ISIS and the Khmer Rouge - Hooray for "Our Side"

A friend of mine recently posted, on Facebook, an article from the Independent by Robert Fisk - one of the greatest journalists writing today. The thrust of the article (click on the link for the full text) is criticism of our western belief that Right is on our side, and will always triumph over all manifestations of Evil, which in this case is ISIS. He says: "Isis is evil. It massacres its opponents, slaughters civilians, beheads the innocent, rapes children and enslaves women. It is “apocalyptic”, according to the Americans, and therefore it is doomed. Better still, Ash Carter – the US Secretary of Defence who accused the Iraqis of running away from Isis – lectured the Iraqi Prime Minister last week. His message – I could hardly believe this naivety – was Hollywood-clear. “Civilisation always wins over barbarism".
Fisk next proceeds to point out, correctly, that while Hitler (bad guy) was defeated, it was only with the help of the USSR under Stalin (bad guy who became a good guy and then a bad guy again). Evil (or barbarism) is not always eliminated and, like the USSR, can reign unchallenged and undefeated for many years. He also points out that barbarism/evil is not always the province of one side: "The Romans kept “barbarism” at bay for almost a thousand years, but in the end the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths – the Isis of their time – won. Unless you were opposed to Rome, in which case Roman barbarism – crucifixion, slavery, torture, massacre (the whole Isis gamut minus the videotapes) – was victorious for almost a thousand years."
Fisk then goes on to predict that, eventually, the West will come to terms with ISIS and seek to do deals with "moderate" elements among them. Fisk, again, concludes: " Then we’ll have a new, liberal Isis – people we can do business with, the sort of chaps we can get along with, sins forgotten – and we can then establish relations with them as cosy as those the Americans maintained with Hitler’s murderous rocket scientists after “civilisation” conquered “barbarism” in the Second World War".
The chilling aspect of this is that such compromises have been reached before. As another great journalist, John Pilger, has said: "As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia."
Pilger speaks with authority, as he was one of the first journalists to enter Cambodia, following the defeat of the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese Army (Guess whose bad guys they were!) in 1979. I well remember his impassioned film about the sufferings of Cambodia at that time. You can watch it here. I also remember his later articles and films, which detailed the not-so-covert help given to the Khmer Rouge (KR) by Western governments and China, after the KR established themselves in bases across the Thai border, in order to exert military and terroristic pressure upon the bête noir of the US and Western Right - Viet-Nam.  Margaret Thatcher's government was an enthusiastic supporter of this strategy, even sending in SAS teams to pass on their combat skills to Pol Pot's murderous merry men. Pilger again:
"I reported this at the time, and more than 16,000 people wrote to Thatcher in protest. "I confirm," she replied to opposition leader Neil Kinnock, "that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with the Khmer Rouge or those allied to them." The lie was breathtaking. In 1991, the government of John Major admitted to parliament that the SAS had indeed trained the "coalition".  "We liked the British," a Khmer Rouge fighter later told me. "They were very good at teaching us to set booby traps. Unsuspecting people, like children in paddy fields, were the main victims."
Admirers of the late Mrs T did not mention this in their obituaries. To cut short a long and sordid story, the Khmer Rouge have been rehabilitated to a large extent, despite having been responsible for the deaths of up to two million people - ISIS must be jealous. There have been token war crimes trials, but many "moderate" ex - KR walk free. All of which goes to show one thing - that even the most evil murderers can be forgiven - provided they are our murderers.
My thanks are due to two fine journalists, both of whom have spoken out fearlessly for the truth over the past few decades. I find it impossible to refute Pilger's assertion that the US bombing of Cambodia led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, as well as the (surely obvious?) fact that the invasion of Iraq was the main cause for the rise of ISIS and Jihadism in general. However, there is one major difference between ISIS and the Khmer Rouge, and that is the avowed mission of the former to spread their terror abroad. We face a choice: do we go on to confront ISIS militarily (risky) or, as Pilger and Fisk suggest,do we do business with them (dishonourable)? A referendum is unlikely.