He was still sending optimistic dispatches even as the holocaust was proceeding. He was so monstrously wrong about what would happen in Cambodia after the Communist victory there that he won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The name of his Cambodian photographer, translator, guide and friend? Dith Pran.

The fast-talking Cambodian managed to save Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from the Khmer Rouge, but was unable to make it out of the country with them. In the swirling chaos of the Communist takeover, all was terror and confusion. The Khmer Rouge were emptying schools and hospitals and whole cities in their hunt for class enemies. (Anybody who wore glasses - the surest sign of a bourgeois intellectual - was in danger.)

At first Dith Pran pretended he had no education and passed himself off as a taxi driver. Then he threw away his money and posed as a peasant. Nothing was heard of him for more than four years, though there was a rumor that he'd been fed to the alligators, like his brother. He would lose some 50 members of his family altogether.

Dith Pran somehow managed to survive the ceaseless labor, the brutal beatings and the starvation diet (a tablespoon of rice a day), and eventually snuck across the Thai border. Reunited with Mr. Schanberg, he would go on to become a renowned photographer for the Times.

Now, once again, the sophisticates are urging Americans to abandon an ally, this time beleaguered Iraq. The leading Democratic presidential candidates speak glibly of pulling out of that country as if there would be no ill effects. As in Cambodia?

This week the American commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is testifying once again before Congress, and once again he'll be met by a chorus of cynicism, no matter how much real progress his strategy, aka The Surge, has made.

Last time he testified, Hillary Clinton told the general it would take "a willing suspension of disbelief" to credit what he said. The critics of the war have their script and are sticking to it. Just as Sydney Schanberg knew all would be better once the Americans had left Cambodia.

It was Edmund Burke who said that a society is not only a contract between the living but between the living, the dead and those yet to be born. It is through the present generation that the past transmits the fruits of its experience to the future. (The process is known as History.) Yes, the dead still speak, and few of their experiences are as relevant today as events in Cambodia decades ago.

What would an American withdrawal now mean for the Iraqis? It is now too late to ask Dith Pran. But his life and trials speak eloquently enough.