Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
Mark Steyn continues to mine the Vietnam analogy in “They Wait for us to Run Again.”
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.”
“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.”
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. …
… Depending on which Americans you ask, “Vietnam” can mean entirely different things. To the New York Times and the people it goes to dinner parties with, it had “few negative repercussions.”
And it’s hardly surprising its journalists should think like that when Times publisher Pinch Sulzberger, in a commencement address last year that’s almost a parody of parochial boomer narcissism, was still bragging and preening about his generation’s role in ending the war. Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (which is apparently some sort of elite institution for which people pay big money to receive instruction from authoritative scholars such as professor Nye), told NPR last week: “After we got out of Vietnam, the people who took over were the North Vietnamese. And that was a government which preserved order” – if by “preserved order,” you mean “drove a vast human tide to take to the oceans on small rickety rafts and flee for their lives.”
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.”
Max Boot follows along.
Ever since the mid-1970s, critics of American military involvement have warned that any decision to deploy armed forces abroad–in Lebanon and El Salvador in the 1980s, in Kuwait, Somalia, and Kosovo in the 1990s, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan–would result in “another Vietnam.” Conversely, supporters of those interventions have adamantly resisted any Vietnam comparisons.
President George W. Bush boldly abandoned that template with his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Wednesday. In a skillful bit of political jujitsu, he cited Vietnam not as evidence that the Iraq War is unwinnable, but to argue that the costs of giving up the fight would be catastrophic–just as they were in Southeast Asia.
This has met with predictable and angry denunciations from antiwar advocates who argue that the consequences of defeat in Vietnam weren’t so grave. After all, isn’t Vietnam today an emerging economic power that is cultivating friendly ties with the U.S.?
True, but that’s 30 years after the fact. In the short-term, the costs of defeat were indeed heavy. More than a million people perished in the killing fields of Cambodia, while in Vietnam, those who worked with American forces were consigned, as Mr. Bush noted, to prison camps “where tens of thousands perished.” Many more fled as “boat people,” he continued, “many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.”
That assessment actually understates the terrible repercussions from the American defeat, whose ripples spread around the world. In the late 1970s, America’s enemies seized power in countries from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua. American hostages were seized aboard the SS Mayaguez (off Cambodia) and in Tehran. The Red Army invaded Afghanistan. It is impossible to prove the connection with the Vietnam War, but there is little doubt that the enfeeblement of a superpower encouraged our enemies to undertake acts of aggression that they might otherwise have shied away from. Indeed, as Mr. Bush noted, jihadists still gain hope from what Ayman al Zawahiri accurately describes as “the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents.” …
Dean Barnett at Hugh Hewitt’s site posts on his Vietnam analogies.
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.
Of course, there’s a serious side to this issue. For decades now, the American left has desperately attempted to scrub the history books of its deplorable conduct during the Vietnam era. One leftist professor even went so far as to publish a book that purported to prove that war protestors never spat on American soldiers. Unfortunately for the professor, countless American soldiers can testify to the contrary.
No one on the American left bothered to mouth empty platitudes like “We support the troops†during the Vietnam War. They “supported†the troops by calling them baby killers. This behavior would have been odious in any era, but it was particularly vile in relation to the Vietnam War where many of the soldiers served because the Army had drafted them. …
And Byron York in the Corner finds some interesting James Webb quotes from a 2000 op-ed in WSJ.
… 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. …
Marty Peretz suggests Britain has some responsibility for Zimbabwe.
… The Brits bear responsibility. Zimbabwe was once Rhodesia, a crown colony, and it still a member if the Commonwealth. At the first elections after independence, London tilted towards Robert Mugabe against Bishop Muzorewa, tilted heavily. And it is the British-backed winner who is the genocidalist. …
Peretz also pins the donkey’s tail on the Narcissist – Bill Clinton.
… Clinton, as everyone knows, had this fixation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his ambitions for a Nobel Prize by solving it. Already in 1998, he put Tenet in charge of this very charged matter. It took time, energy, brain power (or such as he had), imagination…and, of course, he failed. …
IBD Editorial seconds Peretz.
A highly critical CIA report details the spy agency’s failings during the 1990s in preventing the 9/11 attacks. But as the report makes clear, the Clinton administration also deserves a big piece of the blame. …
… True, former Director of Intelligence George Tenet dropped the ball, but President Clinton, in office for eight years before 9/11, did next to nothing. This has now been confirmed by both the CIA report and the 9/11 Commission report, released in 2004.
