What comes with retreat and defeat

John Podhoretz:

AND so the world of conventional wisdom is even now rearing in horror at the mere thought of President Bush daring to compare the war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam - or, rather, describing the consequences of losing the war in Iraq by discussing the consequences of our loss in Vietnam and asking the American people if they want to see that disastrous past repeated as our inglorious future.

You could almost feel the outrage rising like steam heat from the left side of the blogosphere: Why, doesn't that evil moron know that Vietnam is our analogy?

Doesn't he know no one should be permitted to mention Vietnam in any context other than the one we use - as an example of an immoral, pointless and stupid war, a quagmire from which the nation was saved not by heroes on the battlefield abroad but by political opposition at home?

The Bush speech in question, delivered Wednesday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, will remain the subject of hot debate because it is a remarkably substantive and thought-provoking document - really more akin to an article than a speech.

Bush contends that since the end of the Second World War, there has always been a deep divide in the country about the wisdom of trying to affect change in non-Western nations. And the speech offers interesting parallels between American skepticism about the positive effects of U.S. intervention in previous conflicts and American skepticism about our role in Iraq today.

After the Second World War, "some said Japanese culture was inherently incompatible with democracy," Bush said. "Joseph Grew, a former United States ambassador to Japan who served as Harry Truman's Under Secretary of State, told the president flatly that - and I quote - 'democracy in Japan would never work.' "

Others, he continued, argued that "democracy could not succeed in Japan because the national religion - Shinto - was too fanatical and rooted in the Emperor. Sen. Richard Russell denounced the Japanese faith, and said that if we did not put the Emperor on trial, 'any steps we may take to create democracy are doomed to failure.'"

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Bush then daringly contrasted these experiences with the aftereffects of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. He quoted the notorious headline on Sydney Schanberg's 1975 piece about the region following the collapse of South Vietnam: "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life."

In the four years that followed that New York Times piece, more than 3 million Indochinese would die as a result of genocidal actions taken by the tyrannies that came to dominate them in the absence of the United States: "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam," Bush said, "is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.' "

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Reminding Democrats of the price of their perfidy has created a scream of rage on the left. It is too bad they have never acknowledged the results of what their cowardice wrought. They should not be allowed to escape that now or to blame others for the consequences of their bad policy choices.