Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Gareth Porter, the great author of Manufactured Crisis, the truth of the Iran nuclear scare.
And before that, Perils of Dominance, his book about the Vietnam War.
And of course, he's written a thousand articles about Iraq War II, Afghanistan, Syria, and etc.
Like that, especially Iran's nuclear program as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Gareth?
I'm fine.
Thanks so much.
Very glad to be back, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
And this is not a rerun from the other day.
This is an entirely separate interview, everybody.
You got that right.
And you'd be right if you thought that I interviewed Gareth all the time.
I've interviewed him far more than anyone else, more than 200 times, maybe three now.
And for good reason.
It's because all the stuff he writes is so important and good.
Okay.
So the reason I've got you on today, though, Gareth, is actually not about a new article that you've written.
But instead, it's about what seems to me like some old BS, but maybe is worth talking about, since I see this brought up from time to time.
The internet says that you're a big fan of Pol Pot, like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.
And so I was thinking that can't possibly be right.
Gareth, what's the deal?
Right.
I mean, this is a charge that I, as you've suggested, I get from time to time.
People who don't like what I'm writing at this point about the Middle East like to bring up what I wrote 40 years ago, at this point now, about Southeast Asia, specifically the aftermath of the Indochina War, specifically in Cambodia.
Because of a small book that I co-authored and a testimony that I gave to Congress, the book was published in 76 and the congressional testimony in 77, the spring of 77.
In the book, I essentially was responding to the charge that the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian communist movement, which inherited power because of the U.S. war in Vietnam and in Cambodia, and when that war was over or as it was ending, the Khmer Rouge or the Red Communists, as it would be translated into French, were herding the population out of the city, out of Phnom Penh into the countryside.
And the book was essentially aimed at trying to explain, as I and my co-author at that point understood it, why the Khmer Rouge were doing that.
And it essentially was a defense of the rationality of basically the population movement out of the cities into the countryside where the food would be, in a situation where the cities were suffering from starvation, essentially.
We documented that point in the book, that people were dying of starvation in Phnom Penh and in the Environs.
So that was the first thing that happened that we have to talk about.
And the second thing, as I said, is the testimony that I gave before Stephen Solar's subcommittee of the House of Representatives, the subcommittee on East Asia Pacific.
And in that testimony, I was responding to the idea that the Khmer Rouge were carrying out mass murder.
And it was in the context, which I can go into in more detail, of recent stories that had been published in Far Eastern Economic Review and elsewhere, but particularly the review that said that the killing that had been previously reported had basically ended.
So that's the setting.
That's the starting point here.
Okay, so now to back up a little bit, and especially because, you know, as time goes on, you have people who are old enough now to be interested in these things, who, for them, even the 1980s is ancient history, much less the 1970s, and who may not know much about Pol Pot or Cambodia at all.
But this is at the end of America's war in Vietnam, the revolution that came next door, the communist revolution.
And at this point, and I don't think that you're disputing this at this point, Pol Pot is infamous for being essentially as bad as Mao Tse Tung, but just on a smaller scale, with his year zero program to essentially start society over, as according to his whim, ended up starving, I don't know how many millions of people, but also torturing people to death in the most vile ways.
I mean, the very worst reputation that communism has comes out of Cambodian gulags, along with Chinese and Soviet ones as well.
And these are known as just absolutely insane war criminals, as opposed to rational food seekers of whatever description and that kind of thing at this point.
So what is the truth of it then?
And maybe it's somewhere in between.
And how'd you get it wrong?
And at what point did you figure out what was right?
Yeah, let me just first give a thumbnail sketch of who the Khmer Rouge were, who the infamous Pol Pot and his group of leaders, where they came from, and how they came to power, because I think this is necessary to understanding the full scope of this issue.
The Khmer Rouge were the people who had come to power within the Cambodian Communist Party during the conflict, during the Indochina War, and who were really not so much orthodox communists at all, although they claim to be Marxist and Marxist-Leninist, and in fact, were self-proclaimed followers of Mao Zedong.
But in fact, the scholarship on the Khmer Rouge that was to follow for the years that came after their seizure of power and everything that they did, has shown that they were in fact, backward-looking nationalists, first and foremost.
