The Cambodia-Iran connection

Harold Meyerson over at TAP:

The Nixon-Kissinger plan for Vietnam was always to go out with a bang. They extended the war to Cambodia, for the same reason that Bush threatened Iran and Syria tonight -- it was a sanctuary for the North Vietnamese. And even as they withdrew U.S. forces, they upped their bombing of the North, to convey to their fellow Americans that we weren't going quietly, and to the world that we were still crazy muthas that you wouldn't want to mess around with...

Senator Chuck Hagel, speaking to Condi at today's Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting:

Some of us remember 1970, Madame Secretary, and that was Cambodia, and when our government lied to the American people and said we didn't cross the border going into Cambodia. In fact we did. I happen to know something about that, as do some on this committee.

Um, yeah. As I recall, Senator Kerry knows a thing or two about those incursions into Cambodia.

Alison Rowat:

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? Faced with a government whose only response to the hole that had been dug in Vietnam was to bring in bigger shovels, the question John Kerry asked a Senate committee in 1971 was meant to be rhetorical. Three decades on, another time, another hopeless war, George Bush has provided an answer. You do it from the White House library...

...If the President liked the ambience of the White House library, he should spend more time within its rose-tinted embrace. When he tires of admiring the late Federal period furnishings, he might like to peruse the transcripts of past presidential addresses to see how his predecessors assured the nation in times of crisis. One speech in particular might strike him as familiar. Like his address, it referred to the cleaning out of "enemy sanctuaries", expanding a war in order to win it, and the absolute importance of the US standing firm and not accepting defeat. The President was Nixon and, as is now known, what he was telling the American people about Cambodia was only a fraction of the truth. The current President has made his intentions only too plain, and he has done so in the face of opposition from Congress, the American public and much of the world. There is no comfort to be had from his honesty, only a wretched sense of foreboding.

Tonight I'm proud of Kerry and Hagel, but that pride sits next to a knot of dread in the area of my heart.