Hitchens: "Vietnam Syndrome, Again"

A great editorial by Christopher Hitchens! You may access over 1,000 other great editorials and reports Here.

The Democrats can not claim any victory from Iraq or Afghanistan, and have to go back to the next nearest war and are trying to make a backhanded grab at a 'victory'. This "hey we were right thirty years ago" crap is too old.

EXACTLY. Kerry even recently matches his positions on Vietnam and the Cold War to the current War On Terror. He says we are making the same "mistakes." He is wrong, most certainly about the Colde War. And if you read his left wing reasoning, he considers the Vietnam War (and American 'war crimes') to have been a natural result of the Cold War mentality.

Kerry has the audacity to project his left wing view of the former Soviet Union onto the war on terror, which would cause a disaster for America. Hopefuly, the republicans will be articulate enough to explain this.

If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

A war fought with weapons of indiscriminate slaughter, and accompanied by racist rhetoric, with a conscript Army deployed against a highly evolved revolutionary movement is as different as could possibly be from a campaign of precision-guided munitions, with an all-volunteer Army, directed at the overthrow of a hideous and dangerous tyranny, and then taking the form of a drive for free elections and a constitution. If people say that it's "reminiscent" of Vietnam, it means they don't remember Vietnam.

Mr. Hitchens is blinded by his own past here. He has apparently forgotten the hundreds of thousands of people who risked (and often lost) their lives to escape the horrors of post-war Vietnam. Try telling them that the North was anything other than a hideous and dangerous tyranny.

Our failure in Vietnam was surely our own -- but the nature of the butchery that followed surely justifies Reagan's claim that our cause was just.

The crux of the Left position on Vietnam, repeated here, seems to be that the communists who eventually took the South by force were morally superior to the Iraqi Baathists. The one was a native movement for self-determination, the other a cruel tyranny.

This puzzles me.

A ping for your enjoyment. :-)

More than a quarter of a century after the collapse of the doomed American intervention in Indochina, we can't get over it. This is, in my opinion, as it should be. There ought to be no forgetting or forgiving of what happened there, nor will there be while any of us are around who remember it.

Sure, Christopher. As soon as we get done not forgiving or forgetting the roughly 100 million deaths, and many, many more lives wasted from cradle to early grave, by communism, which was the big idea of the "humanists" of the left.

(steely)

Christopher Hitchens is one of that most rare and nearly extinct species, an honest leftist. I don't agree with everything he says or believes but I'm glad to be on the same side with him in this fight. The comment that really struck home, and which may be the most painful for your typical Slate reader to see, was: "It would be as if the Republicans suddenly started talking, as that great veteran Robert Dole once did, about all the conflicts in American history as "Democrat wars." That didn't fly, if you recall, though it would have been a fair description of Vietnam."

...A war fought with weapons of indiscriminate slaughter, and accompanied by racist rhetoric, with a conscript Army deployed against a highly evolved revolutionary movement...

...and to denigrate the extraordinary effort being made to salvage Iraq and to pursue and kill people who really are, unlike the Viet Cong, the common enemies of humanity.

The VC were not a highly evolved revolutionary group but were indeed the very embodiment of evil. Hitchen's brain is pickled from his complete addiction to alcohol. I predict he'll not live out the decade and will die a horrifying death of liver failure.

J

I wouldn't call this a great article, even if it is a useful one. There is nothing noble about the inheritors of Vietnam. Because they won the war they have kept Vietnam in the stone age for another thirty years. Worse, they have all the grueling totalitarianism of Communism, plus the worst of capitalist sweatshops. The evils of industrialization with none of the benefits.

Good work by a clear thinker too honest to stay left.

I'm confused. Are you saying that it is a "leftist" position that the Viet Nam war came out of the cold war mentality? I assume that you use the term "leftist" as a way of discrediting that position.

Have I misread your position?

If it was not an example of cold war thinking, just what was the reasoning behind going to war there?

(BTW, I'm not trying to be a smarta$$ in asking the questions, it just seems that the battles in SE Asia were the prototype for cold war hostilities).

Excellent article and thanks for posting it.

Ping.

Thanks for the ping.

I thought it was a terrific article but I really think that Bush nailed it when he said on "Meet the Press" that it was a political war. LBJ tied the hands of the military behind their backs and somehow they were supposed to have won the war. We could have won that war in the first week if we just told the military to win it and get it over with.