And to the extent that they had any notion of Marxism, they did, of course, have notions of Marxism, it was strictly secondary to their anti-Vietnamese nationalism.
And looking back to the ancient history of the Khmer people, to the time when the ancient Khmer kings had ruled with, of course, an iron fist and had organized the society, in the legend at least, and perhaps there's some truth to it, to have very impressive agriculture and so forth.
So, you know, in some ways, they were the equivalent at that time of the ISIS people today with their backward-looking sort of extremist views and willingness to use force and to carry out executions for the least reason.
And that was not understood at that point at all by either side of the war in Indochina.
I can guarantee you that.
And that takes me to the question of how and why I got the character of that regime wrong in 1975-76 and into 77.
And let me just first of all, again, back up a little bit to say that part of the reason that I did make that mistake is that during the war, as a graduate student getting my PhD in Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University, I had been a journalist in South Vietnam.
I had spent the summer of 1968 covering the war, not so much the military aspect of it, but the politics within Vietnam.
And then throughout 1971, I was doing my doctoral research there in South Vietnam, in Saigon, living in Saigon, but traveling around the country to some extent.
And during that year, I was also filing stories on the political aspects of the war in Vietnam.
And it was during that year in 1968, during summer 1968, that I picked up, as a journalist, the transcript of a long set of interviews with a defector from the North Vietnamese military.
And that defector, who was a colonel, whose name, as I recall, was Tran Van Doc, actually provided very strong evidence, which I was able to use in some things that I wrote, that the whole idea that Nixon had put forward for the rationalization for the United States to remain with its troops in Vietnam for four more years in November 1969, which was that if the United States pulled its troops out and the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese were to win the war, they would carry out a terrible bloodbath against not only the troops and the police and the civil servants of the Saigon government, but also against whole classes of people who were the class enemies of the communists in Vietnam.
And what I found out from this transcript was that he said absolutely nothing in talking about the postwar plans of the North Vietnamese.
He said nothing about any revenge killings or any killing of class enemies or killing of people because they were on the other side in the war.
There was nothing of that sort at all.
It was merely that people would be reeducated in reeducation camps.
Now, that's bad enough.
I mean, there was a lot of suffering in reeducation camps.
But the idea of a massive postwar bloodbath, which Nixon publicly announced, was complete phony.
And so I was the one who wrote on more than one occasion.
I wrote in the New York Times about it.
I wrote a piece for Cornell University's Southeast Asia program or East Asia program publication series.
And I wrote in various other periodicals on that subject.
So when I was a graduate student, I was beginning to look for issues where I could debunk propaganda which was being used to prolong wars or to justify wars.
And it was in that context that at the very end of the war in Indochina in the spring of 1975, that this issue arose of what was going on in Cambodia.
And so my inclination was to believe that the same thing that I had seen happen with regard to the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese, and the war propaganda that suggested there was going to be a massive bloodbath, was going to happen in the case of Cambodia as well.
Because there were already indications that that was going to be the strategy from Kissinger himself.
I was wrong about that in the sense that I had an idea about who the Cambodian communist leadership was, which was false, which was wrong.
And the reason that I was wrong about that is that I had studied the Cambodian communist movement as part of an effort to understand Vietnamese communist strategy during the entire period of the communist movement leading up to the war against the United States.
And of course, that meant looking at the relationship between the Vietnamese communists and the Cambodian communist movement.
And I read a lot of history, not only in English, but in Vietnamese communist party documents about their relationship with the Cambodian communist movement.
And they had succeeded in creating a movement which was in their own image, which was a movement which was not based on the idea of essentially Maoist class opposition to rich peasants or the bourgeoisie or anything like that.
It was a broad sort of national unity strategy that they pursued, particularly in places in Laos and Cambodia.
So the communists that they had raised up were people who followed the kind of sort of ideology regarding communist strategy that the Vietnamese communists themselves had followed.
So it turned out that Pol Pot and his group had seized power within the communist party of Cambodia during the war, and it had not been widely understood, not been widely known that they had that power.
In fact, it was not revealed publicly, to my knowledge, until the Vietnamese-Cambodian war took place in 1978.
