Documents released by the Bill Clinton administration showed that in the first half of 1973, Kissinger and Nixon had more bomb tonnage dropped on Cambodia than was dropped by the Allies during all of World War II.

The US war on the Viet Cong led Washington to attempt to cut off their supply lines, which zigged and zagged over the borders colonial powers had drawn on Southeast Asia, in and out of Cambodia. In a fruitless bid to cut off those supplies, the US began bombing Cambodia in the 1960s, but the intensity of this bombardment increased over time.

The renewed 1969-1973 bombing campaign was Kissinger’s idea, “Operation Breakfast.” Sophal Ear writes, “The diary entry of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reads [on March 17, 1969]: ‘ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s “Operation Breakfast” finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].” The following day, Haldeman wrote: ‘K’s “Operation Breakfast” a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.'”

What kind of genocidal psychopath “beams” at beginning the illegal bombing of a country with which the US was not even at war?

By early 1973 Kissinger’s bright idea had already so disrupted Cambodian lives that disgruntled peasants there turned to the Communists, the Khmer Rouge. Kissinger and Nixon ordered even more bombing as the Communists approached the capital, Phnom Penh.

Embed from Getty Images
Victim of U.S. Bombing Error. Phnom Penh: Wearing head bandage, this young Cambodian youngster is one of some 300 casualties of bombing error on Neak Luong by U.S. warplanes August 6. He and other victims are awaiting transportation to hospital after having been brought here by Navy boats August 7.Getty Images/ Bettman

So Washington upped the ante. Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan reported that in February through August of 1973, “2,756,941 tons’ worth [of bombs were] dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all.” To repeat, in all of World War II the Allies dropped 2,000,000 tons of bombs, including the nuclear warheads at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The authors conclude that Cambodia may have been the most bombed country in world history.

Owen and Kiernan imply that hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died in this carpet bombing. Cambodia only had a population of 6.7 million then, so half a million dead, which is a plausible estimate, would be over 7% of the entire population. That would be like killing 16 million Americans.

While they say that 10% of the targeted sites were indiscriminate, the fact is that bombing populous villages from 30,000 feet is always indiscriminate. Most of the hundreds of thousands dead were certainly innocent noncombatants, a concept Kissinger never understood; or in a darker reading perhaps he understood it and had contempt for it. Responding to the repeated nuking of islands in Micronesia in above ground tests, Kissinger said, “There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?”

Anthony Bourdain, the great traveler and food enthusiast, wrote in his 2001 memoir, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.”

The Netanyahu government’s carpet-bombing of Gaza is a direct descendant of Kissinger’s Operation Breakfast.

“Gaza Guernica 1.1,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/IbisPaint, 2023.

Yuval Abraham of +972 Mag writes, “The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip.”

It is estimated that the Israeli Air Force massacred 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza from the air, very few of them combatants.

Abraham underlines, “the army significantly expand[ed] its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (‘matarot otzem’).”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s mealy-mouthed assertion that Israeli “precision munitions” can kill Hamas without killing large numbers of innocent civilians is mere Israeli propaganda. The precision munitions were set to kill large numbers of noncombatants in a total war of the Kissingerian sort. As Israeli targeting of the Palestinians (it is not a war, since the latter have no heavy weapons or air force) resumes, so will the high body counts, assuming the Netanyahu government permits enough societal organization to survive to permit the counting.

Reuters: “LIVE: View over Israel-Gaza border”

Kissinger’s butchering of villagers from the air threw Cambodia into such volatile political turbulence that a genocide resulted in which 20% of the population was killed, littering the country with sun-drenched white skeletons.

The Communists defeated him in Vietnam, where they still rule as preparations are made for Kissinger’s burial. The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party rules Laos. The Cambodian People’s Party, with roots in Communism, rules Cambodia, though it has turned to supporting a mixed economy model.

I don’t predict any sort of victory or longevity for Hamas itself, but it is clear from this history that you can’t use air power to destroy radical movements with genuine grassroots. Palestinians if anything will come out of the carpet-bombing (and the even more deadly denial of potable water and sufficient food) more radicalized than ever. They will still be on Israel’s doorstep even if they can be crowded into south Gaza as the maniacal Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant diabolically plans.

Kissinger rose to positions of power where he could overrule what he thought of as the soft and namby-pamby laws of war enacted in 1945 and after. Despite being a refugee from the Holocaust, he never escaped his formation in a Central European tradition of elite and profoundly amoral statecraft in the service of an unbridled nationalism and for the purposes of the super-rich in their white tuxedos.

