Iraq-nam
I’m feeling a little trepidatious here, after having had my ass chewed over a mild taunt of John Murtha (I called him Abu Murtha—is that so bad? My response here).
But, via Jules Crittenden, another pin-up of the so-called moderate Democrats, James Webb, is revealed to be—oh, how to put this with the utmost respect—two-faced:
It had taken years following South Vietnam’s 1975 demise before the cycle of war and its aftermath was complete and a full body of facts, particularly from the communist side, became available. The twentieth anniversary of that overthrow offered a moment ripe for a re-examination of American and South Vietnamese wartime successes in the face of continuing derision at home, and of the now-undeniably ruinous consequences to Vietnam of a communist victory. Instead, the world was treated to a deliberate side-show.
In the first fifteen years or so following Saigon’s fall, there was nothing but bad news to report from Vietnam, and those who had made their political and journalistic careers on the wrongfulness of the war bear a culpability for persistently failing to report it. Similarly, during the twentieth anniversary observances these icons and their intellectual progeny persisted in focusing almost solely on the conduct of the war during Mr. McNamara’s tenure as Secretary of Defense, which ended in disgrace in late 1967. It was as if the political, military and even moral issues had been decided in favor of the communists by that point, and the ensuing eight years of fighting and twenty years of suffering were merely an afterthought.
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Media depictions of the fighting typically showed tired and frustrated American and South Vietnamese soldiers, while often using stock propaganda footage of communist troops marching cheerfully down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
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And few discussions recalled the Hanoi pledge in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that Vietnam would be reunited only by peaceful means, with guarantees of individual freedoms in the South, as well as internationally supervised free elections.
So, the media, in the thrall of the Left, defeated America in Vietnam when the Viet Cong itself could not, and left the South at the mercy of the merciless North. Do I have that right?
I like that Jim Webb (ca. 1995). He spoke truth to power, before anyone had ever heard that horrid phrase. So who’s this guy?
The war’s costs to our nation have been staggering. Financially. The damage to our reputation around the world. The lost opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism. And especially the precious blood of our citizens who have stepped forward to serve.
The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is being fought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction. Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos. But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq’s cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.
Oh-h-h-h, same guy, different war. I guess he means that Iraq is not Vietnam. This news may not be welcome to Webb’s fellow Democrats, moderate and otherwise, but it helps clear things up for me. I guess we have nothing to fear from a defeatist media, a duplicitous opposition, a precarious region, or a totalitarian ideology bent on killing anyone not completely in lockstep. I coulda sworn we did. Then as now.
Just when I’m ready to agree that Iraq and Vietnam have a thing or two in common, though more favorable to my side of the argument than the other, I am told there is no such thing. To be sure, the “regionally-based diplomacy” Webb calls for was a failure in Vietnam—so I hope he’s right. But I think the Webb of 1995 would have dope-slapped the Webb of today, and “the majority of our military” would cheer.