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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. .... http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=24328 |
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