Après Nous, Le Deluge?

I trust that by now everyone's already read Kevin Drum's two mini-essays on the rise of the chaos hawks who warn "that if we leave Iraq the entire Middle East will go up in flames."

The only thing I would add is that it's worth looking at this phenomenon, at least in part, through the perspective that to many people the real risk may be that if we leave Iraq the entire Middle East might not go up in flames. We've shifted back and forth from the Shah to Saddam to "dual containment" to regime change to stay the course to "surge" over the decades all on the premise that American domination of the Persian Gulf is vitally necessary in order to prevent something terrible from happening.

What if we get chased out and things turn out to be non-catastrophic? What if bloodshed is limited to Iraq and maybe some areas around the Kurdistan-Turkey border that nobody cares about? What if oil keeps flowing? What if it turns out that, a Shiite-dominated government isn't interested in the kind of pan-Arabist ideology that could make Iraq a threat to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? What if it also turns out that it's not really feasible for a Persian regime in Teheran to control Iraq? And what if Taliban-style governance and global holy war turn out to be really unpopular?

What, in short, if things turn out to be basically okay for America and for Americans? Well, that'd be good, it seems to me. But it would also call into question a lot of habits of mind, past policies, spending commitments, career paths, sacred cows, delusions of grandeur, etc. That, I think, is why relatively few people in Washington seem interested in entertaining optimistic scenarios about the regional context even though an optimistic scenario seems more likely to me than do frequently discussed worst-case scenarios. The truth of the matter, though, is that there hasn't been a moment when the United States didn't try to micromanage events in the Gulf since, well, since the British Empire was doing it instead. There isn't, however, much in the way of evidence that this kind of policy is actually necessary. It does, however, seem to have succeeded in producing one of the most politically screwed up places on the planet.

Comments

What if this Gorbachev guy is serious about changing the USSR? What if he doesn't care how Poland is run? What if he really does tear down that Wall?

Posted by Doug | September 11, 2007 6:45 PM

A friend of mine and I have been discussing history over beers lately and we have focused on the problem that so often experts predict behavior based on what they think people will do rather than what the people logically will do. In this case wingnuts want and predict conflagration because it will verify their current "stay in Iraq" philosophy. They both want to be proven right and to scare everyone about a change in policy.

The key to middle east conflagration would seem to be a total lack of self interest and a lurking fundamental conflict that would spontaneously erupt in all Middle Eastern countries. If you can envision that Iran has imperialistic goals in Saudi Arabia, fine...I don't. If you think there is a serious Shia underground in Saudi Arabia that will destabilize it, go ahead and believe. There isn't. Rational evaluations indicate a very low threat of expanded violence, and Kevin's example of Israel is the best one. Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are effectively dictatorships. Dictatorships don't allow much opposition and few Middle Eastern ones have shown any imperialistic tendencies. Iran, ironically, is more democratic. They may all (along with Turkey) want spheres of influence in Iraq, but I cannot see any indication they want large scale chaos. Partitioning would seemingly be their preference. As an example, if Iran wanted territorial hegemony, they would have been active in Afghanistan, but they are not. It is Sunni and of no logical interest. It would be more trouble than it is worth.

Be very careful when "experts" predict that a population or government will behave the way they want to support their ideology, as opposed to a rational evaluation of how the population or government will most likely behave.

Posted by Mudge | September 11, 2007 7:15 PM

And what if there is genocide and three million people die? Be honest, no one here will care. I know, because the last time there was genocide and three million people died, no one in all of America or Europe cared.

Posted by y81 | September 11, 2007 7:23 PM

Every human being should care, y81, but what if there is no genocide? Must we base policy on the worst case scenario? Couldn't there be a strategic (strategic what's that ?) plan to mitigate possible genocide after we leave Iraq? Besides, is religious purging actually genocide, or more similar to the inquisition? The Iraq situation is not racially based, it is belief based. Northern Ireland is the best comparative example. The Holocaust was less a religious purge than part of a non-arian purge, and it had more of a conservative-hate-liberal tone to it (all liberals are traitors) where the party needed someone to hate than a religious basis.

