What Kissinger and Nixon began [the premeditated destruction of Cambodia], Pol Pot completed. Had the United States 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 United States began secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. Direct contact was made between the Reagan White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr. Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA, made a clandestine visit to Pol Pot's operational base inside Cambodia in November 1980. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser to President-elect Reagan. Within a year some fifty ClA and other intelligence agents were running Washington's secret war against Cambodia from the US Embassy in Bangkok and along the Thai-Cambodian border. The aim was to appease China, the great Soviet foe and Pol Pot's most enduring backer, and to rehabilitate and use the Khmer Rouge to bring pressure on the source of recent US humiliation in the region: the Vietnamese. Cambodia was now America's "last battle of the Vietnam War," as one US official put it, "so that we can achieve a better result." This "better result" culminated in the murder of 1.7 million people, more than 20% of the country's population. The "better result" of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, according to the Cambodian Genocide Project, "was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century. As in Nazi ...
Tags: Khmer, Cambodia, history, war, Prince, Shihonouk, Betrayal, gatorn
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