6
The Perils for the Powers of Small Wars

Wars of the third kind, besides devastating the lands in which they are fought, can pose serious dangers to powers that become involved in them. These risks are of two kinds: they can lead to military disaster, and they can undermine the polity of the state. These dangers arise from initial underestimation of the problems that wars against the weak can pose for the strong, and subsequent inability to bring them to a successful conclusion.

Frustration over inability to bring a war of the third kind to a successful conclusion and unwillingness to cut their losses tend to cause a country's leaders to look beyond the theater in which it is being fought for the root of their difficulties. In doing so they are likely both to extend the geographic scope of the conflict and to enlarge the dimensions of their problem. Leadership implies an ability to choose right paths, whereas turning back would imply admission of error. Because such admissions are seldom willingly made, it is in the democracies, with their freedom of the press, their competition between political parties, and their provisions for the peaceful transfer of power, that there is the best chance of abandoning a wrong course before it ends in disaster.

George C. Marshall once declared that a democracy cannot fight a seven-year war, a statement that suggests that a democ-

racy that attempts to do so runs the risk of ceasing to be one. What he no doubt had in mind was the prospect that the pressures for conformity and the curtailment of press freedom attending a state of war, if too prolonged, might lead to a permanent situation in which the people were no longer the masters of their government. Marshall's statement was made in the context of World War II, when publication of information about troop movements might lead to ship sinkings and the disclosure of strategic plans might result in the loss of battles. In wars of the third kind, however, such considerations have little relevance, and the temptation to impose press censorship is likely to arise from the wish to keep embarrassing information from the public and thus to minimize dissent. In the case of the United States, press censorship motivated by such considerations must be viewed against the background of the provision of the Constitution prohibiting curtailment of the freedom of the press.

The theses that frustration over inability to bring a war of the third kind to a successful conclusion, combined with unwillingness to abandon it, can lead a powerful country to military disaster, that censorship during a war of the third kind may arise from political calculation rather than military necessity, and that the political system of a powerful country can be endangered by entanglement in such a war, may be explored in a number of contexts: the Sino-Japanese war, the Algerian war for independence, the Philippine Insurrection, and the Vietnam conflict.

Pre-World War II Japan, an imperialist power ruling Korea and holding leased territory in Manchuria, had become a state dominated by the army. During the early 1930s the Japanese army had driven Chinese armed forces from the rest of Manchuria, where it had set up the puppet state of Manchukuo. The Japanese military next began efforts to transform five provinces of North China into a special region independent of the nationalist government at Nanking. It wanted to avoid war, but in 1937 the Japanese program of piecemeal conquest met resistance from provincial Chinese troops.

The fighting began near Peking on 7 July, and in August the

Japanese, believing that resistance in North China had outside inspiration and could be ended by defeating Chiang Kai-shek's armies and seizing his capital, landed troops at Shanghai and attempted to drive inland. Chiang's forces put up a stout positional defense until November, when the Japanese turned their flank by making an amphibious landing farther south in Hang-chow Bay. In December, with the broken nationalist armies in retreat and the Japanese about to take Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek moved his government to Chungking, beyond the formidable rapids of the Yangtze in the mountain-encircled western province of Szechwan.

Chiang Kai-shek having eluded them, the Japanese next began efforts to isolate his government in Szechwan from outside support. By the end of 1938, through a campaign climaxed by the capture of the port of Canton in South China and of central China's strategic tricity complex of Wuhan, the Japanese had gained control of most of China's principal cities and main transport lines. As a conventional conflict, the war was over, and what followed was a long period of semi-passive resistance by the remaining regular forces of Chiang Kai-shek and active harassment at the hands of growing numbers of communist guerrillas.

The Japanese now found themselves in a situation much like that envisaged in 1793 by Lord Macartney, who visited China as envoy of George III. In discussing the probable consequences of an attempt to conquer the Chinese, he wrote: "The circumstance of greatest embarrassment to an invader would be their immense numbers, not on account of the mischief they could do to him, but that he would find no end of doing mischief to them ... and, unless the people themselves voluntarily submitted, the victor might indeed reap the vanity of destruction, but not the glory or use of dominion."^[1] Indeed, the Japanese had bitten off more than they could chew and badly wanted a peace settlement. But while it takes only one to make war, two are needed to make peace, and Chiang Kai-shek rejected all their overtures.

In time, and not completely without reason, the Japanese came to see the United States as chiefly responsible for Chiang's unwillingness to make peace. The Japanese had not declared

war and called the conflict "the China Incident." President Franklin D. Roosevelt clearly was referring to it in his "Quarantine" speech of 5 October 1937, when he warned that war is "a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared," which "can engulf states and peoples remote from the original scene of hostilities." In December 1938 the United States began extending financial assistance to the Chinese government, and in July 1939, in order to put itself in a position to take a variety of economic measures against Japan, it gave notice of intent not to renew the Japan-U.S. treaty of commerce and navigation upon its expiration the following year. Early in 1941 the United States approved a plan under which army and navy airmen were released from service and supplied with fighter planes in order that they might help fight the Japanese in China as members of what was called the American Volunteer Group. It was also decided that China should receive military aid under the recently passed Lend-Lease Act.^[2]

During this period of drift toward war between Japan and the United States, some concerned Americans and Japanese succeeded in promoting the initiation of a series of informal talks between Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Japanese Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura, which had as their aim the restoration of good relations between the two countries. On 18 April 1941, shortly after the first of those talks had been held, the apanese government received from Nomura a telegram containing a list of matters at issue and a draft understanding for adoption by the two governments by which they might be settled. The draft understanding provided, among other things, that the American president would advise Chiang Kai-shek to open peace negotiations with Japan on a basis that would have required his government to recognize Manchukuo and to accept amalgamation with a puppet regime the Japanese had recently set up in Nanking. Although no one in Tokyo knew it at the time, the draft understanding had been written by a Japanese colonel on temporary duty in the Japanese embassy in Washington, which had not yet discussed it with officials of the U.S. government. Indeed, it was to be more than a month before its true status became known to Japanese officials in Tokyo.^[3]

On the day the telegram was received, Premier Fumimaro

Konoye called a meeting attended by the principal members of his cabinet, excepting only Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, then en route home from a mission in Europe, as well as by the chiefs of staff of the army and the navy. According to Konoye, it was the prevailing reaction of those present that an agreement along the lines proposed in the message offered the means whereby the China affair could be satisfactorily disposed of. Nothing could be achieved through strictly bilateral negotiations with Chungking, but because the Chinese government was "entirely dependent on the United States," a settlement might be achieved with the United States serving as intermediary. In addition, it was important to respond favorably to the United States because Japan needed to avoid war with the United States and to recover from the resource drain incurred since the outbreak of "the China Incident."^[4]

