An American withdrawal from Iraq can only result in increased slaughter and human suffering, as did the US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Democrats use terms like "quagmire" and "failed" to describe the American military involvement in Iraq as they invoke the painful memory of Vietnam. Now, President Bush has set the record straight in a groundbreaking speech he delivered on August 22 to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City.
In his remarks, the President stated, "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.'"
The parallels between the two conflicts, Vietnam and Iraq, are substantial but not in the way the Democrats would have us think. Today, President Bush faces virtually the same set of circumstances in Iraq that President Gerald Ford faced in Vietnam in 1975. Back then, liberal anti-war Democrats won the mid-term election of 1974 and took over Congress as they did again last year in 2006. Democrats elected to Congress back in 1974 many who are still leaders of the anti-war position, including Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Tom Harkin (D-IA), Max Baucus (D-MT), George Miller (D-CA), Henry Waxman (D-CA), James Oberstar (D-MN), and Jack Murtha (D-PA). Congress clamored back then, as it is doing presently, for a policy of withdrawal. While an end of the conflict should obviously be the long-term goal, what would be the consequences of immediate withdrawal? Let's examine the consequences of disengagement from Vietnam.
After the 1973 Paris Peace Accord, South Vietnam depended on American aid to stabilize their country and fend off the communist North Vietnamese, comparable to Iran, and to fight the infiltration of the Viet Cong, comparable to the terrorists disturbing the peace in Iraq. Emboldened by the new liberal Democratic majority in Congress in 1975, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) led an effort to cut off all aid to South Vietnam by denying the Pentagon's request to spend surplus funds that had already been appropriated.
In March of 1975, the anti-war Congress, in fact, voted to cut off all aid to South Vietnam, thus sealing the fate of our ally. Typifying the attitude of many Democrats in Congress at the time, and in response to a Ford Administration official who asked, "Do you want Cambodia to fall," Rep. Don Frasier (D-MN) answered, "Yes, under controlled circumstances to minimize the loss of life."
In his remarks to the VFW, President Bush continued: "In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule, in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution." It should be noted that President Jimmy Carter, the great moralist in the White House at the time of the Cambodian genocide which followed the cutoff in aid to South Vietnam, never uttered a single public word of acknowledgement regarding the Cambodian Genocide, even as the Marxist Pol Pot stepped over skulls while carrying around a copy of the Communist Manifesto. President Bush continued:
In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousand perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
Would the consequences be any less dire today for the people of Iraq than it was for the people of Southeast Asia if Congress withdrew support? If such a withdrawal of support were to take place today, as a result of Congress cutting off aid, would the high-minded Left turn as blind an eye to the resulting slaughter and human suffering as they largely did back then? Would American traditions of standing up for human rights and fighting against oppression be any less compromised today as it was in 1975 by such action? These are questions that hopefully we will not have to answer if we learn the lessons of history.
I was listening to a leftist radio program recently as the “Vietnam” reference was discussed. All I could do is shake my head, as host and callers discussed the issue and applauded the pullout in Vietnam as the correct and logical thing to do to stop the killing, with not a single acknowledgment of the slaughters that followed.
Leftists like to forget that their Vietnam victory was a death sentence for as many as 2 million people and seem perfectly willing to sentence Iraqis to the same fate.
Fortunately for humankind, many leftist politicians are smart enough to know that the televised slaughter and chaos would amount to a sign hanging around their necks proclaiming, “I did this.”
The problem in Vietnam was information. Vietnam was the first
“media war” and Johnson and his cabinet did their best to keep
it hidden from the American people. While the military did their job,
Johnson consistently exaggerated their accomplishments to the American people; and under-
mind their efforts by selecting the “least effective option” offered by the
Joint Chiefs when compelled to escalate the conflict.
The war’s opponents quickly seized the “credibility gap” as an excuse to say the entire war effort was a failure–and that the SOuth Vietnamese were not worth supporting.
The tragedy of Vietnam lies in the obfuscation of the very real progress that took place in Vietnam between 1965 and 1972. The Cambodian and Laotian operations in 1970-1 were only possible because the enemy had been driven out of South Vietnam.
However by the time Richard Nixon took over in 1969, the AMerican people had lost their
faith in the government and were willing to cut their losses. The great victories in the last years of the VIetnam war were lost in the howls of the war’s opponents who were able to argue that the governemnt’s loss of some crediblity meant that it had lost all crediblity. Nixon’s reports to the nation
were assumed to be more lies.
While the Bush team has been more honest than the Johnson administration, they haven’t invested enough energy selling the IRaqi war
to the American public. Today the “lost victories in IRaq” (when was the last
time you ever heard the media report on any successful military operation in Iraq? They occur daily–but don’t “merit” being included in the news), may
go down with those in Vietnam as triumphs it proved politically expedient to not claim.
The reason for this is not conspiracy–it’s simple lack of information.