The Warden Collection (merged thread)

[Backwards Observer]

Ken, Fuchs, PVebber, I don't think you guys are confused, by the questions ask you are seem to be getting it.

Slap, not that it matters what I think, but you seem like a good guy and Warden comes across as sincere; however your admonition that others are slow to 'get' the Theory of Bloodless Airpower while dropped ordnance is still chopping up folks in SEAsia seems uncharitable.

The following articles may be considered controversial:

We heard a terrifying noise which shook the ground; it was as if the earth trembled, rose up and opened beneath our feet. Enormous explosions lit up the sky like huge bolts of lightning; it was the American B-52s.
— Cambodian bombing survivor

Recorded using a groundbreaking IBM-designed system, the database provided extensive information on sorties conducted over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Clinton’s gift was intended to assist in the search for unexploded ordnance left behind during the carpet bombing of the region. Littering the countryside, often submerged under farmland, this ordnance remains a significant humanitarian concern. It has maimed and killed farmers, and rendered valuable land all but unusable. Development and demining organizations have put the Air Force data to good use over the past six years, but have done so without noting its full implications, which turn out to be staggering.

The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all.

Bombing Cambodia - The Walrus (Canada) - October 2006

Bombs Over Cambodia (pdf) - Yale - October 2006

Benedict F. Kiernan (born 1953 in Melbourne, Australia) is the Whitney Griswold Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He is a prolific writer on the Cambodian genocide. Kiernan has also published prize-winning work on the global history of genocide.

Ben Kiernan - Wikipedia

Taylor Owen is Post Doctoral Fellow at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, UBC. His Doctorate is from the University of Oxford where he was Trudeau Scholar. He has been a lecturer at the Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, Research Fellow at the Center for Global Governance at the LSE, Fellow in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, was an Action Canada Fellow, has an MA from the University of British Columbia, and has worked as a researcher at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, and the International Development Research Center.

Taylor Owen Bio - taylorowen.com

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The KR Tribunal is a national court, so I guess it makes sense that they are not allowed to put countries on trial. But that is not very satisfying to a lot of people in Cambodia. The folks about to be put on trial are already pointing fingers of responsibility at the US and China while the local farmers still can’t quite believe that one of their own could have killed so many.

From the Cambodia Daily, 25 September: The total weight of bombs that the US dropped on Cambodia during its war with Vietnam may have been five times greater than previously thought, according to a new academic study.

The bombing of Cambodia also began in 1965, more than three years earlier than is widely believed, according to historians Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan whose analysis of US Air Force data released in 2000 appear in the October issue of Canada's The Walrus magazine.

Air Force data indicates that 2,756,941 tons of bombs were dropped in 230,516 sorties over 113,716 sites between 1965 and 1973, the authors say.

This surpasses the bomb weight dropped by the allied forces on all combat theaters during the whole of World War II, which totaled 2 million tons, they write.

...Information Minister and government spokesman Khieu Kanharith said the bombing encouraged rural Cambodians to join the Khmer Rouge. But he said he was not concerned with the numbers of bombs dropped. "We are Buddhists...so we try to forgive and forget," he said.

US Embassy spokesman Jeff Daigle could not be reached for comment.

Uh, forgiving and forgetting is probably a wise choice under the circumstances...

Who Is To Blame? - Trials and Denials In Cambodia - 9/30/2006

Graphic: Sites Bombed by the US Air Force in Cambodia, 1965-73 - 113,716 Sites - 230,516 Sorties - 2,756,941 Tons of Ordnance