Bret Stephens: From WikiLeaks to the Killing Fields
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
Innocent civilians become the tragic casualties of war. Insurgents plant thousands of IEDs. Special-ops teams hunt down insurgents. The Taliban may have a few Stinger missiles. Pakistan plays a double game with the Taliban. The U.S. government can't keep its secrets. The New York Times has about as much regard for those secrets as a British tabloid has for a starlet's privacy. The Obama administration blames everything on Bush.
Is any of this news? Not exactly.
Still, you'd be forgiven for thinking it is, given the Pentagon Papers-style treatment now being accorded to the WikiLeak of 92,000 classified documents on the Afghan War. John Kerry says the documents "raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan." WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sees "evidence of war crimes." A Time magazine columnist, making explicit the comparison with the Vietnam War, offers that the leak underscores "how futile the situation in Afghanistan is."
We'll see about that. In the meantime, take note of another item in the news: Yesterday's conviction by a U.N. tribunal of former Khmer Rouge prison commandant Kaing Guek Eav—better known as "Comrade Duch"—to 19 years in prison for his role in the Cambodian genocide. Remarkably, Duch is the first senior Khmer Rouge official to be convicted for the crimes of Pol Pot's regime, more than three decades after it was evicted from Phnom Penh.
The Cambodian genocide is especially worth recalling today not only for what it was, but for the public debates in the West that immediately preceded it. "The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns," said then-congressman, now senator, Chris Dodd, by way of making the case against the Ford administration's bid to extend military assistance to the pro-American government of Lon Nol.
In the New York Times, Sydney Schanberg reported from Cambodia that "it is difficult to imagine how [Cambodian] lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." Mr. Schanberg added that "it would be tendentious to forecast [genocide] as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over."
A year later, Mr. Schanberg was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, though not for tendentiousness.
All in all, America's withdrawal from Southeast Asia resulted in the killing of an estimated 165,000 South Vietnamese in so-called re-education camps; the mass exodus of one million boat people, a quarter of whom died at sea; the mass murder, estimated at 100,000, of Laos's Hmong people; and the killing of somewhere between one million and two million Cambodians.
Now we have the debate over Afghanistan. Should America begin to withdraw, and if so, how soon and by how much?..
Read entire article at WSJ
Innocent civilians become the tragic casualties of war. Insurgents plant thousands of IEDs. Special-ops teams hunt down insurgents. The Taliban may have a few Stinger missiles. Pakistan plays a double game with the Taliban. The U.S. government can't keep its secrets. The New York Times has about as much regard for those secrets as a British tabloid has for a starlet's privacy. The Obama administration blames everything on Bush.
Is any of this news? Not exactly.
Still, you'd be forgiven for thinking it is, given the Pentagon Papers-style treatment now being accorded to the WikiLeak of 92,000 classified documents on the Afghan War. John Kerry says the documents "raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan." WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sees "evidence of war crimes." A Time magazine columnist, making explicit the comparison with the Vietnam War, offers that the leak underscores "how futile the situation in Afghanistan is."
We'll see about that. In the meantime, take note of another item in the news: Yesterday's conviction by a U.N. tribunal of former Khmer Rouge prison commandant Kaing Guek Eav—better known as "Comrade Duch"—to 19 years in prison for his role in the Cambodian genocide. Remarkably, Duch is the first senior Khmer Rouge official to be convicted for the crimes of Pol Pot's regime, more than three decades after it was evicted from Phnom Penh.
The Cambodian genocide is especially worth recalling today not only for what it was, but for the public debates in the West that immediately preceded it. "The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns," said then-congressman, now senator, Chris Dodd, by way of making the case against the Ford administration's bid to extend military assistance to the pro-American government of Lon Nol.
In the New York Times, Sydney Schanberg reported from Cambodia that "it is difficult to imagine how [Cambodian] lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." Mr. Schanberg added that "it would be tendentious to forecast [genocide] as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over."
A year later, Mr. Schanberg was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, though not for tendentiousness.
All in all, America's withdrawal from Southeast Asia resulted in the killing of an estimated 165,000 South Vietnamese in so-called re-education camps; the mass exodus of one million boat people, a quarter of whom died at sea; the mass murder, estimated at 100,000, of Laos's Hmong people; and the killing of somewhere between one million and two million Cambodians.
Now we have the debate over Afghanistan. Should America begin to withdraw, and if so, how soon and by how much?..