Khmer Rouge Trials

First Red Khmer trials just started. Cambodia’s Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge regime that was responsible for the deaths of up to 2 million people. Time magazine sheds some light on something you might not have known:

"The consequences of U.S. intervention in Kampuchea have made a mockery of American intentions before, and they could do so again. The emergence of Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge was partly a result of misguided American policy 20 years ago. Richard Nixon's secret bombing of Kampuchea in 1969 and the CIA's support for a coup by a feckless military junta the following spring contributed to the chaos in which the Khmer Rouge thrived. In 1975 Pol Pot seized power and unleashed a holocaust.

Four years and nearly 2 million deaths later, the Vietnamese invaded and installed their own regime in Phnom Penh. To much of the world, Hanoi's aggression against a neighbor mattered more than Pol Pot's atrocities against his own people. After all, Viet Nam was expanding not only its own influence but also that of its backer, the Soviet Union.

The Khmer Rouge, whom the arch-moralist Jimmy Carter called "the worst % violators of human rights in the world," became an instrument to drive the Vietnamese out of Kampuchea.

"I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot," recalled Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Adviser, in 1981. "Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him. But China could." The U.S., he added, "winked semipublicly" as the Chinese funneled arms to the Khmer Rouge, using Thailand as a conduit."

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This was part of a wider policy of forcing the Vietnamese out of Cambodia by funding anti-Vietnamese guerrilla groups that the U.S. helped create. Between 1979 and 1981, the World Food Program, which was strongly under US influence, provides nearly $12 million in food aid to Thailand. Much of this aid makes its way to the Khmer Rouge. In January 1980 the US started funding Pol Pot while he was in exile. The extent of this support was $85m from 1980 to 1986. Brzezinski's support of the Khmer Rouge was a continuation of the friendly relations the US had with the Khmer Rouge during the presidency of Gerald Ford. Kissinger had already asked Thailand's foreign minister in 1975 to tell the Khmer Rouge that the US would be friends with them.

Both Kissinger and Brzezinski work for the current Obama adminstration.

"In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason."
- Brzezinski, 1970, Between Two Ages : America's Role in the Technetronic Era

"(Soldiers are) dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy."
- Kissinger, Woodward and Bernstein, The Final Days, chapter 14

"Change we can all believe in!"
- Obama