-- On 21 Oct 2004 at 10:28, Tyler Durden wrote:
No. You've got to do more reading. Sihoanouk was in power and loosely held a coalition together. In part because he believed it and in part because it was necessary to hold this coalition together, Sihoanouk did not spout particularly pro-American rhetoric. As a result, the US/CIA backed Lon Nol to overthrow Sihoanouk.
This used to be a self flattering delusion, is now a lie. US records have been opened, we know that the overthrow came as a complete surprise to the US, and that initially the US did not know whose side Lon Nol was on. What happened was that Sihanouk's allies, the North Vietnamese, attacked him. This discredited Sihanouk's foreign policy, and Sihanouk himself, and led to those who sought to save Cambodia from Vietnamese domination, sought to avoid the installation of the (then seemingly puppet) Khmer Rouge, overthrowing Sihanouk. Shawcross, no friend of the US, reluctantly conceded this after doing a big freedom of information thing.
The US was in Vietnam trying to fight their way up. So it would have been pretty evident to anyone watching that the US was trying to undermine the PRC.
You live in a world of delusion. Your dates are all wrong, your events are all fiction.
Mao did the reasonable thing and fought us (and won) in all 3 theaters. I'll agree with you pretty quickly if you say Mao was a fairly Stalinist butcher, but in any event he made use of the Khmer Rouge to push a US-backed puppet out of the peninsula
The Khmer Rouge were primarily backed by the Soviet Union at first. When it became apparent that they were not the puppets that those who organized them and initially armed them intended them to be, they subsequently received more backing from China, and less from the Soviet Union, but they were brought to power by support from both China and the Soviet Union.
What if the US had not followed such an aggressive policy towards the PRC?
The US never followed an aggressive policy towards the PRC.
Chinese history gives us a clear indication: They would never have backed the Khmer Rouge. (Sihoanouk regularly traveled to China before and after that time, BTW, and was moderately friendly with Jong Nan Hai.)
Sihanouk was friendly, indeed abjectly servile, to the North Vietnamese and the Soviet Union, yet the North Vietnamese created the Khmer Rouge and attacked Cambodia. Same thing happened with Laos, where the Americans never got involved at all to any significant extent. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG zb5a74rNSc9lJdS/j1FjUvRf0YLLcKMfJtnK+yY8 4vGyjijdoPOZR1s3LKxaVmjbOBleszE0W5/7pQmoR