Talk:Operation Freedom Deal/Archive 1

Archive 1

WP:MILHIST Assessment

A very nice start, but this needs an infobox and references, if not expansion. Also, separating out an introduction from the main body of the text is a pretty standard formatting element on the 'pedia. Thanks for your hard work, though. Keep it up. LordAmeth 21:13, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Wow, I guess I'd forgotten that I'd assessed this one first time around. Thanks for the expansion and the addition of pictures and maps. Just one thing - right now the Category:Cambodian civil war is a redlink. You might want to go create that, make it a sub-category of whatever fits. Not good to have redlinked cats. Otherwise, good work. LordAmeth 16:44, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Looking good. I'm a bit confused as to why there's an Arc Light photo here; I was under the impression that Arc Light only referred to activity over North Vietnam. Is that not the case? Kirill Lokshin 18:18, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

No, Arc Light was a generic term for any B-52 sortie. RM Gillespie 21:23, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Ah, ok; thanks for the explanation. Kirill Lokshin 02:59, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

How many dead?

Causalities, damage, military effectiveness, are missing in this article.Vendrov 11:51, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Result in the battlebox

It says "Fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge" ROTFL - does this mean that the Khmer Rouge came to power because they were bombed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.137.118.219 (talk) 19:13, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it does - glad you find that so funny. From the Khmer Rouge page:

"The relation between the massive carpet bombing of Cambodia by the United States and the growth of the Khmer Rouge, in terms of recruitment and popular support, has been a matter of interest to historians. In 1984 Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia argued that it is "untenable" to assert that the Khmer Rouge would not have won but for U.S. intervention and that while the bombing did help Khmer Rouge recruitment, they "would have won anyway." [3] However, more recently historians have cited the U.S. intervention and bombing campaign (spanning 1965-1973) as a significant factor leading to increased support of the Khmer Rouge among the Cambodian peasantry. Historian Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen have used a combination of sophisticated satellite mapping, recently unclassified data about the extent of bombing activities, and peasant testimony, to argue that there was a strong correlation between villages targeted by U.S. bombing and recruitment of peasants by the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan and Owen argue that "Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began." [4] In his 1996 study of Pol Pot's rise to power, Kiernan argued that "Pol Pot's revolution would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilisation of Cambodia" and that the U.S. carpet bombing "was probably the most significant factor in Pol Pot's rise." [5]" 87.74.32.50 (talk) 15:52, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't agree with the conclusion, nor is it referenced

The conclusion to this article is: "On 15 August [1973], the last mission of Freedom Deal was flown and the fate of Cambodia was sealed."

It was 20 months after this date when the Khmer Rouge ousted the Lon Nol government, so the connection between the end of U.S. bombing and the fall of Lon Nol is tenuous. Moreover, there is a sizeable body of opinion that the U.S. bombing helped rather than hurt the Khmer Rouge by alientating the rural population of Cambodia and making it difficult for them to make a living in the countryside.

This sentence should be removed -- or at least nuanced and referenced. Comments? If none, I'll take it out. Smallchief 12:44, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Nor, re-reading the article, do I believe the statement is justified that Operation Freedom Deal delayed the Khmer Rouge victory. And that statement has no sources cited either. Smallchief (talk 15:48, 12 February 2014 (UTC) 15:48, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Bombing tonnage totals

I see that the traditional statistic of 500,000 tons of bombs dropped on Cambodia has been found, by at least one researcher, to have been 2,500,000 tons. That's an astonishing difference. Should the article be changed to reflect that higher total? I plan to add a section to this article regarding Cambodian civilian casualties and the bombing total may be relevant. Smallchief (talk 13:24, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, bombing totals should be revised after documents released under President Clinton in 2000, which as Kiernan noted makes the casualties >150,000. I wonder why Kiernan has not revised the figures? I contacted him a few months ago and he said the same thing but with no specific number of casualties. Here's a relevant quote: "Previously, it was estimated that between 50,000 and 150,000 Cambodian civilians were killed by the bombing. Given the fivefold increase in tonnage revealed by the database, the number of casualties is surely higher. Bombs Over Cambodia: New information reveals that Cambodia was bombed far more heavily than previously believed, Tayler Owen and Ben Kiernan, The Walrus, October 2006. Raquel Baranow (talk) 15:23, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

That's assuming that Kiernan's original figures were accurate, and that Kiernan would be able to easily create a formula for converting increased tonnage dropped on largely unpopulated areas into increased casualties.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 16:12, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

I'd like to see a separate section discussing the casualties and why they vary so much -- from Chomsky's 1-million in Operation Menu to the low of 40,000 you defend. Raquel Baranow (talk) 16:42, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

