Vietnam deceptions live on

Liberal armchair generals are still fighting the last war

October 21, 2006
Fred Hutchison, RenewAmerica analyst

The tendency of generals to re-fight the last war has been a recurring phenomenon since Carl Von Clausewitz wrote about it in his book On War (published 1832). Sometimes intellectuals who play armchair general make the same mistake. Liberals seem to be caught in a repeating time loop based on a fixation with Vietnam. Many liberals who oppose the Iraqi War are using some of the same arguments that they or their fathers used in opposing the Vietnam War.

Historical memory is tricky. Agenda-driven people who don't check their facts often selectively reconstruct their memories of historical events. Liberals want to remember the Vietnam War as a story of liberal antiwar activists as the heroes and the Vietnam hawks as the villains. They wish to forget the terrible historical consequences of the anti-war movement, particularly the massive blood purges in Vietnam and Cambodia after the war. In order to celebrate themselves and ignore the consequences of their actions, liberals have perpetuated a mythological version of the Vietnam War.

Many liberal armchair generals are using Vietnam, a war that they do not understand, as a guide to interpreting the war in Iraq, another war they do not understand. Iraq is a different kind of war, with different kinds of ideologies, loyalties, and resentments among the people, and different tactics for fighting. Using Vietnam as a lens can only blur one's vision about Iraq.

Unfortunately, it is common to repeat a historical mistake. Fixation on a historical moment while denying the historical mistake made in that moment is how the mistake can be repeated. The Democrats in Congress in 2006 are trying to repeat the mistake that the Democrats in Congress made in 1973, when they turned South Vietnam over to her enemies. As we shall see, the Democrats made this mistake after the Nixon-Kissinger team had guided the Vietnam war to a successful conclusion on the model of the Korean War armistice.

If we can set the record straight about the Vietnam War and clarify the nature of the fatal mistake of 1973, there is still time to avoid repeating that mistake.

Clear thinking about Vietnam

In the Fall 2006 Collegiate Review, James Kurth wrote The U.S. Victory in Vietnam: Lost and Found. His essay is the clearest-thinking and most succinct analysis of the Vietnam War I have ever read. The essay is must-reading for those who wish to set the historical record straight and learn from history instead of being deceived by historical myths.

My brief overview of the Vietnam War draws from the treasure chest of Kurth's essay and from other sources.

The insurgency phase

America did not commit large numbers of troops to Vietnam until 1965. From the American perspective, the insurgency phase of the war ran from 1965 to 1968. The insurgents (Viet Cong) who used guerilla tactics were recruited from South Vietnamese peasants. Winning the hearts of the peasants and playing off their bad memories of bungled French colonial rule was the strategy of the Communist cadres. Kurth notes that the insurgency phase of the Vietnam War has some interesting similarities with the Chinese Civil War (1946–1950), in which Mao Tse Tung won the support of the Chinese peasants by exploiting their grievances against their landlords.

American troops fought pitched battles with the North Vietnamese army (NVA) as early as 1965. Therefore, throughout the insurgency phase there were instances of battles between conventional armies.

The falsely reported Tet offensive

The Tet offensive of 1968 was a major victory for American troops, but was reported by the mendacious press as a defeat. American troops won all the significant battles of the Vietnam war, including Tet. No American unit of battalion size or larger ever suffered a military defeat.

Kurth described the American victory at Tet in these words: "The counterattack operations of the U.S. military not only seriously damaged the North Vietnamese army (NVA), but they effectively destroyed the South Vietnamese insurgents."

The Tet offensive was the first time in history that a decisive American victory was reported in the news media as a defeat. The liberal anti-war movement went berserk after the story about the "American defeat" hit the newsstands. The dissidents rioted on the streets and on the campuses. In the face of this pressure, President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) decided not to run for reelection. Rioting by anti-war hooligans broke out at the site of Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The Benedict Arnold of Vietnam

Why did the press report the Tet offensive as an American defeat instead of a victory? The liberal press sympathized with the antiwar movement and convinced itself that the Vietnam war was an unwinnable quagmire. They insisted that the Communist-led insurgency was a civil war and that the Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, was a nationalist. This was nonsense, of course.

