Whatever the opposite of a charm offensive is, President Obama is on it.In Chicago on July 24, Obama delivered an hour-long speech in which he complained that “with this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball.” The mother of one of the four Americans murdered at the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi immediately objected. “He’s wrong. My son is dead. How could that be phony?”A short while later, Obama was at it again.Describing an Oval Office visit with the Vietnamese president Truong Tan Song, Mr. Obama reported: “We discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”That assertion registered pretty high on the gaffe meter. Noted the editorial team at Investor’s Business Daily, “Few comparisons have been as odious as the one offered by the president linking one of the great mass murderers of history to one of America's Founding Fathers and authors of our liberty.”It’s alarming when presidents engage in the practice of sloppy history—especially sloppy war history.While Ho quoted the Declaration and Jefferson in his 1945 Declaration of Independence from the French, no reputable scholar of the Vietnam War would ever claim that he aimed to adopt American notions of a democratic civil society. Quite the contrary. His goal was to prevent the French from reestablishing their hold to Indochina once the Japanese were expelled. To that end, he did everything possible to ingratiate himself with the in-country American military advisors—and that included salting his declaration with cherished phrases from the American founding.The advisors fell for it. Their “failure to identify Ho Chi Minh as Soviet-trained and a Communist ideologue,” Claude Berube wrote in a study of OSS operations, “was a major American intelligence shortcoming that smoothed the way for Ho’s emergence as a national leader and in the end, an enemy of the United States.”
I was going to say that Obama's problem is ... but Obama is America's problem, so let me start that sentence again: America's problem is that Obama is an ideologue, and a stupid one. The combination can cause incalculable damage.Assuming that Johnson’s problem was fighting a long war is lazy history. Some long wars must be fought. Johnson’s problem was he fought a stupid war.A less superficial history of the Vietnam conflict suggests that the progressive way of war is anything but the practice “smart” power. Johnson actually started out acting much like Obama, trying to do just enough to avoid being accused of doing nothing. This approach—doing as little as possible to get by—is called the “incrementalist” strategy.The problem with an incrementalist approach is that the enemy pretty quickly figures out your strategy—and responds by incrementally and repeatedly upping the ante. Johnson got sucked into doing more and more until he was in too deep. Then he lacked the judgment to fight the war in a manner that would lead to a responsible conclusion. ...When it comes to foreign policy, Obama’s sloppy history is feeding his penchant for failing often and early.
Read the whole thing.The Northern takeover caused renewed suffering for Kim herself. It was only after the North took over that she began to have trouble getting medical help for her continued pain. It was only after the North took over that she was pulled from college and used as a propaganda tool, “trotted out to meet foreign journalists” and forced to tell them what the authorities told her to say.Kim’s life finally improved after many years. The Vietnamese prime minister arranged for her to study in Cuba, where she met her husband-to-be. They traveled to Moscow for their honeymoon, and when their flight stopped in Canada on the way back to Cuba they seized the opportunity to defect. These days she travels frequently to speak to the public, and she has now accepted the photo as a “powerful gift” in her life.It is wonderful that Kim’s existence has become so much happier. But it is up to us to draw the correct conclusions from her story: what was the real atrocity here, and who were the perpetrators?Kim is glad to be alive now, but she describes her attitude growing up in Communist-dominated Vietnam this way:I got burned by napalm, and I became a victim of war … but growing up then, I became another kind of victim. … I wished I died in that attack with my cousin, with my south Vietnamese soldiers.From her telling phrase “my south Vietnamese soldiers,” it is clear that Kim does not see them as the villains of the piece.
The tape captures one voice saying: "They got somebody," and a few seconds later, male voices shout: "Kill him!" Kill him!" There is then the sound of a .38 caliber revolver shot, followed by a female voice: "Whack that [expletive]!" Three more handgun shots ring out at about five-second intervals, and soon thereafter - in just 13 tragic seconds - 29 of the 77 guardsmen fire a total of 67 rifle shots that are to help seal the fate of the non-communist people of Indochina.
