since it won its independence from France in 1953. In the early 1970s the Nixon administration had targeted the country in a secret bombing campaign. A five-year civil war then raged between the corrupt U.S.-backed government of Lon Nol and a band of notoriously brutal Maoist guerrillas known as the Khmer Rouge. And in April 1975 the Khmer Rouge victory ushered in a totalitarian terror that left more than two million Cambodians dead—a
