Exposing the left's lies about Vietnam

Arthur Herman:

In late August, an American President spoke forthrightly for the first time about what happened when the United States abandoned its commitments to two sovereign nations in Indochina, South Vietnam and Cambodia, and allowed them to be overrun by Communist forces. The President’s remarks, which were intended to heighten public awareness of what might happen if we repeated the same mistake in Iraq, occupied barely three paragraphs in a 45-minute speech. Acknowledging that there is “a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam war and how we left,” Bush added that “Whatever your position is on that debate,”

one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our own vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “reeducation camps,” and “killing fields.”

His words set off a firestorm among America’s liberal elite. Outraged, Senator Joseph Biden accused the President of “playing the American people for fools.” Everyone knows, Biden said, that “in Iraq, just as we did in Vietnam, we are clinging to a central government that does not and will not enjoy the support of the people” and is therefore doomed. The historian Robert Dallek declared that Bush’s comparison “boggles the mind,” and that the true comparison worked the other way around: even though “we dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater, we couldn’t work our will” to prevent North Vietnam’s triumph over its southern neighbor—any more, presumably, than we can “work our will” in Iraq. Stanley Karnow, the author of Vietnam: A History (1983), one of the most widely read accounts of the war, asked sarcastically: “Does [Bush] think we should have stayed in Vietnam?” To Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations, the postwar horrors that befell Vietnam and Cambodia occurred “because the United States left too late, not too early.”

And so it went. Senator John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, was particularly scathing. Already on record as denying there was any “bloodbath” in Vietnam after the war, he denounced the President’s comparison as “irresponsible.” America, he declared, “lost the war in Vietnam because our soldiers were trapped in a distant country we did not understand, supporting a government that lacked sufficient legitimacy with its people” and fighting a war for “politicians [who] knew our strategy would not work.”

In short, Kerry and the others were scandalized not by Bush’s drawing of an analogy between Iraq and Vietnam but by its divergence from their analogy. For if there is one foreign-policy issue that the American Left has prided itself on “owning” over the past three decades, it is the issue that goes under the heading, “the lessons of Vietnam.”

Even before the last Marine helicopter left the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in April 1975, a narrative had developed to explain the course and the ultimate meaning of the war, and ever since then it has served as a template for understanding and evaluating America’s behavior in the world.

That template rests on four basic theses:

1. America’s cold-war obsession with Communist totalitarianism led it to intervene in an internal struggle in which no conceivable vital interest was at stake. “We deluded ourselves into thinking that we were defending freedom,” wrote the military analyst Andrew Bacevich (himself no leftist) after Bush’s speech, when in fact “we had blundered into a civil war,” a war in which our side, the Republic of South Vietnam, “proved to be a fiction.”

2. On account of that initial mistake, we found ourselves confronting a powerful native insurgency in the form of the Vietcong (VC), an indigenous guerrilla force. In this unconventional conflict, for which the U.S. military was woefully unprepared, we soon resorted to drastic, even barbaric methods and then lied to the American public about them. As Jonathan Schell wrote in a famous 1967 essay in the New Yorker: “we are destroying, seemingly by inadvertence, the very country we are supposedly protecting.” Or as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it: “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government.”

3. The frustrations of fighting this losing battle wrecked the morale of American troops, leading to excessive drug use, assaults on unpopular officers with fragmentation grenades, atrocities against Vietnamese civilians as in the village of My Lai in 1968, and, in the aftermath, a generation of veterans physically and emotionally scarred for life. For the American soldier in Vietnam, Marilyn B. Young wrote in The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (1991), “the announced goals of the war—to repel an outside invader, to give the people of South Vietnam a chance to choose their own government—were daily contradicted by the soldier’s sense that he was himself the invader.” According to the writer Peter Marin, what made Vietnam different from other wars was the American soldiers’ “direct confrontation . . . with their own culpability, their sense of their own capacity for error and excess” in an unjust and immoral conflict.

4. Despite intensive bombing, and despite Richard Nixon’s 1970 invasion of Cambodia in an effort to wipe out enemy sanctuaries there, the American intervention was destined to fail. The final collapse, which put an end to the government of South Vietnam in 1975, led at last to the unification of the country and other beneficial effects. Rather than triggering a bloodbath or the fall of other Asian regimes to Communism, as Presidents Johnson and Nixon and other war supporters had predicted, “the strategic effect,” in Bacevich’s words, “proved to be limited.” Once the Americans left, “the Vietnamese began getting their act together” and today enjoy peace and relative prosperity. In the judgment of Robert Dallek and others, whatever violence occurred in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge after we abandoned Vietnam was triggered by our earlier meddling in that country with Nixon’s “secret” bombing and incursion.

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He goes on to destroy all four premises and many of the liars on th left who propagated them. Even as the facts come out of the communist who led the war, the left clings tenaciously to their lies about Vietnam. Thy stubbornly refuse to recognize the truth of what happened and the huge and costly mistakes they made in their retreat from reason in Vietnam. Much of this is because they want to do for the people of Iraq what the did for the Vietnamese. fortunately we have a much stronger President who will not give into their desperation for defeat in Iraq.

Read the whole piece. The lying atrocity mongers remind you of some of the phony soldiers put forward by the left in the Iraq war. It is a shameless rerun, by the shameless defeatist. Until the Democrats admit the mistakes the left made in Vietnam they should never again be trusted with national security.