Sending 30,000 more troops for 18 months is a sure recipe for failure. McCrystal asked for many more troops (as many as 60,000 I believe although the 40,000 number which is most frequently cited would give him a good chance). But sending fewer and managing the war from Washington with a date certain for the beginning of withdrawal is the most blatant and cynical political move that I have ever witnessed. All it will accomplish is the death and dismemberment of more American servicemen all for the purpose of burnishing Obama's credentials. Rush Limbaugh calls Obama "cold" and this is as cold as it gets.
Republicans who support this move will live to regret it because in the end he will say not only that Bush put him in an impossible situation ("It's all Bush's fault") but that he was forced to sacrifice these soldiers because of the drumbeat for war on the Right. The Left will take out the Viet Nam playbook and tell of the atrocities committed by the Americans and the corruption of the Afghan government. The brave or foolish Afghans who supported us will be slaughtered and a book or two will be written about the "Afghan killing fields" without a mention of how this could have been avoided.
Rush should do an hour on this and repeat from time to time because it will happen like this as sure as the sun rises in the East. It's another "I told you so."
And if we leave, there will be a bloodbath in Vietnam. All of the people who supported us will be slaughtered in the streets. Well, it didn't happen.
If the words "swift" and "boat" must be combined and turned into a verb, then let us insist on its proper use. The word as a verb originates from the campaign undertaken in 2004 by the Swift Boat Veterans in response to the John Kerry presidential candidacy. The word means, or should mean, the exposure of a fraudulent autobiography of one seeking political office or public influence. It is the correction of a personal and professional record that has been selectively and dishonestly compiled, as the Swift Vets did so effectively to that of John Kerry.
Although swiftboating may be a neologism, there are other recent examples of this phenomenon. Justus Reid Werner, in a seminal Commentary article, exposed the fraudulent life story created by Edward Said to advance his political agenda. Dan Rather's macho claims to be an "ex-marine", when he did not finish marine basic training, were also revealed to be fraudulent. This is swiftboating in its truest sense.
The Left is now redefining and, therefore, misusing the term swiftboating, and this misuse has become one of the many notable aspects of the 2008 presidential campaign. Democratic candidates and their partisans in the blogosphere use this word to mean smearing their candidates for public office with lies and innuendo. For some blog sites, the word is now synonymous with "screeds," the "politics of smear and fear," and "character assassination of proven effectiveness." Recently, some candidates have angrily declared that they will not be swiftboated.
...
Every time that a candidate today complains of being smeared by calling it swiftboating, he seeks the same exoneration or immunity that this redefined word gives to John Kerry, and, perversely, that candidate reinforces the false impression that the Swift Vets did something dishonorable in their campaign against John Kerry and in Vietnam years ago.
This clever manipulation of the meaning of words and its exoneration of John Kerry has much broader implications. In the 1970s John Kerry led a high profile movement that not only defamed American servicemen as crazed killers, but Kerry and his real "band of brothers" also successfully pushed policies that had truly genocidal consequences in Southeast Asia. To exonerate John Kerry is to exonerate his movement and all who participated in it for their role in the genocide. It is to whitewash all of them from the consequences of their actions. (It also, peremptorily, excuses them of their behavior in the current war.) For them, to raise issues or to expose these facts is now to be summarily dismissed as swiftboating in this newly pejorative sense. So, down the memory hole is flushed another sad chapter authored by John Kerry and his ilk. Oh well, they were only a few million Asians; and history is conveniently sanitized.
John Kerry and the movement that he led have demanded and, for the most part, received a free pass for over a generation. They even had the effrontery to demand a memorial celebrating the "bravery" of their movement back here in the United States where they so heroically endured the hardships of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. In 2004 the Swift Vets made them pay a little for that otherwise free pass by setting a small part of the record straight. This is the meaning of swiftboating, and we should demand more of it. All we have to lose are the dishonest autobiographies from our self-serving political class.