That's when the Vietnamese began to broadcast or to release information about the Vietnamese, excuse me, the Khmer communists, the Khmer Rouge and their ideology.
So I was writing about this without understanding who this leadership really was, and I was assuming, in fact, that the leaders were three Khmer communists who had been, all three had gotten PhDs from the Sorbonne in Paris and were relatively moderate.
They were radical, all right.
They were radical Marxists, but relative to the Pol Pot group, they were moderates.
So that was the basis on which I wrote that book.
Sorry, just one second.
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OK, just to make sure I understand on that last point, you're saying that you didn't even learn the name Pol Pot until after the Vietnamese went to war, really to liberate the Cambodians from their new communist regime there.
I think the name Pol Pot was already being used in 77.
But the but the actual role that this group played in the communist movement and how they got power, certainly I was not aware of by by certainly by 75 and early 76.
And I don't remember exactly when I when I discovered anything at all about the Pol Pot, the Pol Pot's name itself.
But but that did come later after after I wrote the book.
OK, so now you're talking about how so you're mistaken.
Presumption was that it was it was this group that had been the importance of of their group being sort of founded by the Vietnamese chapter across the border there was that they were really based on anti-colonialism first, independence first and deal with the other stuff later kind of an attitude.
Whereas then I think you're implying here that in Cambodia, they really were all those things that you were saying the Vietnamese were not in terms of, you know, being revolutionary down to the very finest aspect of society.
Well, I mean, they were revolutionaries in the sense that they were carrying out a revolution, obviously, but it was not it was certainly not an orthodox communist revolution.
I mean, that's that's the most the plainest and the most basic way in which you can you can characterize the the nature of that of that leadership.
What's the number of dead now internally killed by the Communist Party?
I don't know that there is a settled number because, you know, it's always been based on very broad estimates, which are simply, you know, at best, they are projections of very localized numbers.
And so, I mean, it's certainly, you know, one to two million would be in the in the area that is widely accepted.
I think that's fair to say.
And then, well, and so can you describe a little bit about, I mean, when I say revolutionary down to the finest aspect of life, I mean, I don't just mean overthrowing power.
I mean, overthrowing total control over everyone.
They created a totalitarian system that was, which is kind of funny considering how primitive their technology was to be able to enforce such a thing.
But they really, you know, they ran that society absolutely straight into the ground.
I mean, how do you kill and it took them how long to kill two million people, like a year or something, two years before the Vietnamese invaded?
It went on from 75 to 78.
OK, so three years.
There were waves of it.
It started and stopped, started, stopped.
And to a great extent, I think it's important to understand that that much of that killing was based on the idea that that large parts of the Cambodian communist movement itself had somehow sold out to the Vietnamese and that those people had to be rooted out and killed.
And anyone who had any relationship to them, their families, their friends, their associates had to be rooted out as well.
So a large part, I'm not suggesting that it was, you know, that it was 80 percent or 75 percent of the killing had to do with association with or links with the Vietnamese, but certainly a very large percentage of it did.
And also there was this very powerful, very strong Khmer Rouge hatred of the people who had lived in the cities.
Anybody who was living in the cities was highly suspect because that's where the government had existed that the United States used to be able to carry out its bombing of the countryside during the Khmer War, during the Cambodian War.
Now, I haven't really alluded to this, but it's very important to understand the reality that took place in Cambodia from 1969, not just 75, but from 1969 until 1973.
Well, and I mean, there was a coup in what year where they established the Ngo government?
So the coup against Ngo Dam Sihanouk was in 1970, and immediately the South Vietnamese government troops began to go into Cambodia to try to clean out the communist, South Vietnamese communist troops who were already ensconced there.
And the war basically entered into Cambodia in a big way.
And soon after that, the U.S., which had carried out a set of bombings even as early as 1969 inside Cambodia, where they believed the Viet Cong had their bases in Eastern Cambodia on the Cambodian-South Vietnamese border.
They began then to widen the scope of the bombing by B-52s and fighter bombers to all the places where the Khmer Rouge began to rise up.
They began to organize because of the opportunity given them by the overthrow of the Sihanouk government.
The Khmer Rouge began to rise in various places throughout Cambodia, but particularly in the East.