It was not until the latter part of May that it was understood in Japanese government circles that the proposal received the previous month had originated in the Japanese embassy in Washington, and another month passed before that government received the first American statement concerning the basis on which an understanding might be reached.^[5] It included respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of each and every nation, support for the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, and non-disturbance of the status quo in the Pacific except as it might be altered by peaceful means.^[6] The application of those principles, it was made clear, would require Japan to withdraw its forces from China.^[7]

In mid July the Japanese government sent Washington its counterproposals, which were based on the views of the army and the navy, but at the same time it moved to alter the status quo in French Indochina. The emperor had expressed distaste for the idea of "Japan's playing the thief at a fire," but had agreed to the move on the grounds that Japan had to cope with the tremendous changes then taking place in the world.^[8] In 1940, in a short but sharp engagement against French forces, the Japanese had taken over the northern part of French Indochina. This had enabled them to prevent further use, as a supply route for the forces of Chiang Kai-shek, of the port of Haiphong and the narrow-gauge railway connecting it with

Kunming in China's southwestern province of Yunnan.^[9] Now, taking advantage of the inability of the Vichy regime to protect French interests abroad, the Japanese negotiated with it for an unopposed entry of Japanese forces into southern Indochina. The U.S. government having learned of the negotiations, Ambassador Nomura was called to the State Department and told that Japanese occupation of southern Indochina would destroy the utility of the ongoing talks between Japan and the United States. The Japanese nevertheless went ahead, occupying the naval base at Cam Ranh Bay and eight airfields in striking distance of the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies.^[10]

Within about forty-eight hours of the first Japanese landings, the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands took action to freeze Japanese assets. Then on 1 August, with the Japanese operation continuing, the United States and the Netherlands—the latter with respect to the Dutch East Indies—embargoed further shipments of oil to Japan.^[11] This came as an unexpected blow, and also as a most serious one: Japan had no petroleum sources of its own, it had only limited capacity for the production of synthetic fuels, and the armed forces had on hand stocks that in case of war would last them less than eighteen months.^[12]

The United States and its allies thus had a stranglehold on Japan. Its military leaders were willing that Konoye should attempt through diplomatic negotiations to get it loosened, but meanwhile they would prepare plans for moving farther south in order to gain control of the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies, and the rubber plantations, tin mines, and other sources of raw materials of Malaya and Burma. This would mean going to war with the United States and Great Britain, and Konoye would be given a short deadline. For reasons of seasonal weather to the south, military operations, if not begun by early in December, would have to be postponed until the following spring—by which time the oil situation would have become critical.^[13]

Konoye and some of the others opposed these plans, holding that a war against the United States and Great Britain would be likely to bring disaster to Japan and might bring to an end the 2,600-year reign of its imperial family. Accordingly, they urged that negotiations be carried on without a deadline, that Japan

expand its capacity for producing synthetic fuels as rapidly as possible, and that it meanwhile tighten its belt. They also suggested that Japan agree, at least in principle, to withdraw its troops from China, in the hope that this would induce the United States and its allies to withdraw the economic sanctions they had imposed.^[14]

Nevertheless, on 4 September Konoye's cabinet gave its approval to a document prepared by the supreme command in which it was specified that if in early October there still was no prospect of Japan's attaining its demands through diplomatic negotiations, it would immediately open hostilities with the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. This policy was to be presented at an imperial conference on 6 September, and in preparation for that meeting Konoye sought an audience with the emperor on 5 September. The emperor, Konoye found, was greatly concerned, and demanded to know why the document in question began with a section on war preparations, suggesting that they were being given precedence over diplomacy. The emperor also asked other questions, some of them related to military operations, and because Konoye could not answer them, he suggested that the two chiefs of staff be summoned. Accordingly, General Gen Sugiyama and Admiral Osami Nagano were called in, and when they arrived the emperor again asked whether the order in which matters were being dealt with did not suggest that war was being given precedence over diplomacy. Assured by the service chiefs that the order in which the items appeared was without significance, the emperor turned to Sugiyama and asked: "In case of an American-Japanese conflict, how many months does the army consider with confidence that it will take to dispose of the matter?" Answering the question only in part, Sugiyama replied: "So far as the southern area is concerned, we intend to settle things within the first three months." The emperor then declared: "At the time of the outbreak of the China affair, you were the war minister, and you said, 'The affair will be settled in a month or so.' And yet the affair has lasted four years and yet has not been settled."^[15]

Sugiyama, greatly embarrassed, explained that China had a large hinterland area and offered other excuses, whereupon the

emperor asked: "If you say China has a wide hinterland, the Pacific ocean is larger, isn't it? With what confidence do you say that it will take three months?" Sugiyama having lowered his head and failed to reply, Admiral Nagano spoke up, likening Japanese-American relations to a patient considering whether to have an operation. The patient is gradually weakening, but if he undergoes an operation, though it involves danger, there may be hope for his recovery. The high command hoped that a solution might be attained by diplomatic means, but in case of failure an operation would have to be performed. When Nagano had finished, the emperor asked whether the service chiefs meant to emphasize diplomacy as the way to solve the issues at stake, and they asserted that they did.^[16]

The imperial conference held on 6 September to pass on the proposal discussed at the audience of the previous day was supposed to be a highly ritualistic affair. At such conferences, deemed part of the process by which policies were given imperial sanction, the emperor neither presided nor spoke, and they never failed to endorse the proposals laid before them.^[17] Shortly before the 6 September conference, however, the emperor made it known to Koichi Kido, the keeper of the privy seal, that he would wish to raise questions designed to commit the participants to stressing diplomatic negotiations rather than preparations for war. However, Kido revealed that Dr. Yoshimichi Hara, the president of the privy council, had already been primed to ask such questions, and the initiative accordingly was left to him. During the conference, and after the formal presentations had been completed, Dr. Hara raised anew the question of the order in which matters had been presented in the document before the conference. The two service chiefs, who had just completed their presentations, retained their places, but Admiral Koshino Oikawa, the navy minister, immediately arose and affirmed that the order in which items had been presented was without significance, that every effort was to be made to settle matters through diplomacy, and that Japan would go to war only if those efforts failed. At this point the emperor, breaking the silence that tradition demanded, expressed regret that it had not been the representatives of the supreme command who had responded to Dr. Hara, and drew from his

pocket a piece of paper from which he read aloud a poem composed by his grandfather, Emperor Meiji. In the poem Meiji recalled the Confucian saying that all within the four seas are brothers and asked why, then, the winds and waves of strife were raging so turbulently throughout the world. Having read the poem, the emperor observed that it was a favorite of his and that his efforts were directed toward introducing in his own time the spirit of Meiji's love of peace.^[18]

The emperor's intercession was said to have had an overwhelming effect on those present, but in the days that followed Konoye found himself unable to form his cabinet into a united front for the purpose of opposing the positions of the supreme command, which remained essentially unchanged. He won the lukewarm support of Admiral Oikawa but failed utterly to reach an accord with General Hideki Tojo, the minister of war. Japan, Tojo declared, could not meet the U.S. demand for the withdrawal of Japanese troops from China. They were needed there, he said, for the good of both countries, because the Chinese interior was plagued by communist guerrillas and other lawless elements. Moreover, if Japanese troops were withdrawn from China the resulting loss of prestige would spread from China to Manchuria and Korea. In view of Tojo's attitude, Konoye decided, successful negotiations with the United States were impossible, and the cabinet would have to resign.^[19]

Because of peculiarities in the Japanese governmental system, it would not do to simply ask Tojo to resign. In Japan the supreme command was not responsible to the government as represented by the premier and his cabinet. Each cabinet had to have a war minister and a navy minister drawn from among generals and admirals who were in active service, which meant that they were responsive to the supreme command. Indeed, the supreme command could bring down a cabinet by withdrawing a service minister or prevent the formation of a new cabinet by not making one available.^[20] Had Konoye requested the resignation of Tojo, another general might have been provided as his successor. However, because Tojo's views and those of the army command were in accord, Konoye would hardly have found the new man more amenable.

