The Cambodia Bombing

The bombing of Cambodia is of broad significance in several respects. First, and most narrowly, it was an escalation of the Vietnam war, of questionable legality, in bombing the territory of a neutral nation with which the U.S. was not at war, and had no mutual security arrangements that would permit such bombing. Second, it represented the characteristic features of U.S. military policy in Vietnam, in being an application of bombing over jungle terrain in which such measures were of questionable effectiveness. Third, it added fuel to the domestic fire of angry "debate" over the conduct and morality of the Vietnam War; the failure of the bombing campaign to achieve its desired results led directly to the ground "incursion" into Cambodia, in May of 1969. This incursion in turn led immediately to the Kent State killings of four college students (not all involved in antiwar protests; on

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eyeball"  simply cannot see through the triple canopy to identify and aim at targets on the ground. Further exacerbating the problem was the nature of the enemy, in two vital respects. While the Iraqi army in Kuwait was by no means a "hightech" force, it was unquestionably a motorized, conventional Westernstyle army. Motor pools, supply and gasoline dumps, gasoline storage sites, all were concentrated targets well suited to air strikes. Moreover, it was relatively easy to judge the effects of air strikes on such targets (though U.S. planners, with bitter Vietnam experience behind them, tended to consistently underestimate damage done). North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces operating in eastern Cambodia shared none of these "airfriendly" characteristics. For the most part, logistic support was either localized  troops "living off the land," supported willingly or under compulsion by local populations  or was provided mainly by human beings acting as porters. There were thus relatively few if any of the sorts of physical concentrations of materiel which could be identified by intelligence, targeted for strikes, and then evaluated for level of damage by poststrike reconnaissance. As a result, to a fantastically gr
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Approximate Word count = 3570
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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