The Indo-Pacific region, which includes 24 nations and stretches from Australia to Japan and from India to the U.S. west coast, is home to both the largest concentration of humanity and the greatest source of global emissions. In 2020, the region produced 16.75 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the consumption of oil, gas and coal — more than all other regions worldwide combined.

Success in the global effort to keep global warming below 2 C and stop catastrophic climate change depends on the region to move away from coal and other fossil fuels. Yet at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, China and India proposed countries agree to “phase down” coal instead of “phase out.”

Insufficient financing and the need to increase total energy availability — especially as more sectors become electrified — remain among the structural challenges to energy transitions around the world. China, however, is currently in a better position than the West to assist the Indo-Pacific due to geography, trade dynamics and its own clean tech sector. This could reorient economic networks and shift the balance of power in the region.

As a researcher in the field of green-industrial strategy, I am worried that the democratic world is increasingly losing ground to China in this emerging geo-economic arena. Unless the West provides an alternate network to help the region meet its energy transition needs, it risks ceding the economic alignment of the Indo-Pacific region to China’s government.

Decarbonization

A recent Bloomberg report demonstrated that many Indo-Pacific states can’t meet their 2050 energy transition needs from domestic onshore solar and wind generation. Energy imports have long been a feature of regional politics, but the economics of the energy transition change existing dynamics, favouring fixed-grid integration over more flexible liquid energy imports.

It costs less, in many cases, to build large grids that deliver energy as electrons compared to the added costs of using an energy carrier like hydrogen, which might need to be imported, to meet clean energy needs. Already the Indo-Pacific is moving in the direction of being “wired up,” as demonstrated by the proposed 3,800-kilometre-long “sun cable” to connect Australian solar resources with energy markets in Singapore.

The most efficient course of decarbonization for many East Asian states is to expand their grid connections to their neighbour’s, but this is marred by geo-security risks. Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam, for example, might be less willing to stand up to Beijing if most of their electricity ran through China. And does Japan really want to meet its renewable energy needs by routing power through Russian grid connections?

In addition, much of the industrial capacity for key green technologies and resources required for Indo-Pacific countries to tap their own renewable resources is based in China. A whopping 70 per cent of global lithium cell manufacturing capacity is found in China, and Chinese firms are responsible for the production of 71 per cent of photovoltaic panels (through a supply chain riddled with the usage of Uyghur slave labour).

Meanwhile, a recent White House report put Chinese firm ownership of global cobalt and lithium processing infrastructure at 72 per cent and 60 per cent, respectively.

Export polluting industries

China’s dominance in the production of clean energy technologies is also bolstered by the success of the nation’s trade networks. China is already the largest source of trade for most countries in the region, and through its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing is increasingly providing financing for regional infrastructure.

The nature of Chinese infrastructure investments through the initiative has, so far, been damaging to global efforts to combat climate change. China had been the largest financier globally of coal plants, following a development pattern established by wealthier countries (western and non-western), of exporting polluting industries to poorer nations.

However, President Xi Jinping, in keeping with his endorsed vision of ecological civilization, has made improving the sustainability of China’s trade networks a priority. China’s established trade networks within the region provide a foundation for an increasingly Sino-centric economic orbit, and will likely be flipped to distribute clean energy infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific.

Energy transitions

It’s important the West develop its own green foreign investment strategy to provide Indo-Pacific states a choice of infrastructure as they transition their economies. Giving Indo-Pacific countries, especially energy-poor South and East Asian states, the option to purchase low-carbon technology and resources from a variety of sources will alleviate pressure to concede to Chinese foreign-policy.

Over the long term, the West must focus on developing supply chains in solar and and lithium-ion batteries to balance out Chinese capacity in these markets. However, there are a range of energy transition technologies that western states hold a competitive advantage in, and that could be the focus of a development strategy for the region — starting right now. Investments should, for instance, immediately focus on lowering the costs of exporting green hydrogen by maritime routes.

Australia and Canada both have favourable renewable energy resources to produce green hydrogen, with Canada a leader in the development of hydrogen fuel cells.

Many Indo-Pacific countries have opportunities to generate power from sources beyond wind and solar, with Indonesia and the Philippines already market leaders for geothermal. When it comes to wind, U.S. and European wind turbine manufacturers share about 60 per cent of the market.

In June, G7 leaders announced the Build Back Better World (B3W) partnership, which aims to use their financing potential to help low- and middle-income countries meet an estimated US$40 trillion in infrastructure needs.