The Konoye cabinet resigned on 16 October and Japan's se-

nior statesmen, in their search for a successor, finally settled on Tojo—partly because of objections to everyone else they considered and partly because it was thought he was thoroughly loyal to the emperor and could control the army. The emperor had remained firm and was now making the unprecedented demand that in deciding the policies that should thenceforth guide the state, the next cabinet make a thoroughgoing study of the situation at home and abroad—without being bound by the decision taken at the imperial conference of 6 September.^[21]

Tojo accepted the emperor's injunction that the slate be wiped clean and relevant policy formulated afresh. However, Tojo's perceptions had not changed, nor had those of the supreme command. They were men impatient of obstacles, whose training emphasized decisive action, and in their circles those assailed by doubts were unlikely to give them expression. Though in theory the service chiefs were subordinate to the emperor, much as the prime minister was, the emperor was supposed to reign but not rule, and he lacked the staff arrangements that supervision of the military would have required. Thus it was that Japan's final position, which Ambassador Nomura was on 20 November instructed to present to Secretary Hull, was one Nomura thought would only make matters worse. In Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, Japan would undertake to advance no farther by force. For its part, the United States was to guarantee that Japan's needs for oil would be met through a restoration of the conditions that had existed before the freezing of Japanese assets, and the United States was to agree not to obstruct the restoration of peace between China and Japan by continuing its support of Chiang Kai-shek. Within the Japanese government it was agreed that if no settlement had been reached by 1 December, the decision for war would be made, regardless of the state of negotiations at that time.^[22]

On 29 November, at a meeting with an advisory council composed of ex-premiers, Tojo said that by knocking out the American Pacific Fleet and seizing the resources of Southeast Asia, Japan would gain control of a self-sufficient area that could be defended in depth. The Americans would be forced to see the hopelessness of their struggle, and the conflict might be quickly ended.^[23] This was the kind of success that Japan had

achieved in the Russo-Japanese War, begun without a declaration of war with a surprise attack in February 1904 on Port Arthur, where the Russian fleet was concentrated, and ended the following year by the Treaty of Portsmouth. In this case the emperor asked that the first act of war not take place until the Japanese had broken off negotiations in Washington, intending that this should serve as a declaration of war. However, the navy's plans for the attack on Pearl Harbor and a subsequent safe withdrawal of the Japanese fleet depended on achieving surprise. In the event, the emperor's request was not honored, and the Japanese commander of the first wave of attacking planes, seeing through a rift in the clouds that the American fleet below was lying peacefully at anchor, is said to have asked himself whether the Americans had never heard of Port Arthur.^[24]

With the attack on Pearl Harbor the Japanese had extended their military operations five thousand miles from North China and had converted the "China Affair" into what they called the "War for Greater East Asia," a war that brought to Japan wholesale destruction, military defeat, and the humbling experience of military occupation. (Actually, much of the all-encompassing destruction wreaked on Japan, according to what I was taught at the National War College, was militarily unnecessary. In this view, destruction of any vital link in the chain of Japan's capacity to wage war would have sufficed, and the key link —a view that accorded with that of Japan's former supreme command—was the petroleum supply.)

One member of Tojo's cabinet was doubtless speaking for many others when he declared, in the wake of Japan's defeat, that the "War for Greater East Asia" had been the greatest disaster in the long history of Japan. Nevertheless, it brought in its train changes that all but ultranationalist Japanese can only regard as beneficial. Beginning in the early 1930s, fanatical chauvinists, most of them army officers of the middle and lower grades, had with their jingoistic propaganda and frequent resort to political assassination created an atmosphere in which the decision to expand the China war seemed inevitable. The defeat and occupation of Japan discredited them and created a change of political atmosphere, and in this altered situa-

tion it became possible to eliminate the ambiguous situation in which the military were nominally subordinate to the emperor but in practice a law unto themselves. This was accomplished through the adoption of constitutional amendments defining the status of the emperor as that of symbol of the state and of the unity of the Japanese people and establishing the supremacy of an elective parliament.^[25]

In the wake of World War II, France became successively involved in two wars of the third kind. One ended in defeat, setting the stage for a second and more dangerous war that followed hard upon it. The first was the struggle against the Viet Minh in French Indochina, which began in 1946. It reached its climax in May 1954, when the Viet Minh, having gained the necessary conventional warfare capability, defeated the French in a set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu, and was ended two months later with an armistice agreement signed at Geneva providing for the withdrawal of French forces. The second, the 1954–62 Algerian war for independence, broke out less than four months later. The French military brought to it a sense of frustration that was a legacy of Vietnam and a determination to succeed in Algeria by applying there what they believed to be Vietnam's lessons. In Algeria France was to commit over half a million troops, about twice as many as in that earlier struggle, and to it they were to devote far greater material resources.

In 1848, under the Second Republic, Algeria had been declared an integral part of France, and its territories had been organized into three provinces. Nevertheless, more than a century later Algerian Muslims, though French subjects at birth, generally could not become French citizens.^[26] In 1954 Algeria contained, besides some nine million Muslims, over nine hundred thousand Europeans to whom Algeria was home in the sense of the phrase "Ici, c'est la France." By then the legal fiction that lgeria was not a colony was more than a century old and was being held more tenaciously than ever because under armed challenge. In this connection I recall that while serving in Germany I attended a luncheon addressed by an eminent French politician who informed us that Algeria's status as an

integral part of France made granting Algerian demands for independence impossible—a statement that was received with a quietness I took to denote respectful disbelief.