You, as with many others, use the genocide possibilty to scare those who oppose the war.

Posted by Mudge | September 11, 2007 7:35 PM

"I trust that by now everyone's already read..."

Get out of your bubble.

Posted by AC | September 11, 2007 7:46 PM

The problem I have, Mudge, is that in 1973 every one of my liberal Upper West Side neighbors assured me that the Cambodians and the Vietnamese would be much better off if we left Southeast Asia. Not one of them has ever published a piece, to my knowledge, on "why I was so wrong." So I have considered Upper West Side liberals to be liars and hypocrites ever since.

Posted by y81 | September 11, 2007 7:48 PM

Matthew's plan for the Middle East: HOPE!

Posted by Al | September 11, 2007 8:03 PM

And what if there is genocide and three million people die?

Well, but how many thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are you willing to kill, for certain, to avoid what chance of a 3 million person genocide?

If you are going to engage in such bloody calculations, you'd better think seriously about the likelihood of the harm you seek to prevent. For example, would you appprove killing a million Iraqis to avoid a 10% chance of your hypothetical 3 million person genocide?

Which, of course, is Matt's point: probabilities, not long-shot worse case scenarios.

Posted by rea | September 11, 2007 8:13 PM

What is the timeline of Al Qaeda staying in Iraq if:

1) We leave.

2) We stay forever.

??

And by the way, they keep talking about how long it took us to make a Constitution of our own and how that should give us a perspective on time frames. But we weren't trying to make a Constitution and kick out Britain at the same damn time! We kicked Britain out first, then adopted the Constitution four years later.

How long would it have taken for us to draft the Constitution if at the same time we were still trying to kick Britain out?

Political reconciliation will only happen after we leave.

Don't people understand that with this metaphor - we are Britain?

Posted by bdelloid | September 11, 2007 8:35 PM

in 1973 every one of my liberal Upper West Side neighbors assured me that the Cambodians and the Vietnamese would be much better off if we left Southeast Asia.

Well, the Vietnamese were on balance, better off--the war was a lot bloodier than the aftermath. And as for the Cambodians, the lesson there, like the lesson of Iraq, ought to be "Don't fuck countries up" rather than "Don't fuck countries up and then leave."

Shit, if you guys had your way, we'd be fighting in Vietnam and Cambodia still . . .

Posted by rea | September 11, 2007 8:37 PM

The problem I have, Mudge, is that in 1973 every one of my liberal Upper West Side neighbors assured me that the Cambodians and the Vietnamese would be much better off if we left Southeast Asia.

Serves the liberals right for getting that peacenik McGovern elected.

Oh, wait.

Posted by Delicious Pundit | September 11, 2007 8:39 PM

Well, Matthew advocates doing more to stop nuclear proliferation. But what if terrorists never get access to a nuclear weapon? What if nobody ever decides to use one ever again? In those cases, all our efforts at stoping nuclear proliferation will be wasted.

What, in short, if things turn out to be basically okay for America and for Americans? Well, that'd be good, it seems to me. But it would also call into question a lot of habits of mind, past policies, spending commitments, career paths, sacred cows, delusions of grandeur, etc. That, I think, is why relatively few people in Washington seem interested in entertaining optimistic scenarios about the regional context even though an optimistic scenario seems more likely to me than do frequently discussed worst-case scenarios.

Posted by Al | September 11, 2007 8:41 PM

Well, then, let's get down to brass tacks: how many of you favor instituting a large-scale draft, since that's the only possible way to establish a big enough presence there to prevent the Iraqi genocide that we keep hearing about? And if we do create such a large armed force, why is it more worthwhile to use it for that purpose than to try and keep the Iranian dictatorship from acquring the Bomb, and to cope with any sudden huge crises produced by the fact that North Korea and Pakistan already have it?

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | September 11, 2007 8:45 PM

y81

The situation in Southeast Asia was a dangerous and harmful one to the Vietnamese and Cambodians when our troops were there. One could argue that the wartime situation was worse for the Vietnamese and the Cambodians was just as bad, if not worse, than the post-war situation after our troops left. You say that upper West liberals were dishonest about the harm imposed by the Communist regimes in Vietnam & Cambodia after our troops left. Well, the conservative revisionist argument about the wars in Southeast Asia is even more dishonest.

