Gareth Porter: Bush's "Killing Fields" and the Real Lesson of Vietnam

[laststeamtrain]

Bush's "Killing Fields" and the Real Lesson of Vietnam
By Gareth Porter

George Bush's invocation of the "killing fields" in Cambodia to try to bolster his failing argument for an indefinite continuation of the Iraq occupation was a reference to the extreme right's decades-old rant that U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam caused the bloodbath in Pol Pot's Cambodia.

That argument makes a hash of the history of the Vietnam era, but maybe it's a good thing that he has brought it up now. The media and the blogosphere need to go back over how the killing fields actually came about. The fact is, more than three decades after the end of the U.S. military involvement in Indochina, there has still not been a real debate about the relationship between U.S. policy in Vietnam and the human consequences for Cambodia.

The heavy-breathing right-wing crowd has long blamed the anti-war movement, Congress and anyone else who supported the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam for the unnumbered dead in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime. That argument has been used as an ideological cudgel to keep intellectuals and the media in line, so the next time the United States goes to war and it turns sour, they would be afraid to demand an end to it. Now it's time to drive a stake through it once and for all.

What Bush and his extreme right-wing allies don't want Americans to remember is that it was the American war in Vietnam that made the Khmer Rouge such an irresistible power in Cambodia. Before the U.S. ground troops poured into Vietnam in 1965, there was no armed struggle by the Cambodian Communist movement. It was only because of the spillover of the U.S. war between 1965 and 1969 that they were given the opportunity to contest for power.

U.S. B-52 attacks and ground operations against the Viet Cong base areas in South Vietnam pushed the Viet Cong troops across the border into the jungles of Eastern Cambodia. That, in turn, destabilized Cambodia's economy, as the Viet Cong troops purchased an estimated 40 Cambodia's rice exports on the black market. That in turn led the Cambodian military to use force to get rice from peasants at artificially low prices. The Communists in Cambodia quickly took advantage of that situation to launch an armed uprising.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-gareth-porter/bushs-killing-fields-a_b_61577.html

[lapfog_1]

1. Glad someone (other than a few people here)

has picked up on that.

Here is my original posting on this from a day ago...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2962369&mesg_id=2962463