Pol Pot
It is deplorable that Pol Pot’s capture has been the occasion for Robert Scheer (Column Left, June 24) to try to regurgitate long-discredited theories that Pol Pot and his murderous Khmer Rouge were somehow an American creation. North Vietnam brought the war to Cambodia and destabilized the country’s politics by occupying portions of Cambodia from 1965 onward. Prince Norodom Sihanouk invited the U.S. to take military counteraction against the North Vietnamese. After Sihanouk was deposed in 1970 by his own parliament, the North Vietnamese rebuffed an offer from the Nixon administration to try to restore the status quo ante and proceeded to try to occupy the rest of the country.
North Vietnam built up, armed, trained and fought alongside the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodian government from 1970-73. The Khmer Rouge rebuffed all U.S. negotiating offers from 1972 onward. Congress cut off all U.S. support to the Cambodian government in 1973, dooming the country to a Khmer Rouge takeover. When the Cambodian conflict entered a new phase with Vietnam’s invasion in late 1978, it was U.S. diplomacy that struggled to produce a settlement that, in the end, marginalized the Khmer Rouge.
PETER W. RODMAN, Director
National Security Programs
Nixon Center for Peace
and Freedom, Washington
Rodman served on the National Security Council staff during the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush administrations.
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