Thursday, channel 501 showed the 1984 film The Killing Fields. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s based on the experiences of NY Times reporter Sydney Schanberg and Cambodian reporter Dith Pran in Cambodia in the 1970s; Pran was captured by the Khmer Rouge and spent years living and laboring in their camps before escaping to Thailand. It got me thinking about the the fact taht wars are never neat, tidy and contained. When Paris was liberated, the residents were thrilled; but aside from such instances, most wars are bloody, hideous, ugly affairs. And they are never neat and tidy. The happy predictions in 1914 that it would be a short, glorious war and the boys would be home by Christmas or that American troops would be greeted in Baghdad with flowers spring to mind as examples of policy elites pretending that war was a glorious and wonderful affair and reality proving them horrifically wrong.

Cambodia was the disastrous, horrific final act of the Southeast Asian wars that started in the 1950s. Exacerbated by stupidity and ideological blinders, by people ignorant of the region and its history and people, Southeast Asia was plunged into decades of war, death, dislocation and destruction. The history of US involvement can be safely described as a series of increasingly damaging mistakes from beginning to end.

The Khmer Rouge and the insanity of Pol Pot’s regime was not an historical inevitability. Cambodia was not a stable nation but it wasn’t ready to topple into the bloody madness of Pol Pot either. Pushed by outside forces – US intervention and bombing, Vietnamese incursions into their territory – Cambodia’s infrastructure ruined by US bombing, its people killed in a secret war waged by Nixon, Cambodia was ripe for the disaster of the Khmer Rouge regime – they pretended they were liberators of Cambodia, pretended they would bring peace. The US bombing of Cambodia made an already bad situation inestimably worse. The Cambodian people believed Khmer Rouge were their saviors and they greeted them as such and the madness was unleashed.

The millions who died in Cambodia in four short years did not need to die. At the time, I don’t think anyone realized how bad the Khmer Rouge would be. The idea that a government would empty its cities, send the people into the countryside, literally put them at the mercy of sociopathic 12 year olds with guns and in cold blood murder millions was simply beyond the ability of anyone to predict (I know, “No one could have predicted . . .” has become a Bush Administration tag line, but who would have imagined that a nation’s government would murder somewhere between 15 and 40% of its own population in four years?). The Vietnamese communist government at long last invaded Cambodia and put an end to the genocide. The long, bloody second act of the Vietnam war ended ironically enough when the Vietnamese communists did the right thing for the wrong reasons.

The Gulf War was the first act of a drama. The Iraq invasion another act. What comes next? What disastrous final act is taking shape right now in the middle east?

US involvement in Southeast Asia was predicated on the domino theory – that allowing one nation to fall to communism would inevitably spread throughout the region. The US intervened to keep that from happening. In the Middle East, the Bush administration and its Neo-Con theorists adopted the opposite theory – that the dominoes would fall and we could push them over and they would all fall in the right direction. Thus far, those ideas have proven laughably and horrifically wrong. Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis are an indictment of American hubris and foolishness. The dominoes have not fallen and the chaos of Iraq has threatened to spill in every direction, a toxic sludge of ignorance, malice and destruction.

The Middle East today, like Southeast Asia of 40 years ago, is a seething cauldron of discontent. Nation after nation of medieval autocrats with cell phones and iPods pretending at modernity while the people of those nations grow ever more restive, resentful and paranoid. Iraq, smack in the middle, is aflame. Which breeze will carry the chaos out of Iraq and destabilize which nation? What will be the disastrous final act of the gulf conflicts that horrifies us? No one could have predicted Cambodia. In a few years will we look back in horror at a revolutionary Saudi Arabia gone mad, murdering its own and invading Israel? Will we look at a devastated Syria, run by lunatics and sociopaths, killing people in the streets for not being righteous enough?

The danger with war has always been its unpredictability. The NeoCons and Bushies assured us Iraq was quick and easy. Victory was certain. The Iraqi quagmire is proof that those who would gladly sell us war are liars and fools. There could never have been a quick march to victory followed by flowers and peace and democracy, which does not flow from the barrel of a gun. Unpredictable, the violence of war unleashed in Iraq decades of resentments – of Sunni and Shia hostilities and hatreds, and unleashed the yearnings of clerics in love with the values and beliefs of the year 1100, but with the tools of the modern world to spread their venom. The tragedy of Iraq is bad enough – like the Vietnamese, its people have suffered, died, lost house and home and seen chaos and ruin visited on their land. But chaos is like a gas and it will escape and the violence and dislocations of people will spread the chaos beyond Iraq’s borders.

A militarily exhausted US will face a brutal choice – can we even step in to stop the bloodshed? Cambodia was consumed because no one could intervene, no one could stop the killing. Bizarrely, US administrations supported the Khmer Rouge on the idiotic principle that they were not the communist Vietnamese. Ideological idiocy. Just as US actions in Southeast Asia gave credence to the most radical claims by regional communists, US actions in the Middle East have given credence to the most radical claims by the clerics and leaders there. Mishandling relations with Iran has weakened the moderates. US presence in Iraq makes it sound reasonable that we want to invade and control and destroy Islam. The fact that Saddam Hussein was actually doing what the international community demanded and the US still invaded makes it believable to many Muslims that US is simply a war-mongering giant intent on attacking Islam itself. The dominoes are falling. Which way they fall, which power-hungry, shrewd Islamic Pol Pot will find a way to scramble to the top of the heap and in which nation remains to be seen.

But the disastrous final act is taking shape – off stage and out of sight. The questions remains – how many people will be sucked under the blood dimmed tide?