They talk about the innocent civilian deaths caused by the Communist regimes, but ignore the innocent civilian deaths caused by the war, particularly the deaths directly attributable to our military intervention. They also argue that the anti-Communist regimes in those countries were on the verge of victory against Communist forces, and that if the US just supported them just a little bit longer, the anti-Communists would have prevailed like they did in South Korea. Yet they ignore the fact that these regimes folded like a house of cards the instant American support vanished, because the people they served did not support them, particularly in the case of the South Vietnamese. Most damningly, these same folks claimed repeatedly that saving South Vietnam and Cambodia from Communist regimes was vital and necessary to defeating the menace of global Communism, which warranted sending troops to those countries while the Soviets and Chinese sent supplies. Yet we managed to destroy the menace of global Communism, and caused the downfall of the Soviet Evil Empire even with Vietnam being Communist.

Interestingly enough, one of the things we did to cause the downfall of the Soviets was to make Afghanistan their Vietnam, where they sent troops to support a Communist regime, while we armed and supplied the anti-Communist forces. The strain of Afghanistan sapped the strength of the Soviet Union in less than a decade. What would a 20, 30, 40, year military intervention in Vietnam and Cambodia done to us as a superpower, even with our superior capitalist economy?

Yet according to you, it is the liberals who were dishonest about Vietnam and Cambodia. Talk about selective judgement.

Posted by eltoro | September 11, 2007 8:48 PM

Shorter y81:

We should have killed lots more Vietnamese and Cambodians in order to prevent the deaths of lots of Vietnamese and Cambodians.

Posted by commie atheist | September 11, 2007 9:05 PM

FYI: Iraq is not Viet Nam.

Also-- not to seem snarky, Mudge, but beginning a comment "A friend of mine and I have been discussing history over beers lately" is about the best way I can think of to get people (well, me) to not read it.

Posted by James Gary | September 11, 2007 9:07 PM

Al,
I'll take the hope that doesn't involve spending trillions and killing thousands of Americans, over the hope that does. In the meanwhile I'm waiting to hear a persuasive case that any of the worst case scenarios being bandied about would present a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. Enough of one, that is, to justify re-invading Iraq or any other Middle Eastern country.

Posted by Bill | September 11, 2007 9:22 PM

Maybe the Vietnamese and Cambodians were better off after we left, as many commentators say. What do I know: I'm not Vietnamese or Cambodian, and I don't actually care about them any more than Matt Yglesias's parents did. But none of my liberal neighbors ever explained beforehand that our presence in Southeast Asia was so terrible that, even though there was going to be a genocide of three million Cambodians, that was still better than the status quo. No one can point to a left-wing commentator from 1973 saying anything like that. That's the dishonesty I am talking about.

Posted by y81 | September 11, 2007 9:52 PM

all this time i thought you were referring to the genocide of 3 mm Vietnamese

Posted by scorpio | September 11, 2007 10:07 PM

Well considering upwards of 5 million Vietnamese died during the war, then just by crude numbers yes, the aftermath was less horrible than the war itself, especially in Vietnam.

Posted by mad6798j | September 11, 2007 10:07 PM

none of my liberal neighbors ever explained beforehand that our presence in Southeast Asia was so terrible that, even though there was going to be a genocide of three million Cambodians, that was still better than the status quo. No one can point to a left-wing commentator from 1973 saying anything like that

Are you suggesting it was difficult for you to find commentators (not just left wing) from at least 1969 who suggested that the heavy and in fact carpet bombing of Cambodia by the U.S.' war hawks (1965 - 1973 actually) was slaughtering the population, destroying the people's capacity to survive and even feed themselves, and driving the peasantry into the hands of the guerrillas later to be called the Khmer Rouge?

You are seriously suggesting that no one sufficiently warned you about the immediate and future catastrophic effects of carpet bombing a poor and unstable peasant nation?

Where were you looking? Were you attempting to find left-wing commentators in your local hardware store?

Who is it that people thinks often crawls out from under the rocks after a society has been largely destroyed to take power? Nice, mild reformist types?

