Hang Right Politics

Posted by Republicanpundit on August 26th, 2007 in Dirty Politics, Appeasment, Dirty Tricks, Carter, Diplomacy, Democrats

We have talked this week about how the left is up in arms because President Bush decided it was time to tell the truth, and nothing but the awful truth, about our democrat pullout from Vietnam.

As usual, Mark Steyn says it better than anyone else in his column of today. You should read the whole thing, but I will quote part of it.

George W. Bush gave a speech about Iraq last week, and in the middle of it he did something long overdue: He attempted to appropriate the left’s most treasured all-purpose historical analogy. Indeed, Vietnam is so ubiquitous in the fulminations of politicians, academics and pundits that we could really use anti-trust legislation to protect us from shopworn historical precedents. But, in the absence thereof, the president has determined that we might at least learn the real “lessons of Vietnam.”

“Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Aug. 22. “Many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people … . A columnist for the New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: ‘It’s difficult to imagine,’ he said, ‘how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.’ A headline on that story, dateline Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: ‘Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life.’ The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.”

I don’t know about “the world,” but apparently a big chunk of America still believes in these “misimpressions.” As the New York Times put it, “In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.”

Well, it had a “few negative repercussions” for America’s allies in South Vietnam, who were promptly overrun by the North. And it had a “negative repercussion” for former Cambodian Prime Minister Sirik Matak, to whom the U.S. ambassador sportingly offered asylum. “I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion,” Matak told him. “I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty … . I have committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans.” So Sirik Matak stayed in Phnom Penh and a month later was killed by the Khmer Rouge, along with about 2 million other people. If it’s hard for individual names to linger in the New York Times’ “historical memory,” you’d think the general mound of corpses would resonate.

Another Gem from Mark:

The West” as a whole was infected by America’s loss of credibility. Thanks to Mrs. Thatcher, Galtieri lost his gamble, but it must have looked a surer thing in the spring of 1982, in the wake of Vietnam, and Soviet expansionism, and the humiliation of Jimmy Carter’s botched rescue mission in Iran – the helicopters in the desert, and the ayatollahs poking and prodding the corpses of American servicemen on TV.

American victory in the Cold War looks inevitable in hindsight. It didn’t seem that way in the Seventies. And, as Iran reminds us, the enduring legacy of the retreat from Vietnam was the emboldening of other enemies. The forces loosed in the Middle East bedevil to this day, in Iran, and in Lebanon, which Syria invaded shortly after the fall of Saigon and after its dictator had sneeringly told Henry Kissinger, “You’ve betrayed Vietnam. Someday you’re going to sell out Taiwan. And we’re going to be around when you get tired of Israel.”

Democrats are trying real hard to paint the current vietnam as a communist paradise.
More:

“Vietnam” is not a “tragedy” but a betrayal. The final image of the drama – the U.S. helicopters lifting off from the Embassy roof with desperate locals clinging to the undercarriage – is an image not just of defeat but of the shabby sell-outs necessary to accomplish it.

At least in Indochina, those who got it so horribly wrong – the Kerrys and Fondas and all the rest – could claim they had no idea of what would follow.

To do it all over again in the full knowledge of what followed would turn an aberration into a pattern of behavior. And as the Sirik Mataks of Baghdad face the choice between staying and dying or exile and embittered evenings in the new Iraqi émigré restaurants of London and Los Angeles, who will be America’s allies in the years ahead?

Professor Bernard Lewis’ dictum would be self-evident: “America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”

I will again ask the question. How well off would Vietnam and the world be if it was free and not under communist control. The economy would just not be an emerging one, but a full fledged economic power in IndoChina.