in Vietnam as defined by the survival of the anticommunist government of South Vietnam it is doubtful that the Khmer Rouge would ever have come to power in neighboring Cambodia, or that a "viable" South Vietnam would have permitted them to do what they did. By abetting the failure of the Vietnam war effort, this view holds, the American antiwar movement effectively sealed the fate of one to three million Cambodians.
Flatly opposed to this is what may be called the antiwar interpretation of Cambodia (Shawcross. His entire book presents the U.S. experience in Cambodia from the antiwar perspective). In this view, the U.S. interventions in Cambodia, which began with the secret bombings, led by inevitable degrees to the ground incursions, and to the overthrow of the Sihanouk regime (whether this was actually engineered by the CIA, as has been alleged, or not). When the bombing failed to achieve its desired results, the U.S. had to fall back on ground intervention, and this in turn required a more acquiescent government in Cambodia. But by causin
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