Forget Those Pesky Details
By Mitch Berg
The Strib editorial board tries to lecture the President on history – and proves they’ve never read any.
They’re jabbering about Bush’s visit to Hanoi. Bush made a remark that was an oversimplification, perhaps, when applied to Vietnam…:
My first reaction is history has a long march to it, and societies change and relationships can constantly be altered to the good,” Bush said. The lesson for Iraq, he said, is that, “It’s just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful and that is an ideology of freedom to overcome an ideology of hate.” Then he added, “We’ll succeed, unless we quit.”
…with its customary, presumptive sniffing and phumphering:
Fortunately the diplomats at the conference were much too polite to guffaw Bush out of the room, though that last statement was a complete misrepresentation of what has happened in Vietnam. In a nutshell, Vietnam succeeded after and arguably because we quit.
The editors go in one sentence from helicopters on the embassy roof to a Vietnam that’s recovering and flirting with capitalism.
And about those 25 pesky years in between? Killing fields (which were in Cambodia, but part of the larger war, and part of the same panicked, Democrat-led US abandonment)? Boat people? Re-education camps? Piles of bodies?
Not, apparently, part of the Star/Tribune’s institutional memory – nor that of the Democrats, who refused to acknowledge their existence three decades ago; the inevitable results of a “cut and run” policy by any name.
American-Vietnam relations warmed only after Clinton got Americans to accept, grudgingly at the time (and Republicans were the biggest grudgers), that we needed to move on from the defeat we’d suffered in Indochina.
Republicans begrudged ignoring the defeat (that killed 50,000+ Americans) while Democrats wallowed in it, making it the key to their “foreign policy” to this day.
And perhaps in their spittle-flecked anti-Bush fervor they forgot that the Vietnamese, who suffered hundreds of thousands of dead, may not have been thrilled with the idea either.
If there’s a lesson in Vietnam for American policy in Iraq, it’s that the United States must be able to recognize the lost cause staring it in the face, deal with it and move on.
And if there’s a lesson in Vietnam for Democrats and the Strib editorial board (pardon the redundancy), it’s that the United States bails out with a job half-done, it’s no worse than (allegedly) going into a war for all the wrong reasons. It’s not “planning for the peace”, to put it in Democrat terms.
So when he spoke in Hanoi, Bush was a little bit right: Vietnam does offer lessons for Iraq. But the lessons it offers are far different from those Bush, in his ahistorical fashion, sought to concoct.
And far different than the Strib chose to selectively present.
