Samantha Power - A Problem from Hell

But McGovern had come to the conclusion that events in Cambodia amounted to genocide, and for him this carried steep and unavoidable consequences. McGovern felt such a diagnosis meant first that the United States had to condemn the KR, which it had done hardly at all since the terror began. But it also meant that the United States had to contribute its military might to stopping the horrors. In August 1978 Senator McGovern publicly urged the Carter administration to consider deploying an international military force to launch a humanitarian intervention. It was time for the United States and its allies to ask, “Do we sit on the sidelines and watch an entire people be slaughtered, or do we marshal military forces and move in quietly to put an end to it?” 127The press corps darted for the telephones. “They thought this was big news,” he recalls. “They wondered, ‘How could this dove have become a raving hawk?’” A Wall Street Journal editorial lambasted McGovern for his “truly mind-boggling” stance. For the next several weeks, he deployed three staff aides to answer the phones, which rang off the hook. Some Americans called to denounce him for his opposition to the war in Vietnam and to blame Cambodia’s misery on the U.S. withdrawal from the region. But most telephoned either to applaud him for his proposal or, in the case of old friends, to ask, somewhat shyly, for clarification.

McGovern saw the duty to oust the Khmer Rouge as an outgrowth of, not a challenge to, the United States’ duty to get and stay out of Vietnam. The American role in the war in Vietnam only heightened U.S. responsibility, as he believed the rise of the Khmer Rouge was one of the greatest single costs of U.S. involvement in Indochina. McGovern understood the apparent irony of his position. But at the hearings, he, too, alluded to the parallel to the Holocaust:

I am the last person to be enthusiastic about military intervention except under the most extreme circumstances, but it does seem to me that these are the most extreme I have heard of. If anything close to 2.5 million people have been killed in a few years’ time out of a population of seven million, percentage-wise that makes Hitler’s oppressions look rather tame. 128

McGovern argued that the United States should take the lead politically and militarily. To him Vietnam and Cambodia had little, apart from geography, in common.In Vietnam U.S.forces had squared off against an indigenous independence movement headed by a popularly backed leader, Ho Chi Minh. In Cambodia, by contrast, Pol Pot and a “handful of fanatics” were imposing their vision on millions of Cambodians. In light of Pol Pot’s “bloodthirsty” rule, his victimized populace could not possibly support him; indeed, McGovern believed the Cambodians would welcome rescue from the “murderous, slaughtering regime.” 129

McGovern was not the first American to make such a proposal. The previous year conservative essayist William F. Buckley Jr., perhaps the least likely of all of McGovern’s possible bedfellows, made a similar recommendation in the Los Angeles Times . “I am quite serious,” Buckley wrote. “Why doesn’t Congress authorize the necessary money to finance an international military force to overrun Cambodia?” The force, he argued, should be composed of Asian units from Malaysia, thailand, Japan, the Philippines, and even Vietnam. The troops did not have to establish a democratic state. They simply had to “go there and take power away from one, two, three, perhaps as many as a half-dozen sadistic madmen who have brought on their country the worst suffering, the worst conditions brought on any country in this bloody century.” 130

The McGovern-Buckley premise—that a barbarous, beatable small clan of murderers could be quickly vanquished—was challenged by the State Department. Douglas Pike, a foreign service officer and Indochina expert who testified at the 1978 Senate hearings, agreed that the Pol Pot regime was savage. But he said Cambodian troops loyal to the Khmer Rouge were fighting extremely effectively against their one-time allies, the Vietnamese. “If the regime is as bad as it is portrayed,” Pike asked, “why do the people fight?” He insisted that international forces would face tough resistance:“I think we should not entertain the idea that a quick indochop in Phnom Penh could put things right,” Pike testified. “To control Cambodia and the government, you would have to control the villages, all of them. You would have to put forces into the villages. The idea of just trying to take off the head in Phnom Penh sounds good…but it isn’t.” 131

Robert Oakley, deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was present when McGovern made his appeal for intervention. He was dumbstruck. So far as the Carter administration was concerned, Oakley testified, multilateral military intervention was not a “live option.” The United States would not consider generating or participating in an invasion. In reading Oakley’s testimony today, one can hear the loss of confidence in the U.S. capacity to shape the world or even accurately to diagnose its developments. “We don’t have the sort of intelligence on that that we sometimes in the past told ourselves that we had,” Oakley said, reminding the committee members, “We have learned a lot about the degree of appropriate U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of other countries, as well as an ability to influence them.” 132

McGovern was puzzled. He had heard a great deal about why the situation was more complicated than it seemed, about how difficult it would be to dislodge Khmer Rouge cadres at the village level. And he could find nobody at all prepared to use outside force to end the slaughter. McGovern did not mention the genocide convention. For him, it was not the law but the atrocities that necessitated acts aimed at suppressing the crime:

It just strikes me that we ought not to dismiss out of hand the responsibility of the international community to stop this kind of indiscriminate slaughter. I realize it is a long way from home. These are people with different colored skins and so on. But nevertheless, one would think that the international community would at least be considering the possibility of intervening in what seems to be a clear case of genocide. 133

Two political dissidents facing trial in the Soviet Union were then being celebrated, their imprisonment denounced. Yet, he observed, Americans were ignoring the killing of at least a million Cambodians. Instead of fighting the “last war,” McGovern believed, the United States should pay attention to the current genocide. “I hate needless and ill-conceived military ventures,” he said. “That is why I opposed our military intervention…in Vietnam. But to hate a needless and foolish intervention that served no good purpose does not give us the excuse to do nothing to stop mass murder in another time and place under vastly different circumstances.” 134Later he remembered the glee with which some of his former adversaries greeted his alleged “reversal” and the grief he got at the time:

Dean Rusk was by then out of office, but I remember he gave a public statement after he heard I had called for military intervention in which he said, “Now there is irony.” The implication of Rusk’s statement was that I had finally come around. Of course I’ve never been a pacifist. I always thought there was a time when military intervention was necessary. I never regretted for one minute my time as a bomber pilot in World War II. Fighting genocide is one cause worth fighting for. 135

McGovern’s proposal went nowhere. The State Department issued a statement that the Carter administration was focusing attention on the “monstrous” situation in Cambodia but that it had no intention of resolving “the terrible situation in Kampuchea by military force.”It added, “Nor are we aware of any international support for [such] a plan.” 136In truth McGovern had not expected that states would rush to respond to his summons, but he had hoped the “old shock technique” would at least spark a discussion of the horrors that the Carter administration, the general public, and the international community had resisted to date. 137The appeal did cause a ripple effect in certain quarters, as even the KR, who so many had argued did not care about the opinion of outsiders, felt compelled to respond. On August 26, 1978, McGovern received a letter from the radical regime, slamming him for his “wanton and shameless attacks” and rebutting the genocide charge with the claim that it was the United States that had committed genocide in Cambodia.