page_title: Operation Menu
section_title: Aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Operation Menu / Aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: An aerial view of the Bomb crater in Kandal Province, Cambodia. In the 1970s, the US government ordered bombings in Cambodia and Vietnam.
context_page_description: Operation Menu was a covert United States Strategic Air Command tactical bombing campaign conducted in eastern Cambodia from 18 March 1969 until 26 May 1970 as part of both the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. The targets of these attacks were sanctuaries and Base Areas of the People's Army of Vietnam and forces of the Viet Cong, which utilized them for resupply, training, and resting between campaigns across the border in the Republic of Vietnam. The impact of the bombing campaign on the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the PAVN, and Cambodian civilians in the bombed areas is disputed by historians.
  An official United States Air Force record of U.S. bombing activity over Indochina from 1964 to 1973 was declassified by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2000. The report gives details of the extent of the bombing of Cambodia, as well as of Laos and Vietnam. According to the data, the Air Force began bombing the rural regions of Cambodia along its South Vietnam border in 1965 under the Johnson administration; this was four years earlier than previously believed. The Menu bombings were an escalation of what had previously been tactical air attacks.
context_section_description: 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 consequences of U.S. bombing of Cambodia, positive and negative, are still widely debated by participants and scholars.  As for preventing further PAVN/VC offensives, they failed. In May 1969, PAVN/VC launched an offensive similar in size to that of the May 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.
  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. In response, the prince quickly aligned himself with the Khmer Rouge; this was a major boon to the communist insurgents, whose movement "started growing as on yeast." On 29 March 1970, the PAVN launched an offensive against the Khmer National Armed Forces, with documents uncovered after 1991 from the Soviet archives revealing that the invasion was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge following negotiations with Nuon Chea. Historian Jussi Hanhimäki writes that "the MENU operations pushed the North Vietnamese forces...in east Cambodia westward. American bombers followed suit." 
  Author William Shawcross and other commentors asserted that the "Khmer Rouge were born out of the inferno that American policy did much to create" and that Sihanouk's "collaboration with both powers [the United States and North Vietnam] ... was intended to save his people by confining the conflict to the border regions.  It was American policy that engulfed the nation in war."
  Shawcross was challenged by former Kissinger aide 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.
  Kissinger in an interview with Theo Sommer defended the bombing, saying:
  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...
  The simultaneous rise of the Khmer Rouge and the increase in area and intensity of U.S. bombing between 1969 and 1973 has incited speculation as to the relationship between the two events.  Ben Kiernan, Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, said the following:
  Apart from the large human toll, perhaps the most powerful and direct impact of the bombing was the political backlash it caused ... The CIA's Directorate of Operations, after investi
caption: An aerial view of bomb craters in Cambodia
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