million in 1980 and rose to $630 million per year in 1987, including matching funds from Saudi Arabia. Anti-Soviet mujahideen received American aid through Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence Agency, which cooperated with the CIA. About 90,000 men were in the rebel units; about 20,000 were active at any one time, compared with 100,000 Soviet and 40,000 regime soldiers. Meanwhile millions of civilians fled to neighboring countries, especially Pakistan and Iran, where a worldwide relief effort fed them.

The Soviets had multiple unexpected problems regarding the poor training, low morale and poor sanitation of their troops. They sent 85,000 men in the 40th Army, but it was entirely unprepared for the guerrilla warfare it encountered. Muslim soldiers in the Soviet forces were treated as second class citizens, had high desertion rates, and proved unreliable and unwilling; and were soon replaced by Slavs from Russia and Ukraine.<ref> Leo J. Daugherty, III, "The Bear and the Scimitar: Soviet Central Asians and the War in Afghanistan 1979-1989." ''Journal of Slavic Military Studies'' 1995 8(1): 73-96. Issn: 1351-8046 </ref>

By 1984, however, the Soviets had learned a great deal about fighting a guerrilla war, and had developed a far more effective mix of small unit tactics, helicopter assault capabilities, and strategic bombing. These innovations were so successful that they threatened to suppress the mujahideen during 1985 and 1986. The peak of the fighting came in 1985-86. The Soviet forces launched their largest and most effective assaults on the mujahideen supply lines from Pakistan and forced the mujahideen back to defensive positions near [[Herat]] and [[Kandahar]]. However the mujahideen also learned, and had good weapons and good funding, while their families (who had fled the country) could not be used as hostages. The mujahideen learned to deploy artillery, mines, and small arms. While they never captured a major city or base held by Soviet troops, they fielded about 20,000 men at a time (out of 90,000 or so available) and raised the cost of the war to levels that the Kremlin found unacceptable. Ultimately the Soviets failed because the people of Afghanistan did not want them or their puppets.<ref> A good military history of the Soviet effort is Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, ''The Lessons of Modern War. Volume: 3'' (1990) </ref>

Disease and poor field sanitation proved disastrous. Of the 620,000 Soviets who served in Afghanistan, 14,500 were killed or died from wounds, accidents or disease--a low rate of 2.3%, plus 53,800 (11.4%) were wounded or injured. However, the rate of hospitalization unusually high, as the 470,000 personnel hospitalized represented almost 76% of the men. In all 67% of those who served in Afghanistan required hospitalization for a serious illness. These illnesses included 115,000 cases of infectious hepatitis and 31,100 cases of [[typhoid fever]], followed by [[plague]], [[malaria]], [[cholera]], [[diphtheria]], [[meningitis]], heart disease, [[shigellosis]] (infectious dysentery), [[amoebic dysentery]], rheumatism, [[heat stroke]], pneumonia, [[typhus]] and [[paratyphus]]. Problems included lack of sufficient clean drinking water, poor field sanitation practices, infestations of [[lice]] and [[rodent]]s, and poor official diet, and use of locally purchased foods that carried disease. These difficulties were compounded by the lack of a professional [[noncommissioned officer]] corps.<ref>Lester W. Grau and William A. Jorgensen, "Beaten by the Bugs: the Soviet-Afghan War Experience." ''Military Review'' 1997 77(6): 30-37. Issn: 0026-4148 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref>

==Rollback==
Taking office in early 1981, President [[Ronald Reagan]] began a rollback strategy of supporting insurgencies in [[Nicaragua]], [[Cambodia]], [[Angola]], and, above all, in Afghanistan. The goal, especially after 1984, was to bleed Moscow white--to create a Vietnam for them which would suck their military dry. "We control Kabul and the provincial centers, but on occupied territory we cannot establish authority," the Defense Minister explained to the Politburo in 1986. "We have lost the battle for the Afghan people."<ref> "CPSU CC Politburo Transcript, 13 Nov 1986" in ''CWIHP Bulletin'' 8-9, p. 180 </ref> [[Mikhail Gorbachev]] came to power in 1985 and immediately realized the severe drain caused by trying to hold his empire together, especially as the U.S. was escalating military spending, threatening to build Star Wars, and the Soviet economy was faltering badly as revenues plunged from oil exports. It took him several years to get enough Politburo support, all the time the poor performance and prolonged presence of the Soviet military in Afghanistan created domestic financial and political problems. In 1986 he replaced Karmal with Mohammad Najibullah (1947-96) the head of the dreaded secret police (KHAD) and leader of the Parcham faction. Finally in 1988 to save the heart of the Communist system in Russia he admitted defeat and cut his losses in Afghanistan.<ref> A. Z. Hilali, "Afghanistan: the Decline of Soviet Military Strategy and Political Status." ''Journal of Slavic Military Studies'' 1999 12(1): 94-123. Issn: 1351-8046 </ref>

==Aftermath==
The last Soviet troops left in February 1989, but Soviet military aid continued until the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991. The Najibullah regime lasted another three years, until a military offensive by the mujahideen captured Kabul with little fighting in April 1992. In the end, Afghanistan contributed significantly, perhaps decisively, to the collective loss of confidence that brought the Soviet Union to self-destruction. The lost war discredited the Soviet army, which had been the single most important institution holding the union together, eroded the legitimacy of the Soviet system in the eyes of non-Russian nationalities, and accelerated glasnost.<ref> Rafael Reuveny and Aseem Prakash, "The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union." ''Review of International Studies'' 1999 25(4): 693-708. Issn: 0260-2105 Fulltext: [[Cambridge UP]] </ref>

Critics of U.S. foreign policy consider Operation Cyclone to be substantially responsible for setting in motion the events that led to the [[terrorist]] attacks of 11 September 2001 commonly known as the term [[Blowback (intelligence)|blowback]].<ref name=DID-THE-US-CREATE-OSAMA-BIN-LADEN>{{cite web|title=Did the U.S. "Create" Osama bin Laden?|date=14 January 2005|publisher=[[US Department of State]]|url=http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-318760.html|accessdate=2007-01-09}}</ref> However, scholars such as [[Jason Burke]], [[Steve Coll]], [[Peter Bergen]], [[Christopher Andrew (historian)|Christopher Andrew]], and [[Vasily Mitrokhin]] have argued that [[Osama Bin Laden]] was "outside of CIA eyesight" and that there is "no support" in any "reliable source" for "the claim that the CIA funded bin Laden or any of the other Arab volunteers who came to support the mujahideen."<ref>See Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda (Penguin, 2003), p59; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden (Penguin, 2004), p87; Peter Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know (Free Press, 2006), pp60-1; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (Penguin, 2006), p579n48.</ref>

After 1989 the United States provided relief and economic aid aid but stayed neutral in the ongoing tribal conflicts. After 1990 a new organization arose, the [[Taliban]], a militantly anti-modern group that was strongly opposed to the mujahideen, and both anti-American and anti-Soviet. Primarily a youth group, the Taliban never received any aide from the US.<ref>US State Department, "Did the U.S. 'Create' Osama bin Laden? Allegations that the U.S. provided funding for bin Laden proved inaccurate," (2005) [http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-318760.html online] notes the US did not recruit any Arabs like Osama bin Laden. </ref> The Taliban militia took control of the Kabul in 1996, and installed a very harsh Islamist regime. Later it invited in [[Osama bin Laden]] and his Al Qaeda group, which established its base in Afghanistan.