And wherever there were signs of the Khmer Rouge organizing, the U.S. bombed entire villages and in some cases cities.
And as a result of that, the best estimate that I've seen of the number of Cambodians who were killed is up to 150,000 were killed in that bombing, which was very indiscriminate in its character by definition when you use B-52s.
Well, and I forget which documentary it is where they show the clip of the Air Force commander explaining that, well, they kept shipping us bombs.
And so we kept bombing just because we couldn't let the stockpile of munitions build up like that.
That is the way things work.
That's absolutely right.
Yeah.
So the point I'm trying to make here is that the Khmer Rouge developed in the shadow of the U.S. bombing.
And because of that U.S. bombing, they had a very powerful animosity toward everybody on the other side who were being protected by the Americans.
And so those people were regarded as the enemy automatically.
And they were punished in various ways by the Khmer Rouge.
When they got to the countryside, they were treated with the greatest degree of suspicion.
And, of course, in many cases they were punished by accusing them and putting them in jail and, as you put it, torturing them and ultimately killing them.
So that was another aspect of the mass killing by the Khmer Rouge.
And another thing that happened was that they refused all outside assistance to provide both medicine and food in a situation where it was clear that that society was suffering from massive hunger and disease.
And part of the disease was that there were huge bomb craters.
And the bomb craters created the mosquitoes, the opportunities for mosquitoes.
So people were getting sick all over rural Cambodia during the period when the Khmer Rouge were in power.
And that arguably could have killed nearly as many people as died by the hand directly of the Khmer Rouge.
So that was just to fill out the complete record of the atrocities that the Khmer Rouge were guilty of.
All right.
So then the Americans pull out, I guess they're virtually done pulling out of Vietnam in 74.
And then the NVA takes Saigon in 75.
And so Vietnam is reunited under the communist government there.
And then but it's not until 78 that Vietnam then communist Vietnam invades communist Cambodia to put an end to the genocide.
Well, you know, you can argue that it was to put an end to the genocide, but the refugee problem that it was causing to, I guess, right.
Well, the real the real factor that that precipitated that war was that the Khmer Rouge were actually attacking across the border into South Vietnam.
And the Vietnamese were trying to reach some sort of accommodation with the Khmer Rouge.
But the Khmer Rouge were, as one might expect from the nature of that regime, very, shall we say, they lacked a certain diplomatic capability.
And they were not interested in reaching a diplomatic settlement with the Vietnamese.
In large part, because they believe the Vietnamese wanted to hold on to territory that they believed belonged to Cambodia.
Historically, that was part of the sort of backward looking view of the of the Khmer Rouge that they they accused the Vietnamese of holding on to territory that belonged to Cambodia.
And they were willing to go to war in order to take it back to hold on to it.
Yeah.
All right.
And then you say back to your story here.
You started changing your mind about what's going on here when the North Vietnamese invaded and then they started putting out their information, their side of what was going on in Cambodia.
That was really when the dam broke on the truth.
Ironically, as that might sound for the Americans who just lost to the North Vietnamese communists there.
Scott, it was actually before that.
OK, I'll tell you exactly.
And I've never I've never told anyone this on on the record.
But I had a conversation in the spring of of 19 1978 with an East German medical specialist who had been in Cambodia during the war and after in the aftermath of the war.
And he had worked with the Khmer Rouge and he was the one who basically first told me what he knew about the situation that he had seen inside Cambodia.
And he described the actual policy of the Khmer Rouge toward the people, the city dwellers at some length and described their overall demeanor, their overall ideological orientation.
And really gave me an understanding, a clearer understanding of what was going on there than I had a very different view from what I had held up to that time.
So it was at that point that I realized that I was completely wrong.
What was it that he told you?
Well, it was it was he was describing what I've been saying to you in this interview about the the hatred of of the Khmer Rouge in the countryside of those people in the city.
As as people who had who had been protected by and who were allies of the Americans who had carried out that bombing of their villages and cities of their towns.
So so it was that cluster of realities that he described to me on the basis of his personal his personal experience.
Oh, and by the way, just a few weeks after that, I appeared on the NBC Good Morning America.
That was a good American.
It was the morning show on NBC.
Jane Polly was the hostess host that morning news program.
