Jonah: I’d go easy on quoting Michael Gerson after Ramesh’s evisceration of the man in the last NRODT. In any case, consider the story about the Cambodian P.M. you quoted from his column. Do you think there are many Americans who, reading that story, will smack themselves on the forehead and exclaim: “Jeez, we shoulda stayed till all the SE Asian communists were thoroughly defeated! We were totally wrong to leave when we did!”? No, nor do I. Of course abstract questions of right and wrong have a place in our public conversations. May it always be so. The other sorts of questions–questions about what the U.S. electorate will stand for–have a place, too, though. It’s up to folk like me–folk with only a tepid interest in the right/wrong stuff–to air them. Of course my “invocations of what the political market will bear on this front” leave you “fairly cold.” They’re pretty darn cold invocations, set against the human suffering and mayhem that underlie this issue. Someone has to make them, though–you can bet they are being made by a lot of people in Washington DC. I would say that the horrors of post-1975 Cambodia were in part a consequence of our withdrawal from SE Asia. I would further say that I think most Americans understand that, and are aware of the horrors. And then I would FURTHER say that most Americans think we did the right thing anyway, and would not undo it if they could.