==Bibliography==
* Amstutz, J. B. ''Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation.'' (1986)
* Arnold, Anthony. ''The Fateful Pebble: Afghanistan's Role in the Fall of the Soviet Empire'' (1993)
* Bradsher, Henry. '' Afghan Communism and Soviet Intervention'' (2nd ed 2001)
* Coll, Steve. ''Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211468745&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
* Cordovez, Diego, and Selig S. Harrison. ''Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal'' (1995) [http://www.amazon.com/Out-Afghanistan-Inside-Soviet-Withdrawal/dp/0195062949/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211462936&sr=8-8 excerpt and text search]
* Cordsman, Anthony H., and A. R. Wagner. ''The Lessons of Modern War. Vol. 3, The Afghan and Falkland Conflicts.'' (1991). [http://www.questia.com/read/98604591?title=The%20Lessons%20of%20Modern%20War%20-%20Vol.%203 online edition]
* Daley, Tad. "Gorbachev and Afghanistan, the Soviet Debate over the Lessons of Afghanistan and Consequent Directions in Russian Foreign Policy." PhD dissertation Rand Graduate Institute. 1995. 292 pp. DAI 1995 56(4): 1515-A. DA9528705 Fulltext: [[ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]]
* Feifer, Gregory. ''The Great Gamble: The Soviet WEar in Afghanistan,'' (2009), colorful narrarive history
* Galeotti, Mark. ''Afghanistan, The Soviet Union's Last War'' (1995), shows highly negative impact in Russia
* Gibbs, David N. "Reassessing Soviet Motives for Invading Afghanistan: a Declassified History." ''Critical Asian Studies'' 2006 38(2): 239-263. Issn: 1467-2715 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Granville, Johanna Cushing. "Soviet Decision-Making: A Comparative Analysis of the Interventions in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979)." PhD dissertation Tufts U. 1992. 470 pp. DAI 1993 53(10): 3667-A. DA9301503 Fulltext: [[ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]]
* Grasselli, Gabriella. ''British and American Responses to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan'' (1996)
* Grau, Lester W. "Breaking Contact Without Leaving Chaos: the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan." ''Journal of Slavic Military Studies'' 2007 20(2): 235-261. Issn: 1351-8046
* Grau, Lester W. "The Soviet-Afghan War: a Superpower Mired in the Mountains." ''Journal of Slavic Military Studies'' 2004 17(1): 129-151. Issn: 1351-8046 overall synthesis focused on Soviet military
* Grau, Lester W. ''The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan'' (1998)
* Halliday, Fred, and Zahir Tanin. "The Communist Regime in Afghanistan 1978-1992: Institutions and Conflicts." ''Europe-Asia Studies'' 1998 50(8): pp1357-1380. Comparative perspective. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/153920 in Jstor]
* Hilali, A. Z. ''US-Pakistan Relationship: Soviet Invasion Of Afghanistan'' (US Foreign Policy and Conflict in the Islamic World) (2005) [http://www.amazon.com/US-Pakistan-Relationship-Invasion-Afghanistan-Conflict/dp/0754642208/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211462936&sr=8-7 excerpt and text search]
* Hussain, Syed Rifaat. "From Dependence to Intervention: Soviet-Afghan Relations during the Brezhnev Era (1964-1982)." PhD dissertation U. of Denver 1993. 372 pp. DAI 1994 55(2): 370-A. DA9419261 Fulltext: [[ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]]
* Kakar, M. Hassan. ''Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982'' (1997) [http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft7b69p12h/;jsessionid=HDTaoNyp158tiJpP?&query=&brand=ucpress complete edition online]
* Klass, R., ed. ''Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited.'' (1987).
* McMichael, Scott R. ''Stumbling Bear : Soviet Military Performance in Afghanistan'' (1991), stresses the poor performance of the Soviet army
* Mendelson, Sarah Elizabeth. "Explaining Change in Foreign Policy: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan." PhD dissertation Columbia U. 1993. 320 pp. DAI 1994 54(12): 4582-A. DA9412814 Fulltext: [[ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]]
* Mendelson, Sarah E. "Internal Battles and External Wars: Politics, Learning, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan." ''World Politics'' 1993 45(3): 327-360. stresses the role of ideas about both the foreign and the domestic scene, as well as the role of a network of specialists that helped put these ideas on the national agenda; [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2950722 in Jstor]
* Overby. Paul. ''Holy Blood: An Inside View of the Afghan War'' (1993) emphasizes resistance to modernization. [http://www.questia.com/read/106978900?title=Holy%20Blood%3a%20%20An%20Inside%20View%20of%20the%20Afghan%20War online edition]
* Rogers, Tom. ''The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Analysis and Chronology'' (1992) [http://www.questia.com/read/9634391?title=The%20Soviet%20Withdrawal%20from%20Afghanistan%3a%20Analysis%20and%20Chronology online edition]
* Rubin, Barnett R. ''Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse n the International System'' (2nd ed. 2002) [http://www.amazon.com/Fragmentation-Afghanistan-Formation-Collapse-International/dp/0300095198 excerpt and text search]
* Saikal, A., and W. Miley, eds. ''The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan.'' (1989).
* Sarin, Oleg, and Lev Dvoretsky. ''The Afghan Syndrome: The Soviet Union's Vietnam.'' (1993). 240 pp.
* Speakman, Jay R. "A Continuity of Discord: Responses of the Western Allies to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan." PhD dissertation Columbia U. 1994. 1067 pp. DAI 1995 56(1): 349-A. DA9516189 Fulltext: [[ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]]
* Wolf, Matt W. "Stumbling Towards War: the Soviet Decision to Invade Afghanistan." ''Past Imperfect'' 2006 12. Issn: 1192-1315 [http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~pastimpe/Volume%2012/Stumbling%20Towards%20War.pdf online edition]

===Primary Sources===
* Gates, Robert M. ''From the Shadows'' (1996), explains the CIA role
* Heinämaa, Anna; Leppänen, Maija; and Yurchenko, Yuri, eds. ''The Soldiers' Story: Soviet Veterans Remember the Afghan War.'' (1994) 128 pp.
* Jalali, Ali Ahmad, and Lester W. Grau, eds. ''The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War'' (1996), Mujahideen perspective
* Ostermann, Christian Friedrich, ed. "Gorbachev and Afghanistan." ''Cold War International History Project Bulletin'' 2003-2004 (14-15): 139-192. Issn: 1071-9652 [http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.publications&group_id=75466" online edition]
* Russian General Staff. ''The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost'' (2002), edited by Lester W. Grau, and Michail A. Gress; perspective of Soviet high command [http://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Afghan-War-Superpower-Fought-Lost/dp/070061186X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211472853&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]* Westad, Odd Arne, ed. "Concering the Situation in 'A': New Russian Evidence on the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan," ''CWIHP Bulletin'' (Winter 1996/97) issue 8-9, pp128-33, with documents on pp 133-184 [http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/ACF193.pdf online edition]

====notes====
<references/>

[[Category:Wars]]
[[Category:Soviet Union]]
[[Category:Cold War]]
[[Category:Afghanistan]]

Soviet-Afghan War

2013-02-12T21:12:32Z

JakeRMurrin: Reverse my earlier edits to last version by RJensen

The '''Soviet-Afghan War (1978-92)''' was a civil war in [[Afghanistan]] that matched the [[Soviet Union]] and its Afghan allies against a coalition of anti-Communist groups called the [[Mujahideen]], supported from the outside by the United States, [[Pakistan]], and [[Saudi Arabia]]. The war ended the [[Détente]] period of the [[Cold War]], and resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Soviets, who pulled out in 1989, and for their clients who were overthrown in 1992.
[[File:Afghan-war.jpg|thumb|460px]]
==Origins==
The world was stunned in 1979 when the Soviets sent their army into Afghanistan, which had always been neutral and uninvolved.<ref> Christian Ostermann, “CWIHP Conference Report: New Evidence on the 1979-1989 War in Afghanistan. “ (May 20 20020 [http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/intelforum/2002-May/006251.html online]</ref>

The old monarchy was replaced by democratization and the rise of the Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The Afghanistan crisis began in April 1978 with a [[coup d'etat]] by Afghan Communists called "the Saur Revolution".<ref> A. Z. Hilali, "The Soviet Penetration into Afghanistan and the Marxist Coup." ''Journal of Slavic Military Studies'' 2005 18(4): 673-716. Issn: 1351-8046 </ref> They tried to impose scientific socialism on a country that did not want to be modernized-- indeed, which was heading in the opposite direction under the lure of Muslim fundamentalism of the sort that had topped the [[Shah]] in next-door [[Iran]]. Disobeying orders from [[Moscow]], the coup leaders systematically executed the leadership of the large [[Parcham clan]], thus guaranteeing a civil war among the country's many feuding ethnic groups. In addition the Communists in Afghanistan were themselves bitterly divided between the Khalq and Parcham factions. Moscow confronted a quandary. Afghanistan had been neutralized for sixty years, and had never been part of the Cold War system. Now it appeared that radical fundamentalist Muslims, supported by Pakistan and Iran, and probably by [[China]] and the United States, were about to seize power. The Communist regime in Kabul had no popular support; its 100,000-man army had fallen apart and was worthless. Only the Soviet army could possibly quell the growing rebellion by Parcham, the fundamentalist "mujahideen", and allied tribes who opposed the anti-religious, feminist modernizers.

