Cut The Aid

NEWS REPORTS FROM Cambodia last week indicate that the Lon Nol regime, after five years of military attempts to assert its rule, is on the verge of collapse. Hundreds of thousands of refugees face the prospect of starvation in the coming weeks; troops still loyal to Lon Nol are disorganized and demoralized. The regime now rests on a single pillar; the daily American airlift of rice and ammunition into Phnom Penh. American experts and policy-makers are unanimous in their opinion that Phnom Penh would fall almost immediately to the Khmer Rouge without the airlift.

But money for the airlift is running out, and as Congress debates whether or not the United States should continue the bloody stalemate in Phnom Penh. President Ford--echoing Johnson and Nixon--has been telling Americans that Congress must approve his requested $250 million supplemental aid to "honor our commitments" so that Cambodia will not "fall" and to avoid the "bloodbath" he envisions if the Khmer Rouge enter the city. The Ford policy aims to preserve American credibility on the world treaty market and to place Ford in a position to castigate Congress whatever the outcome in Cambodia. The missing element in Ford's thinking, as in the thinking of decades of American policy-makers, is a consideration of the Cambodian people.

Since the 1970 coup which sent Prince Norodam Sihanouk into exile, Lon Nol has failed to win popular support and has conducted an administration almost universally recognized as openly corrupt. After more than four years of civil war, Cambodia is deeply scarred. The countryside, once a source of glowing reports from visitors, has been laid waste; Phnom Penh is under daily shelling; and civilians have become the victims of guns and poverty.

Without American support, the Cambodian civil war would have ended by now. Any American aid the Congress approves will only go to maintaining an unpopular, corrupt regime and forcing an inevitable loss of life. In fact, it is precisely the rigid and self-serving nature of the American policy which is responsible for the "bloodbath" now in progress in Phnom Penh. To be sure, the Khmer Rouge shelling of civilian sections of Phnom Penh is a reprehensible act, but the prospect of a "bloodbath" in Phnom Penh is more likely if Congress approves more aid than if not. The Khmer Rouge are fighting a war against their own countrymen and will have to establish a new government as a first order of business, a task which would only be more difficult in the wake of a civilian slaughter. Continuing the aid will guarantee a bloody, protracted struggle for the city, Congress should refuse the aid and begin to work with the Khmer Rouge to reassert Cambodian self-determination and repair the damage of half a decade of war.