On 2012-10-16, at 5:33 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
> Because Shamir is despised, we can put aside the attempt to understand what happened in Cambodia?
>
> (A subject about which Western press and scholarship have hardly distinguished themselves.)
>
> 'At the moment [Feb. 2012] , we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.
>
> 'The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia…
However, it should be noted - in the interest of understanding what happened in Cambodia - that the US stopped bombing the country in 1973, and then supported the seizure of power by the Khmer Rouge in April, 1975. That was the same month the combined forces of the North Vietnamese army and the southern National Liberation Front entered Saigon. For the next two decades the US supported the Khmer Rouge as a foil against the newly united Vietnam - both during the period when the murderously austere Pol Pot regime was in power, and following its overthrow by Vietnamese-supported forces under Hun Sen in 1979 and its subsequent guerrilla campaign against the Kampuchean government. US support for a return to power by the Khmer Rouge was mainly diplomatic, though it encouraged Chinese arms supplies and reportedly channeled some military aid to it through the CIA.
See http://www.yale.edu/cgp/us.html#policy, especially the link at the bottom of the page to an article by B. Kiernan which goes into more detail about the support for the KR by the Carter, Reagan and subsequent administrations.