Kudos to President Obama for not using his recent trip to Cambodia as an opportunity to apologize for supposed American sins of the past. His failure to do so must come as a grave disappointment to New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker (an excellent reporter, by the way), who writes an entire article lamenting the lack of an Obama apology.
His piece begins thus: “Four decades after American warplanes carpet-bombed this impoverished country, an American president came to visit for the first time. He came not to defend the past, nor to apologize for it. In fact, he made no public mention of it whatsoever.” He then quotes approvingly from the president of a group known as the Khmer Rouge Victims in Cambodia who claims that Obama “should offer a public apology to the Cambodian people for the illegal U.S. bombings, which took the lives of half a million Cambodians and created the conditions for the Khmer Rouge genocide.” He also quotes Gary Bass, a historian at Princeton who has written an excellent history of humanitarian interventions, who says, “It’s a missed opportunity for Obama.”
Actually, Obama was right not to apologize because it’s not clear what America has to apologize for in this instance. It is grossly misleading to suggest that the U.S. “carpet-bombed” Cambodia, which evokes images of B-52s pummeling Phnom Penh. What actually happened was that during Operation Menu in 1969-1970, the U.S. bombed North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong base camps in eastern Cambodia with the tacit acquiescence of Cambodia’s ruler, Prince Sihanouk, who was deeply unhappy with the uninvited presence of tens of thousands of Communist Vietnamese troops in his country. Along with the bombing there were several “secret” incursions by South Vietnamese and U.S. troops in 1970 to try to clear out Communist base camps.
The notion that the American bombing somehow made the takeover of the genocidal Khmer Rouge inevitable–in some account by supposedly driving them insane–is farfetched. The Khmer Rouge had been fighting to take over the country since the early 1950s with the active support of the Communist regimes in Hanoi, Beijing and Moscow. The massive incursion of Vietnamese troops into Cambodia in the 1960s, which they used as a staging area for attacks into South Vietnam, further destabilized the country. But what really made the Communist triumph inevitable was the fact that the U.S. Congress cut off aid to the anticommunist regime led by Lon Nol (who overthrew Sihanouk in 1970) as part of the general backlash against the Vietnam War.
The rise of the Khmer Rouge was not a reaction to the American bombing, and the bombing did not remotely inflict anywhere close to 500,000 fatalities. (Most casualty estimates are a fraction of that, and many of the dead were Vietnamese troops, not Cambodian civilians.) It is hard to see why the U.S. did anything wrong: If a country allows its soil to be used for military forays into a neighboring country, that neighboring country and its allies have every right to strike back.
Maybe the US should apologize to the French for the damage done in Normandy during D-Day.
The only apologies that are owed the people of Cambodia are the ones that should be made by the anti-war movement, who also owe the conquered victims of South Vietnam an apology as well for in both cases cheering for their conquest and extermination. And as for Peter Baker, the reporter for the newspaper that still won’t apologize to the Ukranians for Walter Duranty, he ought to be apologizing for Sydney Schanberg’s “Indochina Without America: For Most a Better Way Of Life” headline that was written just as the Khmer Rogue was about to take over in Cambodia. Gee, the Times didn’t think the Khmer Rogue was about to commit genocide then!
What about the backing of an illegitimate and corrupt general Lon Nol? What about pulling out the US troops when the Khmer Rouge invaded? What about the hundreds on thousands of people killed by said bombing? What about the thousands more killed by the weapons supplied by the US in the preceding decades?
As someone once said about the "we drove them to it" school of Cambodia, it's like blaming Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd-George for the Holocaust.
Really, Max Boot. A little research goes a long way. To try to claim that no Cambodians were killed by the illegal bombing of, not only a neutral country, but a US ally is preposterous. Get your xenophobic head out of your rear and do your homework.
As a Cambodian, if Obama did not use this opportunity to apologize Cambodian people what America did in the past to Cambodians, please help Cambodians at the present time. Please help release Prisoners who are innocent like Mam Sonando (journalist). Help build democracy and human rights! Most importantly, provide more scholarship to Cambodian youths to study in the US, these young generation will bring about change in the country. Thank you !
you should look into the effects of agent orange used in these part on the people and ecosystem. a bioweapon created by monsanto
Wow, Mr Max Boot. Are you really trying to sum up the causes of the Khmer Rouge regime with this article?
If you are going to defend the US bombing of Cambodia, you should at least get some of your basic facts straight. Just one point of several: the US bombing began before Operation Menu and continued several years after, into 1973, with some of the heaviest bombing occurring in 1973, averaging thousands of tons per day. According to US Air Force records, between 1965 and 1975 a total of 2,756,941 tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia by the US involving 230,516 sorties and 113,716 sites.
Solipsism is the very soul of the American liberal. It operates in every conflict where America is involved, invoking the belief that "we" are responsible for the bad behavior of other people, and allows for the moral grandstanding so dear to the liberal. On 9/11, the first response of many liberals was "what did we do to make them do that?" It is a kind of co-dependent thinking, akin to the sad strategy of the child of an alcoholic to gain control of her chaotic world. But "Daddy drinks because I'm bad" is no basis for a sane foreign policy.