The Kremlin fully realized the dangers involved. Foreign Minister [[Andrei Gromyko]] warned the [[Politburo]] in March 1979 that Soviet intervention in an Afghan civil war would violate international law and would be sharply condemned worldwide.<ref> After the intervention the UN General Assembly voted by 104 to 18 with 18 abstentions to "strongly deplore" the "recent armed intervention" and called for the "total withdrawal of foreign troops" from the country. </ref> According to Leninist principles, Afghanistan was not ready for revolution in the first place. Furthermore intervention would destroy détente with the United States and Western Europe. On the other hand, Gromyko insisted, "We cannot surrender Afghanistan to the enemy." Despite urgent calls from Kabul, the Kremlin hesitated. But factions within the Afghan People's Democratic Party (Communist) government that were hostile to Soviet interests gained ascendancy and raised the specter of an independently minded Communist state located on the southern border that might cause future trouble inside the Muslim parts of the USSR.<ref> David N. Gibbs, "Reassessing Soviet Motives for Invading Afghanistan: a Declassified History." ''Critical Asian Studies'' 2006 38(2): 239-263. </ref> At this point Moscow decided not to send troops but instead stepped up shipments of military equipment such as artillery, armored personnel carriers and 48,000 machine guns; they also sent 100,000 tons of wheat (ironically, the latter was purchased from the U.S.) Washington followed events closely, worried about Soviet expansion plans and a possible breakthrough to the south.

Moscow's man in Kabul was prime minister Nur Mohammed Taraki (1913-79), who was murdered and replaced by his deputy Hafizullah Aminin (1929-79) of the Khalq faction in September 1979. Although Amin called himself a loyal Communist, and begged for more Soviet military intervention, Moscow thought Amin was planning to double-cross them and switch over to China and the US. They therefore double crossed him first. Moscow had Amin officially invite the Soviet Army to enter Afghanistan; it did so in December 1979, and immediately executed Amin and installed a Soviet puppet [[Babrak Karmal]] (1929-96), the leader of the more moderate Parcham faction pf the PDPA. Pressure for intervention seems to have come primarily from the KGB (secret police), whose efforts to assassinate Amin had failed, and from the Soviet Army, which perhaps was worried about the danger of a mutiny on the part of its many Muslim soldiers.
==World reaction==
In July, 1979, before the Soviet invasion, President [[Jimmy Carter]] for the first time authorized the [[CIA]] to start assisting the Mujahideen rebels with money and non-military supplies sent via Pakistan. As soon as the Soviets invaded in December, 1979, Carter, disgusted at the collapse of détente and alarmed at the rapid Soviet gains, terminated progress on arms limitations, slapped a grain embargo on Russia, withdrew from the [[1980 Moscow Olympics]], and (with near-unanimous support in Congress) sent the [[CIA]] in to arm, train and finance the Mujahideen rebels. The US had strong support from Britain, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, all of whom feared the Soviet invasion was the first step in a grand move south toward the oil-rich [[Persian Gulf]]. Carter enlarged his position into the "Carter Doctrine," by which the US announced its intention to defend the Gulf. Historians now believe that analysis was faulty and that the Soviets were not planning a grand move, but were concerned with loss of prestige and the possibility of a hostile Muslim regime that might destabilize its largely Muslim southern republics.<ref>David N. Gibbs, "Reassessing Soviet Motives for Invading Afghanistan: a Declassified History." ''Critical Asian Studies'' 2006 38(2): 239-263. </ref> The boycott of the [[Olympics]] humiliated the Soviets, who had hoped the games would validate their claim to moral equality in the world of nations; instead they were pariahs again.
===Iran's role===
The [[Shiite]] community, which constitutes about 20% of the Afghan population, regards Iran as its religious center; however, Afghanistan is predominantly [[Sunni]] and has maintained cordial relations with Iran since 1921. After the PDPA took power in 1978 the Shah of Iran began to support opposition groups fighting the Kabul regime, as did the [[Ruholla Khomeini|Khomeini]] regime and subsequent regimes in Iran. Refugees from Afghanistan fought for Iran during the [[Iran-Iraq War]], and Iran sent nationals to Afghanistan to assist the rebels and to propagate Iranian politics and ideology. Iranian leaders supported the formation of an Islamic state by providing various provisions, including radio and television equipment, but also supported the Hizb-e-Wahdat faction, a traditional ally that opposed Burhanuddin Rabbani and his Afghan Interim Government that ruled 1992-96.<ref> Hafizullah Emadi, "Exporting Iran's Revolution: the Radicalization of the Shiite Movement in Afghanistan." ''Middle Eastern Studies'' 1995 31(1): 1-12. Issn: 0026-3206 </ref>

==Soviet troubles==
Brezhnev by 1980 was sick, incompetent, corrupt and surrounded by satraps and yes-men. Politburo meetings were pro-forma. The critical decision to move militarily into Afghanistan in 1979 had been strongly opposed by most military and diplomatic planners, but their advice may not have reached Brezhnev. The decision to invade Afghanistan was made by [[Yuri Andropov]] (1914-84) (head of the [[KGB]]), and the Soviet Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov (1908-84) (who overruled his generals). They were maneuvering to succeed the ailing Brezhnev, and apparently discounted the risk of failure. The Soviet Union had never lost a war, and they never dreamed that Afghanistan would be as disastrous for them as [[Vietnam War|Vietnam]] had been for the US.<ref> Odd Arne Westad, "Concerning the Situation in 'A': New Russian Evidence on the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan," ''CWIHP Bulletin'' (Winter 1996/97) issue 8-9, pp128-33, with documents on pp 133-184 [http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/ACF193.pdf online edition]</ref>
==War operations==
By 1985 the war was largely stalemated. The Soviet forces were mainly tied up in cities and in defending airfields and bases, leaving only roughly 15% of their troops for operations. There were few pitched battles. The challenge for the Soviets was to maintain control of all the cities, important towns and highways, and to protect the regime from sudden attack by guerrillas who could strike almost anywhere in the rural areas at any time. The Soviet military depended on [[air mobility]] to cover the large, mountainous land, using small airplanes and helicopters. Their tactic failed when the US in 1986 began supplying the rebels with over 500 shoulder-fired [[FIM-92 Stinger]] [[surface-to-air missile]]s that made it extremely difficult for Soviet aircraft to operate.

The CIA effort code-named "Operation Cyclone" began with funding of $25 million in 1980 and rose to $630 million per year in 1987, including matching funds from Saudi Arabia. Anti-Soviet mujahideen received American aid through Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence Agency, which cooperated with the CIA. About 90,000 men were in the rebel units; about 20,000 were active at any one time, compared with 100,000 Soviet and 40,000 regime soldiers. Meanwhile millions of civilians fled to neighboring countries, especially Pakistan and Iran, where a worldwide relief effort fed them.

