Sideshow - Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia [antikvár]

Foreword This book is an attempt to examine the Nixon administration's uses of power. It tries to demonstrate how decisions made in Washington affected the lives of one particular and distant people. It is, in some ways, a look at the foreign-policy side of Watergate. During the early seventies Cambodia was often referred to as a "sideshow." Journalists who covered the war there used the term with irony; in Washington some officials employed it almost as a matter of policy. It was apt enough. The main arena was Vietnam, and it was there that attention was concentrated. Cambodia was always off stage, away from the light. Many of the decisions regarding the country were made in secret, others were presented inaccurately; inquiry was discouraged and exacdy what was happening remained obscure. From 1970 onward I reported the war in Indochina for The Sunday Times of London and other papers. I regret that I too saw Cambodia as peripheral and was there for only one week; those who knew the country well may find that aspects that they loved are missing from these pages. In 1972 I covered the North Vietnamese offensive in South Vietnam, and then the Harkness Foundation gave me a scholarship to go and learn something about the United States. I became a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association and worked on Capitol Hill through much of 1973.1 also wrote for The Sunday Times, was the Washington correspondent of the New Statesman and of the Far Eastern Eco- 11