And I was on with William F. Buckley.
And we were there to discuss the issue of the Khmer Rouge and what to do about them.
And it was in the wake of George McGovern having made a statement that he would favor the use of military force to do something about the Khmer Rouge.
So that was the news that precipitated this this interview with Bill Bill Buckley and myself.
And on that in that interview, I said, yes, the Khmer Rouge were guilty of of these these policies which were resulted in in massive deaths of their own people.
And that that was the first time that I went on the public record as, you know, recognizing that reality.
And this was how long after you testified before Congress and put out your book and all that following year.
That was it was this it was the early summers, I recall, of 78 versus the spring, late spring of 77.
OK.
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So and then now here's the other thing, too, is you wrote a thing for the nation and for foreign policies of Southeast Asia and for all different things.
I think you say in your note that you sent me before NBC and also CBS News that that's right.
You went on the record correcting previous mistakes here also 40 years ago.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, there are a number of things that I've written, which which accurately I think it's fair to say accurately described the policies of the Khmer Rouge.
And they basically described them in in terms that shows that they were not that they were not Orthodox communists at all, but really backward looking nationalists, extremist nationalists who looked to the early Khmer rulers, the totalitarian early Khmer rulers, if you will, as the models for the policies that they were carrying out inside Cambodia.
Yeah.
Now, this isn't just, oh, no, true Scotsman kind of thing that if it didn't work, then that's how you know it's not really communism or whatever kind of cop out, though.
Right.
I mean, Mao Zedong was plenty communist and he went about the same sort of policy, starving everybody to death and everything.
Right.
Well, I mean, he he certainly followed a very extreme left version of communism.
That's right.
So in other words, I'm just saying when you say that the reason that Pol Pot did this is in your mind, in a sense, because of his deviations from communism, you're not saying that as like, oh, the cop out, because if it had been pure communism, it would have been great or whatever.
You're just saying that that happens to be the story in this case.
In other words.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm putting it in the context of the Vietnamese model, which is the one that I thought the Khmer communists were following.
That's all.
Yeah.
I'm just trying to get clarity here because you know how people are always trying to deconstruct and read into statements what they think you meant to say and that kind of thing.
So I just want to make sure that it's clear, you know.
Yes.
Right.
That what you're saying is exactly what I mean.
What I mean to say.
Yes.
Okay.
And then so now Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan, they take Pol Pot's side after he, I mean, the Vietnamese won that war and deposed him and drove him what like to the western border or something of Cambodia and Thailand or something like that.
Right.
And then that was when Jimmy Carter just started backing him.
Well, that is.
Just because they hated North Vietnam for winning the war so much or what?
Well, no, it's not because of the hatred of of North Vietnam.
It's because of the fact that that Zbigniew Brzezinski was following a master plan of aligning with China.
You know, making a closer alliance with China against the Soviet Union.
It's as simple as that.
It was all it was all pursuant to that big power strategy.
Support the enemy of my new friend's enemy.
Exactly.
And of course, the Chinese and the Vietnamese at that point were at loggerheads.
And of course, the Chinese then invaded Vietnam in 1969 and had a brief war in which the Vietnamese beat their pants off and they had to retreat.
But the but the policy of the United States was already one of aligning with the with the Chinese.
And that meant as well having a very soft policy, a tolerant policy, shall we say, toward the Chinese strategy in Southeast Asia, in Cambodia specifically, of supporting the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese.
And in that in that regard, they were also allied with the government of Thailand, which was similarly pursuing that sort of strategy.
And as you indicated, very, very briefly, the the Reagan administration picked up the same policy and in fact, expanded on it during its during its period in power.
And then how much support to give them and to what effect do you think?
Well, I think it had a great deal of effect on that war.
It allowed the war to go on for years and years.
And it was ultimately only because of Prince Norodom Sihanouk's personal role, which, by the way, the one time that I've ever been published in Foreign Affairs magazine was my article about how Norodom Sihanouk personally managed negotiations with the Khmer Rouge and the opposition, the non-communist opposition.
To the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese in such a way as to set the table for the final peace agreement that ended that war in Cambodia.
This is the same guy that America had used Lon Nol to overthrow back in 1970.
Exactly, exactly.
