Investor's Business Daily, August 22nd, 2007
Iraq: President Bush compares the Democrats' wish to cut and run in Iraq to their betrayal of Vietnam three decades ago. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's reaction proves the president struck a sensitive nerve.
Speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars' convention in Kansas City on Wednesday, President Bush said our soldiers in Iraq wonder: "Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they're gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq?"
The president made his most overt analogy yet to the Democratic-led Congress' abandonment of Vietnam in the 1970s, and reminded the assembled veterans of the price paid in blood by so many:
"In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution," Bush said. "In Vietnam, former allies of the U.S. and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea."
He added that "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.'"
The comparison is so potent that the Democrats' Senate leader responded to the president's speech the day before it was delivered, after the White House released a preview of some of its content.
"President Bush's attempt to compare the war in Iraq to past military conflicts in East Asia ignores the fundamental difference between the two," Sen. Harry Reid, D-NV, contended.
But placing Iraq and Vietnam side by side couldn't be more apropos. The large Democratic majority of the post-Watergate Congress undermined then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's 1973 Paris Peace Accords by withdrawing U.S. military aid to South Vietnam. Communist North Vietnam took advantage, building up enough superiority to launch a general invasion of South Vietnam.
As Communist tanks rolled near, helicopters rescuing a few lucky Vietnamese from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon became the international image of American humiliation. By 1977, well over a million people were slaughtered by the Communists in Cambodia alone, a fifth of the country's population.
The Islamofascists are banking on us repeating that betrayal. "Osama bin Laden declared that 'the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today,'" Bush said, adding Bin Laden's "No. 2 man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al-Qaida's chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to 'the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents.'
"Zawahiri later returned to this theme," the president noted, "declaring that the Americans 'know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet.'"
Fortunately, the Vietnam specter now haunts Democrats in Congress the most, because Americans rightly see that loss of nerve and betrayal of freedom as the country's -- and the Democratic Party's -- most shameful hour.
For more excerpts from Bush's speech, go to IBDeditorials.com