The Algerian rebellion began on 1 November 1954, and it had not been under way for two years before officials in Paris, yielding to the urge to look further afield for the solution to troubles close at hand, focused their attention on Egypt. And not without provocation: the first proclamation of the revolutionary FLN—the Front de Libération Nationale—had been broadcast by Cairo radio.^[27] Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's premier and a self-proclaimed pan-Arabist, ostentatiously offered money and arms for the rebellion, though what he actually supplied was negligible—a fact FLN leaders in Cairo kept secret in the interests of the morale of their fighters in Algeria.^[28] The French, too, were deceived: when Foreign Minister Christian Pineau visited Cairo, Nasser self-important declared that when the French were ready to negotiate in Algeria, they should let him know and matters would soon be settled.^[29]

Based on such grounds, and on wishful thinking, Guy Mollet, the French prime minister, and Maurice Bourges-Maunoury, the defense minister, reached the conclusion that if Nasser went, the collapse of the Algerian revolt would follow, and in the autumn of 1956 events gave them the opportunity to test its validity. Intending to counter the influence of Sovietbloc aid to Cairo, the United States and Great Britain had offered financial aid to Egypt for the construction of the Aswan High Dam. However, Nasser queered the deal by recognizing the government of the People's Republic of China, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles responded with a public rebuke, and the United States and Britain withdrew their offers of aid. In this situation, Great Britain was more vulnerable to a retaliatory blow from Nasser than was the United States. The stockholders of the privately owned and managed Suez Canal Company were predominantly British; Great Britain was dependent on Middle Eastern oil, which reached it via Suez; that country had for decades been guarantor of safe passage through the canal by the ships of all countries, and the last contingent of British troops had been withdrawn from the canal zone as recently

as June 1956. In July, following the withdrawal of the American and British aid offers, Nasser nationalized the canal.^[30]

At the end of October Israel, which had been having its own troubles with Nasser, invaded Egyptian territory, and in November British troops—joined by French paratroopers drawn from the forces in Algeria—began an operation that had as its military objective the retaking of the Suez canal. However, the invasion immediately loosed a storm of opposition: from Moscow came dire threats, from Washington came expressions of disapproval, and from New York the censure of the United Nations. Forty hours after the beginning of their attack, the British and the French halted the advance of their troops, which were subsequently withdrawn.^[31] The short war left the canal blocked by sunken ships, failed to discredit Nasser, led to the resignation of British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and destroyed Mollet's hopes of victory in Algeria.

The FLN established its government in exile in adjacent Tunisia, which also provided a sanctuary where FLN troops could train and rest, as well as the most convenient route for arms supplies. In dealing with this situation, and a similar, though less urgent, problem along Algeria's border with Morocco, the French built the Morice Line along the Tunisian frontier, running 200 miles from the Mediterranean to the wastes of the Sahara. Consisting of a high electrified fence designed to kill on contact, with minefields on either side, the line had sensors that told when and where it had been broken and was constantly patrolled.^[32] Designed to prevent rebel units and supplies from crossing into Algeria, it also kept the French from striking at rebel units and supply bases in Tunisia, as well as preventing them from pursuing rebels who inflicted casualties on French border patrols into that country. In consequence, French officers raised demands to extend the war into Tunisia, which came to a head early in 1958 after a French patrol had been ambushed by rebels believed to have crossed the line near the Tunisian village of Sakiet.^[33] On two occasions French planes that flew over the village to investigate were hit by machine-gun fire, and on 8 February a squadron of bombers staged a retaliatory raid on the village. The timing was unfortunate, for it was

market day in Sakiet. Moreover, besides hitting the FLN base, the bombs and rockets blasted a school where classes were in session and a hospital, as foreign journalists quickly ferried to the scene were able to testify. Tunisia accused France of aggression before the Security Council of the United Nations, and in the uproar they had inadvertently created, the demand of the French military for extending the war was drowned out.^[34]

The French army, it will be appreciated, bore the unhappy memory of defeat in World War II, and that defeat had just been followed by the loss of Indochina. Many of the officers and men of the French army in Algeria had served in Indochina, and were determined not to lose another campaign.^[35] The war in Indochina had been a highly political conflict, and many of the French officers who had taken part had been politicized by it. In addition, some among them, like some Germans after their country's World War I defeat, rationalized military failure with ill-defined notions that there had been treachery. The 1956 Suez misadventure had contributed to a feeling that the politicians were to blame for the troubles of the military, and there was among the military a fear that there would come to power in Paris a government that would decide to abandon Algeria, much as that of Pierre Mendès-France had given up Indochina. Meanwhile, Algeria's Europeans saw the French army standing between them and the loss of their all, and because they were in close rapport, the European civilians and French military reinforced each other's fears and suspicions. In consequence, Algiers, the country's political capital and military headquarters, was pervaded by an atmosphere of tension punctuated by plotted violence.^[36]

On 13 May 1958 a mob of Europeans in Algiers staged a riot that was to lead to the fall of the Fourth Republic, under which France had been governed since shortly after the end of World War II, and the establishing of the Fifth Republic under a constitution providing for a strengthened executive. The mob sacked the headquarters of the civilian governor general, calling for the army to take power, a call that resulted in the creation on the spot of a Committee of Public Safety composed of military officers and leaders of the mob. That night Gaullists in the entourage of General Raoul Salan, the commander in chief in

Algeria, prevailed upon him to follow up his reporting of the day's events with a telegram to President René Coty urging the formation in France of a government of public safety headed by General de Gaulle. Some weeks previously, in the wake of the Sakiet affair, the government of Félix Gaillard had fallen, and on 14 May his successor, Pierre Pflimlin, invested by the Assembly by a better than two-to-one vote, assumed office. However, in Algiers the French military stood by the demand for de Gaulle's return to office, that demand was quickly taken up in Paris by his military and civilian followers, and on 19 May de Gaulle held a press conference at which he expressed readiness to assume power provided the political system of the Fourth Republic was swept away.^[37]

Upon receiving news of de Gaulle's press conference, Salan sent another telegram to President Coty saying that unless de Gaulle assumed power as soon as possible, there might be a military incursion into metropolitan France. As a matter of fact, Salan already had planning for such an incursion under way; by 14 May paratroopers from Algeria had seized Corsica; on 28 May Pflimlin resigned; and the following day President Coty, having received a 29 May deadline from Salan, announced that de Gaulle had been asked to form a government. On 1 June de Gaulle appeared before the National Assembly, asking to be given full powers to govern for six months by decree, and a mandate to submit a new constitution for the approval of the country. The Assembly, although it undoubtedly anticipated that the new constitution would be one that reduced its powers, felt compelled to meet his terms.^[38]

Upon assuming office, de Gaulle brought in a loyal supporter as chief of the general staff and gave him the task of scattering the group of officers in Algeria who had been responsible for the downfall of Pflimlin and his own return to power.^[39] Salan was transferred to the sinecure post of military governor of Paris, from which he soon retired, and replaced in Algeria by General Maurice Challe. De Gaulle, through a variety of political and economic measures, endeavored to win the support of Algeria's Muslims, and Challe conducted a vigorous offensive against the FLN that reduced its forces in Algeria by half and forced them to abandon company-size operations and split into small

groups.^[40] However, because all were not eliminated, there was the danger that, like algae in an aquarium, they would again grow once the pressure against them was relaxed. Moreover, an FLN force of some ten thousand was in being across the border in Tunisia, and there was no assurance that the Morice Line would keep them out forever. Finally, the measures Challe employed turned many farmers and herdsmen into refugees and tended to embitter those who had been displaced.^[41]

