Like most Americans, I came here expecting something north of gentle chaffing about our role in the region. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Even in Hanoi, everyone was absurdly friendly to the Americans. Some of this is politeness--why bring ugly history up?--and more may be commercial desire; we buy an awful lot of stuff from them. Nike's operations alone account for nearly 10% of Vietnamese exports, and the Cambodian garment industry is built largely on the special American quotas that have diverted Chinese production here in exchange for higher labor standards. Everyone in the region is intensely interested in learning English.
But it isn't all simple politeness, or need. For some of the people around Ho Chi Minh City, of course, we were the good guys in the war; I spoke to a fair number of people who had relatives who had fled to the States after fighting on the South's side in the war. And in Cambodia, I'm told, Americans poll fantastically well; public approval seems to be in the 80-90% range. Even the older generation seems to think that what we did wrong was not invading, but leaving after we had.
Even the older generation seems to think that what we did wrong was not invading, but leaving after we had.
And illegally carpet bombing Cambodia and killing tens of thousands? That didn't come up?
I think the Cambodians have bigger fish to fry.
In light of Pol Pot's work in Cambodia, it would be hard to argue that leaving was the right thing. I'm sure that those who lived through it would be even more adamant about this than those who lived 12 time zones away.
In any event, for the survivors and their children, by buying their goods (and yes, shipping our jobs over there), we put food on their tables. Cambodia isn't that far removed from dirt-poor poverty.
I blame Bush for this.
And for pro-American governments in Germany, France and eastern europe. It's probably some Cheney-Rove conspiracy.
freddie, I think it was a little case of "meet the new boss worse than the old boss"
The majority of the population in Vietnam doesn't even remember the command economy, much less the war.
I imagine you'd find similar sentiments in the US toward the English after both the revolutionary war and the war of 1812. They were a huge trading partner and a source of vast amounts of investment capital. It doesn't mean we wished that the English had won those wars.
I have a better vision of American foreign policy than a lot of other liberal non-interventionalists. And I'm amenable to readings of the history of the American adventure in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos that are at least sympathetic to some American intentions. But on the specific question of those bombings, I do believe you have to be an "America right or wrong" fanatic to believe they are justifiable. They were enormously damaging to the Cambodian people, illegal both internationally and in America, probably self-defeating in terms of our objectives in the region, and certainly ineffective from an elementary military perspective. It's a major issue and if it isn't a part of mainstream Cambodian perception of the US, I find that discouraging.
As for the larger question of whether or not American occupation is good for a host nation... its a bigger issue than the topic allows, I guess, and I don't want to muddy the waters. I would just caution that while relevant, the opinion of the people of the country in question is not the only or even the most important consideration. The native people can have just as ill-informed or naive opinion about the consequences of foreign occupation as those pushing for invasion internally.
Freddie:
The eastern third of Cambodia was effectively controlled by the NVA at the time, and the NVA was giving harbor to the Khmer Rouge. The NVA may have initially been there with Sihanouk's permission, but I doubt their presence was really welcomed by the locals- you know, the whole occupying foreign power thing. Something that would endanger that presence was probably fairly welcome, even if it did put some of them through hell.
Given the relationship with the Khmer Rouge at the time and what the Khmer Rouge became, I would also imagine that even those who were ok with the NVA presence have a much different view of the bombings now than they did at the time. Certainly, if we had stuck around Cambodia a bit longer than the one brief campaign with ground forces, there's a chance the Khmer Rouge would never have come into power.
Got to admire an old lefty like Freddie, ever ready to assert that that the "illegal" U.S. bombing was much, much worse than the Killing Fields. Why, the Movement assured that the situation in Cambodia would be better after we left, and it can't be that Big Brother was wrong.
We have yet to bring up the ancillary, yet nonetheless important strategy of triangular diplomacy involved in this campaign. By mounting an aggressive offensive in Cambodia, Nixon aimed at normalizing trade between the US and China as well as SALT I.
Who would understand the failure of communism better than those that have lived with it? And the Khmer Rouge were extreme even by communist standards. The Vietnamese and Cambodians that were against the US at the time have had ample opportunity to see that their lives would have been better if the US had stayed and won. They only have to compare South and North Korea.
"In light of Pol Pot's work in Cambodia, it would be hard to argue that leaving was the right thing. "
There was no salvaging the Lon Nol government. We prompted a coup (possibly inadvertantly) that resulted in a government that was supported by only a sliver of the Cambodian people, then invaded to support it. We drove the people who supported the royalists, the majority of the Cambodian population, into the arms of the Khmer Rouge. We would have needed to kill more people than the Khmer Rouge did to win in Cambodia.
Had we not fought in Cambodia at all, the Royalist government would have kept power, supported by the military and the bulk of the Cambodian peasantry.
Had we not fought in Cambodia at all, the Royalist government would have kept power, supported by the military and the bulk of the Cambodian peasantry.
I like the scenario where we stay out of WWI and a millenium of peace results.
Geez - this whole debate could use a little more history and a little less hysterics.
It was, after all, those godless north vietnamese that, you know, actually deposed Pol Pot.
East Asia is a difficult place to understand. And it really cannot be explained, or even understood, using the simple-minded Axis-of-Evil bullshit that passes for thinking in some circles.
"I like the scenario where we stay out of WWI and a millenium of peace results."-Posted by Henry
That's an interesting statement, Henry, betraying incredible ignorance whether taken sarcastically or seriously. That's not easily accomplished.
"We have yet to bring up the ancillary, yet nonetheless important strategy of triangular diplomacy involved in this campaign. By mounting an aggressive offensive in Cambodia, Nixon aimed at normalizing trade between the US and China as well as SALT I. " Posted by Peter
Are you suggesting that Nixon intentionally put the Khmer Rouge into power? I'm willing to accept just about any callumny directed against Nixon, but even I don't believe that!
