Another Vietnam

What does it mean when opponents of the war in Iraq say we don’t need another Vietnam? Does it mean we don’t need another massacre of the populace after they force US forces to withdraw or does it really mean they do not want the US to intervene in anything militarily? I would suggest that their history has shown that they simply do not want the US to intervene in anything; opponents of intervention liken it to Vietnam because they think America was wrong to intervene there, and they want to avoid "another Vietnam"--that is, another U.S. military intervention.

This line of thinking completely ignores the need to at time intervene militarily and that their belief that military intervention is worse than what ever atrocity is occurring at the time, thus placing opponents of Iraq and Vietnam in the unenviable position of arguing that the outcome in Vietnam was actually a pretty good thing for the world at large. James Taranto writes today:

Now, however, it is the Iraq opponents who are seeking another Vietnam, i.e., another defeat for America, and President Bush who wants to avoid that outcome. And so the erstwhile opponents of the Vietnam War have to argue that the outcome
in Vietnam wasn't really so bad.

This means, among other things, averting one's eyes from the humanitarian costs of American retreat. Newsweek's Michael Hirsh shows how it's done, describing a visit he made to Hanoi in December 1991, when the Soviet Union had less than a month to
exist:

As Taranto notes - Hirsh’s commentary leads one to believe that the travesty of Vietnam didn’t occur until 1991 when Russia was about to collapse and the economic forces that had held a lot Vietnam aloft for 20-plus years were crumbling. No mention is made of the re-education camps or the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields or the loss of over a million lives at the hands of the communists. It’s as if the previous generation had never occurred and was nothing more than a bad dream, to be forgotten upon waking.

The left’s current attraction to Iraq and likening it to Vietnam ignores the potential humanitarian costs of an American retreat of Iraq and the rise of an even stronger brand of Islamic Terrorist emboldened by once again defeating the paper tiger. The anti-interventionist left believes that all of the Islamic world’s hatred is caused by a US presence in the area and ignores the actions and words of the enemy that committed terrorist attacks around the world long before the US intervened in Iraq.

What follows in an excerpt of what President Bush said the other day in front of the VFW when he compared Iraq to Vietnam, it encapsulates all that is wrong with the left’s desire to have us retreat from Iraq and the consequences of their continued policy of non-intervention.

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 naiveté. 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.

The history the left cites when they compare Iraq to Vietnam is not history; it is a construct of their imagination. A sanitized history where all the evils their heroes committed and all the good that the US facilitated is ignored to soften the blow of reality to their fragile minds.

Iraq can not be another Vietnam to let it become so by following the policies of the left would be a crime against humanity.