National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200)

National Security Study Memorandum 200

Quotes re NSSM 200
According to Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, the Pol Pot Regime was "a demonstration model of the NSSM 200 policy" (276). The Khmer Rouge could not have made the gains it did in Cambodia without the aid of Kissinger and Nixon. It was the Nixon Administration's bombing of Cambodia that aided the Khmer Rouge in their takeover of Cambodia. Tarpley and Chaitkin elaborate:
"The most important single ingredient in the rise of the Khmer Rouge was provided by Kissinger and Nixon, through their systematic campaign of terror-bombing against Cambodian territory during 1973. This was called Arclight, and began shortly after the January 1973 Paris Accords on Vietnam. With the pretext of halting a Khmer Rouge attack on Phnom Penh, U.S. forces carried out 79,959 officially confirmed sorties with B-52 and F-111 bombers against targets inside Cambodia, dropping 539,129 tons of explosives. Many of these bombs fell upon the most densely populated sections of Cambodia, including the countryside around Phnom Penh. The number of deaths caused by this genocidal campaign has been estimated at between 30,000 and 500,000. Accounts of the devastating impact of this mass terror-bombing leave no doubt that it shattered most of what remained of Cambodian society and provided ideal preconditions for the further expansion of the Khmer Rouge insurgency, in much the same way that the catastrophe of World War I weakened European society so as to open the door for the mass irrationalist movements of fascism and Bolshevism." (279)
The ruin visited upon Cambodia by the Nixon Administration paved the way for Pol Pot and his murderous insurgents. The Khmer Rouge forced the Cambodian people out of the cities and into brutal agrarian slave labor. The end result was the death of some two million Cambodians. [2007] The Cambodian Memory Hole by Paul David Collins