It is too early to speculate on the success of the B3W, but its visible actions have been limited to scoping tours in Latin America and West Africa, with another planned for South East Asia.

However, the B3W could look to the recent financing deal between the U.S., Germany, France and the United Kingdom to aid South Africa’s transition from coal power for inspiration. The first B3W funded projects are slated to be announced in early 2022.

Decision-makers in China know that in the short term they are uncertain to come out on top in a hard power competition with the U.S., and have identified economic dominance as another front of strategic competition. Subsequently, if the West doesn’t want to further cede the economic orientation of the Indo-Pacific towards China, it must increase its efforts to provide the region’s states with a strategic choice in how they meet their energy transition infrastructure needs.

Jonas Goldman, Reserach Associate, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bloomberg: “Why China’s Electric Car Lead Has Been a Long Time Coming”

The napalm dropped on North Vietnam by American planes was intended to starve the population by destroying their harvests, and above all to defoliate large numbers of trees. This would make it hard for people to find shelter, and would make them easy targets for cluster (or fragmentation) bombs. Such bombs have little effect on military targets such as buildings and vehicles, and are mainly used on human targets, whether fighters or civilians. When they reach the ground they break up into smaller bombs known as clusters, which in turn break up into even smaller bombs that scatter sharp metal fragments. Some do not explode at once, but only when they are touched later on – often by children. The fragments pierce human flesh, causing serious bleeding and migrating on into tissues and organs where they cause dreadful pain and are hard to trace. Someone with such injuries needs constant care from several people, and this even appears to have served as an advertisement for these weapons: a single cluster-bomb strike can put not just one fighter out of action, but a whole group of them in one go.

The Vietnamese people defended themselves against such warfare by digging a vast underground network of tunnels that provided at least some protection. The Science and Technology Committee included Dutch students from Delft University of Technology, who had designed equipment for the North Vietnamese. They had devised a portable X-ray machine that could be used in the underground tunnels to trace the tiny bomb fragments. There was no point in operating on the entry wounds, for the fragments had long since disappeared. Since American bombers could detect infrared radiation from the air, the machine and the accompanying generator had been designed to produce as little heat as possible. The students had brought the North Vietnamese a blueprint and afterwards they would build the device themselves. It had to be shown to them at the mission in Paris, for Holland did not recognize the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (as North Vietnam was officially known) and the two countries did not have diplomatic relations.

As we emerged from the Gare du Nord we saw the small group of students waiting for us: three young men in cut-off jeans, their long hair blowing in the wind, and a girl in a denim miniskirt and a tank top made of self-crocheted dishcloths. They were standing next to the deux-chevaux car in which they had travelled down cheaply from Holland. The idea was for us to drive to the house some way south of Paris where the Vietnamese had their mission; but when the students saw me next to Ab, I could hear them muttering to each other ‘And what do we do with her?’ We couldn’t all fit into their car, and after some to-ing and fro-ing it was decided that two of the young men would go there by public transport. I felt awkward, unused as I was to being treated as ‘the wife’, and suddenly realized how much we contrasted with these young people – me in my below-the-knee skirt and high heels, Ab in his neat jacket and trousers.

In the car they told us all about what they were doing. Besides the portable X-ray machines, they were developing surgical lamps that would run on dynamos in the underground tunnels. Because injured people arrived in huge groups, many such lamps were needed all at once. Cluster bombs were nearly always preceded by an ‘ordinary’ bomb; when people rushed in to help the victims, the cluster bomb was dropped on them. In the absence of surgical lamps, they made do with bicycle lamps; the bicycle dynamo was driven by putting the front wheel in neutral and pedalling fast. This also produced little heat, and could hardly be detected from the air.

The students told us how amazed they were to be backed by some of the teaching staff in what they mockingly dismissed as ‘our right-wing bastion in Delft’. Although the lecturers had initially been reluctant to oppose Holland’s American allies, they now felt they could not square what was happening in Vietnam with their consciences. Not that they automatically supported communist North Vietnam or the Northern-backed rebels in the South; but they had decided they could no longer uncritically accept the black-and-white Cold War dichotomy between the ‘capitalist West’ and the ‘communist East’.