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) lived abroad in America, England, France, Russia, and China for thirty years before returning to Vietnam as a man of 51. He became a Communist in Paris during the period 1917–1923. He organized exiles of French colonial rule to propagate Communism in Paris (1921), and was therefore invited to the Fourth Comintern Congress in Moscow (1922). The Congress rewarded him with a prestigious committee seat at the International Peasants Congress (1923).

Ho's Marxist-Leninist training in ideology and tactics as an operative was perfected in Moscow. Then he was sent to China as an advisor to Soviet agent Mikhail Brodin. Passing himself off as a "nationalist," he organized Vietnamese emigres to China into a "revolutionary society" that included Marxist training for Vietnamese youth. He also organized the South Seas Communist party and the Indochinese Communist Party. In 1941, Ho established the Viet Minh in Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh was a thoroughly westernized cosmopolitan man who embraced Communism, a philosophy-ideology-creed that is Western in origin and international in vision. Communism is deeply antagonistic to the traditional culture of Vietnam.

When Ho returned to French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) in 1941 as a seasoned Communist operative, he had the resources of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist movement at his disposal.

Ho was as the master of treachery. He sold the authentic Vietnamese nationalist leaders into the hands of the French colonial rulers. He insisted that his Viet Minh must have a monopoly in leading the resistance of the Vietnamese people against French colonial rule. Ho betrayed his country to serve the Communist cause. Vietnamese by birth, Ho fooled the nationalist leaders into trusting him as an ally.

As a cultural Westerner, he also fooled Western liberals with his pose as a "nationalist." The naive Western press reported the war in French Indochina as a revolt of Vietnamese nationalists against foreign colonial rule. In reality, the Viet Minh were Soviet proxies fighting against a Western power. The defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu was a victory for the international Communist movement, not for Vietnamese nationalism.

Ho Chi Minh dismantled the culture, religion, and traditions of Vietnam in seeking to create the new communist man, a man without a country and without a soul. This kind of lost soul exactly describes the atheist Ho during his thirty years of wandering in the West. Liberals told us that Ho Chi Minh was the "George Washington of Vietnam." In reality, Ho was the Benedict Arnold of Vietnam.

I clearly remember telling these things to a large campus audience when I was in a public debate with campus leftists in 1970. Jaws dropped as a little light and truth found its way through the dark cloud of leftist propaganda on the campus.

The left got snowed and stayed snowed

Calling Ho the "George Washington of Vietnam" and calling the Tet offensive an "American defeat" was the beginning of the delusional phase of the antiwar movement.

Years ago, a co-worker told me that a certain gullible boss "got snowed and stayed snowed." Like this mediocre boss, many liberals are easily deceived and often stay deceived for the duration. The gullible Eleanor Roosevelt was given a tour of the lush quarters of the Communist party bosses in Moscow and was told that these were the quarters of ordinary workers. She swallowed the con, and effusively reported her findings to the liberal press. They swallowed the con. Tell a liberal what he wants to hear, and he will believe it no matter how incredible it is.

The liberals were immune to the good news of American military victories. They stuck to their defeatist mantra that Vietnam is a quagmire and an unwinnable war. Liberals still think of Vietnam in exactly this way. They got snowed and stayed snowed.

The invasion phase of the Vietnam War

Kurth writes that after the Tet offensive, "the real threat came not from the local insurgents, which were repressed or contained by effective U.S. and South Vietnamese counterinsurgency operations, but from massive infiltration or invasion by NVA conventional forces that had to be deterred or contained by U.S. conventional forces."

Although the invasion of the south and the pitched battles by conventional forces were reported in the press, the left did nor budge from its position that the war was a guerilla war fought by local insurgents. This was the prevailing view on campus in 1970 when I debated the leftists.

At that time, I was arguing the strategic need to bomb Haiphong (North Vietnamese harbor where weapons and supplies were poring in from Russia and China), the need to close the Ho Chi Minh trail (jungle supply trail for the invading NVA), and the need to deprive the NVA of their sanctuaries across the border in Cambodia. The campus leftists were fussing about minor Viet Cong ambushes in rice patties. This was two years after the local insurgency had been broken during the Tet offensive!

Interestingly, President Richard Nixon did all the things I was hoping he would do. The result was in a Korea-style quasi-victory at the signing of the Paris Peace Accords (January 1973). Liberals still refuse to acknowledge this American success.

