Until 1970, the government of Cambodia was led by Prince Sihanouk, a former king who
had stepped down from the throne to become prime minister. Despite his many
limitations, Sihanouk was then, and remains today, the most viable symbol of the national
unity and hope for sovereignty of Cambodia. Under Sihanouk, Cambodia had maintained
a measure of stability and had above all managed to avoid being completely engulfed by
the swirling maelstrom of the wars in Laos and in Vietnam. But during 1969, Nixon and
Kissinger had ordered a secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese troop
concentrations on Cambodian territory under the code name of "Menu." This bombing
would have been a real and substantive grounds for the impeachment of Nixon, and it did
constitute the fourth proposed article of impeachment against Nixon submitted to the
House Judiciary Committee on July 30, 1974. But after three articles of impeachment
having to do with the Watergate break-ins and subsequent coverup were approved by the
committee, the most important article, the one on genocide in Cambodia, was defeated by
a vote of 26 to 12.
Cambodia was dragged into the Indo-China war by the US-sponsored coup d'etat in
Phnom Penh on March, 1970, which ousted Sihanouk in favor of Marshal Lon Nol of the
Cambodian army, whose regime was never able to achieve even a modicum of stability.
Shortly thereafter, at the end of April, 1970, Nixon and Kissinger launched a large-scale
US military invasion of Cambodia, citing the use of Cambodian territory by the North
Vietnamese armed forces for their "Ho Chi Minh trail" supply line to sustain their forces
deployed in South Vietnam. The "parrot's beak" area of Cambodia, which extended deep
into South Vietnam, was occupied.
Prince Sihanouk, who described himself as a neutralist, established himself in Beijing
after the seizure of power by Lon Nol. In May of 1970 he became the titular leader and
head of state of a Cambodian government in exile, the Gouvernement Royal d'Union
Nationale du Kampuchea, or GRUNK. The GRUNK was in essence a united front
between Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge, with the latter exercising most of the real
power and commanding the armed forces and secret police. Sihanouk was merely a
figurehead, and he knew it. He told Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1973 that when
"they [the Khmer Rouge] no longer need me, they will spit me out like a cherry pit."
During these years, the Cambodian Communist party or Khmer Rouge, which had
launched a small guerilla insurrection during 1968, was a negligeable military factor in
Cambodia, fielding only a very few thousand guerilla fighters. One of its leaders was
Saloth Sar, who had studied in Paris, and who had then sojourned at length in Red China
at the height of the Red Guards' agitation. Saloth Sar was one of the most important
leaders of the Khmer Rouge, and would later become infamous under his nom de guerre
of Pol Pot. Decisive support for Pol Pot and for the later genocidal policies of the Khmer
Rouge always came from Beijing, despite the attempts to misguided or lying
commentators (like Henry Kissinger) to depict the Khmer Rouge as a creation of Hanoi.
But in the years after 1970, the Khmer Rouge, who were determined immediately to
transform Cambodia into a communist utopia beyond the dreams even of the wildest
Maoist Red Guards, made rapid gains. The most important single ingedient in the rise of