Got to admire an old lefty like Freddie, ever ready to assert that that the "illegal" U.S. bombing was much, much worse than the Killing Fields.
As you can tell, I'm on the Internet a lot, so I read an awful lot of fallacious and intellectually bankrupt commentary. Let me assure you, though, that this is some of the worst I've seen in some time.
1. I never asserted anything of the kind. Find where I did, quote it, or take your straw man and go home.
2. The comparative "badness" of the Khmer Rouge is a non sequitur. The actions of the United States were either moral or they were not. Carpet bombing civilians, whatever the purpose, is not moral. However good or bad the Khmer Rouge were is immaterial and irrelevant.
3. The carpet bombing was not intended to remove the Khmer Rouge, nor did it fulfill that purpose, so your attempts to make objection to the bombing equal to support for the Khmer Rouge is utterly invalid.
4. When you put illegal in scare quotes, you are of course implying that the bombing was not, in fact, illegal. It was by any definition. The bombings were contrary to the rules of the UN and the Geneva Conventions, both of which the United States are bound to adhere to by our own agreement. Now, if you'd like for us to end our association with that organization and those conventions, say so. But don't pretend that we aren't a part of those things when we are, or that are actions didn't controvert them when we plainly did.
5. As szr pointed out, it was in fact our enemies the NVA that succeeded in deposing Pol Pot. So your simplistic white-hat, black-hat moralizing is revealed for the idiocy it is.
Freddie, I'm encouraged that the Cambodians don't blame current Americans for events that happened almost 40 years ago. While I'd understand if they were still upset, it wouldn't accomplish much and would just be another example of how bad acts in the past lead to more bad acts in the present.
Do you really want to be judged by what previous generations did? Is that reasonable?
If only more people could live in the present and look at what's going on now rather than harboring anger over things that were done before they were born.
EI
Freddie, I'm encouraged that the Cambodians don't blame current Americans for events that happened almost 40 years ago. While I'd understand if they were still upset, it wouldn't accomplish much and would just be another example of how bad acts in the past lead to more bad acts in the present.
In 33 years or so, I'd be interested to ask you if you no longer blamed Al Qaeda for September 11.
No, really, God Fuck America. I mean, if there were a God, anything like the fucking God that Americans pray to, he would be ramming his Godly Rod right down the throats of all those anti-social psychopaths that clamour for less left and more right, less compassion and more selfishness, less Hillary and more Tancredo (he would be one of the first to be buggered). Alas, there is no god, and the Americans are left (right?) to their only devices, which usually means lots of dead civilians. Just ask the Asians, the oriental variety, not the southern dark skinned ones that piss off so many Brits, who may as well be Americans formerly voting for Bush.
Freddie, you don't have to wait. By 1987, very very few Americans gave any thought at all to "blaming" the current Japanese for Pearl Harbor.
If Al Qaeda still exists as a terrorist network, then yes, I would. However, I don't blame current Japanese for Pearl Harbor. I don't blame current Germans for WWII. I don't blame current Russians for the Cold War. Etc... I'm more interested in what the current regimes of those countries are trying to do today. I'm not so worried about what the countries were doing 40 years ago, unless it's part of a pattern that continues today.
I just know that someone is going to jump in and say that the US is just as evil as it was then and that Iraq is just like the carpet bombing of Cambodia 40 years ago. I will ignore that person as a moron.
EI
This is in no way germane to Iraq.
LALALALALALA-I-CANT-HEAR-YOU-LALALALALALALLALA
I agree with EI on this issue.
It actually is very enheartening to think that humans can escape the ideological prison of tribal hatred. Even more surprising than US-Japan relations, consider the strong relationships between France and Germany who, after all, spent the first 50 years of the last century trying to beat each other out of existence.
I do think, in addition, there is value in recognizing the sins of our fathers. It expresses respect for those harmed and makes positive relationships easier going forward.
Njorl,
No, I am not suggesting Nixon put the Khmer Rouge into power. What I said is by no means a direct indictment of that. And I was bringing it up without any particular opinion either way, just that no one's seemed to mentioned that the Vietnam strategy was in fact part of a Chinese/Soviet strategy.
I would agree with both of you, if I thought that the United States had made some sort of quantum leap forward in enacting a moral foreign policy. I'm always confused as to when people think this happened. It has become very, very difficult to argue against the historical accuracy of what is commonly considered an "ultra-leftist" history of American foreign policy, particularly as more and more CIA documents have become declassified. You can actually see pretty clearly how conservative accounts of American foreign policy in the 20th century has shifted from an attitude of denial to an attitude of justification. It's simply become too hard to argue that the United States didn't the things that critics say it has done. The CIA did depose Mossadegh and support the Shah. The CIA did provide the Indonesian military with information and equipment used in the murder of, conservatively, a million Indonesians. The US did do what it is accused of doing in Nicaragua and Panama and Cambodia and Saudi Arabia and Guatemala....
As I said, the arguments have shifted to arguments of justification instead of arguments of denial. And there are arguments to be made. But what I don't understand is how or when it was that US foreign policy suddenly disengaged itself from the business of supporting dictatorships, destabilizing governments, and generally screwing around in other countries affairs with no oversight and little care for the consequences for the people of those countries. After Nicaragua? After our involvement in both sides of the Iraq-Iran war? When? I too believe we all have to move on, but far too often the United States is asking other countries to ignore history while our government repeats it. And if we expect other peoples to forgive our crimes, we had better start from a position of not committing any more.
