Lessons of Cambodia.(Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation Building )(Book Review)

It sounds familiar: a big, powerful nation invades an erratic smaller one, in the name of self-defense. After all, the little country's tyrannical regime has committed atrocities against its own people and attacked its neighbors. The brief war that ensues is strikingly one- sided and ends with the seizure of most of the smaller country. The liberation of a long-suffering nation is lauded.

But many citizens of the smaller country have a different view. While generally ecstatic about their newfound freedom from an oppressive regime, they are wary of their self-proclaimed saviors, whom they suspect of coveting their natural resources. Will liberation be an excuse for occupation? To ensure a quick and painless victory, the invading country offers them incentives to defect. Then, as the cost of rebuilding becomes clear, the liberator announces that the battered nation's natural resources will be used to foot the bill.

Iraq? No; in Evan Gottesman's timely new book, the countries in question are Vietnam and Cambodia. "Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation Building" (428 pages. Yale University Press) is a clear-eyed and nuanced account of multilayered backroom efforts to rebuild Cambodia after it overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979. The lessons for the United States in Iraq are many.

Gottesman's work fills a vast gap in scholarship on Cambodia. He focuses on the period of Vietnamese occupation--from 1979 until U.N. peacekeepers arrived in 1991--illuminating the secretive Marxist- Leninist regime they implanted and oversaw in Phnom Penh. The account is based largely on 1,300 previously undiscovered documents--including the minutes of top-level Communist Party meetings--that Gottesman literally stumbled upon in a government building in the Cambodian capital.

He recounts how Vietnam's efforts to rebuild Cambodia in its own image quickly went awry. When troops entered Phnom Penh in 1979, they discovered little more than abandoned buildings. The Khmer Rouge had forced out the population four years earlier, then fled in advance of the Vietnamese. But it wasn't until the survivors of the killing fields began trickling back that it became clear how many doctors, lawyers, teachers, intellectuals and administrators--the people necessary to regenerate a society--had ...