Most informed Americans have heard about "anger management counseling." It is a widely prescribed therapy for those who lose their temper uncontrollably in public or in private or while watching the Hon. Henry Waxman pretend to be the late Andrei Vyshinsky, prosecutor at the Moscow Show Trials. Well, during the past few days I have been following the Hon. Jean-Francois Kerry's (D-Mass.) controversy with Boone Pickens, and I believe I am in need of "laughter management counseling." Every time I think of this ponderous stone-headed senator bellowing phony pieties, I suffer a dreadful agitation in the funny bone. I only hope that my health insurance is applicable.
As reported late last week, billionaire investor and environmentalist Boone Pickens, during an address at The American Spectator's 40th Anniversary Gala, promised to pay $1 million to anyone who could find error in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads, which he helped bankroll in 2004. The ads were produced to expose the braggart Kerry's incautious claims about his service during the Vietnam War -- that would be the war Kerry participated in briefly before coming home and traducing his fellow comrades in arms with vicious lies and distortions before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Remember his more recent claim that he supported our war in Iraq before he opposed it? Inconstancy is in his DNA.
Pickens is perplexed that the majority of Kerry's fellow Swift Boat pilots from Vietnam, who considered Lt. Kerry a ham and a fraud while serving with them and a louse when he maligned them, have been made out to be liars. In our political culture, polluted as it is by liberal bugaboos and shibboleths (we call it the Kultursmog), "Swift Boat" has become a hate term not unlike "McCarthyism." In the Kultursmog it has come to mean destroying a person by misrepresenting the person's record. But the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did not misrepresent Kerry's hoked up record, not in their ads, one of which presented a tape of Kerry's lurid testimony before the Senate. Pickens knows the ads were accurate, and he wants to demonstrate to the American people that they were. Send him the errors in the ads, and he will send you a cool million.
His challenge was not out in the media for more than a few hours than the Great Massachusetts Braggart responded with a letter to Pickens. Typically it is rude, beginning brusquely with "Mr. Pickens," no Dear Mr. Pickens for Kerry. The letter is also delusional. Kerry writes as though by acknowledging Pickens's challenge he is entitled to the $1 million. "While I am prepared to show they," Kerry writes of the Swift Boat Veterans, "lied on allegation after allegation, you have generously offered to pay one million dollars for just one thing that can be proven false. I am prepared to prove the lie beyond any reasonable doubt." In Kerry's next sentence he tells Pickens where to send the check. I kid thee not.
Kerry's presumptuous letter has gotten plenty of attention in the media, but nowhere have I seen it pointed out that Kerry has offered absolutely no evidence that his Swift Boat critics lied. In fact, he has yet to state what the critics' errors might have been in their ads. Pickens responded immediately, politely asking to see the journal allegedly maintained by Kerry in Vietnam and "Your military record, specifically your service records for the years 1971-1978, and copies of all movies and tapes made during your service."
As I said earlier, Kerry was a shameless ham in Vietnam and he remains one. At this writing Kerry has failed even to reply to Pickens, perhaps with good reason, Pickens ended his letter by asking Kerry to make a "commitment. If you cannot prove anything in the Swift Boat ads to be untrue...make a $1 million gift to the charity I am choosing -- the Medal of Honor Foundation." Both men are very rich. Pickens made his fortune by years of brilliant investments. He is one of the world's leading authorities on oil. Kerry made his fortune by marrying it, twice -- most recently to a woman who made her fortune similarly, through marriage.
Kerry has been whining about the rough treatment he received from his former comrades ever since they exposed him in the 2004 election. All the guff in his letter is typical of him: boastful, presumptuous, sophistical. Henceforth, I think I shall forego teasing him about his Francophile pretensions by calling him Jean-Francois. Rather, I shall call him Crybaby Kerry. Moreover, I shall start a clock on The American Spectator's website (www.spectator.org) and let it tick until Crybaby Kerry supplies Pickens with his Vietnam journal, his military records, and proof that the Swift Boat Veterans lied in their ads. Oh, and let us keep the Crybaby Kerry clock ticking until he comes up with his $1 million for the Medal of Honor Foundation. Upon filing this column my Crybaby Clock will begin ticking at Spectator.org. Now if only I could get my laughter under control.