De Gaulle wanted military success to facilitate reaching a settlement with the FLN under which Algeria, while evolving toward independence, would remain closely associated with France.^[42] However, it became clear over time that the FLN would not enter into negotiations until there was a prospect that they would result in bringing French rule to an early end, and on 16 September 1959 de Gaulle announced that the Algerians would be given self-determination.^[43] This announcement marked a turning point, opening as it did a widening gap between metropolitan France, where it was favorably received, and Algeria, where extremists and disaffected army officers began to plot a rebellion within the rebellion. In January 1960, in Algiers, Europeans staged a week-long uprising during which many gendarmes were killed and wounded while troops stood by and refused to fire. The uprising was ended by other troops, brought in from operations in the field, whose task was eased by the onset of rain. In the wake of the affair there was another purge of dissident officers, and General Challe, whose inability to control them had lost him the confidence of de Gaulle, was assigned elsewhere a few months later.^[44] In December de Gaulle paid a three-day visit to Algeria, which was made the occasion for further rioting in Algiers and for four abortive attempts at de Gaulle's assassination.^[45]

In March 1961 de Gaulle and the leaders of the Algerian government-in-exile reached an agreement for peace talks, to be held at Evian, on the shores of Lake Geneva, and this triggered the launching of a military revolt. It began on 22 April, and in Algeria it was led by four five-star generals who had previously served there and had now been smuggled back in: Raoul Salan and Maurice Challe, the former commanders-in-chief, Edmond Jouhaud, who had been born in Algeria and to

whom it was home, and Marie-André Zeller, well-known as a firm supporter of Algérie française .^[46] In metropolitan France they enjoyed the support of a group of conspirators headed by General Jacques Faure, one of the officers who had been purged in the wake of the Algiers uprising of January 1960. Faure and his fellow-conspirators arranged to have bodies of paratroopers hidden in the forests of Orleans and Rambouillet the night of the 22nd, which were to have joined up with tank units to seize key points in the capital. But Faure and other key leaders were arrested before they could arrive on the scene, and the paratroops, not privy to the detailed planning, could only disperse when some gendarmes appeared and ordered them to do so.^[47]

In Algiers the plotters quickly seized General Fernand Gambiez, the commander in chief, and General Challe took over responsibility for military affairs. They also took into custody Jean Morin, the government-delegate, Gambiez's civilian opposite number, as well as principal members of his staff, intending that Salan should thenceforth take responsibility for Algeria's governmental affairs. However, Challe, Salan, and the others had no sooner taken charge than things began to go wrong. In France the commander in chief of the air force had proved cooperative in the beginning and there had been enough transports in Algeria to ferry two regiments to France, but he quickly abandoned the rebel cause and pulled almost all the transports back to France. In consequence any thought of invading France had to be abandoned, and an inventory of foodstuffs, medicines, and the funds in the vaults of the Banque de France revealed that an Algeria cut off from the metropole could last little more than a fortnight. In Algeria itself only the commanders in the vicinity of Algiers were proving to be firmly behind the revolt; elsewhere they declared opposition, wavered, or remained non-commital. On the night of 23 April de Gaulle made a broadcast speech in which he appealed over the heads of rebel commanders to their troops, absolving them of the requirement for obedience. The conspirators having failed to order the jamming of broadcasts from France, tens of thousands of troops heard de Gaulle's speech, and something akin to passive resistance spread among the rank and file. By 26 April—four days and five nights after the putsch had begun—it was clear to the rebels

that they had failed. Challe flew back alone to France to give himself up. Jouhaud and Zeller went into hiding, but by the end of the month they and some two hundred other officers were under arrest.^[48] Meanwhile another group, headed by Salan, cast their lot with civilian extremists who had formed the Organisation Armée Secrète. Salan and his associates reorganized it along military lines and embarked on a campaign of terrorism in both Algeria and France itself. That campaign—discussed below in the context of its threat to democracy in France—earned the hostility of the people among whom it was conducted and failed to prevent the reaching of an agreement for Algerian independence.^[49]

The two successive wars of the third kind fought by France in the wake of World War II also imposed considerable strain upon the people of France, and they in turn brought pressure to bear upon their government, culminating in the threat of civil war.

In this context it is study of the 1954–62 war in Algeria that is the more rewarding. Indochina was a distant land, Algeria was close at hand; few citizens of France lived in Indochina, whereas almost a million had their homes in Algeria; France had much greater military resources to devote to the second of the two conflicts than to that in Indochina, which broke out soon after the liberation of France itself; and the fielding of a larger and more modern army in Algeria involved financial costs of a different order of magnitude.^[50] All in all, the Algerian war posed problems on which it was difficult to reach and maintain the consensus essential to government stability under a parliamentary system, with the consequence that six of France's prime ministers fell in the slightly more than three and a half years between the outbreak of that war and de Gaulle's accession to power, and that weeks sometimes elapsed between the fall of one cabinet and the voting into office of another. Finally, consideration of the Algerian war benefits from the fact that it has been the subject of exceptionally fine studies, notably that by Alistair Horne.

It is said that up until 1956, which is to say until the Algerian war had been under way for well over a year, all France was united on the proposition that independence for Algeria was

both unthinkable and unmentionable.^[51] However, that unity disappeared and the war in Algeria became an increasingly divisive subject as word reached France of the consequences for the people of Algeria of the repeated rakings over of their villages by the French army; of conditions in Algeria's regroupment centers, where there was much suffering and where children, in particular, were reported to be dying in substantial numbers from malnutrition; of horrible mutilations inflicted on dead, wounded, and captive soldiers by some Algerian guerrillas; of shocking atrocities committed by some French soldiers and civilians against Algerians; and, above all, of systematic use of torture during the interrogation of suspects during a period in which paratroopers were in charge of dealing with the campaign of urban violence the FLN unleashed in Algiers early in 1957.^[52]

Since the days in which highwaymen had engaged in the practice of holding their victims' feet to the fire, there had been a provision in France's penal code that imposed the death penalty on anyone found guilty of torture.^[53] More relevant still, it evoked vividly unpleasant memories of what many French men and women had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo during the 1940–44 Nazi occupation of France. Accounts of French use of torture in Algeria originated from, among others, Paul Teitgen, the secretary-general of Algiers prefecture, who saw on detainees signs of tortures he had himself suffered on numerous occasions some fourteen years earlier, and General Jacques de Bollardière, who had fought during World War II in Norway, at El Alamein, and with the maquis in the Ardennes, as well as in Indochina. After being transferred to Algiers from the field, he had clashed with General Jacques Massu, who was in command of the troops in control of that city, over the use of torture. Later he sent a letter of protest to Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, editor of L'Express —who had himself been prosecuted as a "demoralizer" of the war effort for a book based upon his experiences while serving in Algeria. For that breach of discipline, Bollardière was sentenced to sixty days of "fortress arrest."^[54]

