A recent commentary in the New York Times describes the general lack of attention the Khmer Rouge tribunal has received in the United States. I have to say that, sadly, since I returned to the U.S. in August, I have found this largely to be the case.

It is particularly inexcusable considering the role America played in decimating the country and creating circumstances that allowed the Khmer Rouge to come to power in the first place.

As Richard Bernstein writes, the lack of attention is "strange, given that tens of millions of Americans are old enough to remember when Cambodia was a preoccupying and deeply emotional issue for the United States, a tragic sideshow, as the writer William Shawcross put it, to the larger war in Indochina."