By Richard Laming
Published in The Observer, 26 November 2006
There is a closer south east Asian parallel than Vietnam for the unfolding disaster in Iraq. (‘Time for your Vietnam history lesson, George’, Comment, last week).
Then, as now, an American invasion destroyed a country’s state infrastructure in pursuit of an unwinnable war, to be followed by bloody civil war in the chaos after the Americans withdrew. The parallel isn’t Vietnam, though; it is Cambodia.
Richard Laming, London SE1