Proxy wars and aerial dog fights

Kurth pointed out that after 1968, the Vietnam war resembled the Korean War in some ways. In both wars, the free south was invaded by armies of the Communist regime from the north. Both Korea and Vietnam were proxy wars. Instead of a nuclear war between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers fought each other indirectly through client states.

Russian pilots flying Russian fighters fought American pilots over North Korea in 1951. These spectacular aerial dogfights caused no crisis between America and the Soviet Union, because the American pilots were diplomatically referred to as "United Nations pilots" and Russian pilots were euphemistically called "North Korean pilots." No one was fooled, but no one protested because everyone preferred the pantomime of a proxy war to another world war between the great powers.

Containment

The proxy wars implemented the Truman doctrine of "containment." The idea was to keep Communist expansion at bay without triggering a nuclear war. America, which was economically strong and resilient, was able to persevere in the containment policy until the Soviet Union ultimately became exhausted and collapsed of its own dead weight. This is exactly what happened in 1991. The containment policy was the brain-child of George Kennan, a senior diplomat and state department staffer during the Truman Administration.

The foolish antiwar left ridiculed the containment policy during both the Korean and Vietnamese wars. They continued to ridicule it when President Reagan capitalized upon Soviet exhaustion during his diplomatic showdown with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet premier. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the containment policy was vindicated, the left fell silent. No word of admission that they had been wrong for 40 years could be heard in the deafening silence. The left went into denial, learned nothing, and stood ready to repeat its mistakes.

Vietnam, Korea, and the China wildcard

China was the wild card in both Korea and Vietnam, threatening to spoil the Kabuki dance of the American-Russian proxy wars. When Douglas MacArthur's troops approached the Yalu River — which is the border between North Korea and Manchuria — in late 1950, Red China responded by entering the Korean conflict. The Chinese army secretly crossed the Yalu River in massive numbers, in spite of bitter Manchurian winter weather. They drove back the surprised, outflanked, vastly outnumbered, overextended, and shivering American troops. Due to superior air power, excellent tank and artillery units, quality leadership, good discipline, and fighting spirit, the American troops made an orderly retreat, and brought the Chinese juggernaut to a halt in July 1951.

Two years of stalemate ensued, and the massive Chinese army was frustrated. The great horde was slowly pushed north to the 38th parallel. Contrary to the implied message of the Hollywood movie Pork Chop Hill, American forces grew stronger during the stalemate, especially in the air, and their tactics under General Ridgeway, who replaced MacArthur, became more effective. The poorly supplied Chinese troops, who had been used as cannon fodder, became weaker and many were demoralized.

MacArthur had calculated that the Chinese would do nothing at the outset, and he planned his aggressive strategy accordingly. In both the Korean War and the Vietnam war, calculations about what China might do influenced American policy.

LBJ's weak policies

The Chinese entry into the Korean War was fresh in the mind of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He was determined to avoid repeating MacArthur's mistake of provoking China. In 1965, the Joint Chiefs of Staff requested that American forces be quickly mobilized for war. Since America could mobilize much faster than North Vietnam, a quick victory was possible. LBJ feared that a quick mobilization would antagonize China and bring them into the war. He adopted the weak policy of a "graduated response." If the enemy escalated its forces, then America could escalate their forces an equal amount. This policy of mandatory stalemate guaranteed a long interminable war with no victory possible until LBJ left office.

Johnson refused to allow the bombing of Hanoi — the North Vietnamese capital — or the harbor of Haiphong. He prohibited American troops and planes who might follow the enemy in hot pursuit to proceed beyond the borders of South Vietnam. Allied forces were not allowed to interfere with enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. In spite of having no military experience, LBJ micro-managed the troops on the ground.

Johnson's equivocal and dithering approach to the proxy war appeared to some as bloodshed for nothing. The anti-war activists turned their wrath on the soft, feckless president — which induced him not to run again.

Lyndon Johnson was the first postwar liberal to sit in the Oval office. Although he was a political genius like Bill Clinton, he was weak and confused as Commander-in-Chief of the armed services, as were Democratic presidents Carter and Clinton.

Nixon + Kissinger = genius

I cannot decide if it was President Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger (National Security Adviser and Secretary of State) who was the real genius in U.S. foreign policy. All I know is that when Nixon and Kissinger worked as a team, the result was pure genius. From the vantage point of history, James Kurth explained just how brilliant this team was.

