Agreed. Hitchen spouts the Leftist view of Vietnam, yet look at Vietnam in the aftermath of that war and today. South Vietnam fought on for its independence two years after our forces left. Upon victory, the North Vietnamese government killed tens of thousands, forced millions into reeducation camps, and caused hundreds of thousands to flee via the high seas. Today, we have a repressive Communist regime, motivated by an "aggressive internationalist totalitarian ideology," as our legacy. Ho Chi Minh was just as much a tyrant and murderer as Saddam.
Don't forget the Left also snickered at the concept of the "Domino Theory," as if only an intellectual midget could believe such a thing. Well, what happened in Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam (and almost in Thailand) certainly looked to me like a series of dominoes going down.
Hitchens is probably used to thinking of leftists as hard-thinking, soft-talking democratic socialists in cuddly sweaters with leather elbow-patches, thick wire-rimmed glasses and Birkenstocks.
He's right that the hard left came out against the war in Afghanistan. In my home town, a university professor who's a superannuated Mobe/SDS type and some of his little Leninist playmates had a street demonstration all ready to go with "stop-the-war" chants and signs that looked like they'd been in a closet since 1969. They started their demonstrations as soon as the bombs began to fall in Afghanistan.
Second point: Hitchens needs to recognize that his little socialist friends in Vietnam didn't go anywhere beyond Phnom Penh (to overthrow the Chinese-backed sweethearts of the Khmer Rouge, the rabid bats of the Leftist world) because our Vietnam veterans had eviscerated them. We killed a million of their cadres on the battlefield and in their trenches before Khe Sanh. We slaughtered their tank columns when the NVA divisions finally came out to fight classic Soviet blitzkrieg warfare in 1972. We gutted the Viet Cong's best units in 1968, during Tet, turning them into a shadow-puppet sideshow. We flat-ass ruined them, north and south. And Bangkok, Singapore, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur are all non-Communist because of what our veterans did in Vietnam. We lost three countries, but we guaranteed that six more would never be f____ with. It's why Malaysia's flag looks like ours -- it ain't red, Fred.
Hitchens makes an interesting point that I've seen elsewhere, that the neo-cons are ex-Trotskyites and to a large extent neo-Marxist. In the Middle East, their agenda happens to run parallel to that of National Greatness Republicanism, which is the Bush-McCain brand, and opposed to the paleocons' adhesion to George Washington's advice on foreign policy. Washington was a Federalist, and McKinley and Roosevelt (Teddy) were heirs to the Federalist legacy as Republicans; but they'd also realized that coal-burning warships could put strong forces on our coasts in a week's sailing from European ports, and had changed from Washington's policy of non-involvement to the Mahan Doctrine of forward engagement.
Or as Hitchens puts it, you can fight them now, or you can fight them later -- when they come to see you. Forward engagement, which is a non-Marxist, non-Leftist doctrine, says the same thing: if there are going to be unpleasantries, engage the enemy far out to sea, with the Navy as your long arm and the Marine Corps as your power-projection arm, your mailed fist. Engage the enemy as Grenville did at Seville, before the Armada was ready for sea. Engage the enemy before he is ready to engage. That doctrine has been fundamental U.S. military and foreign policy since World War II.