The Soviets had multiple unexpected problems regarding the poor training, low morale and poor sanitation of their troops. They sent 85,000 men in the 40th Army, but it was entirely unprepared for the guerrilla warfare it encountered. Muslim soldiers in the Soviet forces were treated as second class citizens, had high desertion rates, and proved unreliable and unwilling; and were soon replaced by Slavs from Russia and Ukraine.<ref> Leo J. Daugherty, III, "The Bear and the Scimitar: Soviet Central Asians and the War in Afghanistan 1979-1989." ''Journal of Slavic Military Studies'' 1995 8(1): 73-96. Issn: 1351-8046 </ref>

By 1984, however, the Soviets had learned a great deal about fighting a guerrilla war, and had developed a far more effective mix of small unit tactics, helicopter assault capabilities, and strategic bombing. These innovations were so successful that they threatened to suppress the mujahideen during 1985 and 1986. The peak of the fighting came in 1985-86. The Soviet forces launched their largest and most effective assaults on the mujahideen supply lines from Pakistan and forced the mujahideen back to defensive positions near [[Herat]] and [[Kandahar]]. However the mujahideen also learned, and had good weapons and good funding, while their families (who had fled the country) could not be used as hostages. The mujahideen learned to deploy artillery, mines, and small arms. While they never captured a major city or base held by Soviet troops, they fielded about 20,000 men at a time (out of 90,000 or so available) and raised the cost of the war to levels that the Kremlin found unacceptable. Ultimately the Soviets failed because the people of Afghanistan did not want them or their puppets.<ref> A good military history of the Soviet effort is Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, ''The Lessons of Modern War. Volume: 3'' (1990) </ref>

Disease and poor field sanitation proved disastrous. Of the 620,000 Soviets who served in Afghanistan, 14,500 were killed or died from wounds, accidents or disease--a low rate of 2.3%, plus 53,800 (11.4%) were wounded or injured. However, the rate of hospitalization unusually high, as the 470,000 personnel hospitalized represented almost 76% of the men. In all 67% of those who served in Afghanistan required hospitalization for a serious illness. These illnesses included 115,000 cases of infectious hepatitis and 31,100 cases of [[typhoid fever]], followed by [[plague]], [[malaria]], [[cholera]], [[diphtheria]], [[meningitis]], heart disease, [[shigellosis]] (infectious dysentery), [[amoebic dysentery]], rheumatism, [[heat stroke]], pneumonia, [[typhus]] and [[paratyphus]]. Problems included lack of sufficient clean drinking water, poor field sanitation practices, infestations of [[lice]] and [[rodent]]s, and poor official diet, and use of locally purchased foods that carried disease. These difficulties were compounded by the lack of a professional [[noncommissioned officer]] corps.<ref>Lester W. Grau and William A. Jorgensen, "Beaten by the Bugs: the Soviet-Afghan War Experience." ''Military Review'' 1997 77(6): 30-37. Issn: 0026-4148 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]</ref>

==Rollback==
Taking office in early 1981, President [[Ronald Reagan]] began a rollback strategy of supporting insurgencies in [[Nicaragua]], [[Cambodia]], [[Angola]], and, above all, in Afghanistan. The goal, especially after 1984, was to bleed Moscow white--to create a Vietnam for them which would suck their military dry. "We control Kabul and the provincial centers, but on occupied territory we cannot establish authority," the Defense Minister explained to the Politburo in 1986. "We have lost the battle for the Afghan people."<ref> "CPSU CC Politburo Transcript, 13 Nov 1986" in ''CWIHP Bulletin'' 8-9, p. 180 </ref> [[Mikhail Gorbachev]] came to power in 1985 and immediately realized the severe drain caused by trying to hold his empire together, especially as the U.S. was escalating military spending, threatening to build Star Wars, and the Soviet economy was faltering badly as revenues plunged from oil exports. It took him several years to get enough Politburo support, all the time the poor performance and prolonged presence of the Soviet military in Afghanistan created domestic financial and political problems. In 1986 he replaced Karmal with Mohammad Najibullah (1947-96) the head of the dreaded secret police (KHAD) and leader of the Parcham faction. Finally in 1988 to save the heart of the Communist system in Russia he admitted defeat and cut his losses in Afghanistan.<ref> A. Z. Hilali, "Afghanistan: the Decline of Soviet Military Strategy and Political Status." ''Journal of Slavic Military Studies'' 1999 12(1): 94-123. Issn: 1351-8046 </ref>

==Aftermath==
The last Soviet troops left in February 1989, but Soviet military aid continued until the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991. The Najibullah regime lasted another three years, until a military offensive by the mujahideen captured Kabul with little fighting in April 1992. In the end, Afghanistan contributed significantly, perhaps decisively, to the collective loss of confidence that brought the Soviet Union to self-destruction. The lost war discredited the Soviet army, which had been the single most important institution holding the union together, eroded the legitimacy of the Soviet system in the eyes of non-Russian nationalities, and accelerated glasnost.<ref> Rafael Reuveny and Aseem Prakash, "The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union." ''Review of International Studies'' 1999 25(4): 693-708. Issn: 0260-2105 Fulltext: [[Cambridge UP]] </ref>

After 1989 the United States provided relief and economic aid aid but stayed neutral in the ongoing tribal conflicts. After 1990 a new organization arose, the [[Taliban]], a militantly anti-modern group that was strongly opposed to the mujahideen, and both anti-American and anti-Soviet. Primarily a youth group, the Taliban never received any aide from the US.<ref>US State Department, "Did the U.S. 'Create' Osama bin Laden? Allegations that the U.S. provided funding for bin Laden proved inaccurate," (2005) [http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-318760.html online] notes the US did not recruit any Arabs like Osama bin Laden. </ref> The Taliban militia took control of the Kabul in 1996, and installed a very harsh Islamist regime. Later it invited in [[Osama bin Laden]] and his Al Qaeda group, which established its base in Afghanistan.