Statistics often exhibit a snowball effect: arbitrary figures become widely repeated, and soon become part of the conventional wisdom. Civil war deaths were commonly put at 500,000-600,000 due to Sihanouk and a lack of Western knowledge about Cambodia; some authors combined these figures ("Officially half a million Cambodians died on the Lon Nol side of the war; another 600,000 were said to have died in Khmer Rouge zones", Elizabeth Becker, When the War was Over, pg. 170), while others (Chomsky) attributed all civil war deaths--both military and civilian, on all sides--solely to American bombing. There's no need to explain the variance: Chomsky isn't a RS for this kind of information, and his number is impossible. There were only 4,000 Cambodians living in the entire area bombed by Operation Menu, which just goes to show you how far out of touch with reality Chomsky is.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 16:51, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

I find your statement that "only 4000 Cambodians lived in the entire area bombed by Operation Menu" hard to believe. From the WP article: U.S. bombing of Cambodia extended over the entire eastern one-half of the country and was especially intense in the heavily-populated southeastern one-quarter of the country, including a wide ring surrounding the largest city of Phnom Penh. In large areas, according to maps of U.S. bombing sites, it appears that nearly every square mile of land was hit by bombs. Raquel Baranow (talk) 16:16, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Note: Take a look here everybody for a map displaying the sites bombed. It is the pdf.-ref ("Bombs Over Cambodia") from the section Raquel Baranow cited. RhinoMind (talk) 17:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

At self: I might as well point out that the bombing sites have not been subject to any revision. Except that Kiernan and High points out that the database had holes in it, i.e. missing information, which might apply to both tonnage and bombing sites. It is explained in detail in the 2015 "revision-ref" from Kiernan and Owen. For the sake of precision, I should also point out that quite a few of the bombing sites (marked in red) were carpet bombed several times over. RhinoMind (talk) 15:00, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Mass-graves, starvation and US bombings

The following discussion took place as a sidenote to the "Bombing tonnage totals" thread above. As it has nothing to do with tonnage specifically and as it traverse a speculative path of its own, it has been separated from the main thread. TalkPages on WP are not meant for speculative discussions, there are plenty of other sites on-line where these activities can take place. The discussion below has been kept for the sake of documentation: RhinoMind (talk) 14:48, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Note: Take a look here everybody for a map displaying the sites bombed. It is the pdf.-ref ("Bombs Over Cambodia") from the section Raquel Baranow cited. RhinoMind (talk) 17:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Here's another map of the mass grave sites that overlapped the bombing sites but the graves are attributed to Khmer Rouge killings and many of them are at prison sites. Raquel Baranow (talk) 17:54, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Interesting "sidenote". Are you suggesting that (a larger part of) the mass-graves are filled with people killed by the US bombings? That would indeed be interesting to research in depth. We cannot however convey any synthesis in a WP page of course. I would also like to stress that the bombing sites overlaps just about anything in the eastern half of the country. Which - as yet another sidenote - makes it no wonder Khmer Rouge felt an urgent need to rebuild an agrarian production immediately. An issue that is otherwise usually just explained as purely some kind of twisted ideology. RhinoMind (talk) 18:42, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

It appears Raquel Baranow is trying to promote some form of genocide denial, but her lack of competence on this subject prevents her from doing a very effective job of it. As her own sources show, virtually all of the mass graves are located at or near Khmer Rouge prisons. Oftentimes it only takes a single high-quality source to refute the paranoid ravings of Wikipedia editors; in this case, I recommend Bruce Sharp's "Counting Hell." Here some choice excerpts:

