Today, in a speech at a VFW hall in Kansas City, George W. Bush reiterated another fundamentally dishonest justification for the continued disaster in Iraq. It is a perspective that has been percolating in the mainstream media and evinced by right wingers ranging from Ben Stein to Dr. Laura. That when the US withdrew from Southeast Asia, millions of people perished as a direct result. We must therefore stay in Iraq to avoid the same outcome. Other diarists have already discussed the Vietnamese government's successful defeat of the Khmer Rouge and the general fallacy of most neocon arguments concerning our withdrawal but they did not discuss how the Khmer Rouge came to power to begin with.
If the Bush administration has mastered one thing it is the concept that its base must be able to grasp and use very simplistic concepts when analyzing events. Thus we have been presented with numerous "bumper sticker" fragments that ultimately turned out to be dishonest or absurd. "Saddam was behind 9/11", "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction", "We're spreading democracy", "Iraq is now better off without Saddam", "We have to fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here," and "the surge is working".
This comparison to Vietnam and American involvement in Southeast Asia is nothing more than a similar attempt to dumb down this discussion and give the Bush administration another argument to distract Americans from the obvious. Today George W. Bush said:
"In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution."
All true and in fact the Khmer Rouge would continue to murder upwards of two million people until Vietnam interceded. But what George Bush and his neocon buddies leave out is that the Khmer Rouge did not seize power because America left Southeast Asia, they achieved victory as a RESULT of the policies of the Nixon administration. To recount the events of the Cambodian Civil War would take hours but in a nutshell here's what Nixon and Kissinger did:
Perceiving the longtime and popular monarch of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, as sympathetic to the Communists, the CIA, in 1972, engineered a military coup and installed a chap named Lon Nol as the new prime minister of Cambodia. On top of this, the US military, in an attempt to repel North Vietnamese and Viet Cong from their Cambodian sanctuary, dropped more armaments on Cambodia then THEY USED ON JAPAN FOR THE ENTIRETY OF WORLD WAR II. These two fundamental intercessions destablilized the Lon Nol regime to the point
where the formally divided country became unified behind the Khmer Rouge, allowing them to achieve victory and enter Phnom Penh. You can read about this here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Once, we pulled out of Vietnam the US Government couldn't have given a good goddamn about the "killing fields". Cambodia suffered the same fate as those used and discarded in Vietnam. In fact, the inhabitants of the "reeducation camps" that Bush invoked today were the CIA contacts and ARVN military that the US government hastily threw to the wolves once this episode of the Cold War concluded.
True, the immediate aftermath of our withdrawal from Vietnam was not pretty. Neither was Sherman's March to the Sea. Today, Vietnam is one of the most prosperous and thriving countries in southeast Asia despite American attempts to join the British, French, Japanese and Chinese in a three hundred year conflict to deny this country its national identity.
To put over a big lie, you need big numbers. Even a fanatic would have to admit that the Vietnamese government settled scores with a group of people that numbered in the thousands. But when you incorporate the Khmer Rouge, you get to invoke millions of people dying in another illogical explanation for endless war and suffering. Neat, how these guys think, especially when you lose the half a million Iraqis already killed and the total fragmentation of a stable national entity. Unfortunately, as in all arguments put forth by these folks, any analysis of even basic facts don't support this strange and twisted methodology.