[ooooo00000]

The US provided training, enormous air power, and weapons including land mines to the Lon Nol government.

It may be in the realm of conspiracy theory still, but some would contend that the CIA installed the Lon Nol government and helped oust Norodom Sihanouk as king. Sihanouk himself wrote a book called "My War with the CIA" and as I understand it (haven't read it) his position is that this happened in retaliation for Cambodia remaining neutral in the Vietnam war.

I'm not sure to what extent this is true, or whether or not Sihanouk quietly supported the VC, but Cambodia was absolutely devastated by US bombing and it can only be described as evil. As a personal anecdote, I recently met some Cambodian men who subsisted as children by salvaging unexploded American bombs.

Between 1965 and 1973, the U.S. dropped 2.7 million tons of explosives -- more than the Allies dropped in the entirety of World War II -- on Cambodia, whose population was then smaller than New York City's. Estimates of the number of people killed begin in the low hundreds of thousands and range up from there, but the truth is that no one has any idea.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/wha...

[refurb]

You're forgetting to add why the US bombed Cambodia. The North Vietnamese were using the border areas with Vietnam as a refuge and a supply route for war materials.

Note that the US didn't bomb Cambodia until quite late in the war. That probably helped the North Vietnamese more than anything.

[ooooo00000]

The bombing happened all over the country. A few weeks ago I was in Kompung Thom (right in the middle of Cambodia) and talked to quite a few people about this. The members of these communities were farmers, not combatants or VC sympathizers, and they didn't even have much awareness of why they were being bombed.

[ooooo00000]

I also have to add that there is no reasonable "why" to excuse bombing largely civilian areas. Undoubtably the VC were crossing over the border -- the Cambodian side of the Vietnam-Cambodia border is ethnically and linguistically a mixture of Khmer and Vietnamese, and that border has been fluid up until recent history -- but still most people there would have been civilians.

[evgen]

When military convoys are running through town you no longer live in a "civilian area".

[ooooo00000]

I'll stick with "an area with many civilians" as my definition of a civilian area. These people weren't wealthy, and it's where they happened to own land and build houses. It becomes a choice between being homeless and impoverished, or staying where you are and taking the risk of being bombed.

[Amezarak]

If you commit to the idea "I will not bomb civilians", then you offer an enormous advantage to your adversary, who will therefore proceed to make sure civilians are well-distributed in any area of military operation.