Get Over Vietnam Already
by Greg Strange
Sunday, December 11, 2005
"I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done . . . but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood -- unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn."
Is this just more baseless neocon rhetoric from yet another diehard partisan Republican who refuses to admit that the war in Iraq is, as Al Gore put it, the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history? Actually, no, those are the words of Al Gore's 2000 running mate, Senator Joseph Lieberman, in an opinion piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
Rave reviews haven't exactly poured in from Al or other of Lieberman's fellow Democrats, but one wouldn't have expected it for an article about the war in Iraq entitled "Our Troops Must Stay." On the other hand, if we were in the umpteenth year of a "humanitarian" military action -- say, for the preservation of Haitian "democracy" -- and it had been initiated by a certain articulate and fabulously empathetic president, and neither our national security nor any sort of regional stability were at stake, then an article entitled "Our Troops Must Stay" would have been nominated for a Pulitzer, a Peabody and a National Journalism Award.
Oddly enough, rather than blatant criticism of Lieberman's piece by Democrats, there has just been mostly stony silence, but then, what could they have said? It's not like, say, the movie "Gigli" where critics were able to give very specific and indisputable reasons why the J-Lo/Bennifer vehicle stunk to high heaven. In the case of "Our Troops Must Stay," Senator Lieberman presented a logical and moral argument for why the United States should avoid prematurely pulling out and instead see the mission through for the sake of Iraqis, the Middle East in general and our own national security.
However one feels about the original need or justification for the war, it is hard to argue that the cut-and-run strategy would be anything other than a disastrous hand-over of power to the terrorists. But cut-and-run isn't really cut-and-run according to Howard Dean, the Democratic National Chairman. Rather, it's a "strategic redeployment." Somehow, that's not particularly comforting terminology, especially when you consider that that twisted euphemistic nugget of classic Dean-speak came in the same interview in which he proclaimed that the war in Iraq is simply unwinnable:
"The idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea that is just plain wrong. I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam."
Uh, no, not really. Not unless by "same situation" he meant any generic armed conflict. Beyond that, there's nothing similar about it. But there's no point in reciting all the differences here because it's been in all the papers for years now. Maybe Dean missed it. Or more likely he is simply congenitally incapable of viewing any armed struggle involving U.S. forces through anything other than the twisted prism of Vietnam.
And it's no wonder that he and so many other antiwar types who came of age in the '60s are afflicted by this reality-distorting pathology. It was an intoxicatingly heady time back then when everyone marched and rebelled and listened to trippy music and turned their brains into pharmacological experiments and condemned capitalism and lived in communes and burned their draft cards and ridiculed any notion of patriotism and didn't trust anyone over the age of thirty.
Yep, it was a far out and very groovy time, but the problem is, now that they're all decades beyond the age of thirty themselves, it is unseemly, not to mention destructive, to keep themselves wrapped up in a warm and fuzzy cocoon of anachronistic '60s liberalism instead of growing up and facing the harsh realities of the world.
One of those harsh realities is what happened on 9/11 and the possibility that something far more catastrophic could be in the offing if we don't aggressively hunt down, capture and /or kill terrorists in their own part of the world. We tried the reactive law enforcement method of dealing with terrorism after the first World Trade Center bombing and look what it got us.
So, to say that credibility is a serious problem for the Democratic Party when it comes to matters of national defense is a rather whopping understatement. But there are some Democrats out there who appreciate the problem. Commenting on a Republican ad that takes advantage of that weakness, according to the Drudge Report, one Democratic strategist had this to say: "This is way over the top, but we have no one to blame but Dean, Kerry and others who continue to pander to the antiwar activists within our party."
Yes, and speaking of Kerry, everybody knows how he came back from his tour of duty in Vietnam and branded every soldier who ever served there a raping, pillaging war criminal. Well, he's sort of at it again, though he's updated the vernacular a bit for the times. In a recent interview on "Face the Nation" he intoned the following:
"And there is no reason . . . that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women . . ."
See, they're not war criminals anymore. Kerry's updated his denigrations of American soldiers to people who terrorize women and children. And people who terrorize are terrorizers, or, dare we say it, terrorists. Which makes our troops no better than those they're fighting. Which makes the whole thing an exercise in immorality and futility. And anyway, the war is unwinnable, so why not cut our losses and get out? End of Democratic talking points.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had two political parties in this country that could be taken seriously on matters of national defense? Wouldn't it be nice if the opposition party could be counted on to make reasonable suggestions in grave matters such as war and military action? No one can say the Bush administration hasn't made mistakes in its handling of the war in Iraq, but all the opposition party offers as an alternative is a perverse sort of un-American, self-loathing defeatism. Regardless of their discontent with this war, most Americans simply won't get on board with that. |
