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STEYN: Cambodians deserve better than the killing fields of tobacco 

Hard to say. But, as a general rule, whenever a great international crisis runs up against an anti-smoking policy, bet on the latter. That's been true ever since Hillary Clinton made Yitzhak Rabin go outside to smoke when he was at the White House for negotiations over the Oslo peace accords. (Mrs Clinton's husband remained in compliance with her smoking policy by keeping his cigar famously unlit.)

A couple of years later, Kosovo refugees arrived at military bases in Canada to discover that, although 98 per cent of Kosovars are smokers, the Canadian Red Cross refused to provide them with cigarettes (a breach of the Geneva Convention far crueller than anything Rummy's doing at Guantánamo). . .

People should be allowed to go about their business? As the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto remarked, try going into a New York gay bar and asking for a cigarette. Male life expectancy in Nanny's antiseptic city is 74.5 years. In Albania, where many of those Kosovar refugees lucky enough to escape Canada wound up, smoking's gone up 20 per cent in recent years . . . Yet life expectancy is 73. The New Yorker lives an extra 1.5 years, but loses all of it sitting in the Holland Tunnel going to New Jersey to buy cheap smokes.

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