==Bibliography==
* Amstutz, J. B. ''Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation.'' (1986)
* Arnold, Anthony. ''The Fateful Pebble: Afghanistan's Role in the Fall of the Soviet Empire'' (1993)
* Bradsher, Henry. '' Afghan Communism and Soviet Intervention'' (2nd ed 2001)
* Coll, Steve. ''Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Wars-Afghanistan-Invasion-September/dp/0143034669/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211468745&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
* Cordovez, Diego, and Selig S. Harrison. ''Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal'' (1995) [http://www.amazon.com/Out-Afghanistan-Inside-Soviet-Withdrawal/dp/0195062949/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211462936&sr=8-8 excerpt and text search]
* Cordsman, Anthony H., and A. R. Wagner. ''The Lessons of Modern War. Vol. 3, The Afghan and Falkland Conflicts.'' (1991). [http://www.questia.com/read/98604591?title=The%20Lessons%20of%20Modern%20War%20-%20Vol.%203 online edition]
* Daley, Tad. "Gorbachev and Afghanistan, the Soviet Debate over the Lessons of Afghanistan and Consequent Directions in Russian Foreign Policy." PhD dissertation Rand Graduate Institute. 1995. 292 pp. DAI 1995 56(4): 1515-A. DA9528705 Fulltext: [[ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]]
* Feifer, Gregory. ''The Great Gamble: The Soviet WEar in Afghanistan,'' (2009), colorful narrarive history
* Galeotti, Mark. ''Afghanistan, The Soviet Union's Last War'' (1995), shows highly negative impact in Russia
* Gibbs, David N. "Reassessing Soviet Motives for Invading Afghanistan: a Declassified History." ''Critical Asian Studies'' 2006 38(2): 239-263. Issn: 1467-2715 Fulltext: [[Ebsco]]
* Granville, Johanna Cushing. "Soviet Decision-Making: A Comparative Analysis of the Interventions in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979)." PhD dissertation Tufts U. 1992. 470 pp. DAI 1993 53(10): 3667-A. DA9301503 Fulltext: [[ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]]
* Grasselli, Gabriella. ''British and American Responses to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan'' (1996)
* Grau, Lester W. "Breaking Contact Without Leaving Chaos: the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan." ''Journal of Slavic Military Studies'' 2007 20(2): 235-261. Issn: 1351-8046
* Grau, Lester W. "The Soviet-Afghan War: a Superpower Mired in the Mountains." ''Journal of Slavic Military Studies'' 2004 17(1): 129-151. Issn: 1351-8046 overall synthesis focused on Soviet military
* Grau, Lester W. ''The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan'' (1998)
* Halliday, Fred, and Zahir Tanin. "The Communist Regime in Afghanistan 1978-1992: Institutions and Conflicts." ''Europe-Asia Studies'' 1998 50(8): pp1357-1380. Comparative perspective. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/153920 in Jstor]
* Hilali, A. Z. ''US-Pakistan Relationship: Soviet Invasion Of Afghanistan'' (US Foreign Policy and Conflict in the Islamic World) (2005) [http://www.amazon.com/US-Pakistan-Relationship-Invasion-Afghanistan-Conflict/dp/0754642208/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211462936&sr=8-7 excerpt and text search]
* Hussain, Syed Rifaat. "From Dependence to Intervention: Soviet-Afghan Relations during the Brezhnev Era (1964-1982)." PhD dissertation U. of Denver 1993. 372 pp. DAI 1994 55(2): 370-A. DA9419261 Fulltext: [[ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]]
* Kakar, M. Hassan. ''Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982'' (1997) [http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft7b69p12h/;jsessionid=HDTaoNyp158tiJpP?&query=&brand=ucpress complete edition online]
* Klass, R., ed. ''Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited.'' (1987).
* McMichael, Scott R. ''Stumbling Bear : Soviet Military Performance in Afghanistan'' (1991), stresses the poor performance of the Soviet army
* Mendelson, Sarah Elizabeth. "Explaining Change in Foreign Policy: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan." PhD dissertation Columbia U. 1993. 320 pp. DAI 1994 54(12): 4582-A. DA9412814 Fulltext: [[ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]]
* Mendelson, Sarah E. "Internal Battles and External Wars: Politics, Learning, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan." ''World Politics'' 1993 45(3): 327-360. stresses the role of ideas about both the foreign and the domestic scene, as well as the role of a network of specialists that helped put these ideas on the national agenda; [http://www.jstor.org/stable/2950722 in Jstor]
* Overby. Paul. ''Holy Blood: An Inside View of the Afghan War'' (1993) emphasizes resistance to modernization. [http://www.questia.com/read/106978900?title=Holy%20Blood%3a%20%20An%20Inside%20View%20of%20the%20Afghan%20War online edition]
* Rogers, Tom. ''The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Analysis and Chronology'' (1992) [http://www.questia.com/read/9634391?title=The%20Soviet%20Withdrawal%20from%20Afghanistan%3a%20Analysis%20and%20Chronology online edition]
* Rubin, Barnett R. ''Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse n the International System'' (2nd ed. 2002) [http://www.amazon.com/Fragmentation-Afghanistan-Formation-Collapse-International/dp/0300095198 excerpt and text search]
* Saikal, A., and W. Miley, eds. ''The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan.'' (1989).
* Sarin, Oleg, and Lev Dvoretsky. ''The Afghan Syndrome: The Soviet Union's Vietnam.'' (1993). 240 pp.
* Speakman, Jay R. "A Continuity of Discord: Responses of the Western Allies to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan." PhD dissertation Columbia U. 1994. 1067 pp. DAI 1995 56(1): 349-A. DA9516189 Fulltext: [[ProQuest Dissertations & Theses]]
* Wolf, Matt W. "Stumbling Towards War: the Soviet Decision to Invade Afghanistan." ''Past Imperfect'' 2006 12. Issn: 1192-1315 [http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~pastimpe/Volume%2012/Stumbling%20Towards%20War.pdf online edition]

===Primary Sources===
* Gates, Robert M. ''From the Shadows'' (1996), explains the CIA role
* Heinämaa, Anna; Leppänen, Maija; and Yurchenko, Yuri, eds. ''The Soldiers' Story: Soviet Veterans Remember the Afghan War.'' (1994) 128 pp.
* Jalali, Ali Ahmad, and Lester W. Grau, eds. ''The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War'' (1996), Mujahideen perspective
* Ostermann, Christian Friedrich, ed. "Gorbachev and Afghanistan." ''Cold War International History Project Bulletin'' 2003-2004 (14-15): 139-192. Issn: 1071-9652 [http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuseaction=topics.publications&group_id=75466" online edition]
* Russian General Staff. ''The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost'' (2002), edited by Lester W. Grau, and Michail A. Gress; perspective of Soviet high command [http://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Afghan-War-Superpower-Fought-Lost/dp/070061186X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211472853&sr=1-1 excerpt and text search]* Westad, Odd Arne, ed. "Concering the Situation in 'A': New Russian Evidence on the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan," ''CWIHP Bulletin'' (Winter 1996/97) issue 8-9, pp128-33, with documents on pp 133-184 [http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/ACF193.pdf online edition]

====notes====
<references/>

[[Category:Wars]]
[[Category:Soviet Union]]
[[Category:Cold War]]
[[Category:Afghanistan]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-11T04:46:38Z

JakeRMurrin: /* The North Vietnamese Terror */

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1952, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alex Holcomb, ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Summer 2010, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party. </ref>

From 1953 to 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> 5.68% of the population was targeted for persecution, a ratio the party later admitted was "too high". Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 71.66% were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, p85, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese,<ref>http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/index.cfm</ref> 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm The high is supported by UN figures. The Khmer Rouge reduced the expected 1979 population from 8.4 to 6.2 million; the UN estimated an expected 1979 population of 8.7 million in the absence of the war. Cambodia's actual population in 1975 was roughly 8.2 million</ref> and 30-50,000 Laotians.<ref>http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx</ref> The most comprehensive and detailed demographic survey ever conducted on casualties during the war, from ''Population and Development Review'', estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.<ref>Charles Hirschman et al., [http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/brines/vietcasualties.pdf "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate,"] Population and Development Review, December 1995</ref> R.J. Rummel originally put the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WSJ.ART.HTM</ref> Rummel later revised the estimate to over 2 million in all of Indochina, including 1.7 million in North and South Vietnam.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB11.1.GIF</ref>

US intelligence and available demographic evidence suggest that Hanoi's official figure<ref>Associated Press, April 3, 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North"</ref> of 3 million Vietnamese dead in the war was an exaggeration. Its figures for both military and civilian deaths are about double the accepted numbers, and they further claim that 1 million soldiers died and 600,000 were wounded--even though wounded is typically three times the number of dead.<ref>http://web.archive.org/web/20071222122211/http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1995/vp950404/04040331.htm</ref> No other independent sources arrive at such a high number.

During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref>

Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF</ref>

Demographic analysis indicates that the commonly cited figure of 600,000 dead in the Cambodian civil war may have been invented by Pol Pot himself and is more than the twice the real number of war-related deaths.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. As of 2010, more veterans of the war have died from suicide than killed on the battlefield. <ref>[http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/11/on-veterans-day-some-grim-stat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+beyondblue1+(Beliefnet:+Beyond+Blue) On Veteran's Day: Some Grim Statistic, Beliefnet, November 11, 2010]</ref> This shows a largely unaddressable or poorly administered health issues persist and the U.S. Government has failed in its obligation to care for traumatized Vietnam veterans. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia killed 40,000 combatants and civilians, while US forces in Vietnam killed over 70,000 (higher estimates go to over 100,000) Vietnamese.

The death toll from US defeat surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-10T07:50:47Z

JakeRMurrin: /* The North Vietnamese Terror */

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination.

From 1953 to 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 123,266 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, p85, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese,<ref>http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/index.cfm</ref> 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm The high is supported by UN figures. The Khmer Rouge reduced the expected 1979 population from 8.4 to 6.2 million; the UN estimated an expected 1979 population of 8.7 million in the absence of the war. Cambodia's actual population in 1975 was roughly 8.2 million</ref> and 30-50,000 Laotians.<ref>http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx</ref> The most comprehensive and detailed demographic survey ever conducted on casualties during the war, from ''Population and Development Review'', estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.<ref>Charles Hirschman et al., [http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/brines/vietcasualties.pdf "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate,"] Population and Development Review, December 1995</ref> R.J. Rummel originally put the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WSJ.ART.HTM</ref> Rummel later revised the estimate to over 2 million in all of Indochina, including 1.7 million in North and South Vietnam.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB11.1.GIF</ref>

US intelligence and available demographic evidence suggest that Hanoi's official figure<ref>Associated Press, April 3, 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North"</ref> of 3 million Vietnamese dead in the war was an exaggeration. Its figures for both military and civilian deaths are about double the accepted numbers, and they further claim that 1 million soldiers died and 600,000 were wounded--even though wounded is typically three times the number of dead.<ref>http://web.archive.org/web/20071222122211/http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1995/vp950404/04040331.htm</ref> No other independent sources arrive at such a high number.

