Posted on 08/25/2007 7:51:05 AM PDT by Laverne
Like a pig in muck, the left loves to wallow in Vietnam. But only in their "Vietnam." Not in the real Vietnam war.
Not in the Vietnam war of 1963-68, the disastrous years where policy was shaped by the best and brightest of American liberalism. Not in the Vietnam war of 1969-73, when Richard Nixon and General Creighton Abrams managed to adjust our strategy, defeat the enemy, and draw down American troops all at once--an achievement affirmed and rewarded by the American electorate in November 1972. Not in the Vietnam of early 1975, when the Democratic Congress insisted on cutting off assistance to our allies in South Vietnam and Cambodia, thereby inviting the armies of the North and the Khmer Rouge to attack. And not in the defeats of April 1975. As the American left celebrated from New York to Hollywood, in Phnom Penh former Cambodian prime minister Sirik Matak wrote to John Gunther Dean, the American ambassador, turning down his offer of evacuation:
Dear Excellency and Friend:
I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this
sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is no matter, because we all are born and must die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you [the Americans].
Please accept, Excellency and dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.
S/Sirik Matak
The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh a few days later. Sirik Matak was executed: shot in the stomach, he was left without medical help and took three days to die. Between 1 and 2 million Cambodians were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the next three years. Next door, tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed, and many more imprisoned. Hundreds of thousands braved the South China Sea to reach freedom.
The United States welcomed the refugees--but we were in worldwide retreat. It turned out that the USSR was sufficiently tired and ramshackle that its attempts to take advantage of that retreat had limited success. Still, the damage done by U.S. weakness in the late 1970s should not be underestimated. To mention only one event, our weakness made possible the first successful Islamist revolution in the modern world in Iran in 1979, in the course of which we allowed a new Iranian government to hold 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
The era of weakness ended with the American public's repudiation of Jimmy Carter in 1980. Vietnam played a cameo role in that presidential campaign. In August of 1980, speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Ronald Reagan personally added the following thoughts on Vietnam to the prepared text of a defense policy speech: "As the years dragged on, we were told that peace would come if we would simply stop interfering and go home. It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause. . . . There is a lesson for all of us in Vietnam. If we are forced to fight, we must have the means and determination to prevail." The media went nuts. What a gaffe! Howell Raines, writing a week later in the New York Times, wondered if the Vietnam comments, which had "provided ammunition for his critics," marked "perhaps the turn in Ronald Reagan's luck and in the momentum of his campaign"--a negative turn, Raines meant and hoped.
But it was not to be. Reagan stood by his guns. He beat Jimmy Carter. And all honor to George W. Bush for following in Reagan's footsteps, grasping the nettle, and confronting the real lessons and consequences of Vietnam. The liberal media and the PC academics are horrified. All the better.
As the left shudders, Bush leads. In his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 27 years after Reagan's, Bush also told the truth about Vietnam. Now he has to be steadfast in supporting General Petraeus and ensuring that the war is fought as intelligently and energetically as possible. Not everyone in his administration is as fully committed to this task as they should be. Bush will have to be an energetic and effective commander in chief, both abroad and on the home front, over his final 17 months. Last week was a good start.
Kristol is really stepping up to the plate with this article, imho.
President Bush is an awesome and powerful leader. I am proud to call him my President. He is one of the great visionaries.
We all need to support the President in this to win the war.
IMO history will judge President Bush kindly..
Rush spent most of the week saying this after Bush’s speech. Kristol, thankfully, is echoing...
I agree, remember how the left and the media (is there really a difference?) trashed Reagan the same way they trash Bush. Although I think the vitriol against this President is much more frequent and much more violent (although I’m older and wiser now and pay much more attention). When we win in Iraq, and we will, the media will try to spin it as a result of the democrats taking over congress, yada yada yada, blah, blah, blah.
History will shine brightly on President BUsh and his administration and history will mock today’s media as an organization who lost all sense of perspective, honor, and integrity.
Someone should tell Letterman that Bush is just doing his job and standing up to confused, corrupted, secular-humanist, anti-american liberals like himself. You don't need to be a visionary to see the forest for the trees.
Indeed it will judge him as one of the best president this country has ever had
“President Bush is an awesome and powerful leader.”
Agreed, he treats our military right and knows our history.
Now if he could only get his act together about the border.
I thought on FR it was the Weakly Standard.
***Now if he could only get his act together about the border.***
Mexican history will judge him highly on the border...
The Vietnam war was fought to delay and end the expansion of communisom in Asia. When the war started, Malaysia was under seige, the Philippines, Indonesia was a client of Russia, India was a socialist client of Russia, Burma was a communist state..things were going pretty badly for our side.
At the end of the war..Cambodia and Vietnam fell, but the other countries were on their way to establishing firm democracy. Today they are the economic Tigers and Vietnam was forced to repudiate communism and follow the capitalist road.
What would have happened if we had turned a left in 1964? Or 1968? We will never know, but thousands of Americans, Koreans, New Zealanders, Australians and Brits gave there lives to save Asia.
To turn and run in the face of an evil ideology is to condemn mankind.
Indeed! We must not fail in the Middle East. These are the right wars at the right time!
The Democrats keep trotting out the Vietnam canard as a weapon against the GOP. Its about damn time Pres. Bush whacked them with it. He needs to keep doing this over and over and over..... Hell, he should have been doing this for last 6+ years. Its driven me nuts that Bush lets these preening, leftist, a-holes get away with it.
Everyone, including Kristol, remembers his own Vietnam war.
The one I remember was an escalation begun by Kennedy and Johnson in an attempt to save a Catholic government imposed on a Buddhist majority by Dulles and Eisenhower to prevent a takeover of the entire country by Ho Chi Minh's army following its defeat of the colonialist French.
It's true we beat the North Vietnamese army but its also true that the Catholic South Vietnamese governments were wretched (Kennedy had the Diems (?) assassinated) and, without our soldiers, were totally incapable of surviving, let alone governing.
Kristol, a neocon, knows all this and is lying through his teeth, emphasizing the defeatism and propaganda of the media while ignoring the underlying corruption and incompetence of our allies and the thoroughly questionable morality of our entire endeavor.
Following the American Revolution between 1/3 and 1/6 of the colonists fled to Canada and elsewhere - and ours was quite a humane revolution. The French and Russian equivalents were much, much worse. So were the wars of the Reformation.
There were many, many Southeast Asians who collaborated with the French, worked with them, prospered under them, adopted their religion, manners, culture. These were going to suffer when the French were expelled. Our intervention only made their suffering worse.
She has way under reported the death figures. It was between 1 million to 3 million Vietnamese and up to 3 million to 6 million Cambodians. In the 3 years following the war. To put this into proportion, during the TEN years of the war about 1 million Vietnamese were killed.
Well, the thread almost made it to ten before the borderbots began trashing.
Funny how you do not attack Socialism. In the last century Socialism was responsible for 150 Million deaths and putting about 3 billion people into slavery. This compares to about 35 million killed in all the wars. American haters never mentioned these numbers when attacking our own country.
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