Bush evidently did the gentlemanly minimum, which was itself a good deal more than the average for his college generation. The term "AWOL" is a studied insult and a conscious lie. Second, it's been admitted by the president well before now that the pattern of his youth was not entirely creditable. We've already covered all that, from the boozing to the driving. We don't have to take his word for it that he was "saved," but it's plain enough that he has reformed, thanks largely to his wife, and so it's mean and despicable to revisit that period in such a Pharisaic manner. Third, some Democrats really seem to want to act hawkier than thou. Are they so sure that this is a bright idea?

Great response!

Bush evidently did the gentlemanly minimum, which was itself a good deal more than the average for his college generation. The term "AWOL" is a studied insult and a conscious lie. Second, it's been admitted by the president well before now that the pattern of his youth was not entirely creditable. We've already covered all that, from the boozing to the driving. We don't have to take his word for it that he was "saved," but it's plain enough that he has reformed, thanks largely to his wife, and so it's mean and despicable to revisit that period in such a Pharisaic manner. Third, some Democrats really seem to want to act hawkier than thou. Are they so sure that this is a bright idea?

Great response!

The Vietnam Syndrome, Again

The mistake Democrats make when they compare Iraq to Vietnam.

Original by Christopher Hitchens

[This version was edited for fun and for Truth by Brian Allen]

And was posted by Brian, on Tuesday February 17 2004 at 1050 Pacific PT

Fighting the good fight in Iraq

Speaking, as has subsequently proven to be the case, prematurely [Given that the awful effects of eight years of the combined criminality of the Clinton "administration" and the United Nations' gangster states had yet to be revealed] -- and off the cuff -- in 1991, President George Herbert Walker Bush declared the brilliant Henry Kissinger-coined "Vietnam Syndrome" [Two of whose very worst affects had been to cause the craven Jimmy Carter to have ceded our nation's Panama Canal to communist-china and to have allowed islamofascists in Teheran to start the World War in which we are presently engaged] to have been cured by America's success in our 100 hours long Kuwaiti War of Liberation.

Thanks, however, to the United Nations' evil machininations, America's Kuwait success lead only into an eight-years-long grovellingly-corrupt appeasement of Saddam Hussayn that was brought to an end only by the genius and courage of President George Walker Bush, who has boldly converted Hussayn's Iraq from tyranny to strategic stepping stone in the implementation of the Bush Doctrine.

But now the Vietnam Syndrome, having meanwhile mutated almost beyond recognition and into the more accurately identified, "DemocRATic" Party Syndrome, is back. More than a quarter of a century after the collapse of the always abjectly-corrupt and always-doomed "Democrat" party intervention in Indochina, the "DemocRATS" can't get over it.

This is, in my opinion, as it should be. There ought to be no forgetting or forgiving of what happened there, nor will there be while any of us are around who remember it. Only this year, Lyndon Baines Johnson's scurrilous henchmen, including the execrable Robert McNamara and viscious Bill Moyes, have been groping self-pityingly toward an explanation of what Johnson and they all did -- and even toward some atonement for it.

A "DemocRAT" war fought by that bastard-offspring of the Communist Party of America-descended party's habitually-drunken and/or pot-smoking Georgetown-based politically-appointed "experts" who ill-equipped a Valiant conscript Military, hamstrung it, deployed it against USSR and communist-chinese backed invading forces -- and subsequently allowed the likes of the then cleary treasonous Kerry and Clinton and Fonda et al to follow the directions of their Socialist-Internationalist masters and to subvert it -- is different from a United States Military-led campaign of precision-guided munitions, with an all-volunteer Army, directed at the overthrow of another hideous and dangerous tyranny -- and then taking the form of a drive for free elections and a constitution.

If people say that Iraq is "reminiscent" of Vietnam, it means they don't remember how Vietnam's defense was subverted by such American traitors as now-candidate Kerry.

A huge chance was missed in the election of 1992, when Bill Clinton's record as a draft-evader [He was never a draft "resister" or a draft "dodger"] became an issue.

Clinton lied about his felonious draft evasion from every angle and helped perpetuate the worse lie that Americans like him who were opposed to America and its allies winning the Vietnam War had been principally interested in the wholeness of their own skins -- and completely ignored that they had been largely responsible for the defeat and enslavement at the hands of the USSR's and communist china's surrogates -- of every South Vietnamese, for the deaths of perhaps two million of them, for the diaspora of a million or so other South East Asians -- and for the deaths of more than three million Cambodians and Laotians. Having blown smoke over all of those facts, Clinton was in a weak position to say that he did not think the Vietnam War had been "a noble cause."