During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref>

Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF</ref>

Demographic analysis indicates that the commonly cited figure of 600,000 dead in the Cambodian civil war may have been invented by Pol Pot himself and is more than the twice the real number of war-related deaths.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. As of 2010, more veterans of the war have died from suicide than killed on the battlefield. <ref>[http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/11/on-veterans-day-some-grim-stat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+beyondblue1+(Beliefnet:+Beyond+Blue) On Veteran's Day: Some Grim Statistic, Beliefnet, November 11, 2010]</ref> This shows a largely unaddressable or poorly administered health issues persist and the U.S. Government has failed in its obligation to care for traumatized Vietnam veterans. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia killed 40,000 combatants and civilians, while US forces in Vietnam killed over 70,000 (higher estimates go to over 100,000) Vietnamese.

The death toll from US defeat surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-09T20:54:22Z

JakeRMurrin: /* The North Vietnamese Terror */

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination.

From 1953 to 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref> Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 123,266 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese,<ref>http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/index.cfm</ref> 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm The high is supported by UN figures. The Khmer Rouge reduced the expected 1979 population from 8.4 to 6.2 million; the UN estimated an expected 1979 population of 8.7 million in the absence of the war. Cambodia's actual population in 1975 was roughly 8.2 million</ref> and 30-50,000 Laotians.<ref>http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx</ref> The most comprehensive and detailed demographic survey ever conducted on casualties during the war, from ''Population and Development Review'', estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.<ref>Charles Hirschman et al., [http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/brines/vietcasualties.pdf "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate,"] Population and Development Review, December 1995</ref> R.J. Rummel originally put the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WSJ.ART.HTM</ref> Rummel later revised the estimate to over 2 million in all of Indochina, including 1.7 million in North and South Vietnam.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB11.1.GIF</ref>

US intelligence and available demographic evidence suggest that Hanoi's official figure<ref>Associated Press, April 3, 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North"</ref> of 3 million Vietnamese dead in the war was an exaggeration. Its figures for both military and civilian deaths are about double the accepted numbers, and they further claim that 1 million soldiers died and 600,000 were wounded--even though wounded is typically three times the number of dead.<ref>http://web.archive.org/web/20071222122211/http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1995/vp950404/04040331.htm</ref> No other independent sources arrive at such a high number.

During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref>

Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF</ref>

Demographic analysis indicates that the commonly cited figure of 600,000 dead in the Cambodian civil war may have been invented by Pol Pot himself and is more than the twice the real number of war-related deaths.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. As of 2010, more veterans of the war have died from suicide than killed on the battlefield. <ref>[http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/11/on-veterans-day-some-grim-stat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+beyondblue1+(Beliefnet:+Beyond+Blue) On Veteran's Day: Some Grim Statistic, Beliefnet, November 11, 2010]</ref> This shows a largely unaddressable or poorly administered health issues persist and the U.S. Government has failed in its obligation to care for traumatized Vietnam veterans. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia killed 40,000 combatants and civilians, while US forces in Vietnam killed over 70,000 (higher estimates go to over 100,000) Vietnamese.

The death toll from US defeat surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-07T02:31:16Z

JakeRMurrin: Remove repeat reference to Rummel

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination.

From 1953 to 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese,<ref>http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/index.cfm</ref> 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm The high is supported by UN figures. The Khmer Rouge reduced the expected 1979 population from 8.4 to 6.2 million; the UN estimated an expected 1979 population of 8.7 million in the absence of the war. Cambodia's actual population in 1975 was roughly 8.2 million</ref> and 30-50,000 Laotians.<ref>http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx</ref> The most comprehensive and detailed demographic survey ever conducted on casualties during the war, from ''Population and Development Review'', estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.<ref>Charles Hirschman et al., [http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/brines/vietcasualties.pdf "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate,"] Population and Development Review, December 1995</ref> R.J. Rummel originally put the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WSJ.ART.HTM</ref> Rummel later revised the estimate to over 2 million in all of Indochina, including 1.7 million in North and South Vietnam.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB11.1.GIF</ref>

US intelligence and available demographic evidence suggest that Hanoi's official figure<ref>Associated Press, April 3, 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North"</ref> of 3 million Vietnamese dead in the war was an exaggeration. Its figures for both military and civilian deaths are about double the accepted numbers, and they further claim that 1 million soldiers died and 600,000 were wounded--even though wounded is typically three times the number of dead.<ref>http://web.archive.org/web/20071222122211/http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1995/vp950404/04040331.htm</ref> No other independent sources arrive at such a high number.

During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref>

Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF</ref>

Demographic analysis indicates that the commonly cited figure of 600,000 dead in the Cambodian civil war may have been invented by Pol Pot himself and is more than the twice the real number of war-related deaths.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. As of 2010, more veterans of the war have died from suicide than killed on the battlefield. <ref>[http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/11/on-veterans-day-some-grim-stat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+beyondblue1+(Beliefnet:+Beyond+Blue) On Veteran's Day: Some Grim Statistic, Beliefnet, November 11, 2010]</ref> This shows a largely unaddressable or poorly administered health issues persist and the U.S. Government has failed in its obligation to care for traumatized Vietnam veterans. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia killed 40,000 combatants and civilians, while US forces in Vietnam killed over 70,000 (higher estimates go to over 100,000) Vietnamese.

The death toll from US defeat surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]

Vietnam War

2013-02-07T02:29:31Z

JakeRMurrin: Remove unsourced and redundant

{{War
| image =SaigonFall.jpg
| conflict =
| date =1959-1975
| location =[[Vietnam]]
| combatant1 ='''Anticommunist Forces''' [[South Vietnam]] [[United States]]
| combatant2 ='''Communist Forces''' [[North Vietnam]] [[Khmer Rouge]] [[Pathet Lao]]
| commander1 =
| commander2 =
| strength1 =
| strength2 =
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
}}

[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

==Prelude==
During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The [[United States]] backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. [[Ho Chi Minh]] began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the [[Battle of Dien Bien Phu]] over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War).

The French sued for peace at talks in [[Geneva]], the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of [[Indochina]]: [[Cambodia]], [[Laos]], [[North Vietnam]] and [[South Vietnam]]. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. South Vietnam consistently opposed such arguments on the grounds that free elections were impossible in the communist North. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials ''favored'' such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages."<ref>The Pentagon Papers (Beacon Press, 1971), vol. 3, p661.</ref> The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

===The North Vietnamese Terror===
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination.

From 1953 to 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 innocent people, and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were wrongly classified; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> The full death toll was many times greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref> Conversely, the lowest estimate given by a land reform cadre was that 32,000 people were executed, including 12,000 party members.<ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [http://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340.</ref>

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the [[Vietminh]] and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the [[Khmer Rouge]]), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the [[Vietcong]]) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.<ref>http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Viet Cong massacres were described as follows:
<blockquote>
The village chief and his wife were distraught. One of their children, a seven-year-old boy, had been missing for four days. They were terrified, they explained to Marine Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt, because they believed he had been captured by the Vietcong.

Suddenly, the boy came out of the jungle and ran across the rice paddies toward the village. He was crying. His mother ran to him and swept him up in her arms. Both of his hands had been cut off, and there was a sign around his neck, a message to his father: if he or anyone else in the village dared go to the polls during the upcoming elections, something worse would happen to the rest of his children.

The VC delivered a similar warning to the residents of a hamlet not far from Danang. All were herded before the home of their chief. While they and the chief’s pregnant wife and four children were forced to look on, the chief’s tongue was cut out. Then his genital organs were sliced off and sewn inside his bloody mouth. As he died, the VC went to work on his wife, slashing open her womb. Then, the nine-year-old son: a bamboo lance was rammed through one ear and out the other. Two more of the chief’s children were murdered the same way. The VC did not harm the five-year-old daughter — not physically: they simply left her crying, holding her dead mother’s hand.