Thus the Algerian war created serious differences among civilian officials and military officers between those who were

determined to end the rebellion by whatever means and those who objected to some of the means being employed. Similar fissures opened in France within the populace as a whole, as well as between the citizenry and officialdom. At the far left was a Marxist group that collected funds for the FLN. On the non-communist left, a group of 121 celebrities signed a declaration on the "right of insubordination" in the Algerian war, which incited conscripts to desert. In the center, the Assembly of French Cardinals and Bishops issued a statement condemning desertion and subversive activities but stressing that orders to engage in torture should be disobeyed. On the right, supporting the cause of maintaining French rule over Algeria, there was the Vincennes Committee headed by Jacques Soustelle, who had been governor-general of Algeria in 1955–56 and Georges Bidault, who had served as provisional president and prime minister in postwar France. In November 1961, after a meeting of the committee at which some of the members praised Salan and the Organisation Armée Secrète, more commonly called the OAS, and during which Bidault talked of a possible coup, de Gaulle ordered the committee dissolved.^[55]

In France, the OAS was responsible for acts of terrorism in which hundreds of people were killed or wounded and in which much material damage was done. In April 1961, in response to an announcement that peace talks were about to begin between representatives of the government and of the FLN, and were to take place in the town of Evian, the OAS killed its mayor.^[56] That same month the OAS made the first of its dozen or more attempts on the life of de Gaulle. Hiring an ex-legionnaire who proposed to kill de Gaulle with a telescopic rifle, it gave the man a large down payment, only to have him tip off the police and then disappear.^[57] During the main offensive of the OAS in France, which it conducted between September 1961 and February of 1962, its terrorists bombed the Quai d'Orsay, the newspapers France-Soir and Figaro, the apartment of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the home of André Malraux, among their many targets. Neither Sartre nor Malraux was hurt, but at the latter's home a small girl playing with her dolls was partially blinded and badly cut about the face by flying glass, an incident that helped produce a general revulsion against the OAS. The OAS

sent threatening letters to many people in an effort to extort funds: Brigitte Bardot received one demanding five million francs and turned it over to L'Express with a declaration that she was not going to go along because she did not want to live in "a Nazi country."^[58]

In September 1961 the OAS made a spectacular but unsuccessful effort to kill de Gaulle by exploding a mine beside the road as his car passed en route from Paris to his home at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and in August 1962 an OAS band led by a renegade colonel shot up a car in which de Gaulle and his wife were traveling, but once again the effort faided.^[59] His wife having been so endangered, de Gaulle was enraged and ordered an all-out campaign to eliminate the OAS—an objective that was achieved before another year had passed.^[60] In the eyes of many, de Gaulle had saved France from civil war. He had also kept the pledge implicit in his answer to a newsman shortly before assuming office. "Is it credible," he had demanded, "that I am going to begin a career as dictator at the age of sixty-seven?"^[61]

The Philippine Insurrection, as the first of two wars of the third kind fought by the United States in this century, was a modest affair as compared to the second, the war in Vietnam. The numbers of U.S. troops involved were only about a tenth as large, the conflict was not nearly as long, and it ended in the suppression of the insurrection. In addition, geography tended to limit the one, conducted as it was in an archipelago, and to invite the expansion of the other from the portion of the peninsula on which it had begun. The Philippine Insurrection was, save for a brief initial period, a war between guerrillas and regular troops, whereas the Vietnam War tended, as time went by, to assume the aspect of a conventional war. Nevertheless, each has something to tell us about the bearing of secrecy on the conduct of wars of the third kind and about the relationship between involvement in such conflicts and the health of a democratic polity.

The Philippine Insurrection was fought in circumstances that enabled official Washington to go far toward putting a good face on bad situations, or in hiding them entirely from public

view. It was fought in a distant land, where there were virtually no resident Americans, and in a time when the channels through which news could reach the United States were limited to cables and the mail. At home, successive administrations were headed by men—William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft—whose personal involvement in bringing the Philippines under the American flag came early and whose party and personal ties with one another were exceptionally close. As assistant secretary of the navy during McKinley's first term, Roosevelt had arranged to have Admiral George Dewey's squadron sent to the Far East, in anticipation of war with Spain, with the consequence that it was on hand to destroy the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay within days after the declaration of war. McKinley had made the decision to acquire the archipelago from Spain, and Taft had gone there little more than a year after the insurrection had begun, first as the head of a Philippine Commission and later as the first civilian governor. Roosevelt, succeeding McKinley, appointed Taft to his cabinet as secretary of war, a position that included responsibility for insular affairs. Roosevelt also groomed Taft to succeed him as president. Thus all were inhibited from dealing frankly with the American people in matters any one of them might find embarrassing.

In the early months of the Philippine Insurrection, General Elwell S. Otis, the American commander, sent home a series of overly optimistic reports, which the McKinley administration made available to the press. In Manila Otis's censor, to prevent American correspondents from sending reports that contradicted the picture he was presenting, cut or altered statements of fact on the grounds that "they would alarm the people at home," or "have the people of the United States by the ears." By July 1899 the dozen American correspondents on the scene, unwilling longer to be party to this deception, prepared a joint despatch setting forth the situation as they saw it, and a small group representing the others obtained an interview with Otis. In the course of the interview, a stormy one lasting four hours, he refused to pass the despatch and threatened to "put them off the island." Thereafter they signed the despatch and mailed it to Hong Kong, to be cabled home from there.^[62]

In a separate despatch, the representative of the Associated

Press reported having the censor tell him: "My instructions are to let nothing go out that can hurt the administration." In June, the correspondent reported, he had tried to file a despatch saying that reinforcements were needed, only to have the censor confide: "Of course we all know that we are in a terrible mess out here, but we don't want the people to get excited about it. If you fellows will only keep quiet we will pull through in time without any fuss at home." The assumption was that Otis was intent on avoiding embarrassment to McKinley's 1900 campaign for reelection, in which the acquisition of the Philippines was bound to be an issue.^[63] But the refusal to pass a despatch expressing the opinion that American troop strength was insufficient suggested that Otis was withholding important information not only from the American people, but from the War Department as well. In 1898 he had estimated that in the event of hostilities, he would need thirty thousand men to occupy the archipelago, and he now stood by that figure despite the fact that his forces were not large enough to garrison the towns he had taken, much less for also conducting offensive operations.^[64]

In the United States the publication of the despatches on 17 July 1899 created a great sensation and sharpened public debate between the defenders of the administration's Philippines policy and its critics. They also led to the resignation of Secretary of War Russell A. Alger and his replacement by Elihu Root. On 12 August, at his request, the War Department asked General Otis to report what force he considered would undoubtedly be adequate for the complete suppression of the insurrection during the dry season then approaching. Otis was to consult his general officers before replying, and was told that the secretary, bearing in mind that public impatience might affect legislative provision for the conduct of the war, would prefer to send too many troops rather than too few. Having been urged, Otis admitted that he would need to double his force to sixty thousand men. This figure was only slightly smaller than the total number of men in the regular army, which had been set at a maximum of sixty-five thousand, and to meet Otis's request the War Department issued orders for the enlistment of ten more regiments of volunteers.^[65]

