Charles Jannuzi wrote:
> That got a lot of US and UN support, didn't it?
Then Carrol C:
>Not accurate, but I don't remember the details well enough to make >the
correction. I think China & the U.S. agreed on condemning >Vietnam
Uhh, I was being facetious.
Then Lou P:
>I think he was being facetious ...
Spot on Lou.
Then DDR (who started the subthread):
>The UN cottoned on after, oh, ten years or so, and finally stepped >in to
supervise elections in the early 1990s. Vietnam paid a hefty >price: years
of guerilla war with Khmer Rouge splinter groups, plus >a Chinese invasion
in 1979. But millions of lives were saved.
In fact, US support for the Khmer Rouge (who were never communists in any sense I could understand, but did practice some bizarre form of day zero Maoism) is detailed in John Pilger's "The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot". This is why Madeline Dimwit and others would rather wait around for all the KR to die off rather than see them tried like Slobodan M. However, perhaps a lot of this was never that secret afterall, since I well remember digging like a gopher into the deep pages of the NYT and WSJ (where all the foreign coverage gets lost) getting info. and official statements of support for the KR against Viet militarism, hegemony and totalitarianism (irony kicking in there, please read generously).
Excerpts from it follow (thanks to Grover Furr's page on the www http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html):
"The US not only helped to create conditions that brought Cambodia's Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, but actively supported the genocidal force, politically and financially. By January 1980, the US was secretly funding Pol Pot's exiled forces on the Thai border. The extent of this support -- $85 million from 1980-86 -- was revealed 6 years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation."
"In 1981, Pres. Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. The US", he added, "winked publicly" as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge(KR) through Thailand."
"In 1980, under US pressure, the World Food Program handed over food worth $12 million to the Thai Army to pass on to the KR. According to former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke,'20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerrillas benefited. This aid helped restore the KR to a fighting force, based in Thailand, from which it destabilized Cambodia for more than a decade.'"
"In 1982, the US and China, supported by Singapore, invented the Coalition
of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was, as Ben Kiernan pointed
out, neither a coalition, nor democratic, nor a government, not in
Kampuchea. Rather, it was what the CIA calls a 'master illusion.' ...
Cambodia's former ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was appointed its head;
otherwise little changed. The KR dominated the two "non-communist" members,
the Sihanoukists and the Khmer Peoples' National Liberation Front (KPNLF).
>From his office at the UN, Pol Pot's ambassador, the urbane Thereon Parish,
continued to speak for Cambodia. A close associate of Pol Pot, he had in
1975 called on Khmer expatriates to return home, whereupon many of them
disappeared."
Hmmm...some lessons in state-building for the US, UK, and Pakistan here?
Charles Jannuzi