For a nuanced, comprehensive review (221 pages) of Chomsky on Cambodia, as well as other scholars that are more expert specifically on the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia, a reminder of the Senior Thesis of a Cambodian-American, Sophal Ear, here at http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~sophal "The Khmer Rouge Canon, 1975-1979." Thesis advisors were Ben Kiernan, a leftist that has authored a book for Verso on Cambodia in the 80's and written for the academic left, Journal of Contemporary Asia. Also, David Chandler, situated more on the liberal left and Douglas Pike, who most assuredly is not on the Left! (Pike wrote a study for RAND or the Pentagon published by MIT Press, in the mid 60's on the NLF. The first book I ever read by Chomsky , "American Power and the New Mandarins, " from the late 60's had pgs. and pgs. taking apart Pike on the NLF/VC.Still just like another right-winger here, Stephen Morris in, "Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War, " Stanford University Press, " which is based on Vietnamese and Soviet archives, sometimes 'ya gotta use the research of the right and then rework it though a left lens.)
To get back to Chomsky, even though in the second volume of his work with Edward Herman that South End Press published in the late 70's, he said words to the effect that , "Even though in the end the estimates of Khmer Rouge atrocities may approach the higher number of Ponchaud and Lacouture..." the rest of his narrative is unbalanced, relying on Gareth Porter, Hildebrand and Malcolm Caldwell. (Caldwell, btw, died under suspicious circumstances in Phnom Penh in '75. Author of a few books for Monthly Review Press and one from Zed Press on delinking that was on one of my college reading lists, I think in the class I took with Rob McBride, who had been close to the Weather Underground in the early 70's[ he has a brief scene in the documentary about the anti-war movement at Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, "The War At Home." He brought to our class many speakers from Prarie Fire Organizing Committee approved national liberation movements like the FNLC of the Congo.)
Last cite, critical review of the two volume Chomsky-Herman book, by Michael Kazin in Socialist Review, special double issue on American Politics, circa 1980. Focuses on critiquing the propaganda model. Other good pieces in that issue, btw, by David Plotke and Fred Block, if memory serves. Michael Pugliese