The hard sell of the Long War marches on. The three-pronged attack to try to convince America that perpetual war in the Middle East is our country’s only hope continues largely unabated in “the liberal media.” Through shame, fear, and demagoguery, we’re being prepared for a generation of war. Knowing how pivotal the Petraeus White House report on Iraq is, the forces of war are pulling out all the stops in the op-ed pages.
This week’s hard sell Sunday Wankery comes to us courtesy of Mark Steyn. This week’s Wank-O-Meme(tm: “The Lessons of Vietnam”.
George W. Bush gave a speech about Iraq last week, and in the middle of it he did something long overdue: He attempted to appropriate the left’s most treasured all-purpose historical analogy. Indeed, Vietnam is so ubiquitous in the fulminations of politicians, academics and pundits that we could really use anti-trust legislation to protect us from shopworn historical precedents. But, in the absence thereof, the president has determined that we might at least learn the real “lessons of Vietnam.”
Got that? Everything you know about Vietnam is wrong. They are “shopworn historical precedents.”
“Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Aug. 22. “Many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people … . 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, dateline 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.”
I don’t know about “the world,” but apparently a big chunk of America still believes in these “misimpressions.” As the New York Times put it, “In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.”
Let’s back this up. That lesson Steyn is talking about is that spending that whole eleven years in Vietnam, where we lost 50,000+ soldiers was not the problem. The problem was that we withdrew.
Well, it had a “few negative repercussions” for America’s allies in South Vietnam, who were promptly overrun by the North. And it had a “negative repercussion” for former Cambodian Prime Minister Sirik Matak, to whom the U.S. ambassador sportingly offered asylum. “I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion,” Matak told him. “I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty … . I have committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans.” So Sirik Matak stayed in Phnom Penh and a month later was killed by the Khmer Rouge, along with about 2 million other people. If it’s hard for individual names to linger in the New York Times’ “historical memory,” you’d think the general mound of corpses would resonate.
But perhaps these distant people of exotic hue are not what the panjandrums of the New York Times regard as real “allies.” In the wake of Vietnam, the communists gobbled up real estate all over the map, and ever closer to America’s back yard. In Grenada, Maurice Bishop toppled Prime Minister Sir Eric Gairy: It was the first-ever coup in the British West Indies, and in a faintly surreal touch led to Queen Elizabeth presiding over a People’s Revolutionary Government. There were Cuban “advisers” all over Grenada, just as there were Cuban troops all over Africa.
Because what was lost in Vietnam was not just a war but American credibility.
The conclusion: We were a real country to be reckoned with as long as we stayed in Vietnam and got thousands killed ineffectively and then spread the war into Laos and Cambodia. When the country had finally had enough and pussed out, that’s when we “lost credibility”.
Naturally, Steyn’s wankery compares this to today’s war in Iraq. We will lose credibility if we leave Iraq, and then we will be attacked again. Forget the lessons of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Forget the lessons of Eastern Europe in the 90’s, or the first Gulf War. Those lessons don’t apply here. Forget the fact that America’s credibility was ravaged when we began the war in Iraq. Leaving Iraq will apparently cause people to think we’re weak. That’s the only lesson that needs to be even considered.
But here’s the money graph:
American victory in the Cold War looks inevitable in hindsight. It didn’t seem that way in the Seventies. And, as Iran reminds us, the enduring legacy of the retreat from Vietnam was the emboldening of other enemies. The forces loosed in the Middle East bedevil to this day, in Iran, and in Lebanon, which Syria invaded shortly after the fall of Saigon and after its dictator had sneeringly told Henry Kissinger, “You’ve betrayed Vietnam. Someday you’re going to sell out Taiwan. And we’re going to be around when you get tired of Israel.”
Translation: Even though the Soviet Union crumbled, because we left Vietnam, the Shah fell in Iran and every nasty horrible Islamist terror attack on American interests can be traced directly back to us wimping out in Saigon.
The last heli out of the Embassy caused 9/11. And by inference, everyone who supported out withdrawal from Vietnam is responsible for 9/11. That’s the “lesson” we’re supposed to come away with. We caused this. It’s our fault. That’s why we can’t leave Iraq. If that happens, China will attack Taiwan. If that happens, Israel will get nuked. Your refusal to support the war in Iraq will get millions killed. You’re not a dirty fucking hippie, are you?
But, if you’re not a self-absorbed poseur like Sulzberger, “Vietnam” is not a “tragedy” but a betrayal. The final image of the drama – the U.S. helicopters lifting off from the Embassy roof with desperate locals clinging to the undercarriage – is an image not just of defeat but of the shabby sell-outs necessary to accomplish it.
At least in Indochina, those who got it so horribly wrong – the Kerrys and Fondas and all the rest – could claim they had no idea of what would follow.
To do it all over again in the full knowledge of what followed would turn an aberration into a pattern of behavior. And as the Sirik Mataks of Baghdad face the choice between staying and dying or exile and embittered evenings in the new Iraqi émigré restaurants of London and Los Angeles, who will be America’s allies in the years ahead?
Professor Bernard Lewis’ dictum would be self-evident: “America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”
Translation: You see, if we don’t stay and kill Muslims, nobody will ever like us. And it will be your fault. You will have lead America into oblivion. Vietnam caused 9/11. What will the next “betrayal” cause?
Hopefully, it will cause us to stop and think about America being a world leader not through the barrel of a gun, but by actual leadership. The man currently in charge of that has done more damage to America’s credibility than Vietnam ever could have, and the fact that he’s bringing it up (and worse, having Steyn write garbage like this) shows that the people running this perpetual war will now resort to anything — even complete sham fallacies like this — in order to make sure we never leave Iraq, or Syra, or Iran, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan.
At this point the desperation is so evident that I have to start questioning the sanity of the people running this country, and that should worry the hell out of all of us. We’ve got one last real chance to stop this war before Bush’s cabal makes sure it drags on for decades.
Then again, to Mark Steyn, we’ve been fighting this war since the Fall of Saigon. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
