Seld-defeating US foreign policy

[James A. Donald]

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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. 

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         James A. Donald
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