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ately terminated. Sources close to the U.S. government predicted a million deaths in Cambodia if U.S. aid were to cease. A Western doctor working in Phnom Penh in 1974-75 reported that This generation is going to be a lost generation of children. Malnutrition is going to affect their numbers and their mental capacities. So, as well as knocking off a generation of young men, the war is knocking off a generation of children. The V.S. embassy estimated that available rice in Phnom Penh would suffice for at most a few weeks. The final V.S. AID report observed that the country faced famine in 1975, with 75 percent of its draft animals destroyed by the war, and that rice planting for the next harvest, eight months hence, would have to be done "by the hard labor of seriously malnourished people." The report predicted "widespread starvation" and "Slave labor and starvation rations for half the nation's people" for the coming year, and "general deprivation and suffering ... over the next two or three years before Cambodia can get back to rice selfsufficiency. "33 There is also the matter of the effect of the U.S. bombing on the Khmer Rouge and the peasant society that provided their social base, a factor noted by all serious analysts. Cambodia specialist Milton Osborne concludes that Communist terror was "surely a reaction to the terrible bombing of Communist-held regions" by the U,S. Air Force. Another Cambodia scholar, David Chandler, comments that the bombing turned "thousands of young Cambodians into participants in an anti-American crusade," as it "destroyed a good deal of the fabric of prewar Cambodian society and provided the CPK (Khmer Rouge] with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution," a "class warfare between the 'base people: who had been bombed, and the 'new people' who had taken refuge from the bombing and thus had taken sides, in CPK thinking, with the United States." «French intransigence had turned nationalists into Communists," Philip Windsor observes, while "American ruthlessness now turned Communists into totalitarian fanatics."34 One may debate the weight that should be assigned to this factor in determining Khmer Rouge policies, embittering the peasant society of "base people," and impelling them to force those they perceived as collaborators in their destruction to endure the lives of poor peasants or worse. But that it was a factor can hardly be doubted. Assessing these various elements, it seems fair to describe the re-
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