• "Indeed, (Craig) Etcheson notes, 'Documentation Center mapping teams have located a number of sites over the years where the local informants say that the mass graves were in fact not from Khmer Rouge executions, but rather from the bombing, the 1970-1975 war, from victims of mass starvation and even one or two associated with the Vietnamese invasion of 1979.' The overwhelming majority of the graves, however, were unquestionably from the Khmer Rouge period. 'On two occasions only (out of over 20,000 sites), if memory serves, have Documentation Center mapping teams discovered mass graves, which were attributed to the victims of bombing during the 1970-1975 war.' Moreover, Etcheson notes, 'It bears repeating that the virtually all of these mass graves sites are located at, or quite near—usually within a kilometer or so—of the Khmer Rouge security centers. It turns out that local informants, in most cases, recall the names of the cadre who were in charge of these Khmer Rouge prisons or killing centers. As often as not, it is subsequently possible to locate this former Khmer Rouge security cadre for follow-up interviews.' ... Anthropologist May Ebihara, who conducted fieldwork in a village in Kandal province in 1959-1960, returned to the village in 1990. Of the 159 people she had known in 1960, she found that by 1975, 16 persons had died from old age or illness, and 4 had died during the war. Of the 139 remaining people, half of them—69 people—died during the Khmer Rouge regime. Discussing Ebihara's research, Kiernan notes that 'Eighteen new families had formed in the hamlet after 1960; but from 1975 to 1979, 26 of the 36 spouses and 29 of their children also perished.' Ebihara's data highlights the disparity in the death ratios between the civil war and the Pol Pot regime. The number of deaths in 1975-1979 was roughly seventeen times the number of deaths during the war. ... While the exceptionally high ratios from this village might not be typical, they were also certainly not unique. My own conversations with refugees also suggests very high ratios. When questioned about the Pol Pot years, most Cambodians will immediately begin listing names: 'The terse tally of the dead,' as author Minfong Ho once put it. Yet when asked about deaths during the war, the list of names is almost invariably short: Perhaps a cousin who was a soldier, an uncle whose fate was never entirely clear, and so on."

You might also consider the following:

• "Craig Etcheson has spent 35 years studying Cambodia. From 2006 to 2012, he served as the chief of investigations building charges of war crimes against former leaders in the Pol Pot regime. Etcheson is reluctant to quantify the civilian casualties but he thinks it is much less than many believe. 'I have conducted thousands of interviews with Cambodians who lived through that period of Cambodian history,' Etcheson said. 'I can count on one hand the number of people who described first-hand knowledge of civilian deaths from U.S. bombing. ... it was probably more than 5,000 civilians killed by U.S. bombing.'" The lowest figure we found came from retired Air Force intelligence officer Earl Tilford. Tilford served in the Strategic Air Command from 1971 to 1975 and had first-hand knowledge of the bombing campaigns. His latest book, Crosswinds, argues that much of the bombing during the Vietnam War was ineffective, and in the case of Cambodia, the military goal was distorted by bureaucratic in-fighting between the Air Force and the Navy. Tilford told PunditFact that the Air Force ran many missions simply to keep a higher profile in the military budgeting process. More sorties were taken as proof of military importance. Tilford recalled repeated bombing runs of a lake in central Cambodia. The B-52s literally dropped their payloads in the lake. The sole purpose was to keep the mission count high. The upshot? The total tonnage might have little relation to the damage inflicted. In addition, Tilford said most bombs were dropped in remote, thinly populated regions. 'I would say 4,000 to 5,000 civilians at most might have died,' Tilford said. 'That's a guess based on a knowledge of targets, of the topography and that there were just not that many civilians in those areas.'"

As to the substantive questions:

• The Department of Defense estimated that there were exactly 4,247 Cambodians living in the border areas targeted during Operation Menu. Operation Freedom Deal obviously struck a much wider geographic swath of the country, but you shouldn't conflate the two bombing campaigns.
• It was never plausible to believe that the extent of the bombing had been underestimated by a factor of five; Kiernan and Owen have since retracted the 2.7 million figure in "Bombs Over Cambodia," accepting the conventional estimate of "around 500,000 tons."
• There was never anything "rational" about killing doctors and engineers (or simply anyone with glasses) as a matter of policy, about systematically destroying food sources that could not be subject to centralized storage and control, about exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of rice and rejecting foreign aid in the midst of a government-created famine, or about forcing people to march long distances without access to water—let alone the extravagant tortures practiced in Khmer Rouge "prisons." Cambodia was bombed far less heavily than either South or North Vietnam—let alone Laos, which remains the most heavily bombed country in history—yet only the Khmer Rouge, not the Vietnamese communists or the Pathet Lao, considered genocide a viable tool to reconstruct their society.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 19:48, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

I pretty much agree entirely, exept for the point about aid. Was any aid forthcoming? The only place the DK could have gotten subtantial economic aid was the eastern bloc, but obviously that was not likely to happen once they shifted firmly to China, which was too poor to offer any significant aid. There were some cables where Kissinger said he was open to some sort of dialogue with the DK, but obviously that's a long way off from even considering giving them any kind of aid. "Destroying" food sources took the form of prohibiting foraging under the threat of severe punishment, a prohibition that was widely but by no means universally enforced throughout Democratic Kampuchea Guccisamsclub (talk) 20:36, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Yes. "Several voluntary agencies and foreign countries offered aid, but the Khmer Rouge refused. This refusal suggests that the Khmer Rouge believed that starvation was less important than maintaining the purity and self-sufficiency of their revolution." Moreover, after the PRK was established, a massive international aid campaign helped prevent famine in 1979.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 20:47, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Be careful not to mix "explaining and understanding" with "justification" as the author in the ref you provide does. That is a common mistake unfortunately. Also doing what is "rational" does not automatically imply that a given action "is morally ok" neither. However violent and morally derailed the Khmer Rough "revolution" was in its effectuation, it was somehow hinged on logic and rational thinking, as evidenced by every investigation into the crimes have shown. Quite a lesson I would say. RhinoMind (talk) 16:15, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Whatever the truth is about the individual mass-graves in Cambodia, one does have to wonder what happened to those killed by the US bombings. They could not have been entirely obliterated all together.