On arrival at the mission we were welcomed by five women and two men who nodded and bowed to us politely. They were all smaller and thinner than we were, and dressed in the same sober grey colour: the women in two-piece outfits buttoned up to the neck, and the men in suits. We sat in a wide circle of armchairs round a low table, with the students trying in vain to hide their long, bare legs; and while tea was being served they began explaining to our hosts in perfect French what they had come here to do. There was an animated discussion in which the current situation was compared with the previous months. News was exchanged about the dispatch of the technical equipment by the Medical Committee Netherlands-Vietnam, along with their own medical materials; and assessments were made of how the war would progress over the coming months. It was heart-warming to see how well informed the students were, and how respectfully the two sides communicated.

At one point one of the students produced a rucksack from behind his chair, and unrolled a large sheet of paper with lines and figures printed on it in blue. Our hosts looked with interest at the blueprint of the X-ray machine, and asked questions which the students answered; but suddenly I could see them glancing at each other in dismay. In their enthusiasm the students did not notice this, and they went on pointing to blue lines and giving explanations – until the Vietnamese made clear to them that they should stop.

We were then told the Americans were no longer making the fragments in the bombs out of metal, but were now using a hard plastic that could no longer be detected by X-rays. Incredulous, we sank back into our chairs. The students looked shocked, and began talking all at once in agitated voices. How could this be? And was it even true? Where had the report come from? How long had this been the case? Yes, the Vietnamese nodded, it was quite true; at first they hadn’t wanted to believe it themselves, but there was no escaping the inexorable truth. I could see a mixture of sadness and anger in their eyes, and in their despair they began to apologize, as if it were their fault. They were terribly sorry, but the X-ray machine could no longer be used to detect the bomb fragments. They wished things were different, but that was the way it was… And they really did appreciate all the work the students had done.

When everyone had calmed down a bit, the Vietnamese tried to keep the students’ hopes up, saying they should go ahead anyway and build the X-ray machine, as well as the generator – for there were still plenty of people with metal bullets and fragments of shells and ordinary bombs in their bodies. The students were assured that their machine would be put to good use.

And so, in the May-June 1973 issue of the Medical Committee Netherlands-Vietnam’s Medical Bulletin, the report on the previous year contained the words ‘Dispatched: six complete portable X-ray machines, including electric generators’.

Scientists in the United States were also horrified by the ‘improvement’ to the cluster bombs that had made the fragments invisible. The 11 September 1971 issue of the Dutch weekly news magazine De Groene Amsterdammer, which former editor Maarten van Dullemen has retrieved from his extensive archives, included the following report headed NOORD AMERIKA (‘NORTH AMERICA’):

‘For some time a “Science for Vietnam” movement has been active in the United States … Much of its research is focused on the most conspicuous consequences of the American war of destruction … treatment of injuries caused by cluster bombs. As we now know, one of the latest “improvements” to this weapon, which breaks up into dozens of tiny bullets that then follow almost undetectable paths in the body, is that the bullets are now made of plastic, and so can no longer be seen on X-ray screens. The members of “Science for Vietnam” are trying to develop injectable substances that cling to the plastic bullets so that they can be seen on X-ray screens, and to find out whether they can be made visible with the help of radar or sonar equipment.’

In the years that followed, numerous action groups and organizations around the world worked long and hard to get the development, production and use of cluster bombs banned. In December 2008, representatives of a hundred countries gathered in Oslo to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions. One of the signatories was Holland, and other countries have since joined. But they do not include the main developers, producers and users: China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey and the United States.

What is now known as the ‘Military-Tech Complex’, in which the United States plays a key role, is still working manfully to develop new, ‘smart’ bombs – above all by trying to reduce the proportion of unexploded bombs to less than 1%, for instance with the help of built-in software. For there is a stubborn determination to keep on using cluster bombs; and even today it is hard for activists to discover what kind of weapons will be developed, and how they will be ‘improved’. For this they still depend on the commitment and ingenuity of intelligent young scientists who, just like the students that developed the portable X-ray machines, are using their knowledge to help civilians protect themselves against air raids.[1]

1972, drawing by the Dutch cartoonist Opland (Rob Woud) for the Committee leaflet, from Peter de Goeje, Met solidaire groet, technische en wetenschappelijke hulp aan Vietnam, 1971-2011 (the caption reads ‘Things for Vietnam’).

[1] With thanks to Dr Jolle Demmers, professor of Conflict Studies, Utrecht University.

Reprinted with author’s permission from Joop

Trans. Kevin Cook.

