Learning the Lessons

Some unintended consequences of US benevolence have been sentenced for their roles in the Cambodian economic reforms of the early nineteen-seventies. The two men, now in their eighties, were high-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge, which gained power partly as a result of the Americans' deliberate escalation of the Vietnam apocalypse into a regional holocaust. Nostalgic for more innocent times, the Khmer Rouge instituted a rather radical back-to-basics programme, during which about a quarter of Cambodia's population was collaterally detrimented. The régime was eventually overthrown by the evil Vietnamese, who were roundly condemned by the forces of Western civilisation.

On a different subject entirely, some unintended consequences of US benevolence have chased forty thousand Iraqi Christians up a mountain, and are giving everyone else who disagrees with them a rather radical back-to-basics choice of Islam, death or exile. The Americans are reportedly considering air strikes, which did so much to win them the War Against the Abstract Noun and bring peace to the Middle East.