Lurker - I wouldn't exactly call the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia (Kampuchea) a "just" war. The only war effort I think I would ever refer to as "just" is outright self-defense against an exterior attack. Once a war is underway, all sorts of things can happen, but I'm talking about the initial assault that kicks it off. An initial assault is aggression, and I don't call aggression "just".

I wouldn't call it an "unjust" war either. I would call it a war that I supported, though, for a number of reasons...

The Khymer Rouge had been massacring their own population at a rate that almost has no rivals, and it was getting worse.

The Khymer Rouge had been attacking Vietnamese border areas for some time, not in terms of what could be called an actual "invasion", more in terms of sporadic raids and incursions. Why they did so, I have no idea, but nothing they did was very rational.

The Khymer Roughe were being funded by Chinese Communist and American (CIA) sources. Both of these were sources inimical to Vietnam, to put it mildly. Therefore the Vietnamese considered Cambodia to be a hostile and dangerous presence on their flank. They were correct. It was, under the Khymer Rouge.

The Vietnamese were in great fear of being attacked from the north by China, and simultaneously from the west by the Khymer Rouge. They saw the Khymers as an agent of China and (rather indirectly) America, and they were again correct.

In bringing down that regime, they did a tremendous favour to the stability and future peaceableness of the whole region, and especially to the people of Cambodia (though, of course, they did it for their own self-interests, rather than out of any altruism).

Therefore, for purely practical and rational reasons I supported that attack by Vietnam and wished for the utter defeat of Pol Pot.

And it remains the one unilateral aggression of its sort that I have given such support to. It was a most unusual and extreme situation in Cambodia under the Khymer Rouge. A holocaust, in fact.

The remnants of Pol Pot's people (now based in Thailand) are still getting comfort and support from the same shadowy groups that quietly funded them back then, and that is a disgrace. It's not the first time that China has assisted in genocide nor probably the last.

- LH