", just that no one's seemed to mentioned that the Vietnam strategy was in fact part of a Chinese/Soviet strategy."-Posted by Peter
Probably because it wasn't. Supplying the anti-American forces in SE Asia was the last item of cooperation between Russia and China. They recalled ambassadors, cut off relations with eachother's satellites and even shot at each other on the border, but they still cooperated to resist America in Vietnam and Cambodia.
When I visited Vietnam and Cambodia, my impression of why the people there were so warm to Americans had to do with the fact that most of them are Buddhist, not because we buy shit from them.
And in Cambodia, I'm told, Americans poll fantastically well
The Khmer Rouge were responsible for the deaths of perhaps a couple of million Cambodians. Whatever else was true about the US in SE Asia, it clearly disliked the KR and opposed their taking power.
It does not take a lot to look better than Pol Pot.
Since then, Cambodia has been a small country surrounded by much bigger neighbours, which tends to give people a good opinion of powerful, if distant, allies.
If the US did not poll well in Cambodia, I would be astounded.
I think the real disconnect I have is with people for whom "Better than the Khmer Rouge!" is good enough.
"The CIA did provide the Indonesian military with information and equipment used in the murder of, conservatively, a million Indonesians. "
Are you referrring to that business in the sixites, when Suharto ended up in power? Indonesians? It was Chinese who bore the brunt of that massacre, and that kind of a thing is standard data in Southeast asia; no one needs any help or any encouragement when it comes to the Chinese. You may have some naive idea that well, they were Indonesian citizens, and that makes them Indonesian..... No. They were Chinese. And people despised them and hated them for that. As always. End of.
Freddie, all I said was that the Cambodians are likely to have a positive view of the US because it seems to be better for them than so many of the alternatives.
And Megan described the Cambodians as having a positive view of the US.
I am sorry if this means that the survivors of the Killing Fields are not living up to your expectations.
I'm not surprised that a lot of bad stuff happened during the Cold War. We were fighting a clandestine, global war against Russia. Lots of people got caught in the war as proxies, innocent bystanders, etc...
In the process of fighting this war, I'm sure lots of people who were in positions of power with necessarily little oversight (you can't exactly practice espionage in public view) abused their power and did evil things.
I'm also sure that good intentioned people made stupid, ill-informed, or just honestly mistaken decisions that led to bad stuff happening. I'm also sure that some really good decisions led to bad stuff happening that was better than the alternative.
I also know that other countries were actively out there making bad things happen, too. Some of them even hoped to bring down the US and/or conquer other nations and subjugate their people.
I'm not ready to go and second guess the whole Cold War or beat myself up because the US was responsible for this or that bad thing.
At the end of the day, I'm glad we won. I'm sorry that bad stuff was done. I'm willing to bet that the US did less bad stuff than our enemies and probably less bad stuff than other nations with our power would have. I can't prove that, of course.
I'm not interested in apportioning blame so much as I'm interested in seeing how we can continue to try to do the right thing in the future. We won't always succeed. And the anti-war crowd will always condemn any war no matter waht.
I'm happy that Cambodians welcome Americans who visit. Most of those Americans are probably not interested in carpet bombing them or enslaving them or whatever. I think that everyone is better off if we have mutual good relations with Cambodia.
If I meet any Japanese, Russian, Chinese, German, Iraqi, Italian, British, Spanish, Mexican, etc... visitors, I'll try to welcome them and not treat them badly based on whatever their country might have done to my country 10, 50, or 100 years ago. Wouldn't the world be better if everyone tried to do that? Maybe we should celebrate it when it happens instead of treating like some kind of error to be corrected?
EI
Let's take another tack.
Bill Maher likes to talk about Plan Colombia when he discusses American foreign policy and I think it's a good example to use.
So Americans can't stop doing cocaine. The numbers fluctuate, drugs go in and out of style. But we maintain a pretty healthy appetite for cocaine, whether in its powdered form or in crack. Our government doesn't like this. So they use many means to try to stop it. One of those means is Plan Columbia. Among other interventions, Plan Colombia involves doing large scale sprayings of coca-killing pesticides on vast swaths of Colombian farmland. The American helicopters, fueled with gas bought by American money, spray American chemical agents onto Colombian people, under the supervision and direction of the American Drug Enforcement Agency, and sometimes even piloted by Americans. Because we can't stop doing cocaine.
Sadly, while the spray does indeed kill coca plants, it also kills many other kinds of plants, both indigenous and agricultural. It wipes out perfectly legitimate crops. Dirt-poor farmers have their livelihoods destroyed in seconds. The cocaine cartels have the resources to simply pick up and plant somewhere else. The farmers don't.
Worse still, these areas are not merely agricultural. They are surrounded by residential land. The spray travels far. It makes the people in the areas sprayed very sick, particularly the elderly and children. Cancer rates are many times higher than the average. No one knows the long term effects for sure. The short term effects to health and the local ecology has been devastating. Because we can't stop doing cocaine.
And what would Earnest Iconoclasts response be to this? I can't say. But I can look at his carefully measured statement about the literally millions of foreign people killed in service to fighting the Cold War and see a very typical response. American exceptionalism colors every discussion of foreign policy. Would Earnest Iconoclast really have such equanimity if it was his community that had been destroyed by American intervention? If the victims had been his family? His statement is very careful and very reasonable and very safe. But I don't believe for a second that anyone on the other side of the equation would be so "reasonable."
"I'm sorry people got killed but I'm happy we won" is not, to me, a human response to a carpet bombing campaign that killed hundreds of thousands of people whose only crime was living where they did. And yet, somehow, I am regarded as the crazy lefty, as an America hater. I'm sorry but I simply refuse to privilege American interests over the lives and deaths of thousands of innocent people.