It is worth recalling that 46,233 of those fallen soldiers, sailors and Marines, were killed in battle or died of wounds incurred in war. 9,107 died in accidents. 936 died from illnesses, far from home in the tropics. There were 236 homicides. Some of those were officers making unreasonable demands on men pushed to the limit. Taking out your superiors was called fragging. War makes you do horrible things to other human beings, and people have difficulty dealing with that in the aftermath. It creates high suicide rates. There were 382 suicides among US troops in Vietnam.

It is a horrible toll, and I honor those fallen young men. My own father served in the Signal Corps during that period, but thankfully his services were needed elsewhere, in Europe and Africa. But as a teen on bases, I often got to know GIs who were on the way there. A first cousin married a man who had served over there, who told me the stories. By the time it would have been my turn, Nixon had instituted a lottery, and my number came up like 324. (They took the low numbers in those days.) I was a conscientious objector, but that didn’t stop them from sending you, they just made you a medic, and the joke was you got sent to ‘Nam with a big red cross on your back for targeting.

So my point is in no way to detract from the sacrifice they made. They were my older peers and my classmates, and they did not get to live full lives because they served their country and made the most extreme of sacrifices. Their country did not serve them nearly as well as they served it. But, folks, seriously. We did not do the serious dying in Vietnam. The Vietnamese did.

Walter Russell Mead wrote that the United States dropped three times as much munitions tonnage on Vietnam as it had used during all of World War II. That’s right, the US inflicted three times the punishment on Vietnam for doubting private property rights as it inflicted on the Third Reich and Imperial Japan combined. Ho Chi Minh was a typical anti-imperial revolutionary of the twentieth century, not much different from Ahmed ben Bella in Algeria. The Third Reich?

And then Mead went on, the US military in Vietnam killed on the order of 365,000 civilians in the war. That may just be the civilian casualties in the South. If you count those in the North, killed by intensive US bombing, the total would almost double. There there is Cambodia and Laos, which Nixon secretly bombed and which he threw into a societal chaos that eventuated in genocide.

Of course, some percentage of civilian deaths were the work of the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese Army, but the US was responsible for the bulk of them. Guenter Lewy estimated that the US and its allies killed 444,000 or so Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese soldiers. The latter killed over 200,000 troops of South Vietnam and its allies, including the US.

In Vietnam, US B-52s engaged in carpet-bombing, laying down explosives over fields. Who did they think farmed the fields? They used the toxic carcinogen Agent Orange to clear away vegetation in which they thought the Viet Cong hid. But it was an agricultural country. Didn’t they realize that people lived among that vegetation?

A tight demographic study suggests that there were 1,050,000 total war-related deaths 1965-1974.

The United States corporate and governmental elite was so paranoid about Communism that they destroyed a little Third World country that just wanted out from under French colonialism. Stalinist Communism of the sort they adopted as their ideological tool was a dead end, and was in many ways as deadly to human dignity as colonialism had been. But the inside-the-Beltway theory that if Ho Chi Minh succeeded, the whole world would go Communist, was just a bizarre conspiracy theory. In fact, after 1975, Thailand and Indonesia and the Philippines and Australia and Japan went on just as before. Who knows but that Cambodia could have avoided its paroxysm of self-destruction if Nixon had left them out of it all?

On the other hand, the impetus of the North Vietnamese to end exploitation and inequality was understandable, given the inequities of European colonialism and the almost feudal conditions of the average farmer (they call them peasants when they’re Asians, but Americans don’t seem to have peasants and can’t identify with that word). The US elite often actively supports inequality, and seems to confuse it with democracy.

As for now, Vietnam got an early handle on the pandemic and has received praise for its approach to keeping transmission from getting out of hand. Unlike Trump, they didn’t wait many weeks to act.

And they sent the US 450,000 made-in-Vietnam Dupont hazmat suits as part of their continued opening to America.

But one Vietnamese leader, Adam Taylor at WaPo notes, more or less called for a Tet Offensive against the coronavirus, recalling the 1968 campaign against US forces that won them the war.

So the novel coronavirus is reminding people in both countries of the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese won theirs, and the US lost because it was on the wrong side of history. In some ways, the dedication of the US elite to property and profit above all other values caused it to make both mistakes, of taking on Vietnam but declining to take on the coronavirus until it was too late. With Trump’s Big Business bias, his dismissal of science that might get in the way of corporate profits, his buy-in to the rhetoric of small government (which is intended to shift resources from the people to the rich), Trump has managed to lose the second Vietnamese War, the metaphorical one in today’s headlines, as well.

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25 KXXV: More Americans died from COVID-19 than were killed during Vietnam War