From 50 Years Ago:Short Walk to Long War

Short Walk to Long War

The American intervention in Vietnam has been one long exercise in wishful thinking. It displays a long, dreary list of short-cuts which have failed to pacify Vietnam. Was Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia yet another attempted short-cut to end the war in Vietnam? Some political observers maintain that Nixon is cynical enough to have decided that the Vietnamisation programme was going badly and, seeing that there was no prospect of American withdrawal without handing over Vietnam to the Vietcong, calculated that the only way to go back on his pledges of a phased American withdrawal was to expand the war into Cambodia. This would give him a plausible excuse to keep American forces in Vietnam at least till the Presidential election in 1972.