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The Left Shudders
And Bush leads.
by William Kristol
09/03/2007, Volume 012, Issue 47

Like a pig in muck, the left loves to wallow in Vietnam. But only in
their "Vietnam." Not in the real Vietnam war.

Not in the Vietnam war of 1963-68, the disastrous years where policy was
shaped by the best and brightest of American liberalism. Not in the
Vietnam war of 1969-73, when Richard Nixon and General Creighton Abrams
managed to adjust our strategy, defeat the enemy, and draw down American
troops all at once--an achievement affirmed and rewarded by the American
electorate in November 1972. Not in the Vietnam of early 1975, when the
Democratic Congress insisted on cutting off assistance to our allies in
South Vietnam and Cambodia, thereby inviting the armies of the North and
the Khmer Rouge to attack. And not in the defeats of April 1975. As the
American left celebrated from New York to Hollywood, in Phnom Penh former
Cambodian prime minister Sirik Matak wrote to John Gunther Dean, the
American ambassador, turning down his offer of evacuation:

Dear Excellency and Friend:

I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to
transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly
fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never
believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning
a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your
protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is
that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But,
mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country
that I love, it is no matter, because we all are born and must die. I
have only committed this mistake of believing in you [the Americans].

Please accept, Excellency and dear friend, my faithful and friendly
sentiments.

S/Sirik Matak

The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh a few days later. Sirik Matak was
executed: shot in the stomach, he was left without medical help and took
three days to die. Between 1 and 2 million Cambodians were murdered by
the Khmer Rouge in the next three years. Next door, tens of thousands of
Vietnamese were killed, and many more imprisoned. Hundreds of thousands
braved the South China Sea to reach freedom.

The United States welcomed the refugees--but we were in worldwide
retreat. It turned out that the USSR was sufficiently tired and
ramshackle that its attempts to take advantage of that retreat had
limited success. Still, the damage done by U.S. weakness in the late
1970s should not be underestimated. To mention only one event, our
weakness made possible the first successful Islamist revolution in the
modern world in Iran in 1979, in the course of which we allowed a new
Iranian government to hold 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

The era of weakness ended with the American public's repudiation of Jimmy
Carter in 1980. Vietnam played a cameo role in that presidential
campaign. In August of 1980, speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars,
Ronald Reagan personally added the following thoughts on Vietnam to the
prepared text of a defense policy speech: "As the years dragged on, we
were told that peace would come if we would simply stop interfering and
go home. It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble
cause. .  .  . There is a lesson for all of us in Vietnam. If we are
forced to fight, we must have the means and determination to prevail."

The media went nuts. What a gaffe! Howell Raines, writing a week later in
the New York Times, wondered if the Vietnam comments, which had "provided
ammunition for his critics," marked "perhaps the turn in Ronald Reagan's
luck and in the momentum of his campaign"--a negative turn, Raines meant
and hoped.

But it was not to be. Reagan stood by his guns. He beat Jimmy Carter. And
all honor to George W. Bush for following in Reagan's footsteps, grasping
the nettle, and confronting the real lessons and consequences of Vietnam.
The liberal media and the PC academics are horrified. All the better.

As the left shudders, Bush leads. In his speech to the Veterans of
Foreign Wars 27 years after Reagan's, Bush also told the truth about
Vietnam. Now he has to be steadfast in supporting General Petraeus and
ensuring that the war is fought as intelligently and energetically as
possible. Not everyone in his administration is as fully committed to
this task as they should be. Bush will have to be an energetic and
effective commander in chief, both abroad and on the home front, over his
final 17 months. Last week was a good start.