Posted by El Cid | September 11, 2007 10:09 PM

Especially considering it was communist Vietnam that eventually toppled the Khmer Rouge.

Posted by mad6798j | September 11, 2007 10:10 PM

Y8l,

Listen you dirtbag piece of shit, I realize that your libel against the left with regard to Cambodia is most likely a result of your own guilt as a supporter of our not so little series of war crimes in SE Asia, but, to the extent that the United States bears any responsibility at all for the horror of Cambodia, that responsibility falls squarely upon the blood soaked hands of the architects of our criminal venture there, not on the opponents who were proven right in every particular.

I'm sick and tired of you interventionist monsters trying to lay a guilt trip on the opponents of your insanity. It's one thing to honestly state that you feel that the economic health of the west is worth the death of innocents - repellant, but at least honest. It's quite another to try to justify your murderous impulses by making the absurd claim that you are actually SAVING lives. "Well gee, we needed to kill 500,000 Iraqis to avoid the risk that 1,000,00 might die if we didn't kill the 500,000."

Well fuck you and die in a fire you monster.

Posted by LarryM | September 11, 2007 10:13 PM

y81, y should any of us care about your neighbors from 34 years ago?

My neighbors in 1973, when I was two, were diehard liberals who were terribly worried about what would happen to the Cambodians if we left Viet Nam...

[Not really...but would it change anyone's mind about Iraq today if it were true?]

Posted by Brandon Claycomb | September 11, 2007 10:14 PM

"how many of you favor instituting a large-scale draft"

Me. On record since at least Dec 2001.

But it's a long complicated argument.

Posted by bob mcmanus | September 11, 2007 10:30 PM

y81,

Why are you so fixated on the failure of liberals and other anti-war types to address the possibility of atrocities committed by post-war Communist regimes, in the light of the far greater failures of conservatives and other pro-war types (including chicken hawks like Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani) to address the evils unleashed by widespread destabilizing bombing in Cambodia, and a 15 year civil war in Vietnam that was unnecessarily prolonged by our intervention in a conflict that ultimately didn't concern us? The US had the opportunity to achieve a peace in Vietnam that wouldn't have resulted in the atrocities we saw after Saigon was taken by force, by allowing the Vietnamese people to have a country peacefully united under the nationalist hero Ho Chi Minh long before 1975. Instead we militarily defending regimes in Saigon that were viewed as illegitimate in the eyes of the South Vietnamese, prolonging the civil war by over a decade. Yet according to you, the war and its resulting evils, including post-war atrocities, are the fault of the anti-war people, not the pro-war people.

What's the weather like in Bizarro world?

Posted by eltoro | September 11, 2007 10:48 PM

Along this same line of reasoning, why is it assumed that there are sure to be negative political consequences for de-funding this war? Even if the worst case scenario for post-occupation chaos in Iraq were to come true, I don't think voters in America would care. Getting out of Iraq is wildly popular, why is it so hard for politicians, Democrats even, to accept this?

Posted by Just Karl | September 11, 2007 11:16 PM

Listen you dirtbag piece of shit

Thank you. There is nothing quite as disgusting as watching the lizards put on clothing and bleed for humanity to keep bombing the crap out of of Iraq for humanitarian purposes. You probably should have skipped the listen part and left it at "dirtbad piece of shit".

Posted by Ed Marshall | September 11, 2007 11:20 PM

You guys are making a mistake by treating that evil fuck y8l as a human being capable of reason. Many people decry the so-called lack of civility these days. I say bullshit on that; there is far too much civility, too much unwillingness to name people for what they really are.

Do you guys realize that, of the three classes of crimes that were prosecuted at Nuremberg, our leaders have BY THEIR OWN ADMISSION committed crimes in two of the three classes? There defense is NOT a denial of a factual predicate for the crimes (I'm talking about aggressive warfare and certain interrogation techniques, however characterized), but rather a denial that the United States is bound by the relevant international laws. Similar defenses were offered by the Nuremberg defendants.

Doesn't any of this BOTHER any of you? Germans were hanged by the neck until dead for actions quite similar to the actions undertaken by our president, vice-president, and their co-conspirators.

