Returning to Cambodia Killing fields of media fallacies.

National Review Online ^ | August 23, 2007 | Peter W. Rodman

[ChessExpert]

Military historians seem to be converging on a consensus that by the end of 1972, the balance of forces in Vietnam had improved considerably, increasing the prospects for South Vietnam’s survival. That balance of forces was reflected in the Paris Agreement of January 1973, and the (Democratic) Congress then proceeded to pull the props out from under that balance of forces over the next 2 ½ years — abandoning all of Indochina to a bloodbath. This is now a widely accepted narrative of the endgame in Vietnam, and it has haunted the Democrats for a generation.

[ChessExpert]

President Bush is right. The Democratic Congres abandoned Vietnam and Cambodia with tragic consequences.

[rawcatslyentist]

[ChessExpert]

Ping

[EagleUSA]

President Bush is right. The Democratic Congres abandoned Vietnam and Cambodia with tragic consequences.
:::::
Something the filthy, cowardly left will never admit....while they still try to defend the indefensible. Themselves, and their gutless politics.

[Malone LaVeigh]

and it has haunted the Democrats for a generation.

Yeah, they appear to have lost a lot of sleep over it. /s

[dodger]

Too true. All too true.

[piytar]

It has haunted the Democrats for a generation

It should haunt those Democraps responsible for longer than a generation. They are directly responsible for the deaths of literally millions of innocent people. The only people more responsible are the ones who actually committed the killings, but the Democraps definitely enabled them. Knowingly and for political reasons to boot.

I'd say something just short of eternity in a firey place would be an appropriate time for them to be haunted...

[jwalsh07]

The Democratic Congres abandoned Vietnam and Cambodia with tragic consequences.

Millions of tragic consequences, it is long past time that the bleeding heart left got stamped with the Killing Fields logo on their collective noggins.

Good post.

[BallyBill]

The Killing Fields comparison is one of the most brilliant moves in awhile.

It is one part of that time the Left would like to keep a secret. It really rained on their Post Viet Nam defeat party.

[Islander7]

Haunted the democrats?

For that to be the case, they would have to have a conscience.

[bray]

Killing Fields are fine if they are commie Killing Fields. Over 200 million worldwide have been brutally murdered by “friends” of the DNC.

Pray for W and Our Troops

[caisson71]

I’ve wanted to shove the results of quitting in Vietnam up the Democrats...... for a long time. President Bush has done just that.
I’ve printed his speech to the VFW and will frame and display it at a very prominent place in my office for all to see.
My kids and grandkids will know the real history of our cowardly and deceitful congressional members for their betrayal of the military in VietNam and abandonment of loyal Vietnamese friends who were slaughtered while we stuck our tails between our legs and ran away from our promises and responsibilities.
It was a shameful time in our history and we were led by Dimocraps.

[popdonnelly]

Liberals and leftists think this was their shining hour. They pine for the good old days. Which is why they will never admit they were in any way wrong about Southeast Asia.

[Obie Wan]

The D’craps threw in the towel but here’s the problem with Vietnam and the potential problem with Iraq. Fighting a war where the bad guys are in their own backyard and get resources and asylum from neighboring countries means potentially being in a conflict for the long haul. If the USA isn’t willing to stay the course OR expand the conflict to “enabling” countries then we’re going to lose every time. Korean War type results don’t always happen and we better realize that truth !!!

[ChessExpert]

The text, audio, and video of President Bush's speech is available here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/08/20070822-3.html#

President Bush gives excellent speeches. He is a lot smarter than his critics. He could be more aggressive. For example, he puts the communist murders in Cambodia at hundreds of thousands, when it was more like two million. He could have blamed the Democratic Congress for abandoning Vietnam and Cambodia, and blamed them for the subsequent bloodbath.

Here's an excerpt:

Finally, there's Vietnam. This is a complex and painful subject for many Americans. The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I'm going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.

The argument that America's presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, "The Quiet American." It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism -- and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.

In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?" 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, date 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. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.

Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There's no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) 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 vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields."

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that "the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today."

His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al Qaeda's chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents."

Zawahiri later returned to this theme, declaring that the Americans "know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet." Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility -- but the terrorists see it differently.

[dfwgator]

Hey Jane Fonda and John Kerrey and all the other anti-war losers. This is your legacy. Pleasant dreams.

[what's up]

Wonderful to see President Bush publicly address the Vietnam pullout and resulting bloodbath.

Times are changing. Politicians have stayed away from the topic for years. The fact that the President brought it up shows that the tide is turning.

[irgbar-man]

Why not heckle/freep democrats with chants of “Killing Fields! Killing Fields! Killing Fields!”? Harsh but the truth hurts.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

What the Democratic Party did has haunted the Democrats for a generation.

But it did get them a peanut farmer elected president. Now that they are trying hard to screw the armed forces of the United States of America again they are trying this time to elect one of the peanuts.

[rlmorel]

Excellent, excellent speech. Thanks for the link.

President Bush may be an ignoramus on Immigration, but he understands history and the threat liberalism poses in their coddling of evil as they try to “get along” with everyone.