MISSING THEIR OWN STRONGEST ARGUMENT:

Getting Vietnam Right (Mark Moyar, 8/30/2007, American Spectator)

In the past week, the criticisms swirling around the President's VFW speech have provided much less insight into the President or the speech than into the critics. Rather than address the speech's central issue -- the 1975 debate over the ramifications of abandoning Vietnam -- these individuals have tried to push their own views on Iraq by mentioning other aspects of Vietnam. Emblematic of the attackers was Senator John Kerry, who said that the President's comparison of Vietnam with Iraq was "irresponsible" and "ignorant of the realities of both of those wars." Kerry explained that in Iraq, as in Vietnam, "more American soldiers are being sent to fight and die in a civil war we can't stop and an insurgency we can't bomb into submission." Senator Ted Kennedy, another opponent of both wars, backed this interpretation with the comment that the United States lost the Vietnam War because the South Vietnamese government "lacked sufficient legitimacy with its people."

Kerry and Kennedy missed key facts about Vietnam, some of them long obvious, others newly emerged from historical studies. The New York Times and NBC News and CNN and so on missed them, too, because they chose to rely on outdated historians or their own prejudices. The insurgency in Vietnam was dead by 1971, thanks to South Vietnam's armed forces, America's forces, and a South Vietnamese civilian population that overwhelmingly viewed the South Vietnamese government as legitimate. During 1972, after all American combat units had departed, South Vietnamese forces defeated a massive North Vietnamese invasion with the help of American air power. The so-called Christmas bombing of 1972 bombed North Vietnam into submission, resulting in a peace treaty. Had the antiwar Congress not slashed aid to South Vietnam and prohibited the use of American aircraft over Vietnamese skies, the South Vietnamese probably could have repulsed the North Vietnamese when they violated the peace treaty in 1975.

If the Left could accept the reality of South Vietnam, that it was succeeding after we withdrew and fell only after they stabbed it in the back, they'd have a powerful historical argument for withdrawing our troops from Iraq but maintaining assistance to the popular Shi'a and Kurdish governments.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 30, 2007 11:22 AM