Crazy in Cambodia.

To the Editors:

The article by Keith Windschuttle in the June issue, "The journalism of warfare," repeats my somewhat emotional claim, made in 1976, that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia in 1969-71 and 1973 drove at least some Cambodians out of their minds. I based this comment on written reports and oral testimony that were widely available at the time. I never claimed that the U.S. bombing (heartless and inexcusable though it was) accelerated the Khmer Rouge victory. Windschuttle goes on to state that I was in no position to make this statement, because I was a graduate student at the time and had never been in Cambodia.

As a dual U.S.-Australian citizen who has lived in Melbourne since 1972, I have followed Windschuttle's trajectory from left to right and also his virulent attacks on historians who are careless with sources and assertions. To hoist him on his own petard, I should inform him and your readers that in 1976 I was a senior lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, a position I had held since 1972 (i.e., before the carpet bombing of Cambodia began) and that my Ph.D. thesis on nineteenth-century Cambodian history benefited greatly from the twenty-six months I had spent in Cambodia in 1960-62 as a language officer in the U.S. Embassy. I returned to Cambodia for research in 1970 and 1971 and have devoted my professional life to studying and writing about its history, literature, and politics.

David Chandler

Emeritus Professor of History

Monash University

Melbourne, Australia

Keith Windschuttle replies:

The substantive point my article made about David Chandler was how bogus were his claims in 1976 about the consequences of the American bombing of Cambodia in 1973. I did not mean to say that Chandler had never been to Cambodia in his life, but rather that he had never gone there after the bombing to gather any evidence that the Cambodian peasants were driven so "out of their minds" they flocked to join Pol Pot's forces. What I said was perfectly true. Chandler's claim was not based on testimony from Cambodian peasants themselves. It was an invention.

His letter's assertion that he never said U.S. bombing accelerated the Khmer Rouge victory is belied by his own writings. In his 1999 biography of Pol Pot, Brother Number One, he makes that very point on page 96, although once again he lacks any firsthand evidence. He says there is "some corroboration" that the bombing produced "thousands of dedicated, enraged recruits" to the Khmer Rouge but he fails to provide even one example, and is forced to concede that the point remains speculative: "The bombing campaign's effect on rural society is difficult to judge, but in view of the tonnage involved and Cambodia's unpreparedness it must have been catastrophic."

The truth is--and this is a point that Chandler himself does acknowledge--the bombing was successful in breaking the Communist encirclement of Phnom Penh. Unfortunately, the U.S. Congress, pressured by news media complaints about civilian casualties, called a halt to the campaign five months after it began, thus allowing Communist forces to regroup. Hence, rather than American bombing being responsible for Pol Pot, the cessation of American bombing was far more influential. I am glad to learn that Chandler now acknowledges his 1976 claim was "somewhat emotional." His contrition would be more convincing, however, if he had written this not while trying to score a minor point against me, but in response to just one of the many occasions over the past thirty years when John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, and their followers have cited his assertion as expert testimony from the period. Instead, he has been happy to bask in their esteem.

His letter confirms the assessment made by Stephen Morris in the recently published Anti-Chomsky Reader: "Over the years Chandler has retained a habit of saying different and sometimes contradictory things, according to what seems appropriate to the political and other expectations of his listening or reading audience, or according to his personal or political grievances."