November 11, 2007 08:00 PM Hey, do you remember Bobby Caina Calvan, the arrogant newspaper reporter who blogged about his snit fit in Iraq when a soldier asked him for identification–earning himself a Jerk of the Year nomination?
Well, Calvan’s MSM friends and editors have again come to his defense. They’re as clueless and snotty as he is. Armando Acuna, public editor of the Sacramento Bee, chose Veterans’ Day to mount his blog-bashing campaign and apologia for Calvan.
The mighty MM points out an example of complete tone deafness by the Public Editor of the Sacramento Bee in publishing a pitiful rationalization for the actions of their tone deaf and brain dead reporter Bobby Calvan, who I battered here. Let's read the tap dancing of the Sac Bee's conscience, now remember he is covering the ass of his jackass reporter who had the wrong ID and then belittled the gate guard for doing his job.
Even the mainstream media got into the act. On Oct. 25 USA Today’s “On Deadline” Web site wrote about the controversy, including running an excerpt from Calvan’s blog.
It’s as if the armchair critics were pointing a big, fat finger and saying, “Aha, we caught you!”
Well no, actually the little punk fronted himself out and we shined a light on it. Isn't that what you jagoffs are supposed to do? There was absolutely no cause for that reporter to disrespect a kid serving his country. But he did and the idiot Public Editor could have let diseased dogs lie, but NOOOOOO! On freakin' Veteran's day this maroon decides that's a great time for a primer about pissing on the troop's heads and telling them it's raining.
What do these modern memorials to heroism and sacrifice have in common?
* The Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. Designed by college student Maya Lin, it was unveiled in Washington, D.C. on Veterans' Day 25 years ago. It's a black granite thingy-a long, plain wall that lines a big hole dug 10 feet into the ground. It lists the names of the war's 58,000 fallen Americans and . . . nothing else.
In her first proposal to build the memorial, Miss Lin explained its purpose: "We, the living, are brought to a concrete realization of these deaths." That's it. Not to honor what they did. Just a reminder that they're dead. Thanks.
* The Flight 93 National Memorial. The National Park Service has decided to erect the "Bowl of Embrace," in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed to earth on September 11, 2001. Here's the plan: For their heroism in overpowering four Islamic hijackers and foiling their attempt to destroy the White House or the Capitol, the passengers are to be honored with . . . an empty field. It's little comfort that the field is surrounded by a stand of red maple trees planted in an arc that eerily resembles the crescent of Islam. The design's original name: "The Crescent of Embrace."
Like the Vietnam memorial, the monument itself has no inscription honoring anyone's actions-just 1970s-style wind chimes and the names of dead people inscribed on glass cubes.
* The National September 11 Memorial. On the spot where New York's mighty World Trade Center stood, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.'s anointed designer, Michael Arad, decrees that there be . . . an American eagle? How about a statue of the three firemen raising the American flag over the rubble? Heck no. Just two huge, square, "reflecting" pools. Maybe you can gaze at your navel through them. In a complex slated to cost $1 billion, this urban swamp is called "Reflecting Absence."
Absence, indeed. What these modern war memorials have in common with each other is nothing. They portray nothingness. They have no people in them, never mind men carrying guns or swords, statues of Winged Victory, or even doves of peace. Just death and names -- grief without glory.
Oddly enough, for structures that are purposely barren, the promotional literature about all of them says their purpose involves "healing." By "healing," I infer they must mean "sitting in the corner, licking your wounds and whining pitifully." It may not be surprising that both 9-11 memorials have failed to attract more than a fraction of the private contributions they need in order to be built.
Where did such parking-lot-style art come from? On one level, you might say it results from a misunderstanding between the memorial-creating classes and the war-fighting classes.
