The Debate: To Aid or Not to Aid

"If Cambodia falls, we'll all feel very bad." So said a Pentagon official last week as the Ford Administration pleaded with a reluctant Congress to vote $222 million in extra military aid for the Phnom-Penh government. In defense of their request, White House officials and Cabinet members trotted out several arguments. Most compelling was the warning that without an emergency infusion of ammunition, the government of President Lon Nol is in imminent danger of falling to the Communist-led Khmer Rouge insurgents. "An independent Cambodia cannot survive unless the Congress acts very soon to provide supplemental military and economic assistance," President Ford wrote to House Speaker Carl Albert, adding that "if additional military assistance is withheld or delayed, the government forces will be forced, within weeks, to surrender to the insurgents."

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger weighed in by raising the old specter of falling dominoes. "I know it is fashion able to sneer at the words domino theory," Kissinger told a Washington news conference, referring to the old Eisenhower-era philosophy that if one nation fell to Communism, it would cause other countries around it to fall also. The Secretary went on to argue that "we cannot escape this problem by assuming the responsibility of condemning those who have dealt with us to a certain destruction." The Administration is concerned not only with dominoes falling in Southeast Asia but also with the ripple effect that abandoning Cambodia would have on American credibility.

The Administration's arguments, while valid up to a point, are not totally convincing. For one thing, some Administration officials privately concede that the present government will probably fall sooner or later; to avoid any appearance of abandoning an ally, they would prefer to give it the extra aid anyway. U.S. policymakers, however, want to separate Cambodia from Viet Nam, where, the Administration feels, greater stakes are involved. It thus wants to convince the legislators that the extra $300 million of military aid to comparatively strong and well-equipped South Viet Nam would be of real help to Saigon in resisting its enemies.

The collapse of the Cambodian domino, as Kissinger implied, might well enhance the prospects for an eventual Communist victory in South Viet Nam. Still, Vietnamese Communists have been able to put enormous pressure on Saigon even with Phnom-Penh in Lon Nol's hands, and the fall of his government is not likely to make a crucial difference. Beyond that, there remain obstacles to the spread of Communist influence in Southeast Asia. Neighboring Thailand, presumably the next endangered domino, is well equipped to resist Vietnamese influence. Communist insurgents in the northeast have achieved little so far, and Thailand has sufficient economic and military strength--including 25,000 U.S. military personnel and 350 aircraft--to successfully counter any threat from outside.

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The Administration's dire prognoses also ignore the most crucial question about the Cambodian situation: To whom will the Phnom-Penh regime fall? The answer: to other Cambodians. Despite President Ford's references last week to a "ruthless enemy" and "outside aggression," not even the most hawkish U.S. embassy officials in Southeast Asia believe that the North Vietnamese control the Khmer Rouge movement, even though it is Communist-dominated. Essentially the Cambodian conflict is a civil war in which the pro-U.S. Lon Nol government, despite almost $2 billion in American aid in five years, has proved too ineffectual and corrupt to stand on its own. Its replacement by other Cambodian rulers--even Communist ones--represents a minimal threat to American security.

In any case, the issue of increased aid may be academic. Nobody on Capitol Hill expects Congress to pass the Administration's request. When President Ford asked House Majority Leader Thomas ("Tip") O'Neill what the chances were for passage of his aid request, O'Neill's blunt reply was: "None whatsoever."

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