Man, oh man.
Sihanouk, that was a great tragedy.
The overthrow of Sihanouk, of course, was a great tragedy because Sihanouk was the one man who could have avoided war that overtook Cambodia and resulted in such horrible deaths that we saw unfold in the years that followed.
Because of his dexterity diplomatically and his ability to deal with both the Americans and the Chinese communists and the Vietnamese as well.
And then, oh, I remember what I was going to emphasize before, too, or go back over about your part in this story.
We'll get back to Ronald Reagan in a second if you want, if there's more there.
But at the time, and I know you're some kind of leftist, although we never really talk about economics or any of that kind of thing because we're always much more narrowly focused on the lies underlying American imperialist foreign policy and have so much in common there.
But it does raise a question, I guess, or the question is open, or maybe it's not.
I think you kind of already answered this implicitly, that just like when we're talking about the Ayatollah or Manuel Noriega or whatever it is, that none of this has anything to do with an ideological affinity of yours.
Like, oh, at one time you thought Pol Pot was going to lead the world into the brave new future, but then you became disillusioned or anything like that.
It's just like what you said.
Well, so my analysis was that the Vietnamese Communist Party doctrine was dominant.
And then I realized later it was a separate group.
In other words, this is just a very factual kind of evolution of information, has everything to do with it.
Not partisanship on your part, other than in the sense of maybe suspicion against the U.S. government's claims, as you talked about before.
Exactly.
That's what I was going to say.
It was overwhelmingly governed.
My view of the situation, my approach to the situation was overwhelmingly governed by my reaction to the approach that the U.S. government had taken in the war, not just in Cambodia, but especially in Vietnam, whereby they used propaganda in a way that completely turned black into white, if you will.
In the sense that they created issues that simply had no existence.
The idea of the post-war bloodbath, the idea that the Vietnamese communists were dead set on setting up a regime that was going to carry out huge numbers of killings.
All of this was the background of why I felt that I was safe in believing that they were going to exaggerate.
They were already exaggerating what was happening in Cambodia.
By the way, what I learned from that experience was the danger that always exists in any situation, in any war the United States is fighting, where the U.S. government essentially establishes the nature of the issue, the definition of the issue.
And does so in a way that almost inevitably causes the people who are opposed to that war to take exactly the mirror opposite position.
And I could give you many examples of that, but I won't get into that.
I'll give one example, I think, and he's long dead and he wouldn't care anyway.
But Jude Winoski went to full scale defense of Saddam Hussein, and in a very John Adams, the defense lawyer kind of way.
That like, hey, this has got to be an adversarial process.
Someone has to stick up for the other side's point of view here.
And none of you will listen to Tariq Aziz.
So let me explain, was Jude Winoski's point of view.
And he ended up going so far as saying Saddam didn't do the Halabja massacre and that the Reagan administration's cover up based on some fake DIA report that actually it was Iran that had done it, that that was the real truth.
And the deal was that, in fact, Saddam was guilty of Halabja and the Anfal campaign before that.
And every war crime Ronald Reagan helped him commit that he was accused of in the war with Iran, etc.
And Jude didn't need to go that far.
He was out over his skis and that ended up undercutting, you know, more of his argument among people who were otherwise would have taken him more seriously, I think, at the time.
Not that it would have made the difference necessarily, but.
It's a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
And it also influenced the politics of the anti-war movement, of course, where not only was the anti-war movement oriented towards suggesting that the U.S. was exaggerating the cruelty and the planned massacre of the by the Vietnamese communists, but also would challenge the position that the U.S. government took that the Vietnamese communists were committed, that the North Vietnamese communists were involved in the war in the South very early on, that they controlled the South Vietnamese communists, that the Vietnamese communists in the North and those in the South were somehow independent of one another.
And that was, of course, wrong.
That was an exaggeration.
So this danger always exists.
And to be both opposed to a war and to avoid that is really a very important challenge.
Well, and, you know, we see the opposite of this, too, where some of my favorite writers, who I won't name, and I'm certainly not talking about you, sometimes go ahead along with the kind of assertions that they certainly ought to challenge.
Like, well, you know, everybody knows that Iran did the Khobar Towers attack, you know, or everybody knows Assad did the gas attack.
