What Southeastern Asian Communists? Oh, these!

Fred Kaplan wrote up a hack-job piece in Slate attacking Rudy Guiliani's new foreign policy missive. Most of Kaplan's stuff is simple rubbish, a little of it has a couple good points but is predominantly a "there's no detail here." The following exchange, though, is most striking:

"America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War...Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire, and not only in Vietnam: numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker America."

Does he really believe this? What books have his advisers been giving him? The "South Vietnamese partners" were as corrupt and illegitimate as they come. The Khmer Rouge came to power amid a political vacuum that was spawned as much by Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia as by anything else. As for the "expansionist" Soviet Union, things didn't end very well for the Moscow Politburo. America, it is now widely agreed, was weakened by the Vietnam War, not by its termination. And, by the way, how about that "domino theory"? You'd think from his description that Southeast Asia has subsequently all gone Communist.

The idea that the primary reason for the ascendancy of the Khmer Rouge was due to a power vacuum is self-evident; however, the power vacuum existed when the U.S. removed several hundred thousand troops. That was the real cause of the vacuum, not the bombing of Cambodia.

More importantly, though: I hate to break it to Fred Kaplan, but Southeast Asia pretty much did go entirely Communist. Vietnam became Communist, which meant Communists in Laos and Cambodia. Malaysia and Burma were already Communist at the time and Thailand spent the 70's and the early 80's fighting off Communist rebels. Obviously, China was already Communist. What part of mainland Southeast Asia is he talking about? That pretty much covers it. I must be missing this liberal democratic paradise which flourished in Southeast Asia after we abandoned it.

He goes on for four long pages of further drivel which really isn't worth the space to critique it but, be assured, it's more of the same.