Whoops! Guess I'm not serious!
killed hundreds of thousands of people whose only crime was living where they did.
What gets you tagged as an "America hater" is that you seem to think that's a unique description of American actions rather than, with some variation in the numbers, a decent description of every war in history.
The death of innocents for stupid reasons has been a part of the human condition since, well, forever. It's not something the US invented or something the US has to be uniquely or excessively sorry for. Indeed, we've killed far less than some other countries, and often for better reasons. If killing innocents is a reason to criticize or hate America, there are a bunch of countries on the list ahead of us.
That doesn't do much for the dead, I grant. But in passing judgment on American foreign policy, you really ought to place it in proper context, and you really ought to acknowledge that, bad as it has been at times, it has also been better than others'. In this fallen world, that may be the best you can hope to get.
Sarah wrote: When I visited Vietnam and Cambodia, my impression of why the people there were so warm to Americans had to do with the fact that most of them are Buddhist, not because we buy $^&# from them.
A quick statistical check indicates that this view may be true for Cambodia, since the country is overwhelmingly Buddhist; but Vietnam is only about one-tenth Buddhist and primarily areligious otherwise.
I have read that not bearing a grudge is endemic to Vietnamese thinking. Because they've been invaded by *everybody*. China, France, Japan, us. You can't survive long if you're made at everybody.
Interesting to hear the Vietnamese perspective on the war.
From the American POV, though, I think what's most relative is that the war was bad for America.
At the end of the day, a government's first duty is to its own people, and that's the standard it ought to be judged by. By that standard, the Vietnam was was certainly a mistake.
What's heartening about your anecdote of the Vietnamese perspective, though, is that it's a reminder that even the big mistakes need not be be permanent catastrophes. If the Vietnamese, whose country we bombed to pieces, can make their peace and move on, maybe there's hope that Americans can do so as well, instead of making everything a rehashing of the 60s and 70s...
As one person mentioned these are fairly young populations. The median age for Cambodians is a little over 21. From what I've gathered about 85% of the population of Cambodia is under 35.
http://www.nationmaster.com/red/country/cb-cambodia/peo-people&all=1
Vietnam is a bit older of a population, but even then over 75% are apparently above 35.
http://www.nationmaster.com/red/country/vm-vietnam/peo-people&all=1
So most of the people didn't live then. In addition Cambodia hasn't been any form of Communist for many years now so there'd be little reason for the media to keep alive the image of evil capitalist Americans bombing them. The media itself I think is likely less significant as televisions-per-capita is quite low in Cambodia and to a lesser extent Vietnam.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/med_tel_percap-media-televisions-per-capita
In the US TV had a bigger influence on the post-Vietnam generations and those shows were often written by baby-boomers. In addition the generation from that era is, as mentioned, much larger in the US than in Vietnam or Cambodia.
People have to remember that the US under Carter and Reagan post-Vietnamese invasion had a policy of supporting the KR guerrillas in their attempts to topple the Vietnamese-backed puppet government. That is partly why Pol Pot escaped justice and lived so long after the war that he died of old age. We worked with Thailand on this (where some of the worst KR lackies now live the high life) and we did it also to make our new allies in China happy (after all, Pol Pot was more Maoist than Mao and China invaded Vietnam in response to Vietnam invading Cambodia).
"And illegally carpet bombing Cambodia and killing tens of thousands? That didn't come up?
Posted by Freddie | November 16, 2007 1:55 PM"
I have a friend who is living in Cambodia now who is surprised how little it is brought up without anger. He toured one village with an old monk as a guide. The monk pointed out an old hut that was the only building still standing in the village that we didn't bomb out of existence, yet he said this without any anger. Part of this is Buddhist culture and a Cambodian cultural approach to the past and Westerners and part of it is having to do with the fact that Cambodians have just gone through so much shit that eventually they can't be mad at anyone much anymore or they would never have time for anything else. With that said, we shouldn't have bombed the country in the first place, which probably would have prevented the KR from coming to power.
Wow, Outasight! The grooves on this record sill play after 40 years!
Anony-Mouse, I'm a Vietnamese and I could say Sarah is correct about the Buddish population in Vietnam. (Not the part why they are friendly toward western people.) I believe there are about 90% of Vietnamese are Buddish. The statistic you saw is generated/given by the communist government.
brooksfoe-
The majority of the population in Vietnam doesn't even remember the command economy, much less the war.
I wonder why is America different?
After all, the majority of today's black Americans didn't even experience "Jim Crow"- (much less "lynchings" or "slavery")-
Yet... those ideas and their effects are still such a major part of our 'cultural inheritance' that a noose in a Halloween display will be considered 'racist'- (and Sandy Day O'Connor says blacks should get 'extra-credit' for another 22 years).
Generally people remember their ancestor's grudges when it serves a political purpose. Ask any American leftist.
I remember The New York Times suggesting that it was "cultural imperialism" for anyone to suggest that American withdrawal from Cambodia would result in a bloodbath. If the generation that come to power in the Sixties had been running things in the Forties, we would all have near black uniforms with armbands to wear, but at least we would feel good that we had not bombed Germany or dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. The day Vietnam fell I became physically ill because I knew that the Congress had decided to cut off all money with no regard for Vietnamese or Cambodian civilians. Read Bin Laden today. We are sill paying for that breach of faith. Are we supposed to feel better about our betrayal because they now make our running shoes?
Well, giving the choice between what the people who live there say and people posting who know what the correct thing that the people who live there should say, clearly I would have to listen to the random posters.