In the early 1980s, when veterans proposed adding an American flag to Maya Lin's memorial design -- a design that did not originally contain the word "Vietnam" -- the artist complained that installing a flagpole would be "like putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa." I don't think she meant to compare herself to Leonardo. I assume she meant that a flag would get in the way of her Nothing.
FIRST, the media must finally reconcile with the Vietnam War. It's remarkable, breathtaking, that 32 years after the fall of Saigon, the press still can't grasp how deep the wound of Vietnam remains. Proof? Look at the passions it still aroused in the 2004 campaign.
...
SECOND, the media must come to terms with abortion, probably the most intense, most divisive domestic issue of the last 35 years. It's as present in the politics of today as it was in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided. No matter what position you take, it's hard to argue that the elite media has done justice to the question. It has managed to alienate millions of pro-life Americans with a kind of glibness, an arrogance that too often suggests that they're simply captives of religious dogma, rather than thoughtful people working through a profound moral dilemma. I believe that much of this glibness stems from the simple fact that the media is largely based in New York, Washington and Los Angeles.
...
THIRD, the media must bury the belief that it must have an "adversarial relationship" with government. That notion grew after Watergate, and it's reckless. An adversarial relationship is, by definition, a point of view.
The proper relationship of press to government is neutrality. The press should be neither for nor against government, but a vigorous inquirer into its affairs. The "adversarial relationship" leads to the "gotcha" game, the destruction of public officials as a career goal. That game has outlived the usefulness it never had. The public hates it. It erodes the credibility of the press every time viewers see it in a televised news conference. Journalists can give us the news without destroying the newsmaker.
The establishment media’s attitude toward the invasion manifested itself — until quite recently — in the frequent invocation of Vietnam as an analogy. As ABC News would later concede, questions about a Vietnam-style “quagmire” haunted the president’s Iraq policy since before a single bomb fell on Baghdad. CNN and the L.A. Times were among those doing the questioning, as was CBS News correspondent Bob Simon, who told USA Today that he opposed any invasion of Iraq back in October 2002.It takes a boat load of moral insensitivity and just plain gall to assume that your readers don’t remember what you wrote just yesterday. It takes the kind of assumptions that the editors of these papers make about the stupidity of its readers when they say, as the editors of the Pilot did
Within the opening days of the invasion, the Baltimore Sun was claiming that “This war in its early stages recalls the pitched battles and bloody skirmishes of the Vietnam War,” while New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd found it “hard not to have a few acid flashbacks to Vietnam at warp speed.” Barely a week into the operation, ABC’s Peter Jennings and CBS’s Lesley Stahl had invoked the Vietnam quagmire, while NBC’s Today Show invited The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh on air a few days later to contend that “it’s never too early” to roll out the Vietnam analogy. The Scripps-Howard News Service warned that saddam Hussein’s “strategy was to drag America into a Vietnam quagmire.”
After Coalition forces toppled Saddam, the trend only intensified. John Watson, assistant professor of communications at American University, told the CSM that media skepticism set in more quickly than in Vietnam, beginning with the occupation phase and coinciding with reporters leaving the embedded media program — which is what the aforementioned CMPA study showed as well. In June, CBS’s Bob Schieffer and others were asking whether the US was involved in a “guerrilla war” in Iraq. By October 2003, former WaPo reporter David Maraniss was insisting that “the echoes are immense” between Iraq and Vietnam on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. On November 14, 2003, Reuters ran a piece headlined, “US War Dead in Iraq Exceeds Early Vietnam Years,” burying deep within the story the fact that the US presence in Vietnam was tiny for the first four years of its involvement, as compared to the force in Iraq.
