Reply #43: Do you know WHO finally overthrew the Khmer Rouge? Surprise answer! [View All]

[0rganism]

Wait for it....

The VIETNAMESE! Yes, those same communists we spent so much money to eradicate from their native country ended up having to uncover the mess that American attacks on Cambodian infrastructure created.

By the time Americans pulled out of Vietnam, Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia in the mid-70s, we didn't give a rat's ass if the Khmer Rouge were killing by the thousands or the tens of thousands or the millions. It was too expensive, too politically charged, too unsafe, too ugly, too insane. Not all the rubber trees in the world could have kept us involved. Real enemies with real weapons and real determination make occupying a country into living hell.

Much easier to pick on the non-targets, like Grenada, or the bombs-only targets like Libya. Gives you that same sweet taste of power and vengeance, but none of those extra calories that come with actually doing something responsible.

Kosovo was a mess. Clinton, and even Clark, still catch shit over the intervention in Kosovo because NATO actually tried to do something. Afghanistan is a mess. Of course, it was such a freaking mess before that any net loss would be hard to measure -- the Afghan people actually considered the Taliban to be an improvement, that's how fucked up the place was twenty years ago. Iraq, though, is a different order of mess. It's an expensive mess. It's a modernized mess. It's a complicated delicate mess. Hussein's totalitarian regime was a relatively stable balancing force within the mess, with predictable motives and methods. We removed that regime.

Now we are left with an unbalanced mess like we haven't seen in 30 years. I doubt that our friends in the departments of state and defense are capable of fixing it.