Considering the horrific state of Iran for the 30 years since Carter betrayed the Shah and encouraged the mullahs to take over, it absolutely astonishes me that anyone (like Freddie) considers "CIA support for the Shah" to be evidence of American perfidy. Dear God.
Qwinn
And illegally carpet bombing Cambodia and killing tens of thousands? That didn't come up?
Posted by Freddie
Yup,
Some of you are right on the money. What's never mentioned by Progressives is that SIhanouk was allowing - and at times encouraging the NVA and Chinese (actually) to persecute his own people.
Also, that their presence in Cambodia existed before America's direct involvement in the region (um, go find the Mekong Delta on a map, and do try to explain how all of a sudden there are a bunch of Viet Cong and NVA hanging out there - and why they skipped Saigon).
It was Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh (Ho Chi Minh! Ho Chi Minh!) who violated the Geneva Accords, not America. The claim that we were carpet bombing Cambodians is used to distract from the fact that our targets were North Vietnamese. If you mention that North Viet Nam was shuffling men and materiel through Cambodia, the whole Progressive concept starts shuffling off to the dustbin.
For the Freddies of the world, it's always 1968, and America is always throughly, uniquely evil...which, of course, doesn't stop them from living here.
I live in Lowell, Mass, a city of about 100,000, of whom about 20,000 are Cambodian immigrants or the descendents of Cambodian immigants. In 2004, while out campaigning I ran into an older Cambodian, who had been in the Cambodian Army, He was just livid about Senator Kerry. Not mad at the US, but very mad at Senator Kerry for his post-tour stand on the war in SEA.
As for the term "carpet bombing," I am put out by it. It came up this week in a Middle East history course I am taking. I flew combat missions over Cambodian in 1973, right up to just before the bombing halt (I took leave to not be there on the last day--my form of war protest). We went after specific targets and we did it based upon a fairly thick book of Rules of Engagement (ROE). Maybe the B-52s did "carpet bombing" at some point, but in the fighter world we went after specific targets. Did we always do good? I doubt that very much. Did we try to not be stupid? Yes.
Regards -- Cliff
It doesn't matter. We've known who are enemies are since the late 60s. We let you leftist scum make us abandon our allies one time... but never again.
This is banal and doesn't deserve this kind of response. Cambodia has been through so much hell, and the US has treated them as a pawn (or not at all) throughout. I don't have time to pull down books and articles and give a history lesson, but please read something worthwhile (i.e., not the post above) and educate yourself. I recommend a book called "Cambodia Now" as a good balance between good writing and readability, connection to reality, and enough history to get started.
The moral of this thread is that people who we've oppressed love us more/hate us less than our own left wing.
Freddie: "The actions of the United States were either moral or they were not." (Skip a few paragraphs about how things are either moral or not to Freddie's conclusion) "So your simplistic white-hat, black-hat moralizing is revealed for the idiocy it is."
That was the funniest part of this whole thread.
Henry,
Never mind Njorl's "incredible ignorance" and incredible obtuseness. Your comment was spot on in both substance and style. It is absurd the way people predict the utopian alternate universe which would have resulted from their favored policies, perhaps especially when they include a US which turns the other cheek even in war.
I'd be interested in reading Freddie's condemnations of the horrors inflicted by the USSR. Or do those not count? Oh, right. Nevermind. /Emily Littela
Freddy: "When you put illegal in scare quotes, you are of course implying that the bombing was not, in fact, illegal. It was by any definition. The bombings were contrary to the rules of the UN and the Geneva Conventions, both of which the United States are bound to adhere to by our own agreement."
Please enlighten me as to exactly why the bombing (and incursion) were against international law. I would, as part of such a claim, like to know whether you believe:
1) that there weren't actually Vietnamese troops and weapons in Cambodia;
2) or if instead you believe that a party at war must respect a given country's claimed neutrality even if said country's territory is used for the transport and storage of enemy soldiers and weapons.
It seems to me you would have to believe one of these two things -- respectively, absurd and baseless -- but maybe your argument for why the bombing was internationally "illegal" is entirely unrelated to this line of thought. (Hard to know when assertion replaces stated reasoning.) I would like to know any third possibility I may have overlooked.
What we did in Viet Nam was nothing more than an extention of policy created by FDR...read up on what was discussed by FDR and Churchill at Yalta. This policy was then carried out by Truman, Ike, Kennedy, LBJ and Nixon. It was all about the containment of communism.
I believe that 90,000,000+ people lost their lives under various communist regimes. I beleive that 2 million Cambodians and 200,000+ Vietnamese lost their lives AFTER we left.
Carpet bombing in Cambodia? What we did in the 60s and 70s is nothing compared to what the 8th Air Force did in Europe in the 1940s. How about the fire bombing of civilian targets in Japan? FDR gave LeMay the green light to do this.
A better solution is to bury our heads in the sand like we did in the 1920s and 1930s. If we want to be a leader on the world stage, then lets do it with a Chamberlainesce sense of flair.
Freddie,
I hate to disillusion you but no country in the history of the world has at any time acted morally. Every nation acts in what it perceives to be its best interest. There are no exceptions ( the totally incoherent foreign policy of Jimmy Carter comes closest ). The US, Vietnam and every other country attempts to advance what it wants.
To ever expect any nation to act morally is an act of faith that might be compared to an early Christian expecting the lions in the arena to be moved by his piety. It isn't going to happen.
In every case morality will be abandoned if national interest demands it. The only difference is that the US allows us to whine about it later. Some other places, including Vietnam, do not.
I have travelled a bit in Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, and I too have noticed that Americans are respected and welcomed there. In fact I have noticed that europeans, Canadians and antipodeans can find it hard to believe that Americans are so warmly welcomed.