President Bush was asked directly about the Vietnam “quagmire” analogy by the establishment media again and again and again. From the outset of the invasion through mid-July 2007, the TV networks each aired hundreds of stories containing the Iraq-Vietnam comparison; CNN, the NYT and the WaPo have done thousands of them apiece. The AP has compared Pres. Bush’s rhetoric with that of LBJ, the bad intelligence on Iraqi WMDs with the Gulf of Tonkin, and the Haditha killings with My Lai. Combined with the ever-increasing percentage of stories devoted to the daily death tolls, the message being conveyed by the establishment media was unmistakable.
It might be asked why the establishment media resorted so early and so often to the Vietnam “quagmire” analogy, and so rarely challenged the subjects of their coverage who invoked it. The specious Reuters story aside, US casualties in Iraq have been lighter in Iraq than in Vietnam. At Slate, even after engaging is some very dubious body count inflation — giving terrorists extra credit for each US soldier killed due to improvements in medical treatment and force protection since Vietnam — Phillip Carter and Owen West came up with an imaginary 2,975 comabt deaths in Iraq during 2004, compared to 4,602 real combat deaths during 1966 in Vietnam.
“The certainty of reopening old wounds is precisely what the White House wants. At a time when the nation should be focusing on what to do next in Iraq, the administration is hoping Americans can be diverted by another political sleight-of-hand to keep its mistakes from showing.
Don’t be fooled, and don’t be baited. America is too busy fighting in Iraq to be fighting again over Vietnam.”
In December 1967, a prisoner was dumped in Day's cell on the outskirts of Hanoi, known as the Plantation. This prisoner's legs were atrophied and he weighed under 100 pounds. Day helped scrub his face and nurse him back from the brink of death. The fellow American was Navy Lieutenant Commander John Sidney McCain III of the Panama Canal Zone. As his health improved, McCain's rants against his captors were sometimes as ferocious as Day's. The North Vietnamese tried and failed, through torture, to get McCain to accept a release for their own propaganda purposes: The lieutenant commander was the son of Admiral John McCain Jr., the commander of all American forces in the Pacific. "Character," writes the younger McCain, quoting the 19th century evangelist Dwight Moody, "is what you are in the dark," when nobody's looking and you silently make decisions about how you will act the next day.
In early 1973, during a visit to Hanoi, North Vietnamese officials told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that they would be willing to free McCain into his custody. Kissinger refused, aware that there were prisoners held longer than McCain, ahead of him in the line for release. McCain suffered awhile longer in confinement, then, once freed, thanked Kissinger for "preserving my honor." The two have been good friends since. McCain blurbs with gusto Bud Day's memoir. The senator writes: "I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the dimensions of human greatness."
[...]
There is little sense here that the war was lost. While historians cite 1968 as a turning point because of the home front's reaction to the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the protests at the Democratic party convention in Chicago, on the ground in Vietnam, 1968 marked a different trend: William Westmoreland was replaced by Creighton Abrams, population security rather than enemy body counts became the measure of merit, "clear and hold" territory replaced the dictum of "search and destroy," and building up the South Vietnamese Army became the top priority. "There came a time when the war was won," even if the "fighting wasn't over," writes Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate and career Army officer, in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999). By the end of 1972, Sorley goes on, one could travel almost anywhere in South Vietnam in relative security, even as American ground forces were almost gone. Retirees I know in the armed forces affirm how much more benign an environment South Vietnam was during this period than the Iraq of today. Still, as one veteran told me: Everyone has different memories of Vietnam, depending upon where they served, and what time they were there.
Sorley's book was reviewed prominently by the major liberal newspapers and foreign policy journals. They gave it generally respectful write-ups, a sign of a reassessment of Vietnam based less on ideology than on paying more attention to the second half of a war: a period to which, as Sorley notes, Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History (1983) devotes only 103 out of 670 pages, and Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bright Shining Lie (1988) devotes 65 out of 790 pages. Sorley told me he isn't sure what would have happened had Congress not cut off aid to South Vietnam at about the time the ground situation was at its most hopeful. He felt that a respectable case might be made that it would have survived. His book has seen a rise in sales among military officers eager to know how the ground situation in Iraq might be improved to the level it had been in Vietnam, thanks to Gen. Abrams's change of strategy.