Nobody's saying that.
We're just saying that we shouldn't bomb him for it.
And then that way to try to stay inside the line of what's acceptable when it actually amounts to going along with a line of BS that can help get us into a conflict unnecessarily.
Right, right.
So, so, yeah, this is this is why I'm just the phenomenon that we're talking about right now is why I have been accused of being an agent of Hanoi.
I've been accused of being an agent of the Iranians, of course.
I've been accused of being an agent of the Syrians, of course.
Let's have I left anybody out yet?
You're tied to the Texans now.
Direct links.
Right.
Yeah.
Gareth Porter.
Yeah.
And, you know, I was just going to say that I'm so glad that you got burned this badly back when I was one, because, you know, you're just absolutely batting a thousand in the 21st century.
I think I remember one article you retracted that was based on one Cambodian.
I mean, pardon me.
I'm looking at the word Cambodia.
Sorry.
Based on one Pakistani source or one Iraqi source.
It was a little something that you retracted.
But other than that, I mean, that's out of probably four or five hundred pieces you've put out since I've been reading you in the last 12 years now.
I think I've made some errors in the way I've I've tried to put together the storyline more than once.
But in terms of big, big issues, I certainly have been much more cautious.
And and I have demanded, in a way, a higher level of of evidence before basically coming to a major conclusion about an issue than I think is normally the case for for journalists.
I think it's fair to say that I have become much more cautious about the necessity to line up multiple sources, multiple kinds of evidence that that is consistent and ruling out every other possible evidence to the contrary.
Before I before I satisfy myself that it's OK to to take that position.
Which is, of course, the only acceptable attitude, and especially when it comes to things that would seem to confirm your bias.
Right.
I mean, you have to.
I only just in the last year or so become familiar with the phrase steel man.
You always hear the straw man argument.
Well, the steel man argument is where you argue your opponent's position even better than them.
As good as you possibly can.
You make the very best case for the other side in as honest as you can, hopefully even better than your opponent, and then still be able to defeat that.
As you're saying, there's no other explanation left.
Because if you're just telling yourself you're right all the time, you're going to be wrong really quick.
The way I would put it is, is that you must take seriously every claim and every piece of evidence that is cited or that is available that's relevant to any claim that's made by those who you are seeking to either refute or to to establish whether they're right or wrong.
Although, you know, too, it's important to always have as a premise that the U.S. government are the worst liars and killers on the planet, bar none.
And that's a quote from Martin Luther King, so it's okay to say it.
The greatest purveyor of violence on the face of the planet.
Although he was wrong when he said that.
Mao was way out ahead at that moment, even in the midst of Vietnam.
But still, it's certainly true today.
And they do nothing but lie in order to justify their criminal violence, too.
And so, you know, every good Karlinian should believe nothing that they say.
And certainly when they're accusing foreign nations of doing this, that, or the other thing, we ought to always remember when they're pointing their finger, there's four pointing back at Washington, D.C.
Yeah, and that that is why, you know, we need to examine every claim that is made by the U.S. government in circumstances where it obviously serves their interest.
And and begin to become investigative journalists if we're journalists from the get go.
And that's what's missing.
That's totally missing from the corporate media at this stage.
And maybe maybe it always was, with rare exceptions, of course.
But, you know, that's that's what we absolutely need in every instance that we're we're talking about here.
I just want to make one more point, Scott, about the significance of this issue in terms of understanding the politics that still surround the whole Cambodian war and the and the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge phenomenon.
And that is that the people who are associated with support the war machine, the permanent war state, whatever you want to call the military industrial congressional complex, obviously are still blaming everything that happened in Cambodia entirely on the Khmer Rouge.
Whereas, in fact, the reality in that situation, if you go back and look at the entire history of the war in Cambodia, that suffering from beginning to end is the result of the U.S. war in Indochina.
Starting with the war in South Vietnam, 1964-65, the U.S. starts bombing in the border area of South Vietnam.
And what happens?
Viet Cong troops begin to move into Cambodia.
That sets up the situation where the U.S. then begins bombing in Cambodia.
That weakens the hold on power of Prince Sihanouk.
It leads to the coup that leads to Khmer Rouge rising up and the rest we've already talked about.