Yes, it's true that our leaders haven't YET committed actions in the third class of crimes prosecuted at Nuremberg, but there are plenty of people on the right advocating genocide. Which makes it particularly ironic that these sick fucks are pretending to be concerned about genocide in Iraq if we leave.

Posted by LarryM | September 11, 2007 11:20 PM

There seems to be some slippage here that assigning ultimate responsibility for outcomes or dangers allows you to know what particular policy choice should be made after events are sent in motion. Did US expansion of the war into Cambodia in the Nixon administration make the Khmer Rouge more likely? Quite possibly, though of course the North Vietnamese bear at least equal responsibility since they were the first to use the country as a theater of operations and they sponsored the Khmer Rouge right up until it took power. But if the U.S. bears responsibility for making the Khmer Rouge more likely, does it really follow that the right thing to do was to withdraw all support from the authoritarian but non-genocidal government that was fighting the Khmer Rouge? Not at all, but this was the policy Congress forced through on the grounds that the region was better off without us. The fact that this was true in 1963 didn't make it so in 1975. Bugging out entirely produced decent results in Vietnam, since the vicious but orderly regime that followed was probably better than war. By contrast the withdrawal of all American support directly led to catastrophe in Cambodia.

Posted by rd | September 11, 2007 11:43 PM

Totally agree.

Forgot one other thing: when people become vested in hundreds of thousands deaths -- wow, they are deep.

Posted by dunnage | September 11, 2007 11:48 PM

rd,

Did US expansion of the war into Cambodia in the Nixon administration make the Khmer Rouge more likely?

Kind of blew your credibility right there, you murderous fuck.

Posted by LarryM | September 11, 2007 11:59 PM

One thing that nobody seems to remember is that -- immediately after the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia -- there was some expression of hope among both liberals and conservatives that they were showing tentative signs of behaving in a relatively tolerant and ecumenical manner. This, needless to say, didn't last long; but NOBODY that I can can remember envisioned that they would set up a regime tremendously bloodier than even the worst neo-Stalinist regime that had been envisioned as likely under the North Vietnamese. (And, lest we forget, it was the Vietnamese Communists -- regardless of their other repulsive aspects -- who finally put an end to the bloodbath.) In short, even those people who were under no delusions about the Stalinoid tendencies of the Indochinese Communists could still hope at the end of that war that the aftermath might not be all that horrible. Combine that with the simple fact that even Barry Goldwater had become convinced by then that the war was unwinnable, and you can see why there was such widespread support for bailing.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | September 12, 2007 12:23 AM

All the speculation about potential genocide ignores the fact that it seems to be well underway right now even with 160k US troops in country.

How many neighborhoods in Baghdad have been pacified because the ethnic cleansing has been completed?

Posted by STS | September 12, 2007 12:27 AM

Matthew, don't you think it a bit optimistic about human nature to feel that people are more likely promoting a continued US military presence in the Middle East because of wounded pride and investment in old ideas, rather than that the people with influence over this policy benefit from US commercial ties which they think are enhanced to a great degree by dependency of local elites on US military power and economic and diplomatic support?

Posted by brooksfoe | September 12, 2007 12:53 AM

Hey Brooks, don't be TOO hard on Matthew. He is learning, at least.

And there remains the fact that, as central as the influences that you cite are, there are still some people who do indeed support said policies for the reasons cited by Matthew. They may be in the minority (at least among policy makers), but if we could peel those people away from the interventionist conventional wisdom, we might finally be on the road to REAL change in our foreign policy.

And maybe Mathew is a bit more subtle than you give him credit for. One read on this post is that Mathew is well aware of those interests, and that his point is that, if we withdraw our troops and nothing dire happens, the role of those interests will be laid bare for all to see. Now it's true that many of us don't need for the writing on the wall to be made any clearer, but obviously some people do.

Posted by LarryM | September 12, 2007 1:12 AM

"rise of the chaos hawks who warn 'that if we leave Iraq the entire Middle East will go up in flames.'"

