During the three years and eight months they held power, Pol Pot and his
medievalists may have put to death a third of the nation.
It is all too easy and too dangerous to remember Pol Pot as a unique
monster. The truth is that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would be historical
nonentities, and a great many people would be alive today, had the United
States not helped bring them to power and the governments of the US,
Britain, China and Thailand not supported them, armed them, sustained them
and restored them.
To hear Henry Kissinger this week deny, on the BBC, that the United States
and especially the Nixon administration, bore any responsibility for
Cambodia's horror, was to hear the truth denigrated and our intelligence
insulted.
Cambodia's nightmare began on the eve of the American land invasion of
neutral Cambodia in 1970.
The invasion provided a small group of extreme ethnic nationalists with
Maoist pretensions, the Khmer Rouge, with a catalyst for a revolution which
had no popular base among the Cambodian people.
Between 1969 and 1973 American bombers killed perhaps three quarters of a
million Cambodian peasants in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese supply
bases, many of which did not exist.
What Kissinger and Nixon began, Pol Pot completed.
Had the US and China allowed it, Cambodia's suffering could have stopped
when the Vietnamese finally responded to years of Khmer Rouge attacks
across their border and liberated the country in January 1979.
But almost immediately the US began secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. By
January 1980, the US was secretly funding Pol Pot's beaten forces in
Thailand."