The key question for Nixon-Kissinger was how to fight the Vietnam War more aggressively without bringing China into the war. This had to be done without inflaming the domestic antiwar movement that had developed to fever pitch under LBJ. The Nixon-Kissinger team found a way to do these things which had eluded their weak predecessor.

The Nixon administration established the policy of "Vietnamization." They strengthened South Vietnamese forces (ARVN — Army of the Republic of Vietnam) so they could cooperate with the Americans to suppress the Communist insurgency. Nixon and Kissinger looked to the day when ARVN could handle that task alone.

The China wildcard had to be removed from the table through superpower diplomacy before America could fight aggressively and defeat the NVA. New military tactics also had to be found to bring the NVA to its knees without excessive effusion of American blood. And the TV cameras of the liberal TV networks, which specialized in close-ups of dying Americans in order to inflame the anti-war movement, had to be disengaged. By 1972, all these goals had been met by the amazing Nixon-Kissinger team.

Quieting the campus

Nixon had to perform his diplomatic initiatives on the world stage from a position of strength. He could not negotiate in strength if the college campuses were in upheaval. In 1970, he established an all-voluntary military. Immediately the campuses went silent.

When the protesters learned that they would not be drafted, the narcissistic students in the midst of the sexual revolution suddenly lost interest in the war. The moral insincerity and hypocrisy of the campus anti-war students in 1970 was incredible to me. These are the rascals who the left still lionizes as heroes. However, the Nixon-Kissinger team saw through the campus farce and knew just how to bring quiet to the campus.

A diplomatic tour de force

Now able to focus intently on diplomacy, the Nixon-Kissinger team noticed that a new opportunity was knocking. The Chinese and the Soviets nearly went to war over a border dispute during the fall of 1969. In the words of Kurth, the Nixon-Kissinger team shrewdly recognized that "superpower diplomacy could separate China and the Soviet Union and strip away the protective umbrella that each provided to the North (Vietnam).... Both China and the Soviet Union wanted something from the United States. From China, it was some kind of diplomatic recognition, and for the Soviets, it was an arms control treaty.... [I]n the spring of 1972 the United States concluded its grand strategic bargain with each of the two Communist superpowers."

China, which had been an international pariah, was desperate for respect and status on the world stage. They also wanted to intimidate the Russians with hints of friendship with America. Nixon's journey to China to meet Mao Tse Tung was stage-managed to be a grandiose and colorful piece of political theater.

Russia, in a panic about American technological superiority in the arms race, desperately wanted a nuclear arms control treaty. Nixon brought moral authority to the bargaining table because he had outstanding anticommunist credentials going back twenty-six years. These sterling credentials kept Nixon from being rejected by American anticommunists when he went to China and negotiated with the Soviets.

The liberal press was in euphoria about Nixon's trip to China and his trip to the Paris bargaining table. Glamorous symbolism meant everything to American liberals in 1972, who were still in the thrall of the fading Romantic movement.

NVA invasions and bombing responses

During the 1970–1972 period, the Nixon-Kissinger team implemented the program of the "Vietnamization of the war." In 1972, after the China card was taken off the table, a new phase of the war began.

Nixon and Kissinger had to find a way to defeat the NVA with limited American casualties. It was no good winning on the battlefield and losing the political battle at home because of heavy casualities — as happened to LBJ.

In the spring of 1972, the NVA invaded the south, hoping to wreck the Vietnamization project. With the China card off the table, Nixon was free to forcefully retaliate. American planes bombed Hanoi and Haiphong — the first time this was done during the war. The North was badly hurt by the bombing and halted its invasion.

During the election of 1972, Nixon, fresh from his international initiatives, defeated George McGovern — a stridently anti-war Democrat — in an historic landslide. With the anti-war movement temporarily discredited, and the China wildcard taken off the table, the Nixon-Kissinger team saw their chance for victory in Vietnam.

In addition to the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the Americans bombed the NVA sanctuaries in Cambodia, and the Ho Chi Minh trail. The North Vietnamese were in agony — which gave the Americans a strong hand at the bargaining table. The American position was further strengthened by Nixon's landslide victory — and by another, massive bombing campaign.

Victory and vindication

In January 1973, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and America signed the Vietnam Peace Accords in Paris. The North Vietnamese had a strong incentive to keep their promises because they knew that Nixon would bomb them again if they did not. The Nixon-Kissinger team had brought peace to Vietnam, avoided arousing China, and had politically humiliated the anti-war Democrats through the crushing electoral defeat of McGovern.