So you cannot understand what happened in Cambodia, the reason that millions of Cambodians died, unless you understand that it was the result of the U.S. war in Vietnam.
That simply would not have happened except for U.S. policy.
You know, as long as we're at it, too.
What about the war in Laos?
Well, of course, that's true.
Of course, the war in Laos is the same.
The same principle applies completely.
You know, when Fred Bronfman died, I think, I can't remember who it was that wrote it.
Maybe it was Hayden.
There's this whole group of, you know, leftist activists back there.
And I forgot who all exactly was in the group.
I think it was Tom Hayden wrote a piece about when he first got to Laos, there was Noam Chomsky was there.
And, you know, was documenting what was going on in the Plain of Jars, where it was what it was called, where it was just completely pocked with bomb craters.
And how this was just a complete secret from the Western world.
There was no coverage of this whatsoever.
And they were there to try to document it and show the people what was going on there.
And, you know, this is something that we have covered on the show, actually, in the past, too.
Is that hundreds of people every year, every year, hundreds of people are blown up, maimed and killed by leftover bombs, so-called duds.
And particularly from cluster bomb units there in Laos and Cambodia.
And to this day, I mean, today, some little kid is getting his leg blown off by those things.
Absolutely.
On a personal note in that regard, in 2006, when I was doing some work for United Nations Development Program in Laos, I was allowed personally to blow up some of the unexploded ordnance that still lay under the ground there in Laos, which the UNDP had a project which was continuing to work on.
And so I watched the unexploded ordnance blow up before my eyes.
You know, there's a project now, and I'm sure this is not very cost effective, but you know who could afford it if they would end all their wars?
And this project is these drones.
And apparently it works.
I mean, they showed footage of it where the drones have metal detectors on them.
They go and find these bombs and then they hover over and gently place a shaped explosive charge, a very small shaped explosive charge on top of the mine or the undetonated shell or whatever it is, and then fly away and remote detonate it and set off the mine.
That seemed to be the very safest way to do it, although obviously extremely capital intensive there when it comes to deploying the high tech to do it.
And if you'll let me pay my personal tribute to Fred Branchman, I would love to do that.
He was a great friend of mine, a great co-director of the Indochina Resource Center with me from 1973 to 76, 74 to 76, excuse me.
And his role as a man of conscience who made a difference is a very precious one in the history of the anti-war movement, for sure.
He did a really great thing with regard to basically educating Americans about the bombing of Laos.
Oh, that's great.
Yeah, I interviewed him.
Oh, geez, looks like four or five times or five or six times, including about that.
He wrote a book, Voices from the Plane of Jars, Life Under an Air War there.
So anyway, yeah, good stuff, man.
And I didn't really, it's interesting to know your history, arguing with Buckley on the Jane Polly show in the morning and all of this stuff, Gareth.
I might have been, you know, sitting there in my playpen watching at the time.
Who knows?
But yeah, good stuff, man.
My mom watched the Polly show.
I remember that, you know.
Anyway.
All right.
Well, listen, is there anything else important that I missed that I'm not thinking to ask you about here?
We covered it very thoroughly.
We covered it very thoroughly.
Thanks.
Thanks, Scott.
All right.
Good deal.
Well, thanks very much for coming back on the show, Gareth.
I sure appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
All right, you guys, that is the great Gareth Porter.
He wrote Perils of Dominance about the war in Vietnam and Manufactured Crisis about Iran's nuclear program.
He writes regularly for Truth Out and Truth Dig and the American Conservative magazine.
And we reprint virtually everything at original.antiwar.com slash Porter.
Hey, guys, this is Bert and Car from the Friends Against Government podcast here.
And you've probably heard Scott talk about the crowdsourcing effort on Reddit about his upcoming book.
All you got to do to get in is to donate $5 a month to Scott's Patreon and request to join the private Reddit group.
In Scott's Reddit group, you will find a pin post outlining the details for how you can help find source material for Scott's upcoming book by listening to archived interviews and taking a few notes.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to either myself at Berdarkist or Car at Car Camp It on Twitter and we'll be happy to help.
We look forward to seeing you in there.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book Fool's Errand Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot U.S.