A similar thesis emerges in The Battle of An Loc (2005) by retired Army Lt. Col. James H. Willbanks, who describes a 60-day siege in mid-1972, in which heavily outnumbered South Vietnamese troops and their American advisors (including himself) rebuffed several North Vietnamese divisions. This gave Nixon the fig leaf he needed for a final withdrawal. Optimism then might not have been warranted, but it wasn't altogether blind. Lt. Col. Willbanks said he wrote his book, published by Indiana University Press, for the same reason Sorley did: to give more attention to the second half of the war.
In all the hysteria over the Bush Vietnam evocation, people are losing their sanity. Now those in Vietnam are being dragged out and quoted by the mainstream media to prove Bush’s lunacy. But what are subjects of a police state supposed to say — “I wish our present Communist dictatorship had lost”? Do we think Cubans routinely give widely publicized interviews criticizing their Castroites — and live?
The president’s decision this week to compare the wars in Iraq and Vietnam isn’t about the lessons of history, or the danger of insurrection and guerilla tactics. It is about feeding red meat to a political base grown anemic on a diet of bad news from the Middle East.
[…]
In other words, the blood of millions of people in southeast Asia belongs to an America unwilling to fight there forever.
[...]
The certainty of reopening old wounds is precisely what the White House wants. At a time when the nation should be focusing on what to do next in Iraq, the administration is hoping Americans can be diverted by another political sleight-of-hand to keep its mistakes from showing.
Don’t be fooled, and don’t be baited. America is too busy fighting in Iraq to be fighting again over Vietnam.
This Congress was elected in November 1974, only months after Nixon's resignation, and it was dominated by a fresh group of antiwar Democrats. One of the first actions of the new Congress was to vote down a supplemental appropriation for the beleaguered South Vietnamese that would have provided $800 million in military aid, including much-needed ammunition, spare parts and medical supplies.
This vote was a horrendous blow, in both emotional and practical terms, to the country that had trusted American judgment for more than a decade of intense conflict. It was also a clear indication that Washington was abandoning the South Vietnamese even as the North Vietnamese continued to enjoy the support of the Soviet Union, China and other Eastern bloc nations. The vote's impact was hardly lost on North Vietnamese military planners, who began the final offensive only five weeks later, as the South Vietnamese were attempting to adjust their military defenses.
Finally, the aftermath of Saigon's fall is rarely dealt with at all. A gruesome holocaust took place in Cambodia, the likes of which had not been seen since World War II. Two million Vietnamese fled their country — usually by boat — with untold thousands losing their lives in the process. This was the first such diaspora in Vietnam's long and frequently tragic history. Inside Vietnam a million of the South's best young leaders were sent to re-education camps; more than 50,000 perished while imprisoned, and others remained captives for as long as 18 years. An apartheid system was put into place that punished those who had been loyal to the United States, as well as their families, in matters of education, employment and housing. The Soviet Union made Vietnam a client state until its own demise, pumping billions of dollars into the country and keeping extensive naval and air bases at Cam Ranh Bay.
Those of us who opposed the American war in Indochina should be extremely humble in the face of the appalling aftermath: a form of genocide in Cambodia and horrific tyranny in both Vietnam and Laos. Looking back on my own coverage for The Sunday Times...,I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the Communists would provide a better future. But after the Communist victory came the refugees to Thailand and the floods of boat people desperately seeking to escape the Cambodian killing fields and the Vietnamese gulags. Their eloquent testimony should have put paid to all illusions.
…the barbaric nature of the Communist Khmer Rouge was painted over in soothing tones by much of the American press. The New York Times was the most flagrant offender. In one dispatch, its correspondent Sydney Schanberg described a ranking Khmer Rouge leader as a "French-educated intellectual" who wanted nothing more than "to fight against feudal privileges and social inequities." A bloodbath was unlikely, Schanberg reported: "since all are Cambodians, an accommodation will be found." As the last Americans were withdrawn, another upbeat article by Schanberg appeared under the headline, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." In short order, the Khmer Rouge proceeded to march nearly two million of their fellow Cambodians to their deaths in the killing fields. Also in short order, Schanberg went on to greater glory and a Pulitzer prize.
