Revolutionaries for the Right by Burke Kyle;

Author:Burke, Kyle;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The notion that the U.S. government was failing to support anticommunist rebels—and that private groups could fill in for the state—emerged in other conflicts, with ever diminishing results. In Southeast Asia, Americans turned their efforts to several armed groups engaged in a string of conflicts known as the Third Indochina War.245 In 1978, the Vietnamese army invaded neighboring Cambodia to force the Khmer Rouge, a brutal Marxist regime that murdered more than a million of its own citizens, from power. After a year of fighting, the triumphant Vietnamese had relegated the Khmer Rouge to the countryside, from which it launched periodic guerrilla attacks against the new Vietnamese-supported state, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Just as the ousted communists began their counterattacks, remnants of Cambodia’s former monarchy started their own guerrilla campaigns. So did antiroyalist and anticommunist rebel groups, such as the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front. By 1980, a half dozen rebel factions were fighting in Cambodia, against the new government and with each other.246 In Laos, the communist Pathet Lao took power in 1975 after decades of fighting with anticommunist guerrillas, particularly among the highland-dwelling Hmong people, who had been armed and trained by the CIA.247 As the Pathet Lao consolidated power and collectivized land holdings, many began to resist. In turn, the Laotian communists turned to Vietnam for support. The Vietnamese leadership sent a few battalions of soldiers to help their neighbor combat the growing popular resistance, especially the resilient bands of anticommunist guerrillas operating in the mountains.248

Although these wars were complex and shifting affairs, the Reagan administration and its supporters saw a clear pattern of Soviet expansionism. In their eyes, Vietnam was not helping kindred nationalist movements but rather serving as a proxy for Soviet efforts to gain a greater foothold in Southeast Asia. As such, the United States needed to find a way to counter their moves without making the same mistakes of the Vietnam War, particularly the escalating use of U.S. soldiers. Shortly after Reagan took office, Bill Casey and the CIA began flirting with the idea of sending aid to anticommunist guerrillas in Laos and Cambodia. But it was not until 1982 that the agency received the green light to send non-lethal covert aid to the three main resistance groups in Cambodia, which had recently formed a quarrelsome coalition.249 The amount of U.S. aid, however—roughly $5 million a year—was almost meaningless, only able to purchase a small number of vehicles, food, uniforms, medicine, and other supplies.250 It mostly served as a symbol of the administration’s willingness to fight communism through covert warfare, to carry out the pledges of the Reagan Doctrine. Many in the administration were far more concerned with other conflicts, especially Nicaragua and Afghanistan, and did not want to upset the delicate balance of support they had built in Congress for those covert actions. Cambodia, then, was a sideshow to more important struggles elsewhere. Laos hardly mattered, as U.S. policymakers rarely considered sending covert aid to the Laotian resistance. For the most

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