But I am surprised I don't meet more hostility in some countries. In fact, I'm surprised some of them even let me in. Look at the horrors we've inflicted on Central America, starting with the CIA's overthrow of Guatemala's government in 1954, through the spectacularly misguided (and illegal) meddling of the Reagan Administration in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.
In Southeast Asia the Vietnamese obviously have reason to feel hostile towards Americans. Cambodia as well. I recently read a biography of Pol Pot. When he was kicked out of the country by the Vietnamese in 1979, he found asylum in Thailand. I was horrified to learn he was able to maintain his army and his base of support due to the support of Thailand, China ... and the United States.
You see, he was a communist, which was bad, but he was anti-Vietnam, which was good. So the US supported a man who, in less than four years, managed to kill off perhaps as much as 30 percent of his people.
But Laos really has reason to hate us, because of the Secret War.
Trivia question: What is the most bombed country in history?
Answer: Laos
From 1964 to 1973 the US dropped more bombs on Laos than it did in all of WWII. We flew over a half-million recorded bombing missions. On average we dropped one B-52 bomb-load every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for ten years.
We dropped over 1.5 million tons of bombs. Over 13 tons per square kilometer. Over half a ton of bombs for every person alive in Laos at the time.
There are still visible craters everywhere.
The bombs were primarily cluster bombs. These are metal tubes full of hundreds of tennis-ball sized bombs, each containing 300 metal ball bearings. When the bombs explode it's like a massive shotgun blast.
In Phonsavan, Laos, I visited an exhibit by the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British non-profit organization that removes bombs and mines in war torn countries throughout the world. I watched a short film about their efforts in Laos. About 30 percent of the bombs didn't explode. These are still being found, often the hard way, by farmers who hit them with their plows, or children who play with them.
Even today, 35 years later, people are being killed by these bombs.
The target of the bombs was ostensibly the communist Pathet Lao group. The purpose was to destroy their supply base. We bombed their farms. We bombed civilian targets.
Laos doesn't have much in the way of tourist attractions (which is part of its appeal, ironically). The one thing they have that other countries don't as far as tourist attractions is an archaelogical oddity called the Plain of Jars, thousands of giant stone urns strewn all over the countryside in the northern part of the country. They were studied extensively by the French in the 1930s.
We bombed them. We bombed the Plain of Jars. That would be like bombing Stonehenge. Here's a sign at the Plain of Jars.
And here's one of the jars, next to a crater.
All this was done without the knowledge of the US public or even Congress. This was flagrantly illegal according to both national and international law. How many Americans know about the war on Laos? Hell, considering there are Americans who can't find America on a world map I wonder how many have even heard of Laos.
My tour guide at the Plain of Jars in Phonsavan didn't know there was an American in the group. He told us that there is still a great deal of bitterness towards the US. Our government gives Laos aid, but they think of it as charity, not reparations for wrongdoing. We should be rebuilding the country as we did with Japan and Germany.
He said that in some rural parts of the country it is not safe to travel as an American because people there still hate the US.
I don't blame them. I don't blame them one bit. As I watched the film at the MAG office I felt physically ill.
Laos is probably the least-developed country I've visited. It's a country of small pleasures. There are no big mountains or canyons or ruins. Just the Mekong River, a slow pace of life, and the joy of being able to stand on a hill in the middle of the day and hear no machine noise in any direction: no cars, no tractors, only cowbells and rooster calls. Of the 194 countries ranked by the CIA, Laos is the 148th poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income.
So if the country is this primitive now, I can't imagine what it was like when we started bombing in the 1950s. What on earth did we think we had to fear from these people?!
The country is officially called Lao People's Democratic Republic, which is a bit ironic since it's one of the few single-party communist governments left in the world. So our bombing campaign accomplished nothing in that regard.
The last eight years was one of the darkest periods in US history. There has been much hand-wringing (but not nearly enough) about how we went to war in a foreign country that had never attacked us and posed no direct threat.
I am no Bush fan, obviously, but the seeds of his administration's foreign policy have roots at least as far back as LBJ in Southeast Asia. Eisenhower was president when Guatemala was overthrown. Iraq isn't a departure from US foreign policy. It's how we've done things for over 50 years.
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