History isn't why Americans are welcomed, polite interaction is the main reason. Most SE Asians have no personal memories of the wars, but they do remember how much of a jerk the Russian that they met last week was, and how the American tried to be a decent person. They know that Germans and French people tend to be a bit more class conscious than Americans, and they prefer not to be spoken down to. Go to a small store in Hua Hin or Hoi An, talk to the clerk. Ask them about their favorite tourist stories. Positive stories tend to be about Americans, Australians and Brazilians. Negative stories are often about Russians, South Africans, Israelis, and Germans. It isn't because the Americans are better people or the the Germans worse, it is because Americans tend to be less class conscious than Russians or Germans, etc...
"Even the older generation seems to think that what we did wrong was not invading, but leaving after we had."
Yup, and that, it might be noted, is a particularly coherent thought, fully capable of standing up to the most thoroughgoing of critiques - unlike the flim-flam and shell-game apologetics endlessly repeated from the ideological/political precincts of the left.
Why can't we trade our leftists for Cambodians?
The Cambodians seem so much fonder of us.
Travel to Cambodia sometime. See the Torture Museum and the Killing Fields, travel to Angkor Wat, buy some fabulous silk or silver jewelry. Talk to the locals - they love to practice their English. Cambodians think Americans are a bit of alright mainly because they see us as dollar bills - loud, relatively harmless, walking dollar bills - and a few of our dollars go a long, long way over there. To them, every American is rich, and they respect that. The young population is desperate for ways out of the poverty, and almost everyone is trying to be an entrepreneur of some sort, and America symbolizes wealth and capitalism. It also helps that most Americans are fairly fun for them to interact with, so for the average Joe Cambodian there's not much reason to hate America.
Well, Freddie and Njorl, "don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya!" Wouldn't what to give a Copperhead a concussion.
Democrats: The party of slavery since 1860. From the plantation to the Gulag to the burqa.
Last week, the president of France tells us how much he loves America, now we hear the Cambodians love us... has G.W. Bush made us loved around the world?
I like the scenario where we stay out of WWI and a millenium of peace results.
Posted by Henry | November 16, 2007 3:48 PM
* Heh. That's beautiful. Well done, Henry.
No, really, God Fuck America. I mean, if there were a God, anything like the fucking God that Americans pray to, he would be ramming his Godly Rod right down the throats of all those anti-social psychopaths that clamour for less left and more right, less compassion and more selfishness, less Hillary and more Tancredo (he would be one of the first to be buggered). Alas, there is no god, and the Americans are left (right?) to their only devices, which usually means lots of dead civilians. Just ask the Asians, the oriental variety, not the southern dark skinned ones that piss off so many Brits, who may as well be Americans formerly voting for Bush.
Posted by mr fy | November 16, 2007 4:39 PM
Ah, yes, mr fy
My normal response to this kind of silly rant used to be an adolescent retort that you are wrong and that not only does God exist and He is on our side. Not only that, but to punish you atheist Europeans, He is going to allow your countries to be taken over by Muslim fundamentalists so that you can learn first hand what it is really like to live in a genuine theocracy.
Fortunately, I am too mature to do that kind of thing any more.
Henry - I like the scenario where we stay out of WWI and a millenium of peace results.
Actually, not so much staying out of WWI, but if Wilson had not insisted on removing the Kaiser, and creating the Weimar republic post WWI, there is a reasonable chance European history might have been a little different in the period 1939-1945.
Yes, I am aware of the German revolution etc, and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm, but the removal of the monary per se was a stated US goal, which arguably backfired.
On the actual topic of SE Asia - P J O'Rourke covered a visit to Vietnam made about 15 years ago, which was most entertaining and informative.
Could have been an interesting thread had it not been hijacked immediately by that idiot Freddie.
He's so obsessed with hating the USA that he can't stand to hear of even ONE instance where the USA isn't reviled and loathed. Can't he get his fix of anti-Americanism at any one of the 1,000,000,000,000 other outlets that provide it?
Will Freddie show up at your house if you dare to say something at dinner that isn't sufficiently condemnatory about America?
The Cambodians are made at us for leaving? Um, wouldn't it be nice if nations fought their own wars for a change, instead of asking us to do it for them?
I fought in Vietnam, Megan. If we're going to fight all over the world, the way you seem to think we ought to, we're going to need a draft again, particularly one that will take chicks. Are you ready?
Look beyond the ad hominems against me, and you'll find very little to change the essential fact: the United States undertook a bombing campaign which took the lives of several hundred thousand innocent Cambodians who had no hand in the Vietnam war whatsoever. That is a historical fact supported not only by all of the available scholarship, but by the US military's own official history.
So, what to do with that fact? You can try this:
"You are saying the United States is worse than the Khmer Rogue.
No. The relative morality of the United States's actions is irrelevant to the discussion. Whether or not any enemy nation is moral or not has no influence on the morality of the United States. Our actions are either moral or not. And, it is worth pointing out, this is a misleading argument, in that our enemy in the campaign was not the Khmer Rouge, but the NVA-- precisely the people who did, in fact, succeed in deposing the Khmer Rouge.
"The US is better than the Khmer Rouge, so you are wrong to criticize the US.
No. Again, relative morality is meaningless. It is a basic tenant of morality that the actions of others do not make one's actions right. And as a simple benchmark of ethical conduct, "Better than the Khmer Rogue"-- like, say, better than the Nazis-- is such a low hurdle that the statement is meaningless.
"No country has ever acted morally in any war."
True but irrelevant. My responsibility is to argue that my government undertake a moral foreign policy. No government has ever enacted a perfectly just legal system, either; and yet I don't hear anyone suggesting that we should abandon the cause.
