It is a matter of time, and not much of
that — a week or two, no more — before the formal recognition of the collapse of the American-backed regime in Cambodia takes place. This event has been recently'described in advance by President Nixon as a "serious blow to America's international credibility that would go far beyond Indo-China;" and doubtless the President, in• making this statement, hoped to avert the fact of the matter. Nixon was, in practice, justifying American bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which bombing has been a desperate and unconstitutional attempt to salvage something or other from the wreckage of American involvement in the successor states to the French Indo-Chinese empire. In Vietnam the war between South Vietnamese Government troops and the Viet Cong becomes more fierce, and the withdrawal of Canadian truce observers will make matters worse. The entire American enterprise in Indo-China, in which every American president since Truman has been implicated, and which Senator Kennedy in particular escalated, is now like a barbed spear which, pressed home, wounds and mutilates and, withdrawn, wounds and mutilates again.
President Nixon's policy of withdrawal was nevertheless correct: The damage had been done, and had therefore ful ther to be done. It was also unavoidable that he should seek to put the best face on it and declare, however foolishly, that "peace with honour" had been achieved: domestic niceties required no less. In retrospect it has seemed fortunate that his foreign policy had achieved withdrawal, diplomatic exchange with China, and further main stages in the detente with the Soviet Union, before he was rendered impotent by Watergate. Retrospectively, also, it has been accounted fortunate that his foreign policy has not been seriouslycorrupted, as have his domestic policies, the trashy nature of his immediate inferiors.
It now appears, however, that the United States administration of President Nixon has been engaged on a cover-up operation far more grave and extensive than Watergate, and that for many months now parts of Lads and Cambodia have been subjected to intensive American bombing unauthorised by Congress, denied by formal Presidential statements and falsified by Pentagon news releases. This great pattern of deceit — which cannot have fooled the countries receiving the appalling punishment, and must have been arranged in concert with their ruling cliques — can have had no other object than to fool the American public, the American Congress, and America's allies. It now looks daily more probable that Dr Kissinger and his National Security Council provided the immediate authority for this policy of war and this massive series of acts of deception. A collective irresponsibility amounting to a collective madness appears to have infected almost everyone high enough up in the Nixon administration. Only one man could be the source and inspiration of so much infection. The unfolding news of the secret bombing in Indo-China provides the final circumstantial but damning proof that Nixon, and only Nixon, must be the source of the cancer.