Since the REAL hawks - the neocons and the Zionists - absolutely INTEND the Middle East to go up in flames, I'd say the "chaos hawks" need to look over their shoulder at the guys they're standing shoulder to shoulder with...

Or maybe they already know...

Matt's "what if" is apparently intended just to illustrate the point that IT'S NOT CERTAIN that the ME "will go up in flames" if we pull out of Iraq.

So the rest of the "what-iffing" done here is not relevant. Matt's point is sound.

What IS relevant is that if we DO NOT pull out of Iraq, the US military will go up in flames in Iraq. And if the war expands to Iran, as clearly Bush, Cheney, the neocons and Israel are definitely trying to do, then the ME definitely WILL "go up in flames."

Try to keep your eye on the real issue here.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 12, 2007 1:18 AM

Once we overthrew the popular Cambodian monarchy and installed the unpopular Lon Nol, who publicly backed us while we were dropping WWII-level numbers of bombs all across his country (at least measured in weight), we weren't going to see Lon Nol survive long, especially after the Prince thought he could control the Khmer Rouge. We also weren't exactly occupying Cambodia with troops that were provided security to Cambodians prior to our withdrawal from Vietnam. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia, our CIA pulled a Chomsky and denied that the KR were responsible for millions of deaths. The CIA blamed the Vietnamese originally for the large drop in population. Starting under Carter and continuing under Reagan, we supported the KR against the Vietnamese puppet government in Cambodia because the KR were allied with China and Vietnam was our old enemy that we never got over losing to and leaned toward the Soviet Union.

"Well, Matthew advocates doing more to stop nuclear proliferation. But what if terrorists never get access to a nuclear weapon? What if nobody ever decides to use one ever again? In those cases, all our efforts at stoping nuclear proliferation will be wasted.

What, in short, if things turn out to be basically okay for America and for Americans? Well, that'd be good, it seems to me. But it would also call into question a lot of habits of mind, past policies, spending commitments, career paths, sacred cows, delusions of grandeur, etc. That, I think, is why relatively few people in Washington seem interested in entertaining optimistic scenarios about the regional context even though an optimistic scenario seems more likely to me than do frequently discussed worst-case scenarios.

Posted by Al | September 11, 2007 8:41 PM"

It has to do with the relationship between means and ends. The worst-case scenario of either a false positive detection of a nuclear strike (as almost happened on both sides during the Cold War) or a state passing nukes onto terrorists would be catastrophic, yet mitigating these problems can be done rather cheaply and easily. Buying off North Korea from the start and not over-hyping their nuclear program would have been a lot cheaper than the Iraq War comparatively. Following Hitchens's idea of Bush pulling a Nixon-goes-to-China to help end the Iranian nuclear program would also be comparatively cheap and easy. Invading a country with not enough troops, giving away no-bid contracts to cronies, killing, raping and torturing innocent locals, trying to rebuild an entire diverse nation's infrastructure while expecting them to create a pluralistic liberal capitalist democracy within a timeframe that doesn't see the collapse of the American military is pretty much impossible.

Posted by Reality Man | September 12, 2007 5:27 AM

IF someone 30 years ago told me that going hands-off on Vietnam would result in a stable nation-state with strong diplomatic ties to progressive powers, where US companies' would subcontract the manufacture of kids clothing and motorscooter parts, I would have been turning cartwheels of joy.

Or I would have, had I not been in a stroller...

Posted by Jamey | September 12, 2007 10:36 AM

Rd,

The withdrawal of American support from Cambodia did not have to lead to a Khmer Rouge takeover. The Cambodian government could have stopped the Khmer Rouge takeover had they been able to rally their populace in support of the government.

Why weren't they able to? In large part, this was due to the destabilizing effects of the Nixon administration's bombing campaigns. As a result of our bombing, the Cambodian government was like a guy whose lower body is crushed between a train platform and a train. He's going to die eventually, but so long as the train doesn't move, he will get to live a little bit longer. As soon as the train moves, however, he will die instantly and gruesomely. Continuing to support such a government would have amounted to trying to keep that one train in place indefinitely.

Unfortunately, because of our previous actions in Cambodia, we were left with no good options, just bad ones and worse ones.