After this disastrous affair, Otis supposedly terminated cen-

sorship, but in actuality merely appointed a new censor and became increasingly arbitrary. In Washington, as secretary of war, Elihu Root acted in much the same spirit, pigeonholing reports that contained embarrassing information and assuring the public that all complaints coming out of the Philippines were being made the subject of prompt investigation.^[66] However, censorship in Manila and official cover-up in Washington did not prevent the involvement in the Philippines from becoming a bitter source of contention. Opponents founded and promoted an Anti-Imperialist League, which eventually had half a million members, including such well-known figures as ex-presidents Harrison and Cleveland, Republican Senator George Hoar, Andrew Carnegie, Jane Addams, John Dewey, and Mark Twain. Among its activities, it carried on a controversial program designed to discourage young men from enlisting, and its people found themselves being called "traitors" and "copper-heads." One of its pamphlets, entitled The Cost of a National Crime, was ordered printed by the Senate as a public document, but copies sent to regiments being held in the Philippines despite the expiration of their terms of enlistment were removed from the Philippines pouch in the San Francisco post office. When this tampering with the mails became known, a further uproar followed.^[67]

Back in the Philippines, the doubling of his force that Otis had expected to suffice had not enabled him to suppress the insurrection during the dry season to which Root had referred. Indeed, resistance continued through the remainder of the McKinley presidency. In the autumn of 1901, when McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt succeeded him, the war was still going on and the American people had become tired of it. In dealing with that problem, Roosevelt acted in characteristic fashion: on 4 July 1902 he terminated military rule over the Philippines and issued a proclamation of peace and amnesty whereby the insurrection was officially ended.^[68]

In some regions, however, resistance still continued, and this was notably so on the island of Samar. In conducting the pacification of Samar, General Jacob Smith had ordered his troops to kill every Filipino male above the age of ten and to convert the island into a "howling wilderness."^[69] In attempting to carry out

his orders, they destroyed the fabric of social order but did not succeed in ending resistance. By 1904 it became evident that widespread outlawry on Samar called for the institution there of martial law. However, Roosevelt was that year a candidate for reelection, and the institution of martial law was postponed in order not to embarrass his campaign by calling attention to the fact that the insurrection he had declared ended two years earlier was still continuing.^[70]

Writing during the administration of President Taft, and from the perspective of one who had served in the Philippines first as an officer of the U.S. Volunteers and then as a U.S. district judge, James E. Blount declared: "No administration has ever yet during the last fourteen years been in a position to be frank with the Senate and the country concerning the situation at any given time in the Philippines, because at any given time there was always so much that it could not afford to reopen and explain."^[71] Conceding that Elihu Root had been an extraordinarily effective secretary of war, Blount nevertheless observed: "The splendor of Mr. Root's intellect is positively alluring, but he is a dangerous man for republican institutions ... because he is of the type who are constantly finding situations they consider it best for people not to know about."^[72] All of the men concerned, he conceded, "were personally men of high type." Nevertheless, he continued, "loyalty to the original ill-considered decision became impregnated, in their case, with a fervor not entirely unlike religious fanaticism, and belief in it became a matter of principle, justifying all they had done, and guiding all they might thereafter do."^[73]

In March 1968 President Lyndon B. Johnson, in his quest for victory in Vietnam, found himself at a dead end. General Westmoreland had asked to have another two hundred thousand men sent to reinforce the half million already there. However, the generals in the Pentagon could give the secretary of defense no assurance that the additional troops—or, indeed, any particular number—would suffice to bring the struggle in Vietnam to a successful conclusion. Nevertheless, General Earle G. Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had rejected suggestions for a change of strategy. Both he and Gen-

eral Maxwell D. Taylor, his predecessor and now a White House consultant, were urging the politically unpalatable measure of calling up the reserves. In his perplexity President Johnson sought the counsels of members of his Senior Informal Advisory Council, more commonly known as the Wise Men. Most of these men, almost all of them former incumbents of high position who were no longer in office, had until then been supporters of the government's Vietnam policy. But now, against the background of their own recognition of the extent to which the Vietnam involvement was opening divisions within American society and on the basis of a series of official briefings and discussions among themselves, almost all felt that some action had to be taken to reduce the American involvement and to find a way out.^[74] This was the context, it may be remembered, of President Johnson's announced decisions of 31 March 1968 to deescalate the bombing of North Vietnam, to move toward peace through negotiations, and to leave office at the end of his term rather than to seek reelection.^[75]

About two and a half years after leaving office—at a time when antiwar demonstrations in the United States were at their height—Lyndon Johnson was described as feeling that failure to impose censorship had been a mistake.^[76] In 1979, four years after the war in Vietnam had ended, a similar remark was attributed to Dean Rusk, who had perhaps been Johnson's closest advisor. "If another war like Vietnam comes up," he is reported to have said, "the leaders and the Congress should take a hard look at censorship, such as we had in World War II."^[77] However, neither was quoted as explaining what course of action he believed the United States could have pursued to a successful conclusion but for the failure to institute censorship.

Upon assuming office as secretary of defense, a few weeks before President Johnson announced his decision not to run again, Clark Clifford asked his military advisers whether the war could be ended by the continuing bombing of North Vietnam. They replied that, by itself, it could not: the United States had already dropped a heavier tonnage of bombs there than in all theaters during World War II. He then asked what plan there was for achieving victory, and was told there was none. There was none because the president had forbidden them to invade

North Vietnam lest the Chinese intervene or to pursue the enemy into Laos and Cambodia, because to do so would widen the war geographically and politically.^[78]

The People's Republic of China had responded to the U.S. buildup in Vietnam of half a million men, and to the campaign of bombing against North Vietnam, with a series of measures that included sending fifty thousand troops of the People's Liberation Army into North Vietnam. As a token of readiness to engage the United States, should it attempt to conquer North Vietnam, this buildup was a reminder of the Chinese entry into the Korean War that had followed upon the approach of U.S. forces to China's border with North Korea.^[79] As Lyndon Johnson's successor in the presidency, Richard Nixon proved no more anxious to carry the ground war to North Vietnam than his predecessor. However, he did carry the war to Cambodia, insofar as possible under conditions of secrecy that censorship could hardly have improved upon, and to Laos as well.

In keeping with President Nixon's Vietnamization policy, U.S. troops were to be withdrawn as South Vietnamese forces gained the capability to take their place. In the event, it proved not to be practicable to keep U.S. forces in Vietnam as long as that would have required. Indeed, it may have been realized at the start that this would be so, and in the interest of improving the prospects of Vietnamization, the United States quickly began extending the war to Cambodia.

