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There have been efforts to deal with this humanitarian catastrophe. The British-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG) has been trying to remove the lethal objects, but the British press reports that the United States is “conspicuously missing from the handful of western organizations that have followed MAG,” though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian civilians.88 The British press also reports, with some annoyance, that the United States has refused to provide MAG specialists with “render harmless procedures,” still treated as a state secret for weapons three decades old.89 The U.S. mainstream media have treated in very low key the continuing human toll suffered in Laos and have maintained almost complete silence concerning the U.S. non-cooperativeness in attempts to alleviate a crisis dating back to the “secret war” against Laos, which again was “secret” only by tacit propaganda service of the mainstream media (see chapter 6).

CAMBODIA

Important changes have occurred in Cambodia since 1988, including Vietnam’s withdrawal from that country, elections held under UN auspices, and the death of Pol Pot. We noted in chapter 7 that, after the Vietnamese had ousted Pol Pot in December 1978, although the United States and its allies had denounced Pol Pot as “another Hitler” committing “genocide,” they quickly became his supporter, allowing him to retain Cambodia’s U.N. seat and otherwise aiding and protecting him in his Thailand refuge. Vietnam was severely punished—by harsh sanctions and by U.S. support for a Chinese invasion to teach Vietnam a lesson—for having terminated Pol Pot’s atrocities! President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in 1979 that “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help D.K. [Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot’s forces]. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could.”90 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Vietnamese sought to end their isolation by exiting from Cambodia, but insisted as a condition for withdrawal that Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge be excluded from returning to power, the United States objected, and insisted, with eventual success, that the Khmer Rouge be included as a contestant party in the post-occupation settlement.91

What dominated U.S. policy and led to its support of Pol Pot was the classic rule that the enemy of my enemy (Vietnam) is my friend, and perhaps also the new tilt toward China, also hostile toward Vietnam. The support of Pol Pot was awkward, given the prior denunciations of his policies, but the mainstream media handled it with aplomb, and the U.S. public was almost surely completely unaware that the United States had become his ally and supporter. (The explicit statement of support by Brzezinski quoted above was never mentioned in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Newsweek; it was quoted once in both the Los Angeles Times and Time.)

However, in the late 1990s, after Vietnam had left Cambodia and U.S. officials’ anti-Vietnam passions had subsided, and Pol Pot was no longer a useful instrument of anti-Vietnam policy, U.S. officials and pundits rediscovered Pol Pot’s and the Khmer Rouge’s villainy and candidacy for war crimes trials. The media handled the previous “tilt” toward Pol Pot mainly by evasion, essentially blacking out the years 1979–95, or vaguely intimating that the U.S. had supported him for reasons of “realpolitik,” but avoiding both details on the nature and magnitude of support as well as any reflections on the morality of backing “another Hitler.” The New York Times’s summary of “Pol Pot’s Rise and Fall” (April 17, 1998) lists for “1979–1990: Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge are given refuge at Thai border where they fight back against the Vietnamese.” “Given refuge” is misleading: they were given economic and military aid and political support by the United States and its allies. The Times’s main reporter on Cambodia in early 1998, Seth Mydans, repeatedly blacked out mention of U.S. support, referring to “the decade-long civil