Treaty Organisation. In 1959 the United States backed the Dap Choun coup to overthrow Sihanouk. The aim of this particular manoeuvre was to dismember Cambodia and create a new state in alliance "aid' programme. When this was rejected in 1963 it created a crisis which led to the severing of dip. lomatic relations between Cambodia and the United States. Finally in 1966 the Americans thought about suppressing the left. It appears likely that President Johnson contemplated invading Cambo Phnom Penh. The country which the Americans decided to dismember has instead become the weak Exit stage right - Lon and weeping wife Ten years and $144,000 million after the first open contingents of United States troops landed in Vietnam the American puppets are collapsing in indochina. Lon Nol has gone on his "extended rest-cure." Thieu spends his time skulking between the front and his headquarters wondering whether it will be his own generals or the PRG who get him first.
It is indeed poetic justice that Cambodia should be the first country to fall to the Indochinese liberation forces. As long ago as the early 1950s the United States was trying to install a reliable pro-American government in Phnom Penh. As early as 1956 a Thai South Vietnamese economic blockade was imposed on the country to try to force it into the Americans' South-East Asia with the southern part of Laos and its then puppet ruler Prince Buon Oum.
Following the failure of this plot, the Americans then attempted to subvert Cambodia through an they had got what they wanted. Pro-American elements engineered a majority in the National Assembly, while Sihanouk remained head of state, and the new government under Lon Noi set dia to support Lon Nol even then.
For a variety of reasons, notably fear of the spread of the armed resistance which had started in 1967 and the hope that Sihanouk could be persuaded to come out openly for the Americans, the US held back. Sihanouk, however, continued to vacillate and accused Lon Nol of planning an Indonesian-type massacre of Communists. Finally, therefore, the ClA organised the 1970 coup against Sihanouk and gave the signal for the US/South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia It was this coup which set off the train of events leading to the isolation and inevitable fall of link of the Indochinese revolution. The fall of Phnom Penh will resound through Saigon. Thieu's "extended rest-cure' will not be long delayed.