H.D.S. Greenway: Cambodia reflected in Iran waters

[Eugene]

Source: Boston Globe

H.D.S. GREENWAY
Cambodia reflected in Iran waters

By H.D.S. Greenway | April 10, 2007

WHEN I saw pictures of the British sailors and marines, on the eve
of their freedom from Iran, dressed in ill-fitting suits that Iranian
tailors had run up for them, memory raced back nearly 40 years
when a similar drama was being played out in another country of
which the United States then disapproved.

-snip-

Some American soldiers, on a river boat, had wandered up the
Mekong from Vietnam into Cambodian territory and been captured.
Sihanouk played the incident with the same theatricality as
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did with his British
prisoners.

-snip-

Scarcely 18 months later, Sihanouk was deposed. I have never
believed that the Americans were directly involved in the coup, but
they certainly encouraged it, and took advantage of it. An American
invasion, and a no-quarter war followed for five years, until the
long, genocidal night of the Khmer Rouge descended across the land.

It was the final spasm of a disastrous American foreign-policy
mistake that had engulfed Indochina, and I thought, when it was
finally over, that a painful lesson had been learned. I was wrong.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/04/10/cambodia_reflected_in_iran_waters