Pol Pot disbanded his Communist Party during the 1980s so as to emphasise a unified national struggle against Vietnamese occupation. That decade, Pol Pot commented that "We chose communism because we wanted to restore our nation. We helped the Vietnamese, who were communist. But now the communists are fighting us. So we have to turn to the West and follow their way." This action led Short to suggest that "the veneer of Marxism-Leninism which had cloaked Cambodian radicalism had only ever been skin-deep."