What Does This Mean for US-Iran relations and the Middle East?

[mep]

I would cite the 500,000 people murdered in Rwanda as an example. It seems the world noticed by accident months after the fact.

How about Cambodia?

 

[jazdoc]

How about Cambodia?

Probably not a great example if you against intervening in Syria. We dismissed the warnings about what would happen.

To wit some pronouncements in 1975:

At a press conference on March 7, 1975, then President Ford warned of "horror and impending tragedy" if Congress cut off aid to the Cambodian government.

George McGovern noted:

``The growing hysteria of the administration's posture on Cambodia seems to me to reflect a determined refusal to consider what the fall of the existing government in Phnom Penh would actually mean. . . . We should be able to see that the kind of government which would succeed Lon Nol's forces would most likely be a government . . . run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia.''

Sydney Schanberg (jounalist for the NY Times and "The Killing Fields" fame) added:

``it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.'' He dismissed predictions of mass executions in the wake of a Khmer Rouge victory: ``It would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior as national policy under a Communist government once the war is over.''

 

[mep]

Mark-My point was that we did nothing to stop the slaughter. Cambodia didn't have anything we wanted.

 

[jazdoc]

Mark-My point was that we did nothing to stop the slaughter. Cambodia didn't have anything we wanted.

Agreed. Sadly "never again" is only a shibboleth....