@TheTimesAreAChanging: Thanks for the details btw. I haven't read everything yet, but it certainly raises the quality of the thread with these links. I would like to point out though, that none of the people you cite had any access to the database that Kiernan and High studied. With the knowledge we have now about the bombing sites (not counting the tonnage), I find it extreme to uphold the idea that only a few thousand people died. Civilians or not. RhinoMind (talk) 15:11, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

"Obliterated all together": Craig Etcheson says "Many of those killed in the bombing were just vaporized." US Bombing of Cambodia -- Still Counting the Dead, The Irrawaddy, Dominic Faulder, October 2001, Vol.9 No.8 Raquel Baranow (talk) 16:03, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Good (reffed) point. I don't think carpet bombings of entire villages - especially with napalm, which happened -, would leave much left of dead bodies and witnesses. RhinoMind (talk) 16:21, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Results

Hi. It should also be mentioned that the result was a heavy increase in Khmer Rouge recruitment. Several sources speak about this and that the Khmer Rouge quickly grew from a rather small group to the largest, as a direct result of the US bombings. Just a note to self. I can provide some sources later on, but maybe "the experts" can point to good and useful sources easily? That would be very helpful. RhinoMind (talk) 23:29, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

The Khmer Rouge rapidly expanded because it was endorsed by Sihanouk and because North Vietnam installing it in power over large swathes of Cambodia enabled it to build up its forces by conscription. U.S. bombing was a major theme of Khmer Rouge propaganda, but it was only a minor factor in this saga. Indeed, without the U.S. bombing of North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge targets in Cambodia it remains probable that the Khmer Rouge would have gained power even earlier than it did, leaving South Vietnam with a communist country on its flank. No-one is obsessed with proving that the real reason the Pathet Lao ultimately prevailed in the Laotian Civil War is because U.S. opposition to the Pathet Lao paradoxically "created" the Pathet Lao, even though the U.S. bombing of Laos was nearly ten times as intense as the U.S. bombing of Cambodia on a per capita basis, because the Pathet Lao did not commit genocide—thus forcing Marxist "scholars" to invent a scapegoat. (Given that Cambodia was bombed far less heavily than both Laos and South Vietnam, the U.S. bombing is not a compelling scapegoat for the Khmer Rouge's extremist mentality or for the mass deaths that occurred under Khmer Rouge rule, either.)TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 05:24, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

40,000 figure from Sliwinski?

Can anyone provide an English language source where Marek Sliwinski estimates that 40,000 Cambodians were killed by the bombing? - GPRamirez5 (talk) 20:09, 29 December 2017 (UTC) GPRamirez5 (talk) 20:09, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

If you want, I can try to get my hands on a copy of Sliwinski's book in the next few days, so that I can attempt to verify the material with rudimentary French. (Or do you already have a copy?) There is no requirement on Wikipedia that sources must be in English; as a former French colony, a lot of the best scholarship on Cambodia is (unfortunately) in that language. Sliwinski has, however, been widely cited in English sources: Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique has 64 citations on Google Scholar. With regard to the specific question of the infobox, I am fine with simply using Kiernan's range, as it reflects the current academic consensus.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 07:20, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

I guess that's a no. And yet we do have an English source where he says 53,000. -GPRamirez5 (talk) 17:35, 3 January 2018 (UTC) GPRamirez5 (talk) 17:35, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

I honestly don't know what you're talking about. You refused to respond to my comment; so I had no reason to follow up in an attempt to read your mind. (BTW, I do have an English-language source that says 40,000, but it isn't a reliable source, so I wouldn't use it.) What English-language source says 53,000?TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 19:50, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Oh, I see; you got that from The Phnom Penh Post (an article that also gives the wildly wrong estimate of "2.75 million tonnes of ordnance dropped"). Not the best source, but good enough to change the Sliwinski figure pending further research, I suppose.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 19:56, 3 January 2018 (UTC)