RadioBanter - Iraq and Cambodia

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Underlying the Clinton security failure was the fact that the administration
was made up of people who for 25 years had discounted or minimized the
totalitarian threat, opposed America's armed presence abroad, and
consistently resisted the deployment of America's military forces to halt
Communist expansion. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was himself a
veteran of the Sixties "antiwar" movement, which abetted the Communist
victories in Vietnam and Cambodia and created the "Vietnam War syndrome"
that made it so difficult afterwards for American presidents to deploy the
nation's military forces.

Berger had also been a member of "Peace Now," the leftist movement seeking
to pressure the Israeli government to make concessions to Yasser Arafat's
PLO terrorists. Clinton's first National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake was
a protégé of Berger, who had introduced him to Clinton. All three had met as
activists in the 1972 McGovern presidential campaign, whose primary
conclusion was the "arrogance of American power," rather than Communist
aggression, fueled the Vietnam War.

Anthony Lake's own attitude towards the totalitarian threat in Southeast
Asia was displayed in his March 1975 Washington Post article, "At Stake in
Cambodia: Extending Aid Will Only Prolong the Killing." The prediction
contained in Lake's title proved exactly wrong. It was not a small mistake
for someone who in 1992 would be placed in charge of America's national
security apparatus. Lake's article was designed to rally Democrat opposition
to a presidential request for emergency aid to the Cambodian regime. The aid
was required to contain the threat posed by Communist leader Pol Pot and his
insurgent Khmer Rouge forces.

At the time, Republicans warned that if the aid was cut, the regime would
fall and a "bloodbath" would ensue. This fear was solidly based on reports
that had begun accumulating three years earlier concerning "the
extraordinary brutality with which the Khmer Rouge were governing the
civilian population in areas they controlled." But Anthony Lake and the
Democrat-controlled Congress dismissed these warnings as so much
"anti-Communist hysteria" and voted to deny aid.

In his Post article, Lake advised fellow Democrats to view the Khmer Rouge
not as a totalitarian force-which it was-but as a coalition embracing "many
Khmer nationalists, Communist and non-Communist," who only desired
independence. It would be a mistake, he wrote, to alienate Pol Pot and the
Khmer Rouge lest we "push them further into the arms of their Communist
supporters." Lake's myopic left-wing views prevailed among the Democrats,
and the following year the new president, Jimmy Carter, rewarded Lake with
an appointment as Policy Planning Director of the State Department.

In Cambodia, the termination of U.S. aid led immediately to the collapse of
the government allowing the Khmer Rouge to seize power within months of the
congressional vote. The victorious revolutionaries proceeded to implement
their plans for a new Communist utopia by systematically eliminating their
opposition. In the next three years they killed nearly 2 million Cambodians,
a campaign universally recognized as one of the worst genocides ever
recorded.
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http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=24328