Elizabeth Becker (When the War was Over): It was not the atrocious policies of the Khmer Rouge that turned Vietnam against Cambodia, not the slaughter or the slavery. It was a question of domination, control, and territory, of ridding Vietnam of the problem of Cambodia once and forever--questions that cannot be arbitrarily relegated to the communist era, the colonial period, or even the Angkor era. But they are questions that can be resolved without full-scale war and occupation. It was Vietnams resort to total warfare that prompted the inevitable comparisons with their Red River ancestors. The communists in Hanoi had turned a near-disaster into a historic opportunity to realize what their predecessors had attempted centuries earlier: control of the Mekong River...
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 09:02:23 +0000
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