In a recent post about Kosovo, someone [I can't tell who from the way the
message was composed] wrote the following:
" his argument, bastard stepchild of Gareth Porter's argument that the US
bombing of Cambodia was responsible for the Khmer Rouge, was made during
and immediately after the war by many on the Left as well, Alexander
Cockburn among them."
First, many more scholars than Gareth Porter argued this. Among others
Sidney Schanberg of the NY Times [who won a Pulitzer for his reporting from
Cambodia] and William Shawcross [author of SIDESHOW, still the definitive
work on the topic] argued this forcefully at the time. Since then, the
major scholarly works on Vietnam--including David Chandler, Ben Kiernan,
and Michael Vickery, all show the links between the U.S. bombing and rise
of the Khmer Rouge. This, I'm pretty certain, has also been discussed by
Chomsky [sorry I can't provide the cite right now]. Indeed, I would think
that even "mainstream" [i.e. corporate] journalists and academics now would
concede that the U.S. bombings [150,000 TONS from B-52s in Cambodia alone]
so destroyed the traditional political structure and social fabric of
Cambodia life, and installed a weak puppet govt and deposed the only
unifying force in the nation [Sihanouk], that the Khmer Rouge, formerly a
minority group, were able to emerge and gain power. And, don't forget, it
was the Reagan-Haig-Fitzpatrick foreign policy team that voted to seat Pol
Pot's government in the U.N. because it considered the Cambodian government
in power at the time to be a puppet of Vietnam.
While historical parallels are always shaky, in this case, U.S. policy in
Kosovo does in fact seem similar to Cambodia [I point I made in an article
I wrote amid the bombings in April]. In both cases, the Americans helped
unleash forces which caused greater havoc for the people of those two places.
There are always dangers in making historical analogies before
understanding the history!
Bob Buzzanco
Associate Prof. of History
University of Houston
Department of History
Houston, TX 77204-3785
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http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/buzzanco.htm
713.743.3093
713.743.3216 [fax]
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