As for claims later made by both President Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, that a comprehensive plan for dealing with al-Qaida was given to President Bush, that now appears to be an outright lie.
As the CIA report concluded, “before 9/11, neither the U.S. Government nor the IC (Intelligence Community) had a comprehensive strategy for combating al-Qaida.”
The media and the Democrats used the 9/11 Commission report, released three years ago, to relentlessly bash President Bush for his “failures” in stopping the 9/11 attacks, even though he had been in office for just eight months when they occurred. …
The New Editor spots the real problem in a story on the Las Vegas schools.
Reason’s Hit and Run posts on gun control in Britain. How do you think that’s working?
Following the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, in which seventeen people were killed by a man armed with two 9mm pistols, Britain passed a law outlawing the ownership of most handguns, despite researchers finding “no link between high levels of gun crime and areas where there were still high levels of lawful gun possession.” It’s a law so severe that the Britain’s Olympic shooting team is forced to train abroad, lest one of its members try to shoot up a grammar school. So how effective has the law been? A doubling in gun-related crimes since the ban, naturally. …
Reason also posts on the success of NJ’s $2.57 cents a pack cigarette tax.
… the latest increase in the tax was followed by a reduction in revenue, from $787 million in fiscal year 2006 to $764 million in fiscal year 2007. …
Jonah Goldberg, noted dog lover, writes his Michael Vick column.
Readers keep asking me what I think about Michael Vick, the disgraced Atlanta Falcons quarterback who this week agreed to plead guilty to a number of charges relating to his aspiration to be the Don King of dogfighting. They ask not because I’m a renowned sports lover, but because I’m such a dog lover.
And I do love dogs. They are, evolutionarily and otherwise, man’s partners, our wingmen — winghounds if you prefer. Dogs are the only animal to choose to be our friends and comrades in the great struggle of muddling through our turn on this mortal coil. (Cats, I’m sorry to say, hold one paw in each camp so as to forever keep their options open, and all other domesticated animals had to be forced into the arrangement.) …
Betsy Hart has a look at “organic” myths.
Occasionally, I will buy “organic” fruits and vegetables or other food, supposedly meaning food grown without pesticides or fertilizers or other chemicals.
But when I buy the stuff, it’s always by accident.
(Ditto for “fat-free” foods, like ice cream or half-and-half or cookies. Once in a while I’ll buy the “fat-free” varieties without realizing what I’ve done, only to gag when I put it in my mouth. I mean, if I want to eat a goodie, I want the satisfaction of the real thing.)
Other people feel virtuous when they buy expensive organics. I feel I’ve been had.
A recent piece in Time magazine backs me up. In “Rethinking Organics” by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the doctor writes that while few things make people feel more “virtuous” than eating organic food, there’s little evidence that they are either more nutritious or any safer for our bodies than traditionally grown produce with their fertilizers and pesticides.
Gee, you mean “organics” won’t save the world after all? …
Dilbert was outstanding.
A reader sent this story about his workplace.
————-
“A theme from many of your previous comics came true to life for us today. Quality in the workplace.Yesterday, a pointy-haired boss decided our meeting room needed nice motivational pictures on the wall. Twelve by eight inch, wooden frame, 1940s-style motivational tools (think ‘Rosie the Riveter’ in artwork, color and font). So an assistant was ordered to procure such things. …
… This story made me think about one of the great wonders of capitalism: It is driven by morons who are circling the drain, and yet. . . it works!
Think about all the people working and earning paychecks from companies that will ultimately fail. It’s a lot of people. But until those companies fail, the employees are getting paid, buying goods, and contributing to the economy. After the failure, those employees hop over to another sinking ship, and so on.
Within successful companies, a huge portion of resources are dedicated to projects and products that will ultimately fail. But in the meantime, everyone is getting paid and propping up the economy. …
… In the rest of the animal kingdom, being a moron is nothing but bad. A moron lion, for example, who can’t catch anything to eat, is adding nothing to the lion economy. But a moron human who starts a business selling garlic flavored mittens is stimulating the economy right up until the point of going out of business.
My point is that I hope the monkeys that already know how to use sticks for tools don’t start using leaves for money. If that happens, we’re screwed.