President Bush has raised the hackles of the American Left with a major foreign policy speech that is to draw comparisons between a premature pull-out from Iraq and the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.
The speech, to an audience of military veterans, has not actually been delivered but the White House has released extracts in advance ”“ and its arguments have not gone down well with Mr Bush’s political opponents.
“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left,” Mr Bush will tell the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, many of whom fought in Indo-China, later today.
“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.'”
One might reply that millions paid the price of our decision to go in, not our decision to withdraw. Had the first mistake not been made, the second would not have been necessary. The U.S. victory in the Cold War proves that our involvement Vietnam was not required by our wider goal of containing communism. The same will be said of this war.
[blockquote] Too many of our brightest people were too easily deceived by creatures of a communist state during the Vietnam War. Too many Americans are even today allowing ego to override intellect. So they ignore the reality of their own deception, even as it unfolds before their eyes.
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Perhaps the ultimate lesson of the Holocaust is that we do not believe incomprehensible tragedies until they have played themselves out. And then we console ourselves with little ceremonies and empty phrases like “Never Again.”
I wish it were not so.[/blockquote]
Jim Webb, current Senator from Virginia in the Washington Post, April 14, 1983.
Nick,
You don’t know the history.
Ho Chi Minh returned to China and Southeast Asia during the 1930s as an employee/agent of the Soviet devised COMINTERN after signficant service in the Soviet government during a period of brutal repression throughout the USSR.
Yes, HCM was an ethnic creature, we are all ethnic creatures, but his first loyalty was the COMINTERN’s mission of spreading communism and Soviet imperialism throughout the whole world.
As a Soviet COMINTERN agent in China, he set up and operated a communist (that is internationalist) spy and organizing network in Vietnam. One of his first COMINTERN achievements was to identify Vietnamese nationalists who might offer a truly Vietnamese alternative to his communist organizing activities.
HCM then betrayed these Vietnamese nationalists by providing their names to the French colonial authorities and then to the Japanese occupiers of Vietnam. The French and Japanese imprisoned and killed these nationalists.
So, when the French finally left Vietnam, the only strong leadership left in the country was communist. The weakened Vietnamese nationalists were at least 15 years behind the communists trying to take over Vietnam. And these Vietnamese communists were truly international communists in their behavior in that they would not permit any political alternatives other than communism to exist in Vietnam.
The communists under Ho Chi Minh subjected communist controlled areas of Vietnam to a severely repressive communist dictatorship before direct U.S. involvement in Vietnam, during our involvement in Vietnam and after the fall of alternative nationalist leadership in Vietnam.
We did not cause communist agression in the third world, we responded to it.
Whether our politicians such as President Lyndon Johnson and our Democratically controlled Congress responded in the most effective manner to this communist aggression led by HCM is a moot point.
It could have been better handled and we could have defeated Ho Chi Minh and his henchmen/bully boys, but the evidence is clear that Johnson and his Congress were not up to the task.
Many of the opportunities lost by Johnson were never to be available again. Each of Johnson’s poor decisions contributed political fodder to America’s political enemies ( external and internal) which was abundantly used to weaken our efforts in South Vietnam during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”