General Walt tells of his arrival at a district headquarters the day after it had been overrun by VC and North Vietnamese army troops. Those South Vietnamese soldiers not killed in the battle had been tied up and shot through their mouths or the backs of their heads. Then their wives and children, including a number of two- and three-year-olds, had been brought into the street, disrobed, tortured and finally executed: their throats were cut; they were shot, beheaded, disemboweled. The mutilated bodies were draped on fences and hung with signs telling the rest of the community that if they continued to support the Saigon government and allied forces, they could look forward to the same fate.

These atrocities are not isolated cases; they are typical. For this is the enemy’s way of warfare, clearly expressed in his combat policy in Vietnam. While the naive and anti-American throughout the world, cued by communist propaganda; have trumpeted against American “immorality” in the Vietnam war — aerial bombing, the use of [[napalm]], casualties caused by American combat action — daily and nightly for years, the communists have systematically authored history’s grisliest catalogue of barbarism. By the end of 1967, they had committed at least 100,000 acts of terror against the South Vietnamese people. The record is an endless litany of tortures, mutilations and murders that would have been instructive even to such as Adolf Hitler.
</blockquote>

In 1960, some 1,500 South Vietnamese civilians were killed and 700 abducted. By early 1965, the communists’ Radio Hanoi and Radio Liberation were able to boast that the VC had destroyed 7,559 South Vietnamese hamlets. By the end of 1967, 15,138 South Vietnamese civilians had been killed, 45,929 kidnapped. Few of the kidnapped were ever seen again.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hochiminh.html</ref>

==The War==
In 1958, North Vietnam launched an invasion of Laos.<ref>http://countrystudies.us/laos/24.htm</ref>

In 1959, by its own admission, North Vietnam decided on war in South Vietnam.
North Vietnam created the Viet Cong and sent 20,000 men to attack the South. In 1961, North
Vietnam used 30,000 troops to build invasion routes via Laos and Cambodia. North Vietnam
later admitted that it “played a decisive role” in bringing to power the Pathet Lao in Laos and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>

The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for full combat intervention by the United States was an alleged attack on the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack of August 4, 1964 on both the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy by North Vietnam; the events became known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by ''prosecuting'' it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, [[Henry Kissinger]], hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

Although Sihanouk designated all insurgents "red Khmers," or "Khmer Rouge," in reality there were two main indigenous insurgent groups. One was the Khmer Viet Minh, modeled on the Pathet Lao, that Hanoi held total political authority over. The other was called the Khmer Krahom, a fanatical Maoist cult that would soon be led by one Saloth Sar, who would later become infamous for his genocidal brutality under his assumed name, Pol Pot. Both traced their roots back to a common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh in China from 1925-30. At Geneva, Hanoi had attempted to secure a KVM "zone" in northeastern Cambodia that would have been modeled on the Pathet Lao zone they secured in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to divide Cambodia into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Vietnam.

By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.

By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and far-left activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref>--despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
<blockquote>
"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million [actually 8 million] people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/nixon430.htm</ref>
</blockquote>

Although North Vietnam would invade and annex South Vietnam and invade, occupy, force the collapse of and establish total political control over Laos; it would ultimately fail to meet this objective in Cambodia. Though it supported, or rather offered support to, the KK; its goal of directly establishing political control over Cambodia would not be reached until 1979. Some commentators, like William Shawcross, have controversially argued that the US bombing, by forcing out the North Vietnamese, helped to create the conditions that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Shawcross and others have also claimed that the US bombing was the main propaganda tool used to recruit members for the KK, and that it helped radicalize the Cambodian populace and swell the ranks of the Communists.

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.<ref>Dmitry Mosyakov, “The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives,” in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. Availible online at: http://128.36.236.77/workpaper/pdfs/GS20.pdf "In April-May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"</ref>

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."<ref>http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/31/opinion/oe-kissinger31/2</ref>

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between [[Israel]] and [[Egypt]], and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, the Khmer Krahom fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again, the US again launched a bombing raid against Communist forces. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win."<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself.<ref>http://www.grunt.com/scuttlebutt/corps-stories/vietnam/north.asp</ref> The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed [[Ford]]'s call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story".<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/cambodia/bloodbath1.pdf</ref> The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

==Aftermath==
Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.7 million people from 1945 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or boat people),<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM</ref> from a total range of 700,000 to 3.7 million murdered.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF</ref> Some 400,000 to 2.5 million of these were killed after 1975. These figures include Laotians and Cambodians killed by Hanoi.

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.

The victorious Communists perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> Including Vietnam's foreign [[democide]], Rummel estimates that a minimum of 400,000 and a maximum of slightly less than 2.5 million people died of political violence from 1975-87 at the hands of Hanoi.<ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide"/> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge, installing a puppet government headed by Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin. From January until July 1979, according to [[CIA]] estimates, around 350,000 people were killed, primarily by Vietnam's refusal to allow foreign aid for a time. In addition, a comparable number of people fled Cambodia for [[Thailand]].<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm</ref> The toll from the entire famine over the years 1979-81 is estimated at about 500,000 dead (according to Etcheson).<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Some 25-50,000 Vietnamese died in combat,<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref> while perhaps 100,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians died in the war itself.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat3.htm</ref><ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> Tens of thousands more were killed by the Khmer Rouge, which controlled parts of the country late into 1979 and waged a guerilla war against the Vietnamese-backed government.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> The total number of people killed by the Samrin regime in democide has never been clearly documented. Rummel estimates 230,000;<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB4.1A.GIF</ref> but this is mere guesswork. As noted, scores of thousands more were killed in the civil war that followed the invasion and by Khmer Rouge guerillas. Rummel believes that the full toll from this period could be in excess of one million.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM</ref> This claim may be an exaggeration, but as is common in post-genocide societies, the population growth rate for Cambodia in the eighties was exceptionally high--which could have masked the full extent of the democide.

In response to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including some 30,000 deaths.

In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organization he led:

<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>

Communist Vietnam's refusal to allow international food aid into Cambodia after 1979 so as to starve out whatever remained of the Khmer Rouge resistance nearly led to the mass death of millions of people from starvation and disease.<ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref>

Vietnam fought three more wars after 1975 and armed Communist insurgencies with billions of dollars in an attempt to overrun [[Thailand]] and [[Malaysia]]. In South Vietnam, a nightmarish police state was established based on the Stalinist model: Political parties were outlawed; all music, books, literature, movies, and other media published prior to 1975 were banned completely; rationing, malnutrition, and famine ensued; ongoing class discrimination, xenophobic ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution continue to this day.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/toai.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/hoan.html</ref><ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/Vietnam-Reeducation-Camps-1982</ref><ref>http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sdenney/SRV-Discrimination-1990</ref>

The US and other Western countries covertly armed the non-Communist forces of Son Sann and Prince Sihanouk in an attempt to force out the Vietnamese troops occupying Cambodia. These brave guerillas also engaged in extensive fighting with the Khmer Rouge.<ref>Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988</ref> (See [[Reagan Doctrine]])

Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.

===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia." <ref>When Richard Nixon became president, he wanted to end the war by pulling out American troops, and he did so. None of the three presidents wanted to win, but all wanted to report "progress." All three administrations instructed military commanders always to report gains and rely on suspect body counts as a way of measuring progress. [http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203] </ref>

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men. {{fact}}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

==Cost of the War==
The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese,<ref>http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/index.cfm</ref> 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref><ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/demcat.htm The high is supported by UN figures. The Khmer Rouge reduced the expected 1979 population from 8.4 to 6.2 million; the UN estimated an expected 1979 population of 8.7 million in the absence of the war. Cambodia's actual population in 1975 was roughly 8.2 million</ref> and 30-50,000 Laotians.<ref>http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx</ref> The most comprehensive and detailed demographic survey ever conducted on casualties during the war, from ''Population and Development Review'', estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.<ref>Charles Hirschman et al., [http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/brines/vietcasualties.pdf "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate,"] Population and Development Review, December 1995</ref> R.J. Rummel originally put the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WSJ.ART.HTM</ref> Rummel later revised the estimate to over 2 million in all of Indochina, including 1.7 million in North and South Vietnam.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB11.1.GIF</ref>

US intelligence and available demographic evidence suggest that Hanoi's official figure<ref>Associated Press, April 3, 1995, "Vietnam Says 1.1 Million Died Fighting For North"</ref> of 3 million Vietnamese dead in the war was an exaggeration. Its figures for both military and civilian deaths are about double the accepted numbers, and they further claim that 1 million soldiers died and 600,000 were wounded--even though wounded is typically three times the number of dead.<ref>http://web.archive.org/web/20071222122211/http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1995/vp950404/04040331.htm</ref> No other independent sources arrive at such a high number.

