Hack Memorial of the Day

You really have to hand it to people like Jules Crittenden, who refuse to allow Dith Pran’s near-total total silence on Iraq to deter their efforts to use Pran’s death to cast a thick glaze of approval over the war.

In so doing, Crittenden faithfully evokes the boundlessly misinformed wingnut history of the Cambodian genocide, then attempts to cast the war in Iraq as a grand gesture of vindication:

[H]istory already was blaming the United States for abandoning the Shiites in their failed rebellion after the Gulf War, which led to the murder of 300,000 of them. Some people blame the United States for the Iran-Iraq War and Saddam’s use of poison gas on the Kurds. Mainly people who would like the United States to abandon Iraq.

I suppose this is the sort of thing Crittenden would have been arguing if the US rather than the Vietnamese had invaded Cambodia in 1978. Of course, when right wingers discuss Cambodia, it’s important to remember that their underlying thesis has nothing whatsoever to do with the genocide per se; if it did, you’d at least hear them referring once in a while to the fact that the United States had resisted adding its signature to the UN genocide convention (and would continue to do so until 1988). Instead, they use the killing fields to argue that the US should have continued fighting on behalf of a government in Saigon that was no closer to viability in 1975 than it was in 1954, when the fiction of an independent, non-communist South Vietnam was first conceived.