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By the early '70s, military failures were not our only pecking order
problems.  We were showing signs of an unaccustomed financial
vulnerability.  And our willingness to look world events squarely in the eye
altered as well.
While we still fought in Viet Nam, a guerrilla group called the Khmer
Rouge waged war in Cambodia.  Aided by the North Vietnamese, these
Marxist "freedom fighters" struggled violently to gain control of what had
once been a pleasant, peaceful land.  Two years after our departure from Viet
Nam, the Khmer Rouge finally achieved their goals.  They ousted the old
regime and installed Communist zealot Pol Pot as prime minister.  The
48-year-old idealist immediately set to work imposing his vision of freedom,
peace and justice.  He executed those who didn't share his dedication to
building a new society.  He emptied entire cities at gunpoint.  He sent his
soldiers into hospitals, forcing the patients to pick up their beds and march to
the fields.  He ordered college professors, doctors and civil servants into the
countryside to help grow crops.  He turned schools into torture and
extermination centers.  He had babies beaten to death, children's throats cut,
old women nailed to the walls of their homes and burned alive, and
pregnant women shot.  Then he heaped the bodies of his countrymen in
thousands of mass graves.84
By the time North Vietnamese invaders threw Pol Pot out in 1979,
roughly three million Cambodians had been killed by bullets, forced labor or
famine.  Nearly half country's population had died! 85
What was the American reaction?  We didn't march in the streets, nor
did our newspapers blare the tale in daily headlines.  Our moral leaders--our
priests and rabbis--failed to protest.  And our university students did not
demand that we cut off aid that might conceivably trickle into Pol Pot's
hands.  Instead,  Newsweek went so far as  to deny that there were any
atrocities.  So did The Sunday Times of London.  When a Sunday Times
correspondent turned in a story explaining just how bad the plight of the
Cambodians really was, the paper refused to print it.86  And leading
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