From the hard-left perspective from which folks like me see the world, the "noble" cause was the movement of support for South Vietnam's, Cambodia's, the Laotians' and America's enemies: almost the only case in history when a just war had been stopped by the combination of stupendous "Democrat" political corruption and incompetence and by the civilian dissent, subversion and treason that scurrilous combination incited, encouraged and enabled. Had Clinton said that the pro-Communist anti-America winning-the-war movement was somehow "noble" there is every chance that even those patriotic Americans who disagreed strongly with him would still have scratched up at least a modicum of respect for him.

But now, those like Terence McAuliffe who defended every piece of Clintonian mendacity have decided, during a World War, to pin the label of "deserter" on United States of America's President and Armed Forces Commander-In-Chief, George Walker Bush.

This is sordid from at least three points of view. First, in respect of the facts it was self-evidently untrue even before the release of President Bush's Texas Air National Guard Records. [And before some of his original accusers began to change their minds, or, in one case, to admit that he was losing same because of early onset Alzheimer's disease] President Bush's Guard Service quite clearly exceeded the gentlemanly minimum, which was itself a good deal more than the average for his college generation. The term Absent With Out Leave -- "AWOL" -- is a studied insult and a conscious lie.

Second, it's been admitted by the President well before now that the pattern of his youth was not entirely creditable. We've already covered all that, from the boozing to the driving. Some of us may remain cynical about his having been Saved -- but it's plain enough to all Good Men of Faith that President Bush has in fact been Born Again -- and so it's mean and despicable to revisit that period in such a Pharisaic manner.

Third, some Democrats really seem to want to act hawkier than thou. Are they so sure that this is a bright idea?

Sooner or later, John F-ing Fonda-Cohn-Kerry-Heinz-Etceteras is going to have to say which he thought was his noble cause: his participation in America's Vietnam War or his subsequent un-and-anti-American, pro-Soviet, pro-communist-chinese and pro-invading North Vienamese treason and subversion. In the later movement, he clearly was not numbered among the "moderates."

I remember those "Winter Soldier" hearings very well, and as far as I'm aware the Socialist-International-drafted allegations made against the United States Military Forces who were then defending South Vietnam from communist invaders were substantially untrue, and were cast by loathesome, fearsome and despicable un-and-anti-American shady and suspect characters. However, if, as they then swore and/or attested, Kerry et al practiced tolerance for and/or rape, torture, mass killing, and a depraved indifference to human life -- what is to become of Kerry's newly discovered "band of brothers?"

It would be easier for Kerry to find his voice on this, perhaps, if he could remove the cluster of frogs that lurk in his throat whenever he is questioned about his position on Iraq. On Sunday night in Milwaukee, asked whether his vote on the war resolution made him feel responsible for American casualties, he didn't even rise to the level of waffle. Candidate/trial-lawyer John Edwards distinguished himself again, I thought, by saying that Kerry's was "the longest answer I have ever heard to a yes-or-no question."

Edwards went on to volunteer that he did accept responsibility. That's a bit more like it.

Did Kerry think that he wasn't ever going to be asked? Does he think he isn't going to be challenged about Vietnam as well? He's had plenty of time to think about his morbid mendacity, pathological subversion and serial treasons -- so the evasiveness and butt-covering is double-trouble, and multiplying.

There's something creepy about the Democratic decision to hail the heroes of Vietnam, from Kerry to Clark, and to denigrate President Bush's extraordinary efforts to salvage Iraq and to pursue and kill people who, just like the Viet Cong, really are the common enemies of humanity. It's trying too hard, and it's inauthentic and hypocritical as well as point-missing. It would be as if the Republicans suddenly started pointing out the fact that all the conflicts in American history have been "Democrat wars." That usually does fly, if you recall, though it was and is a very accurate description of Vietnam.

Christopher Hitchens is a communist for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to Slate. His most recent book is A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq.

Brian Allen, who edited Mr Hitchen's piece for fun and for the sake of veracity, is a Jeffersonian Constitutionalist and a Laissez-Faire Capitalist and, being also foreign born, is also therefore a hyphenated-American.

An AMERICAN-American, that is.