"You don't condemn the USSR/the Khmer Rogue/The NVA/etc. etc. so you aren't consistent or fair."
I am not a citizen in the USSR, or living under the Khmer Rogue, or the NVA, or any other country. I am a citizen of the United States. It is my responsibility to improve this democracy. And, in a post entitled "God Bless America", there would be no legitimate need to speak in favor of American foreign policy. That role has been played by our host.
"You are an America hater."
No. I reject the infantile "hater/lover" dichotomy. I admire and respect many things about my nation. Many other things I abhor. When my country is worthy of praise, I praise it. When it is worthy of blame, I condemn it. When a commentator travels to the site of one of our most shameful atrocities and sees fit to entitle her post "God Bless America", I cannot in good conscience let that stand. I am fulfilling the most basic responsibility of any citizen in a democracy, speaking out against what he or she finds immoral or unwise in his or her government's actions, in an attempt to affect change. My patriotism is useless unless it is expressed through fulfillment of civic duty. I clearly have a better impression of my country than all of you, as I am unwilling to take such horrifically low standards as "better than the Khmer Rogue" as evidence of success.
"If you hate this country this much, you should leave."
A particularly empty non sequitur. My desire to change my country has no impact whatsoever on my desire to live here. To suggest that one follows logically from another is flatly incorrect. There is no legal, moral or ethical responsibility for me to leave my county because I disapprove of its actions. The phrase "love it or leave it" doesn't express any idea found in our Constitution. I don't love it, and I won't leave it, and I won't stop criticizing it. So now what?
Henry, SDM, Chris and others. You might want to read some historical account of what actually happened in Cambodia. Your comments don't make any sense at all even from a right-wing perspective. You're just spouting knee-jerk "America right or wrong" blather that you probably don't understand.
This site seems neutral enough. Educate yourselves.
http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/index.html
I am unwilling to take such horrifically low standards as "better than the Khmer Rogue" as evidence of success.
How about "better than any other great power, past or present"? Good enough for you?
I broadly agree with everything in your last post, and I don't defend the bombings in Cambodia specifically, being short on information.
But you opened by calling the bombings "illegal," which was a very bad start, and evidence of, at the very least, somewhat muddled thinking on foreign policy. It was also was destined to impair the rational faculties of a lot of people. The phrase "violation of international law" has come to mean, in 2007, "whatever the US happens to be doing at the moment." Like "unconstitutional," it generally says more about the preferences of the speaker than about what a studious consideration of the law would reveal.
Given that we operate in more or less a state of nature with respect to other countries, and given that even the biggest proponents of transnational institutions blithely ignore them when it's convenient (France's recent invasion of the Ivory Coast comes to mind), you'll find the notion of "legality" in warfare a tough one to ram down my throat. Morality too, come to that, although much less so.
I'd take you more seriously--and you'd probably have gotten less of a reaction from our more intemperate commenters--if you called the bombing "militarily ineffective and devastating to civilians."
The phrase "violation of international law" has come to mean, in 2007, "whatever the US happens to be doing at the moment."
The United States is a high-contracting signatory of the Geneva Conventions, which means it is obligated to abide by the conventions and to prosecute those that violate those tenants. If you'd prefer that the United States drop that obligation, that's a perfectly legitimate opinion. But while we are obligated by treaty to do certain things I find it eminently reasonable to expect our country to do them.
Njorl, the answer is (b) sarcasm.
I'm not asking for much. Just a little more love for proximate causes and a little less for hypotheticals.
Freddie, throw me a bone and post your analysis of the Geneva Conventions that shows it's "illegal" to bomb the members of a belligerent army operating with impunity the territory of a neutral power.
From convention IV: "Art. 28. The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations." So the presence of civilians--even "protected persons," including the wounded, the sick, children, and expectant mothers--does not render bombing that area "illegal." Immoral, perhaps.
Really, "legal" and "illegal" are kind of silly in a context where there is no meaningful rule of law. It's kind of like your bookie saying it would be "illegal" not to pay him. It might be immoral, and it might have bad consequences, but the who transaction is so far outside anything that can meaningfully be called "law" that the word lacks meaning.
Really, "legal" and "illegal" are kind of silly in a context where there is no meaningful rule of law. It's kind of like your bookie saying it would be "illegal" not to pay him. It might be immoral, and it might have bad consequences, but the who transaction is so far outside anything that can meaningfully be called "law" that the word lacks meaning.
All true.
Freddie, I am not happy that the US won the Cold War just because the US is automatically good. I'm happy because I believe the entire world is better off with US winning instead of Russia.
The bad stuff that happened during the Cold War was bad and I wish it hadn't happened, except where it was necessary to win. I don't "defend" the bad things but I'm not going to beat myself up over them nor am I going to blame the current administration for them.
The War on Drugs and the many things that are done in it's name are bad and should stop. What we are doing to Colombia is wrong. Just because I believe that some bad things may have been justified in the past doesn't mean that I think that all bad things are justified for all time.
While the bombing of Cambodia may have been wrong (I don't know enough about it to judge), it happened a long time ago and I'm not going to be upset of the Cambodians living there today are willing to forgive and forget when dealing with Americans there today. We can all wish it hadn't happened and try to figure out ways to make sure that more bad things don't happen in the future. But that doesn't mean that it's better for Cambodians to hate Americans over what happened 40 years ago during a small hot war that was part of a longer, world-spanning cold war.
I reacted to your initial comment that seemed to imply that the Cambodians should hate Americans and that there was something wrong with them liking Americans. That sort of tone is why people may think you don't like America.