On 15 March 1969 President Nixon authorized the Joint Chiefs of Staff to begin the bombing by B-52 aircraft of twelve areas of Cambodia neighboring South Vietnam that had been identified as sanctuaries for Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops.^[80] In order to keep knowledge of this bombing campaign from the people, the press, and the Congress, a dual reporting system was put into effect. The usual system of reporting to the command and control system of the Strategic Air Command was continued, but with the raids falsely reported as having been conducted against objectives in Vietnam. It was only in the second and highly secret set of reports that the true targets were given. Some officers were upset about the requirement to submit false reports, which was a court martial offense, but it was not until four years later that one of them was

to reveal the secret by writing a congressional committee to complain.^[81]

On 9 May 1969 the New York Times carried a report by William Beecher on the first of the raids on Cambodia. He had produced the report on the basis of stray bits of information, picked up in the Pentagon and at the White House, and evaluated against a background of personal knowledge that there were no targets of consequence in the area of Vietnam that supposedly had been bombed. The report failed to arouse public or congressional interest, but in the White House it gave rise to misapprehensions that someone had been guilty of a deliberate leak. In the hope of identifying the culprit, wiretaps were placed on the phones of three members of the White House staff, seven members of the staff of the National Security Council, and a number of newsmen, and were kept in place for periods of upward of two years.^[82]

In the spring of 1970, despite the U.S. bombing campaign, which had been conducted for almost a year, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces remained across the border in Cambodia and within striking distance of Saigon. It was considered unsafe, in the circumstances, to continue the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, and in April U.S. and South Vietnamese troops mounted spoiling operations against the occupants of the sanctuaries, operations they pushed in as far as the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The invading forces inflicted thousands of casualties and captured enormous quantities of weapons and supplies; they also brought the ground war and disaster to Cambodia. Its leader Lon Nol, not realizing that U.S. forces were not to remain beyond the end of June, made it known to the Vietnamese Communists that their use of Cambodian sanctuaries would no longer be tolerated.^[83] The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, in need of all the help they could get, made common cause with the Khmer Rouge—Cambodian communist guerrillas with whom they had until then had a relationship characterized by mutual suspicion. Fighting soon spread throughout the Cambodian countryside, and in June General Abrams cabled the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Vietnamization would have to be slowed down and South Vietnamese forces allowed to remain in Cambodia for

some weeks longer than intended to prevent that country from falling to the Communists. In Washington, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird complained that South Vietnamese troops were wandering all over Cambodia protecting that country while U.S. troops in turn were in South Vietnam protecting the Vietnamese.^[84] Indeed, as late as September there were twenty-one battalions of South Vietnamese troops in Cambodia, and a major part of the South Vietnamese air force was committed to their support.^[85]

In the United States the invasion of Cambodia, undertaken without consultation with the Congress and coming as a surprise to the American people, set off antiwar protests across the country. Students on the campuses were in an uproar, and after a number of them were killed and wounded by National Guardsmen at Kent State University, a huge antiwar demonstration was staged in Washington itself. President Nixon would not believe that the antiwar demonstrations were wholly spontaneous and called upon his intelligence people to uncover the agents of Communist countries who must be responsible.^[86] Nixon also approved a plan by Thomas Charles Huston, a member of the White House staff, under which the intelligence agencies of the federal government would have resorted to mail intercepts, burglaries, and other illegal measures, but it was not put into effect because of the objections of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John N. Mitchell.^[87]

In February 1971, there having been another North Vietnamese and Viet Cong supply buildup across South Vietnam's border, this time in Laos, another cross-border operation was mounted. It was conducted by two South Vietnamese divisions with U.S. air support. As a spoiling operation it achieved a modicum of success, but at the cost of a South Vietnamese casualty rate of nearly 50 percent. During this operation American pilots flew 160,000 sorties, during which 107 helicopters were lost to enemy fire, a loss rate of 60 percent.^[88] In a television speech of 7 April, President Nixon described the performance of the participating South Vietnamese forces as evidence that Vietnamization had succeeded. However, the invasion of Laos was attended by a renewal of public protests, often with returned veterans in the lead, and in the latter part of April

some two hundred thousand protesters took part in one of Washington's biggest antiwar rallies.^[89]

On 13 June the New York Times began the publication of the Pentagon Papers . Though the study's seven thousand pages of secret documents related to the conduct of the war during the Johnson administration, President Nixon and his aides saw its publication as a security breach that might be followed by the revelation of secrets of their own that they were anxious to protect, and as itself an act of protest against the war. Morton Halperin, who had served on the National Security Council in the early years of the Nixon administration, and Leslie H. Gelb, a former director of the Pentagon's policy planning staff, were reported to be working at the Brookings Institution on a study of the Vietnam War, assertedly with the benefit of government documents that they had retained upon leaving office, and there was no telling what secrets they might reveal.^[90]

Such was the background for the creation in the White House itself of the Special Investigations Unit, more commonly referred to as "the plumbers" because its primary task was to be the stopping of leaks, which intended to use means that included those contemplated under the discarded Huston plan of the previous year. Nixon wanted the files of Gelb and Halperin to be retrieved and brought to the White House. A little earlier the plumbers had made a successful break-in at the office of a psychiatrist in search of confidential information that might be used, it was hoped, in efforts to discredit Daniel Ellsberg. Now a plan was worked out under which the Brookings Institution was to be firebombed and the papers retrieved during the resultant confusion. This plan was rejected as too risky, and no alternative was put into effect while the plumbers were still in business. It was, of course, the bungled break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, as a fouling of the well of American electoral politics, that was their and Nixon's undoing. Nevertheless, H. R. Haldeman was undoubtedly correct when he declared that the Vietnam War "destroyed Nixon as completely as it shattered President Johnson."^[91]

The foregoing examples illustrate the validity of assertions advanced at the beginning of this chapter: that inability to bring

wars of the third kind to a successful conclusion is likely to cause the leaders of great powers to extend their geographic scope and thus to enlarge the wars themselves; that such wars, especially when so extended, can lead to military disaster; and that they can undermine the state polities of countries that embark upon them. In the example of Japan, the military having suppressed all civilian dissent, extension of the war ended both in military defeat and in the destruction of their regime. During the Algerian war for independence, the extension of hostilities to Egypt proved to be an embarrassing mistake, while the long and unsuccessful effort to hold Algeria destroyed the Fourth Republic and endangered the Fifth Republic that succeeded it. The Philippine Insurrection demonstrated that even a relatively short war of the third kind can create bitter divisions within the country that carries it on, and that censorship can deprive a government itself of important information. Finally, the danger to constitutional rule, seen as flowing from the governmental secrecy that attended counterinsurgency in the Philippines, emerged unmistakably during the latter years of the Vietnam War. It was that secrecy, or more particularly the methods used in efforts to maintain it, that led the House Judiciary Committee to pass against Richard Nixon three articles of impeachment, in one of which he was charged with abusing his power and repeatedly violating the rights of citizens, rights set forth in the Constitution he had sworn to uphold and defend.^[92]