Posted by eltoro | September 12, 2007 11:40 AM

It would also be pretty hard to argue that, at the time, a serious motivation for U.S. policymakers would be current or potential suffering faced by Cambodian civilians.

The fate of Cambodian civilians was simply not a serious motivation for policy; no one in power cared whether Cambodian civilians lived or died, and the only point at which their deaths became noticeable was when it became ideologically useful to the hawk / stabbed-in-the-back groups to try to blame US liberals and leftists for the Cambodian genocide (the one which the hawks had just spent nearly a decade facilitating).

The tendency of the right and liberal hawks to posture their concern for Cambodian civilians is entirely a retrospective and ideologically useful posture, and completely unconvincing.

Posted by El Cid | September 12, 2007 2:33 PM

That's like saying the Reconstruction state governments in the American South fell because they couldn't "rally the populace" to stop the Ku Klux Klan. In reality, most ordinary people want to live and won't sacrifice themselves and their families even to stop a vicious insurgent movement. It takes a trained and resource rich army to do that. This would have been true in Cambodia regardless of the effects of American bombing. I am unpersuaded, to say the least, that the withdrawal of American support from Lon Nol and the subsequent slaughter of one fifth of the population were either necessary or inevitable. Countries are never in the position of of somebody caught under a train. They're composed of millions of separate existences, many more of which would exist today if we had not washed our hands of the situation out of a misguided belief that our actions can only do harm and our inactions only good.

Posted by rd | September 12, 2007 2:37 PM

"In reality, most ordinary people want to live and won't sacrifice themselves and their families even to stop a vicious insurgent movement. It takes a trained and resource rich army to do that."

If the Cambodian government had the support of its people, and rallied them to fight against the vicious insurgency that the people did not support, there would have been an army more than powerful enough to fight the Khmer Rouge insurgency. You don't really need a superpower quality professional regular army to stop an insurgency, when the insurgency is not a professional regular army to start with. What you need is a determination by the population to fight against the insurgency. Yes, it's not the natural inclination of ordinary civilians to go fight against armed thugs; that's where societal leadership comes in. Had the Cambodian government convinced its people of the patriotic necessity to fight the Khmer Rouge, do you really think that ordinary Cambodians would have sat out of the conflict? No, they would have rushed to enlist in their country's military or millitias in order to crush the insurgent menace, just like ordinary civilians in our country joined the Union Army in order to crush the Confederate insurgency during our Civil War.

Posted by eltoro | September 12, 2007 2:54 PM

I thought the quote was "Apres Mois...". Is he saying "Apres Nous" as in "after we/us"? My French is rusty.

I still think it is immoral to go into a country, destroy the government and then walk away because it is too hard to fix. Whether we like it or not, we have a responsibility in Iraq. No one else is going to fix it. We can wish it away but if the US can't do it then nobody can.

Posted by danceswithgoats | September 12, 2007 3:11 PM

"I am unpersuaded, to say the least, that the withdrawal of American support from Lon Nol and the subsequent slaughter of one fifth of the population were either necessary or inevitable"

Nobody is saying that the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields were necessary or inevitable.

First of all, let's not forget that it was the Khmer Rouge that bears the blame for the slaughter of 1/5 of the Cambodian population. It was not the anti-war left that killed millions of Cambodians in the name of some insane Marxist utopia.

Second, it was not inevitable that Lon Nol's goverment would fall, and fall so quickly like a house of cards, just because American support disappeared. If the resistance to Lon Nol's government was simply confined to marginal yet vicious insurgents, and Lon Nol's government railed his people into a patriotic defense against the Khmer Rouge, the Khmer Rouge would have lost, and Pol Pot would have joined the ranks of failed and dead revolutionaries. It's not the fault of the anti-war left, that this failed to occur. It is the fault of the Nixon administration though that the bombing of Cambodia sapped Lon Nol of the good will of his people, and provided the resistance movement to Lon Nol with a broad base of support among the Cambodian populace. So again, if you want to blame someone for enabling the Khmer Rouge, blame Nixon and the pro-war crowd.

Posted by eltoro | September 12, 2007 3:13 PM