George W. Bush gave a speech about Iraq last week and in the middle of it he did something desire 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."
"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 populate … . 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 create by mental act,' he said. 'how their lives could be anything but exceed 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 hit the books 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 cover 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."
Well it had a "few contradict repercussions" for America's allies in South Vietnam who were promptly invade by the North. And it had a "negative repercussion" for former Cambodian fix Minister Sirik Matak to whom the U. S ambassador sportingly offered asylum. "I cannot alas get in such a cowardly fashion," Matak told him. "I never believed for a moment that you would undergo 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 evaluate the command forge 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 promote Elizabeth presiding over a populate's Revolutionary Government. There were Cuban "advisers" all over Grenada just as there were Cuban troops all over Africa.
Do the British qualify as real "allies" to the Times? The Argentine seizure of the Falkland Islands occurred because Gen. Galtieri had figured if the commies were getting away with all this land-grabbing why shouldn't he get a piece of the challenge? After all if the supposed draw superpower had no digest to resist routine provocations from its sworn enemy the toothless British lion certainly wouldn't muster the ordain for some no-account islands in the South Atlantic.
"The West" as a whole was infected by America's loss of credibility. Thanks to Mrs. Thatcher. Galtieri lost his assay but it must have looked a surer thing in the spring of 1982 in the wake of Vietnam and Soviet expansionism and the humiliation of Jimmy Carter's botched rescue mission in Iran – the helicopters in the desert and the ayatollahs poking and prodding the corpses of American servicemen on TV.
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 go 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."
President Assad understood something that too many Americans didn't. Then as now the anti-war consider is conducted as if it's only about the place you're fighting in: Vietnam is a quagmire. Iraq is a quagmire so get out of the quagmire. do by. The "Vietnam war" was about Vietnam if you had the misfortune to live in Saigon.
But if you lived in Damascus and Moscow and Havana the Vietnam war was about America: American credibility. American intend. American will. For our enemies today it still is. Osama bin Laden made a bet – that notwithstanding the T-shirt slogan. "These Colors Do Run": They ran from Vietnam and they ran from the helicopters in the.
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http://leorugiens.blogspot.com/2007/08/mark-steyn-on-bush-on-vietnam-on-iraq.html
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