Unlike Truman, Nixon was able to win a proxy war while avoiding a superpower crisis and increase his domestic popularity and international prestige. Few American presidents had known such a moment of complete vindication as when Nixon went to Paris in victory and glory.

However, Nixon's moment of triumph and exaltation was celebrated on the edge of a precipice. Nixon was one step from ignominious disaster.

Watergate!

The signing of the Paris Peace Accords, the crowning moment of Nixon's career, occurred at the same time the Watergate burglars were summoned into federal court. The obstruction of justice uncovered by the Watergate investigation drove Nixon from office and discredited his administration. The bitter irony of the timing of Nixon's triumph and humiliation reads like an epic tragedy from classical literature.

The Watergate upheaval shifted the balance of power from the strong presidency of Nixon to the Democratic Congress. Many antiwar Democrats of a McGovern type sat in Congress. The dual agenda of the liberal Democrats was to demonize Nixon through the Watergate hearings and to withdraw from South Vietnam.

On November 7, 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act over President Nixon's veto. The act diminished the president's discretionary use of military powers and weakened his ability to deter North Vietnam from violating the peace accords. The Democrats also substantially reduced U.S. economic and military assistance to South Vietnam, which weakened the Vietnamization program.

Nixon was impeached by the Senate on July 27, 1974. Realizing that he would probably be convicted of the impeachment charges, he resigned on August 9, 1973. Gerald Ford was sworn in as president, and retained the services of Henry Kissinger.

McGovern's revenge

Following the resignation of Nixon, the North Vietnamese planned an attack on the south that was launched the following January. As required by the War Powers Act, President Ford asked Congress for authority to bomb North Vietnam in retaliation for their violation of the peace accords. In an act of partisan obstinacy and strategic blindness, the majority Democrats in Congress turned Ford down.

In the words of Kuth, "[T]he Democrats were dominated by activists who wanted America out of Vietnam as soon as possible and unconditionally. They cared little about the security and liberty of the people of South Vietnam or even about the credibility of the United States in international politics: they mocked the notion that Communism presented a threat to America and to the world. On the contrary, they cared about the anti-war (and sometimes anti-American views) of the media and the student protesters...."

The Democrats — still in a Watergate lynch-mob rage — threw away the fruits of eight years of war and the impressive achievements of the Nixon-Kissinger team. I like to call this sad denouement "McGovern's revenge."

ARVN, bereft of allies and supplies, was no match for the NVA, which was a well-equipped, seasoned, and battle-hardened army. Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. "The night of the long knives" began.

The night of the long knives

Following the fall of Saigon, one million South Vietnamese were sent to concentration camps in the jungle. Another million refugees fled the country in fishing boats and rafts. The "boat people" risked the perils of the open sea rather than face the perils of Communist rule. Some of the one million Vietnamese Catholics tried to flee to France or to French colonies. Two million people were murdered in Cambodia, which was more than 25% of that nation's population.

In 1970, when I faced an auditorium full of students who had gathered to hear a debate on the Vietnam, I briefed them on the massive blood purges that had followed the Communist seizure of power in Russia, China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. Then I read the following quotation from an author whose name I have forgotten. The writer said that after the Communists take-over in South Vietnam, "A curtain of silence will descend, and the night of the long knives will begin." Five years later, the night of the long knives came to Vietnam and Cambodia.

Holocaust in the East, silence in the West

The antiwar protesters who rioted in the streets and cursed America because Vietnamese children were accidentally killed by American bombs, never had a word to say about the millions killed by the Communists in South Vietnam and Cambodia.

Kurth wrote, "The response of the United States — and particularly the Democratic party and, after 1976, of the Democratic Administration of Jimmy Carter — to all this was to say very little and to do absolutely nothing. They were joined in their indifference by the now-adults who had been the student anti-war protesters of the late 1960's and 1970's, the Boomer students who had always been so eager to condemn human rights abuses by the U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam."

How are we to understand the passionate moral indignation of the left, followed by their complete indifference to the Asian holocaust? Could it be that if they acknowledged the Communist genocide, they must face their own complicity in the unleashing of a firestorm of evil that consumed millions of people?

Unfortunately, people who act as part of an angry mob can seldom accept personal responsibility for the result.

