To paraphrase the Great Philosopher, sometimes you have to accept the genocide you get rather than the genocide you had hoped for.

But, wait..... Are you saying that we needed to bomb Cambodia EVEN HARDER in order to stop the genocide that we started by bombing the holy freaking bejeesus out of that country in the first place? Are you secretly a liberal hawk too?

I think Rumsfeld explained it a couple of years ago: you have to keep killing 'em 'til they get tired of being killed and smartened up. That's the best way to prevent genocides and various other bad things.

Bombing Iraq into the stone age didn't work, maybe bombing Iran into the Nuclear Age will.

Curtis LeMay once gave this guideline for winning a war" "You kill enough of them, they'll stop." Now, that worked with Germans in WWII. The Red Army and the Allied armies and bombing stopped them.
What were the Cambodians doing that had to be stopped? The Iraqis?
Now, the Iranians are building a "nucular" facility. That's got to be stopped. (Why? Go to the back of the class.) The LeMay principle at work.
But, who's gonna stop us? The "people" don't like the way this war is "being handled." It's all a matter of management skills.
Peru will be done better! We at Halliburton look ahead to the challenge of rebuilding Lima.

He told us he supported the Bush/Iraq war because 9/11 was a wake-up call and it was inconceivable to him that the Bush administration would lie the United States into an invasion.

This person lived through Vietnam, Watergate and Iran-Contra, but he couldn't imagine that Bush would lie us into a war? He's hopeless.

No wonder America keeps losing it's "innocence" (e.g. at Pearl Harbor, in Vietnam, on 9/11). Most of us are brain dead.

It seems to me that the liberal hawk is intellectually lazy. He found it easier to believe that Bush and his administration would not lie to us about entering a war in Iraq. He found it easier to believe the propaganda peddled in the major news media including the New York Times and the Washington Post, supposedly the best newspapers in the country, during the build up to war. If something sounds preposterous it probably is and I think a lot of people found it preposterous that Iraq was a threat to America. America still has Vietnam on the brain because we seem to have never gotten over the defeat of that war. Not long ago I watched a program about present day Vietnam, the people there were friendly to Americans, they did not bear any grudges and in fact said that that war was just one more invasion in a long history of invasions and life goes on. Vietnam has already moved on while apparently for some Americans it is the bogy many hiding under the bed or the closet waiting for a manipulator like Bush to use it to divide the country and get what he wants namely power and money. Bush's claims were extraordinary and as someone once said extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs and a couple of empty trailers and some aluminum tubes hardly constitute extraordinary proof. When someone tells us we need to go war the last thing we should be is intellectually lazy yet that is what is happening all over again with Iran. China, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea, India all have the bomb yet we don't hear the war hawks beating the war drums for these countries, they are beating the war drums for the perceived weakest target that being Iran.

how come you of all people were right about Iraq but the most respected, most experienced, most intelligent, most serious thinkers in the United States got it wrong?

Tristero's response is a nice line, but I would have been more likely to reply: "Your question is based on an astonishingly daft premise."

What's more, the rest of the world knew more than they'd like to admit to about what was happening. The State dept had a "Cambodia observer" (or something) in the embassy in Bangkok, who was filing reports of atrocities based on first-hand accounts, throughout 1978 and '79. But everyone stood by and let it continue, until the Vietnamese eventually got sick of the border incursions.

Meaning that just like in Iraq, the US gov't didn't ever give a krap about the people in Cambodia. In Iraq there are billions of barrels of reasons to invade despite not caring what a despot does, but in Cambodia there weren't.

Vietnam is a country, not a war. it's nice to remember that every now and then.

:)

The reason the Vietnamese 'got over' what they call 'The American War' is that they won, of course. I guess Americans don't obsess over the invasion of Panama very much for exactly the same reason.

So the US bombing of Cambodia between 1969-73 triggered the KR genocide? Forsan, non forsan. There's a lot of "misremembering" out there about the Vietnam War, particularly with people who only experienced it through television. Wild claims have been made about this bombing, like it was a sort of mini-genocide that preceeded the very real KR genocide, but I don't buy it. We bombed the eastern provinces bordering South Vietnam -- partly agricultural & partly forested, with a relatively low population density. This area, like eastern Laos, was a wholly-owned subsidiary of North Vietnam all the way down to Sihanoukville, hosting the southern portion of the Ho Chi Minh trail. It was a sanctuary, and that's what we bombed. While some Cambodians died more became refugees; this may well have helped destabilize the government, but under Sihanouk it was a pretty rickety edifice to begin with. After Sihanouk was tossed out in 1970 a weak "neutralist" regime became an even weaker pro-American one. The Khmer Rouge had been gaining strength throughout the previous decade with minimal North Vietnamese sponsorship and support. A resentful Sihanouk -- still popular in rural Cambodia -- gave them a real boost by joining forces with them. The collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 was what really put them over the top, so in a sense we _are_ to blame: we made a conscious decision to sit out the final round of the Vietnam War.

It's a complex story, and of questionable relevance to what's happening today in Iraq.

Ralph, with all due respect, I think you would look askance at anyone making a similar argument about actions directed at the U.S.

We killed perhaps 5-10% of the population of Cambodia. Imagine if another country killed 15-30 million Americans. I think we'd get some pretty bizarre political reactions here. And if so, and if someone from the country that bombed us said, "But we only bombed east of the Mississippi, so we really didn't have much to do with the way America went berserk afterwards," I suspect your reaction would be negative.

Also, everything is a complex story. Nothing is exactly the same as anything else. But it's a pretty good rule of thumb that gigantic amounts of violence have many unintended and unpleasant consequences.

I think the most important contribution the US made to the rise of the Khmer Rouge was propaganda. The Lon Nol regime was US-aligned, and the US was bombing the sh*t out of Cambodia, causing tons of people to flee and abandon their homes and stress other areas of the country. (Phnom Penh ballooned up to 1/3 of the country's population.) And then how easy it was for the KR to gain support in opposing Lon Nol and the US imperialists!

Then the next big thing the US did was not intervene despite knowing at least roughly what was happening - my point in my earlier comment. Why care? They didn't have no oil.

A friend from Vietnam said over there, she heard about the war less than twice a year, while here she hears about it twice a day. In this case, she knows less history, though her lack of knowledge might be less destructive than an American with incorrect knowledge. Sophomore, little knowledge dangerous, etc.

Jon, you think we killed somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 Cambodians during our bombing? I don't know of any authoritative number sources, but for comparison purposes we know that 4+ years of Allied bombing of Germany cities (including horrific firebombing) killed around 650,000 or so. Which Cambodian cities did we bomb? The answer is, by and large we didn't bomb any, and I really doubt that bombing the agricultural and forested regions of Cambodia could have produced as many casualties as you cite.