Laos and Cambodia weren't participants in the war but that doesn't really feel like it matters all that much. Whenever I talk about the bombings of Cambodia and Laos with Americans (who - liberals and conservatives alike feel they must always defend) I sometimes here "well we bombed cities in Germany and Japan in WW2 and no one talks about those being war crimes". But were they? I really don't know much about those bombings. My gut says yes they were also war crimes but we just accept them because they were combatant countries?
I'm gonna say; I think comparing the numbers of dead and maimed, and saying this bombing or that bombing is worse, I think looking at war that way destroys our humanness. Because if the bombing of Tokyo was worse than the bombing of Dresden, if murdering 100,000 civilians is worse than murdering only 25,000, it means were accepting that there are degrees of mass murder, and if we're not careful we might decide that there is an acceptable degree of mass murder.
Bombing civilians is wrong. It doesn't matter if it's one person or a million. It's wrong. It's a crime.