Is President Bush simply ignorant of history, or does he just think the American people are stupid? In his address to the VFW he argued that when the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, there were consequences for Vietnam and Cambodia. He said about Cambodia, “…The Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution.”
What President Bush failed to note was that the U.S. supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The U.S. had been supporting Pol Pot since 1972. Then, when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to put a stop to Pol Pot in Jan. of 1979, the U.S. immediately supported him with between 20 and 24 million dollars of foreign aid, knowing full well that Pol Pot had killed two million of his countrymen. Then, in 1990, the first Bush Administration added another 7 million. The U.S. supported this butcher through the 90s.
In short, the U.S. enabled Pol Pot to stay in power until the Vietnamese invasion. Thereafter, the U.S. continued to support the greatest mass murderer (given the size of the population) in the history of the world! This was a shameful episode in American foreign policy.
President Bush did not tell the truth in his speech, and the information is available to anyone who wants to read history.
Charles Moton
Lucerne
