Reply With Quote
Never let the facts get in the way of a good "we were stabbed in the back" myth.
It's time to put to bed once and for all the chicken-hawk spin that the domestic Vietnam War peace movement was largely responsible for the inevitable deaths of millions of Cambodians under the Communists and Pol Pot. The current justification the draft-dodger in charge has given for keeping the troops in Iraq.
Fact is, if Nixon hadn't extended the war and pushed the Vietcong into power in Cambodia in the first place, the massacre by the Communists in Cambodia would not have been inevitable...
Bush's "Killing Fields" and the Real Lesson of Vietnam
Posted August 23, 2007 | 01:52 PM (EST)
Read More: Breaking Politics News, Pol Pot, U.S. Congress
Gareth Porter, Huffington PostGeorge Bush's invocation of the "killing fields" in Cambodia to try to bolster his failing argument for an indefinite continuation of the Iraq occupation was a reference to the extreme right's decades-old rant that U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam caused the bloodbath in Pol Pot's Cambodia.
That argument makes a hash of the history of the Vietnam era, but maybe it's a good thing that he has brought it up now. The media and the blogosphere need to go back over how the killing fields actually came about. The fact is, more than three decades after the end of the U.S. military involvement in Indochina, there has still not been a real debate about the relationship between U.S. policy in Vietnam and the human consequences for Cambodia.
The heavy-breathing right-wing crowd has long blamed the anti-war movement, Congress and anyone else who supported the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam for the unnumbered dead in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime. That argument has been used as an ideological cudgel to keep intellectuals and the media in line, so the next time the United States goes to war and it turns sour, they would be afraid to demand an end to it. Now it's time to drive a stake through it once and for all.
What Bush and his extreme right-wing allies don't want Americans to remember is that it was the American war in Vietnam that made the Khmer Rouge such an irresistible power in Cambodia. Before the U.S. ground troops poured into Vietnam in 1965, there was no armed struggle by the Cambodian Communist movement. It was only because of the spillover of the U.S. war between 1965 and 1969 that they were given the opportunity to contest for power.
U.S. B-52 attacks and ground operations against the Viet Cong base areas in South Vietnam pushed the Viet Cong troops across the border into the jungles of Eastern Cambodia. That, in turn, destabilized Cambodia's economy, as the Viet Cong troops purchased an estimated 40 Cambodia's rice exports on the black market. That in turn led the Cambodian military to use force to get rice from peasants at artificially low prices. The Communists in Cambodia quickly took advantage of that situation to launch an armed uprising.
Even after four years of war in Vietnam, however, the Khmer Rouge were far from being able to contest for national power in Cambodia. In 1970, they had an estimated 2,400 to 4,000 guerrillas, few of whom had modern weapons.
This is where the story is full of bitter irony. Had Richard Nixon chosen to negotiate a quick end to the war, the Vietnamese troops would have left Cambodia, Sihanouk probably would have remained in power and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge would probably have remained a footnote to history. Instead, however, Nixon opted for four more years of war, and in order to gain time politically, he invoked the threat of a "bloodbath" in Vietnam if the United States were to withdraw prematurely.
That was a completely phony issue for which Nixon and Kissinger did not have a shred of evidence. But Nixon's decision against peace in Vietnam set in motion another new dynamic that made the postwar massacre in Cambodia inevitable.
When Sihanouk's right-wing opponents ousted him from power in March 1970, it may or may not have been with the explicit encouragement of the Nixon administration. The full story has yet to be written on that question. But Nixon did nothing to try to reverse a process that could only result in Cambodia being completely engulfed in war.
After just two years of extremely heavy bombing by the United States of the vast Khmer Rouge zone of Cambodia, that movement had exploded to some 50,000 troops and was able to go on the offensive. By then, nothing except a massive number of U.S. ground troops in Cambodia indefinitely could have stopped the Khmer Rouge victory.
It was the Nixon's geographical escalation of the Vietnam War itself -- not of the success of the antiwar movement or Congressional fatigue with war - that produced that outcome.
So the real lesson of the Vietnam-Cambodia war is that U.S. elective war is profoundly destabilizing, and that destabilization has a terrible human cost, which may spread beyond the country where the war began.
