Operation Menu - Aftermath

Aftermath

For more details on military operations, see Cambodian Civil War. For more details on the U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia, see Operation Freedom Deal.

The Constitutional issues raised at the hearings became less important when the House Judiciary Committee voted (21–12) against including the administration's falsification of records concerning Menu in the articles of impeachment leveled against President Nixon. One of the key issues that prevented congressional inclusion was the embarrassing fact that five key members of both political parties had been privy to the information and had neither said nor done anything about it.

The result of the attacks themselves are still debated among participants and historians. As for preventing further North Vietnamese offensives, they failed. In May 1969, PAVN/NLF launched an offensive similar in size to that of the mini-Tet offensive of the previous year. It certainly cost North Vietnam the effort and manpower to disperse and camouflage their Cambodian sanctuaries to prevent losses to further air attack. President Nixon claimed the raids were a success, since air power alone had to provide a shield for withdrawal and Vietnamization. They certainly emboldened Nixon to launch the Cambodian Campaign of 1970.

William Shawcross and other commentors asserted that the bombings caused the domino effect in Cambodia that the Vietnam War had been intended to prevent, claiming that there was no doubt they helped set Cambodia on the road to an abyss of violence that Sihanouk had worked for ten years to avoid. While out of the country on 18 March 1970, the prince was deposed by the National Assembly and replaced by Lon Nol. The Nixon administration, although thoroughly aware of the weakness of Lon Nol's forces and loath to commit American military force to the new conflict in any form other than air power, announced its support of the newly-proclaimed Khmer Republic.

Shawcross was challenged by Peter Rodman as follows:

When Congress, in the summer of 1973, legislated an end to U.S. military action in, over, or off the shores of Indochina, the only U.S. military activity then going on was air support of a friendly Cambodian government and army desperately defending their country against a North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge onslaught...What destabilized Cambodia was North Vietnam's occupation of chunks of Cambodian territory from 1965 onwards for use as military bases from which to launch attacks on U.S. and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam. Cambodia's ruler Prince Sihanouk complained bitterly to us about these North Vietnamese bases in his country and invited us to attack them (which we did from the air in 1969–70). Next came a North Vietnamese attempt to overrun the entire country in March–April 1970, to which U.S. and South Vietnamese forces responded by a limited ground incursion at the end of April...The outcome in Indochina was not foreordained. Congress had the last word, however, between 1973 and 1975.

Kissinger in an interview with Theo Sommer defended the bombing, saying:

"Now, with respect to Cambodia, it is another curious bit of mythology. People usually refer to the bombing of Cambodia as if it had been unprovoked, secretive U.S. action. The fact is that we were bombing North Vietnamese troops that had invaded Cambodia, that were killing many Americans from these sanctuaries, and we were doing it with the acquiescence of the Cambodian government, which never once protested against it, and which, indeed, encouraged us to do it. I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see the moral issue involved and why Cambodian neutrality should apply to only one country. Why is it moral for the North Vietnamese to have 50,000 to 100,000 troops in Cambodia, why should we let them kill Americans from that territory, and why, when the government concerned never once protested, and indeed told us that if we bombed unpopulated areas that they would not notice, why in all these conditions is there a moral issue? And, finally, I think it is fair to say that in the six years of the war, not ten percent of the people had been killed in Cambodia than had been killed in one year of Communist rule."

Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.

When Phnom Penh was under siege by the Khmer Rouge in 1973, the US Air Force again launched a bombing campaign on Communist forces, claiming that it had saved Cambodia from an otherwise inevitable Communist take-over and that the capital might have fallen in a matter of weeks. By 1975, President Ford was predicting "an unbelievable horror story" if the Khmer Rogue took power, and calling on Congress to renew air support for the Lon Nol regime, which it refused to do.