The leftist lynch mob

A lynch mob — as a rule — is consumed by a collective madness. The individual melts into the mob and personal moral responsibility fades to nil. Everyone is responsible and no one is responsible. The delusion of self-righteousness in the heart of an angry mob is more intoxicating than whiskey. Some participants in hideous mobs congratulate themselves later instead of being embarrassed. The lynch mob quality of the anti-war movement and the self-righteous character of that movement go together.

Kurth wrote, "Even today, many Boomers (particularly aging members of university faculties) look back on their days of anti-war protesting as the best, most moral moment of their lives, and proudly take credit for ending U.S. efforts in the war." Mob delusions enable evil men to boast of their moral superiority, and ignore the harm they have done.

Kurth said that the role of the American left in ending U.S. efforts in the war make them "morally responsible for the U.S. abandonment of the peoples of Indochina, and they are morally responsible — indeed, because of their great silence after 1975, doubly responsible — for the retribution and executions that were the results of the Communist victories there." The left has never accepted this responsibility.

Denial of responsibility

Why cannot the left accept responsibility for such outcomes? It is because their world view is based upon Rousseau's idea that man is inherently good and that all human ills are caused by society. Therefore, the individual is excused from responsibility for his actions.

The moral relativism introduced into the public schools by John Dewey denies the existence of good and evil and claims that all human action is culturally conditioned. According to this logic, individual moral responsibility does not exist.

Liberal progressives have traditionally championed the values of the collective over the values of the individual. It stands to reason that collectivism and group-think are in their most pure form in a leftist lynch mob. After the mob does its worst, group-think can be perpetuated so that the mob alumni can agree in their version of what happened.

When a group denies responsibility and congratulates itself for evil deeds, an alternate reality and a revised history must be concocted to provide shelter. The myths created to provide shelter must be sustained by group-think, as the Vietnam myths have been sustained for thirty years.

If the truth about liberal complicity in the Asian holocaust comes to light, a terrible guilt must fall upon many liberals for removing the restraints on the Communists, thereby allowing three or four million deaths in Vietnam and Cambodia. That is why liberals will not allow deviation from their myths about Vietnam. The suppression of a guilty conscience drives their passionate group-think.

A collective neurosis

When an entire group believes a lie, they must cut themselves off from reality — that is to say, they participate in a collective neurosis. Neurotics live in fear that their delusions might be proven false. Thus liberals suffer from a triple fear: the fear of the collapse of their illusions, the fear that their fall into reality will have a hard landing, and the fear that a great weight of guilt will crush them if the truth comes out.

These fears may be responsible for the streak of paranoia to which leftists are prone. The rise in group-think among liberal Democrats since the Vietnam War involves the suppression of a guilty secret. Liberals cannot endure dissent from group-think, partly because of fear.

Attempts to relive Vietnam

Liberal Democrats see the Iraq War as another Vietnam. Boomer liberals cannot wait to relive their glory days of protesting the Vietnam war and feeling like the good guys once more. No sooner did America invade Iraq than liberals started calling it a "quagmire."

Liberals are calling the Iraq war a "civil war," just as they called Vietnam a civil war. Neither war can be properly defined as a civil war. Sectarian death squads supported by Iran do not constitute a civil war. A series of pitched battles between indigenous Shiite militia and Sunni militia would be a civil war — but no such civil war exists or is likely to come into being in the near future. Al Qaida in Iraq is on the ropes and the Baathist revolt is no longer a serious problem. Sectarian death squads and the interference of Iran is the problem.

Democrats are raising a great hue and cry either to set a time table for leaving Iraq, or to pull out forthwith. Their indifference to the subsequent fate of the Iraqis resembles the indifference of Vietnam-era liberals to the fate of the Vietnamese.

Conclusion

Democrats have an opportunity to take control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. While not all Democrats in Congress are under the spell of Vietnam, their leaders in the House and Senate are anti-war liberals and Neo-McGovernites. If power comes into their hands, they are likely to abandon the Iraqis to their fate. In 1973-74, the Democrats abandoned the Vietnamese and Cambodians to annihilation and never looked back. If the Democrats take power in January 2007, they are chafing at the bit to abandon the Iraqis to unimaginable horror.

It is not too late to stop the Democrats from taking control of Congress. Let us join ranks to stop them.

© Fred Hutchison