But there is a further lesson from that war. When Nixon began crying "bloodbath" in 1969 the Vietnam War was already four years old. It was his fateful decision to continue and escalate that war that brought about the Cambodian catastrophe. The longer American wars of occupation are continued, the worse the human and political consequences.
Now history appears to be repeating itself. Once again, after four years of war, a president is crying "bloodbath" even as he appears to be headed toward the geographical escalation of the war. Only this time the escalation will be far more dangerous than was the escalation into Cambodia in 1970.
Never let the facts get in the way of a good "we were stabbed in the back" myth.
I'm not sure it's fair to discount what was then the very real possibility of a bloodbath given the atrocities of previous communist regimes, regardless of Nixon's motives.
Fair enough, but countless numbers of leftists were also killed in South and Central America...
Then you would disagree with the article where it claims that a bloodbath was a completely phony issue without a shred of evidence.
No, I would disagree as to the causes of the bloodbath. The U.S. exacerbated the problem by not ending the war sooner......had Nixon withdrawn a few years earlier, then maybe Pot Pol never comes to power in Cambodia........
The real lesson is that it's three decades later and it still dominates our presidential politics. What else is McCain's campaign built on? It was alive and well in '04, '00, '96, '92, and '88.
Maybe sooner or later the US will get over it.
...maybe, but the comparisons to our current situation in Iraq are undeniable....
I was referring exclusively to Vietnam and the article's reference to a BB being a phony issue. Few would dispute that the VW contributed to destabilization in Cambodia.
There was irony in the fact that the brutal Pol Pot government was extinguished by the very government the US most feared in a post war regime change, the communist Vietnamese.
The 20/20 hindsight and possible revisionist history can be debated at lengthy over that war. Could have, would have, should have… does it really matter now? What should not be denied is the clear correlation to congress defunding the war leading to our pull-out. The after effects were disastrous to those we left behind, and we were winning.
Do we want a repeat in Iraq?
We shouldn't pretend to care about the people of Iraq.
We don't.Was that before or after we got the leader of the country we were "helping" assassinated?we were winning.
Then you would agree with the article where it claims a BB was a completely phony issue?
It's more a matter of causation. The oversimplification is that withdrawal = bloodbath.
Speak for yourself.
Now I uderstand you a bit better...
I am one that does care about them.
So you care about the people of Darfur too? Or do you still not know where it is?
Re-education camps were most likely a compromise by a country that was economically drained and relying heavily on other nations. If no one was watching, I have little doubt that withdrawal would have equaled bloodbath.
True statement...and its mostly lip service when it comes to our own military.
I'm constantly surprised by the comparison's between the Iraq and Vietnam; in the annals of American imperial history there is one example of failed nation-building that is even more stark: the Philippines.
We forget, but they occupied the Philippines with the intent to create a beacon for democracy in an unstable region wracked with "dictatorships" and authoritarian governments. Sounds eerily familiar eh? And if you really want to find another parallel Google "Samar" and the taking of Manila in 1898.
we must destroy the villiage, in order to save it.
"does it really matter now??"
sure it does.
VN was full of lessons, lessons ignored, to all our detriments, by the neo- /PNAC/AEI/Repug guys who didn't fiight in VN and who bullied the US into Iraq for a "regime change", to obtain a new, friendly regime that would was supposed to let US/UK oilcos into Iraqi oil fields.
I remember many years back, it was said we entered Viet Nam to show the soviets we are bold enough to do anything to stop communism. I have no idea if that's what was going on in president Kennedy's mind, but could it be so? Could that be why he santioned regime change obver there?
The regime he helped overthrow was the pro-US regime!
kennedy said his first day in the oval office a WH staffer approached him and asked the pres. "what are we going to do about vietnam"?
kennedy said that was the first time he'd ever heard that word.
if you'll remember, when he took office there about 500 or 600 "advisers" in VN and he immediately increased troops to about 20K.
Diem was not the answer in kennedy's eye. I wonder if Al-Maliki has boned up on American History?
The real lesson of Vietnam is that once we change a regime, we really do own that problem for the long haul. The Bush administration was completely negligent in its planning for the post-invasion occupation and reconstruction.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