During the peak war years, almost a third of civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.<ref>Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.</ref>

Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF</ref>

Demographic analysis indicates that the commonly cited figure of 600,000 dead in the Cambodian civil war may have been invented by Pol Pot himself and is more than the twice the real number of war-related deaths.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995)</ref><ref>Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref><ref>Banister, Judith, and Paige Johnson (1993). "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia." In Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, ed. Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.</ref>

Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. As of 2010, more veterans of the war have died from suicide than killed on the battlefield. <ref>[http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/11/on-veterans-day-some-grim-stat.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+beyondblue1+(Beliefnet:+Beyond+Blue) On Veteran's Day: Some Grim Statistic, Beliefnet, November 11, 2010]</ref> This shows a largely unaddressable or poorly administered health issues persist and the U.S. Government has failed in its obligation to care for traumatized Vietnam veterans. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>

{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''

'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. ---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986'''}}

The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia killed 40,000 combatants and civilians, while US forces in Vietnam killed over 70,000 (higher estimates go to over 100,000) Vietnamese.

The death toll from US defeat surpassed that exacted by the war itself.

==Controversies about the War==

Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>

==Media Bias==

Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,
<blockquote>
For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the "native" guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance....Never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.<ref>[http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/Vietnam/Readings/elegant.htm How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam]; Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90</ref>
</blockquote>

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he stated,

"Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese had fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women, and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year."

"Why, for heaven's sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as of the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not part of the U.S. policy in Viet Nam?. What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi. What made us think that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, Anthony Lewis shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, "so much for the talk of a massacre?"

"...Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."<ref>Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in Encounter, October 1979</ref>

''CBS Evening News with [[Walter Cronkite]]'' regularly carried news reports from its [[Moscow]] Bureau Chief, [[Bernard Redmont]]. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became ''CBS News'' [[Paris]] Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a [[KGB]] operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious [[Silvermaster group]].<ref>[http://hnn.us/articles/11581.html KGB file 43173 vol. 2 (v) pp. 46-55], Alexander Vassiliev, Notes on A. Gorsky’s Report to Savchenko S.R., 23 December 1949. Original document from KGB Archives [http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page46.html].</ref> Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow [[Comintern]] party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>

An on going example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref>http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref>

Young ignores the testimony of former North Vietnamese government officials like Hoang Van Chi, as well as foreign witnesses like Gerard Tongas; she denies the irrefutable evidence of the "disappearance" of at least 150,000 landowners from 1953-6<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref>; she dismisses US intelligence; accuses Vietnamese experts like Lam Thanh Liem of lying; and mocks the survivors of Communist genocide as CIA propagandists. She endorses [[Noam Chomsky]]'s nonsensical lies, ''supports'' the North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, paints a glowing picture of the concentration camps, and reduces the role of Khmer Rouge atrocities to 500-1,000,000 by citing the obscure and unknown Pol Pot apologist Michael Vickery--despite the 1,386,734 victims of execution in the mass graves!

Young further blames America for Pol Pot's rise, attributes all of the deaths in the entire war solely to the United States, and (on page 310) argues that the "boat people" really fled Vietnam not due to Communist repression, but rather the US trade embargo. She also simply denies the Hue Massacre.

Finally, Young claims that South Vietnam was the aggressor and that its imaginary “violation” of the 1973 cease-fire prompted the invasion from the “peace-loving” North--which is not surprising in the light of her reliance on official Communist sources, although it suggests quite a chasm between their claims and reality.<ref>Vietnam Wars, 1945-90 by Marilyn Young.</ref>

Notably, all of Young's sources on North Vietnamese crimes come from the North Vietnamese government itself, and she fails to cite a single dissident Vietnamese publication independent of that government in her entire work, while casting suspicion on the honesty of Vietnamese refugees. That she is a respected Professor indoctrinating American youth is consistent with the overall liberal propaganda that has come to characterize American higher eduction.

Paul Bogdanor notes: "The bloodbath deniers simply ignore or dismiss the evidence from dissident publications, communist defectors and foreign witnesses. They rely on official North Vietnamese publications, which they take at face value. This is what passes for scholarship on the 'anti-imperialist' left."<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html</ref> And Young is but one gulag-denying professor out of many.

Young's denial of the "land reform" bloodbath is not unique. Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy, wrote the key bloodbath-denial work, titled simply "The Myth of the Bloodbath." Professor Robert F. Turner, drawing on his knowledge of thousands of captured Viet Cong documents, scores of interviews with Communist defectors, and extensive research on the "land reform;" carefully refuted all of Porter's charges, demonstrating that they could not withstand any serious critical scrutiny and that some 300,000 people were, in fact, killed during the genocide.<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf</ref>

Porter is shown repeatedly contradicting himself, lying, making judgments that lack evidence and credibility, and accusing others of mistranslating a language he could barely speak. Although Porter's work was apparently sufficient to convince Young, its manifest sloppiness is contrary to honest scholarship. Vietnamese scholar Hoang Van Chi (1913-1988), who worked as a revolutionary and diplomat writing history and political science, also responded to Porter, who accused him of being a CIA propagandist in a ridiculous ad hominem attack.<ref> http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/chi.pdf</ref> Porter would later deny the Cambodian genocide and express admiration and outspoken support for Pol Pot in the infamous ''Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution.''

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia.<ref>"Irvine derived from the Television News Index and Abstracts a statistical table on media coverage of human rights in Chile, South Korea, North Korea, Cuba and Cambodia. The news organizations covered were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the three television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1976. The findings were startling. In table 4.1, the reader will see that, contrary to the Porter-Hildebrand-Chomsky-Herman claims, the New York Times and Washington Post published four and nine stories on human rights in Cambodia, respectively. According to table 4.1, Chile received more than eight times the coverage "on human rights problems" as did Cambodia. South Korea was covered merely 5.6 times more often. The total allocation of media resources to Cambodia paled in comparison to the massive campaign against Chile and South Korea, two non-communist countries. Perhaps the reason why Chomsky and Herman used anecdotal evidence to prove their theories was because they knew that aggregate analysis would show they were wrong." Sophal Ear. "The Khmer Rouge Canon." http://jim.com/canon.htm</ref> Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."<ref>http://jim.com/canon.htm#ch2</ref>

==Vietnam War in Popular Culture==
The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including ''The Green Berets'', ''The Deer Hunter'', ''Platoon'', ''Hamburger Hill'', and ''We Were Soldiers''.

The TV series ''Tour of Duty'' was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the [[Tet Offensive]]. The series ''Magnum, P.I'', ''Night Court'', ''Airwolf'', and ''Area 88'' all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series ''JAG,'' the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

===Quotes===
See: [[Vietnam War Quotes]].

==References==
<references/>

==Further reading==
* Prados, John. ''Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975'' (2009) 704 pages
* Jennings, Phillip. ''America's victory in Vietnam'' 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

==External links==
* [http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/vietnam.html Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen]
*Larry Berman, [http://hnn.us/articles/37934.html ''Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An''], Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060888381/Perfect_Spy/index.aspx]
*[http://www.fas.org/irp/nsa/almanac-saigon.pdf SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975].
*[http://www.independent.org/events/transcript.asp?eventID=6 "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers"].
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]

[[Category:United States History]]
[[Category:Vietnam War]]
[[category:Cold War]]