A Thought
On Dith Pran’s death. Help prevent the next genocide. No abandonment of Iraq.
I have no idea how the late New York Times photographer felt about Iraq. I’ve been looking around for anything that would indicate this genocide survivor and anti-genocide crusader’s thoughts on the subject, and haven’t found anything definitive. I know how he felt about genocide, though.
His own website posts a 2002 article in which he doesn’t blame the United States for what happened to Cambodia. He knew the United States was trying to fight communism, and failed. At that time, he didn’t take a position on the pending Iraq war. But he had a few interesting things to say about it:
A young woman wanted to know his position on the potential war with Iraq.
Dith Pran said it is a discussion that is important for this democratic country’s people to have, and that he does not have the answer.
“Is this true what our president says, or just a politic? I don’t know,” he said.
“I’m not anti-war or pro-war, I’m just a realist,” he said. “I go by the majority.”
But he warned that “history will blame you in the long run if say Saddam becomes Hitler,” Dith Pran said.
Well, he already had. And history already was blaming the United States for abandoning the Shiites in their failed rebellion after the Gulf War, which led to the murder of 300,000 of them. Some people blame the United States for the Iran-Iraq War and Saddam’s use of poison gas on the Kurds. Mainly people who would like the United States to abandon Iraq.
Here is Dith’s website. No mention of Iraq.
Last year, William Shawcrosson made the connection between Iraq and Cambodia in an article you may remember that cited Dith’s experience and made some remarkable statements:
At the end of 1975 I went to the Thai-Cambodian border to talk to refugees. Their horrific stories of people with glasses being killed as “intellectuals” and of “bourgeois” babies being beaten to death against trees were being dismissed as CIA propaganda by the antiAmerican Western Left, but it seemed obvious to me that they were true. I wanted to discover how the Khmer Rouge had grown and come to power; I wrote a book called Sideshow, which was very critical of the way in which the United States had brought war to Cambodia while trying to extricate itself from Vietnam.
But horror had engulfed all of Indo-China as a result of the US defeat in 1975. In Vietnam and Laos there was no vast mass murder but the communists created cruel gulags and, from Vietnam in particular, millions of people fled, mostly by boat and mostly to the US. Given the catastrophe of the communist victories, I have always thought that those like myself who were opposed to the American efforts in Indochina should be very humble. I also think it wrong to dismiss the US efforts there as sheer disaster. Lee Kuan Yew, the former longtime Prime Minister of Singapore, has a subtler view. He argues that, although America lost in IndoChina in 1975, the fact that it was there so long meant that other SouthEast Asian countries had time to build up their economies to relieve the poverty of their peasants and thus resist communist encroachment — which they probably could not have done had IndoChina gone communist in the 1960s.
That long view seems to me to be the one that has to be applied to Iraq. I still believe the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was the correct thing to do — and it was something only the United States could have done. For all the horrors that extremist Sunnis and Shias are inflicting on each other today, the US rid the world of the Pol Pot of the Middle East. So long as the vile Saddam family regime remained in power there was no hope of progress in the region. There is still hope — if we do not abandon the Iraqi people.
There has been a concerted effort by element of the American mass media to reject any Vietnam comparison that doesn’t support withdrawal from Iraq. Newsbusters on that last August.
Topics: Iraq, genocide, history
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:59 pm on Sunday, March 30, 2008
2 Responses to “A Thought”
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March 31st, 2008 at 1:08 am
For all the horrors that extremist Sunnis and Shias are inflicting on each other today, the US rid the world of the Pol Pot of the Middle East.
That’s the long view, and the correct one IMHO. But try telling that to a leftie and you’ll get a hysterical response comprised of talking points concluded by “Yes, we can!”
March 31st, 2008 at 10:23 am
Typical lefty boomer response to Cambodian genocide, boat people, one million in Vietnamese re-education camps:
“LA LA LA I HAVE MY FINGERS IN MY EARS AND I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA”