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.

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.  As Max Boot writes today in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1968, after Gen. Creighton Abrams took over as the senior U.S. military commander in South Vietnam, he began to change the emphasis from the kind of big-unit search-and-destroy tactics that Gen. William Westmoreland had favored, to the sort of population-protection strategy more appropriate for a counterinsurgency. Over the next four years, even as the total number of American combat troops declined, the communists lost ground.

By 1972 most of the south was judged secure and the South Vietnamese armed forces were able to throw back the Easter Offensive with help from lots of American aircraft but few American soldiers. If the U.S. had continued to support Saigon with a small troop presence and substantial supplies, there is every reason to believe that South Vietnam could have survived. It was no less viable than South Korea, another artificial state kept in existence by force of arms over many decades. But after the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, we all but cut off South Vietnam, even while its enemies across the borders continued to be resupplied by their patrons in Moscow and Beijing.

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.

The New York Times also offers a convenient reconstruction of the Vietnam saga:

The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam. Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.

At least the Times uses the more colorful term “brutal” as opposed to the Globe’s weak-tea term of “suppression.”  Still, the Times reveals its intellectual dishonesty glossing over millions of deaths with one tiny word. 

The Times' history of Vietnam is as fanciful and intellectually dishonest as the Globe’s.  North Vietnam was about to break, until America’s will broke first.  A prolonged American effort, even just financially supplying south Vietnam as Max Boot pointed out, would have prevented the ultimate disaster.  Since members of the Times’ editorial board cheered on the strategy that led to that disaster, their motive for trying to sweep this inconvenient fact under history’s rug is clear.

LAST NIGHT WHILE I SAT IN for Hugh, a caller asked how long I would be willing to take in Iraq to get things right.  My answer was simple – as long as it takes.  I recognize that politically such a position would be a tough sell.  Lord knows America’s politicians love their exit strategies. But when did this country become so addicted to mediocrity and amorality?  We have obligations in Iraq.  We cannot in good conscience walk away from them.  Additionally, what happens in Iraq is of vital strategic interest to our country. Losing there would be more than just a moral catastrophe.  It would be a practical one as well.

During the tiresome 9/11 Commission hearings, Bob Kerrey repeatedly bellowed, “They were on a war footing!  Why weren’t we?”  “They” are going to remain on a war footing for the foreseeable future.  That means that no matter how strongly the Grey Lady’s editorial board wishes for peace, we are in a war that is open-ended.  It’s a disquieting reality, but it’s reality nonetheless.  Shrinking from it won’t make the situation any more tolerable.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com