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Politics : Support the French! Viva Democracy! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (649)	4/8/2003 10:39:54 PM
From: Michael M	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7834

Dream on yourself. The US bombed Cambodia for good reason -it was a sanctuary for the enemy and "neutrality" of the Sihanouk government was pure fiction. Cambodia, for years, was used to supply communist forces fighting in the RVN and served as a staging area for enemy ops. The people in the streets may have never wanted US bombers in Cambodia but their countrymen in Vietnam had a different view (the "secrecy" part of the equation was irrelevant except that it became a needlessly self-inflicted black eye - a Nixon specialty). You began this exchange with a heart-breaking letter from a Cambodian left by this country to certain death. Would you not grieve for your own neighbors who died because we gave Cambodia a pass for so long? In a letter to the New York Times, an American citizen whose only son was killed during the fighting in Vietnam wrote: "Had the fathers of these young men known that this nation would countenance a sanctuary a scant fifty miles from Saigon, we would have counseled them against induction. That we did not is a burden we will always bear. A great percentage of our ground dead from 1965 to 1970 came from an enemy who with impunity was staged, trained and equipped in the Parrot's Beak of Cambodia .... The perfidy ... is anything but the U.S. bombing of the sanctuary itself. The perfidy lies in the fact that for more than four years the United States of America, without serious recorded concern, allowed her fighting men to be attacked, maimed and killed from a position which was itself privileged from either ground or air retaliation." The citizens of the United States are not a stupid and arrogant people - unless you count our willingness to sacrifice our very lives for strangers who, as often as not, spit on us for our trouble. You have already made clear your preference for the feckless French - perhaps they will risk all for you some cloudy day. If you get the urge to run the other way when the US offers help, I promise to not stand in your way.