Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge was committing genocide in Cambodia. Vietnam wanted to intervene. The U.S. opposed this, even though it was clearly in the best interests of the Cambodian people to rid themselves of Pol Pot.
<<< With US backing, China supplied the
Khmer Rouge with military equipment and the right-wing military regime in
Thailand, a US client state, allowed free flow of supplies to Pol Pot's
guerrillas in their base camps along the Thai-Cambodian border.
As Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, later admitted,
"I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. The question was how to
help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never
support him, but China could."
Equally important was the diplomatic support from the United States and
other imperialist powers, which recognized the Khmer Rouge as the
legitimate government of Cambodia and backed the seating of Pol Pot's
representative as the Cambodian delegate to the United Nations for more
than a decade. Throughout the 1980s the Reagan administration blocked
international efforts to characterize the events of 1975-78 in Cambodia as
genocide or to hold the Khmer Rouge leadership responsible for mass
murder, since it would undercut the American alliance with Pol Pot. >>>
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