"Vietnam should teach us an important lesson. Hanoi [is creating] a collectivist society . . . likely to produce greater welfare and security for its people than any local alternative ever offered, at a cost in freedom that affects a small elite." -- Stanley Hoffman
The New Republic
May 3, 1975
"The greatest gift our country can give the Cambodian people is not guns but peace. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now." -- Rep. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.)
Congressional Record
March 12, 1975
"It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated." -- Producer Bert Schneider
Academy Awards
April 8, 1975
How dare he! In his speech to the VFW the other day, George W. Bush had the audacity to compare the current struggle to the Vietnam War. What was he thinking? Doesn’t he know that the left has the exclusive franchise on Vietnam analogies? The President may well be hearing from the Democratic Party’s attorneys in the coming days.
[...]
The most serious consequence of the American left’s Vietnam-era behavior was the death and destruction it caused for our allies. However aging leftists and their spiritual descendants try to spin it, images of Vietnamese boat people, the fall of Saigon and the Cambodian killing fields indelibly mar the image of the American political factions that enabled those tragedies. So here we stand today, over thirty years later, with the American left still madly grinding away trying to airbrush the consequences of its Vietnam-era behavior from the national memory the way Stalin’s apparatchiks airbrushed Trotsky from the Soviet history books.
THE PRESIDENT DEFINITELY HIT A NERVE. Today, the Boston Globe and the New York Times both editorialized on what they consider the true record of Vietnam. The Globe took its unique version of amoral cowardice out for a spin, writing, “It would have been better to surrender South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese communists in the early 1960s than to engage them in a struggle that cost 58,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives before it ended in 1975 with the same result: victory for Hanoi and the suppression of non-communist opposition in the south.”
That’s a classic strawman argument. There was another choice that the Globe doesn’t deem fit to mention – we could have stayed the course in Vietnam until the South had become sustainable, just as we had done in South Korea a couple of decades earlier.
[…]
The true error of Vietnam wasn’t the decision to stand up and fight evil. The real sin was abandoning our allies to certain death in 1973. If you go back to the Globe’s editorial, you’ll notice that the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the imprisonment of an entire society are blithely written off with the glib one-word summation “suppression.” Perhaps the Boat People or the prisoners of the re-education camps could come up with a more descriptive term.
Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal published a powerful column by the former Romanian intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa. The subject of Pacepa's column was the destructive effect of the left's intemperate attacks on the president. Buried in Pacepa's column is this intriguing paragraph:During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.
The themes identified here by Pacepa were of course products of the "Winter Soldier investigation" in which John Kerry participated. Kerry featured each of the themes identified by Pacepa in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. Pacepa's comments warrant attention.
Pacepa's NRO column is more detailed and more devastating, with regard to Kerry, than his WSJ piece. If Pacepa is credible, John Kerry built his political career as a willing dupe of a hostile foreign power, the U.S.S.R. There was a time when such a history--especially an unregretted history--would disqualify a politician from prominence as a national leader; that time is gone, apparently.
As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, "our most significant success."
The KGB organized a vitriolic conference in Stockholm to condemn America's aggression, on March 8, 1965, as the first American troops arrived in south Vietnam. On Andropov's orders, one of the KGB's paid agents, Romesh Chandra, the chairman of the KGB-financed World Peace Council, created the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war. It was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and received about $15 million annually from the Communist Party's international department — on top of the WPC's $50 million a year, all delivered in laundered cash dollars. Both groups had Soviet-style secretariats to manage their general activities, Soviet-style working committees to conduct their day-to-day operations, and Soviet-style bureaucratic paperwork. The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from this period. I believe it is very like a direct quote from one of these organizations' propaganda sheets.