Freddie said:
While the above is true if you are trying to determine the moral rightness or legality of an action, it is relevant how the "victims" feel and it may very well be that they have a valid reason for feeling the way they do. It's certainly interesting and real and worth comment. Rather than discussing why they might feel the way they do you immediately jumped to arguing that they should hate Americans and were either lying or ignorant or naive if they didn't.
Liberals seem to have a lower opinion of brown people than Conservatives...
EI
Freddie doesn't hate America, he just hates you and your politcal choices.
As for the attitudes of peoples and places that have suffered from being on the wrong side of US foreign policy objectives, well not everyone can indulge in intergenerational hates and resentments of others.
Something conservative americans should practice towards their liberal brethren, if they could just get over the joy of hating.
You get somewhat reasonable statements like the first few paragraphs of what EI said, and then you get
Liberals seem to have a lower opinion of brown people than Conservatives...
and
As for the attitudes of peoples and places that have suffered from being on the wrong side of US foreign policy objectives, well not everyone can indulge in intergenerational hates and resentments of others.
If you think that the United States is no longer in the practice of supporting, arming and funding horrific regimes, by the way, I'd encourage you to spend some quality time in Uzbekistan, where the United States is currently helping the reigning regime to murder dissidents. But wait! I'm just an America hater for accurately reporting America's conduct in the world!
One of the most basic principals of conventional morality is that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Now I'd like for you to imagine, just imagine, if a foreign nation, at war with Mexico, conducted a bombing campaign over the American Southwest in an effort to kill hidden Mexican soldiers, and in doing so killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Can you imagine that? Would you, and your friends in this thread, not advocate war? Would you be so sanguine about that atrocity? Would you be so quick to point out how much better the attacking nation is than Mexico, how it was serving a just cause? And would you tell American survivors 40 years in the future that the shouldn't have the gall to remain angry about such a campaign?
Amazingly enough, I doubt you would.
Freddie, if the Mexican military was using bases in the US to attack country X, and the US agreed to this, on what grounds would you claim that US protestations of neutrality were honest?
Just what does the word "neutral" mean to you?
BTW - am I correct in assuming that you would condemn Americans bombing Germany in WWII, but not eg German gassings at Treblinka? After all, the Holocaust was not conducted by Americans, so you would have no interest in condeming it.
And would you tell American survivors 40 years in the future that the shouldn't have the gall to remain angry about such a campaign?
1) That's the price of failing to enforce your rights as a neutral power.
2) Yes. After 40 years, it's time to move on. My maternal grandfather was on Ieshima, and I wouldn't have approved of him going around badmouthing "those dammned Japs" and their atrocities in 1985 (I don't think he did that even in 1946).
3) Who said Cambodians "shouldn't have the gall to remain angry"? The only person here objecting to Cambodian "gall" is you, when you said it was "discouraging" that they weren't holding a grudge. Do you stand by that?
Let me quote myself:
I never said that the Cambodians have no right to be angry or no justification for anger. I merely said that it was heartening that they weren't angry and weren't blaming current Americans, who really had nothing to do with what happened 40 years ago.
Assuming that what you say about Uzbekistan is true, then the Uzbekis would have every right to be angry at Americans and I would be hesitant to defend our actions as they sound reprehensible.
If my parents had been killed by Germans during WWII while not fighting in the military, I might still be angry at the Germans. But that would be an emotional response, not a logical one. The reaction of someone emotionally involved in a situation is not necessarily the best way to determine the logical, ethical, or moral reaction. People make bad decisions under strong emotions all the time. I wouldn't ask someone whose son had just been murdered if they thought that the death penalty was better or worse for society as a whole...
EI
Freddie,
You are free to have obtuse opinions about what is moral, but your belief that something is immoral does not make it illegal or against Geneva Conventions, etc.
I note you have made no attempt to defend your claim that the bombing of Cambodia was "illegal by any definition" and against international law or "rules of the UN and the Geneva Conventions" to which the US has bound itself.
I'm sure that this omission is due to the fact that you know that the bombing of Cambodia was, in fact, neither illegal nor against any such convention.
Please set me straight if I am wrong.
Just to the poster who claimed that what we did in SE Asia is nothing compared to what we did to Germany in the 1940s: compare bombing tonnage in Cambodia vs Japan and Germany in the 1940s. Cambodia wins.
http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf
A statistic of profound and total irrelevance. What matters is the number of people killed, not the weight of bombs employed to kill them.
So why does no one make that comparison, when they wish to be shocking?
"Democrats: The party of slavery since 1860. From the plantation to the Gulag to the burqa."
well, not the democrats of Truman and Kennedy. I think today they'd be considered neocons (but for the fact that the antisemitic overtones would be wasted on them . .)
I was in Hue in 2004, and ran into many locals that had nothing but positive feelings about Americans. I told one business owner in Hue that my cousin had told me that I had to go to Vietnam because they had, "The best food, the most beautiful women and the perfect beaches! And you will be the first member of our family to go there without a weapon!" The Vietnamese gentleman said my cousin was right about Vietnam and asked when my cousin had been in Vietnam. I told him that Ron had been there in 1968 with the 5th Marines, and he got kind of quiet. And then he said, "Tell your cousin he would be very welcome here!" It was very powerful, because the 5th Marines fought straight through the middle of Hue in a horrendous battle that left the Viet Cong in shreds, the City of Hue in ruins and the marines themselves in a state of shock.
The Atlantic Monthly prides itself on good, well-researched writing. Why then are its' equally well-traveled readers being served up this tawdry, naive rubbish.
God Bless America; it's loved everywhere.
If that's the best that this writer can deliver from visits to Cambodia and Vietnam then you need to reconsider your hiring policies.
God fuck America