The Third Indochina War
by William S. Turley and Jeffrey Race
https://static.blog4ever.com/2011/03/476705/artfichier_476705_219712_201103114443972.pdf
Mainland Southeast Asia has once again
became a quagmire of conflict. Since December
1978 between 150,000 and 220,000
Vietnamese troops have occupied Cambodia.
Elements of this force have been involved in
small cross-border operations in Thailand
and have on several occasions seemed on the
verge of launching a punitive attack on that
country. The Thai are expanding their armed
forces by a third and are shopping for more
weapons in Washington. Malaysia, Indonesia,
the People's Republic of China (PRC),
and the United States have promised to come
to Thailand's aid if it is attacked.
In February 1979 Beijing invaded northern
Vietnam to punish Hanoi for its invasion
of Cambodia. Although it withdrew its
troops, China has left several hundred thousand
men on Vietnam's border. Hundreds of
thousands of people who have fled their
homes by boat from Vietnam and by land
from Laos and Cambodia are cooped up in
squalid refugee camps in poor and hostile
neighboring countries, waiting for someone
to take them in.
The current turmoil is a resumption of
historic patterns of conflict that colonial rule
forced into abeyance. American withdrawal
from Indochina represented the exit of the
last non-Asian power from the region. Southeast
Asian states are more free now than at
any other time in the last century to deal with
one another without outside interference. The
current conflicts are a complex brew of ancient
ethnic antagonisms, limited conflict for local...