October 13, 2005

Iraq Ain't Vietnam

I have been busier than usual at work the last few weeks, which means I haven't had time to cruise the Internet as much as I'd like, and also that I haven't had time to keep up with some of my favorite blogs, like Brainster.

A couple of days ago, Pat posted something terrific on why Iraq cannot, and should not, be compared to Vietnam. Read it all (scroll down a bit), but the following passage just jumped out at me. Pat came of age during Vietnam and was among those who protested our presence there:

But unlike a lot of the 1960s' folk, I have always been willing to reexamine things I did as a youth in light of later experience, and fresh information. As a youngster I believed it when anitwar leaders said that the Vietnamese people didn't really care which side won, they just wanted the war to end. But the million or so boat people who fled the communists convinced me that was not the case. The communists claimed that they would improve the lives of the people, but as time went by it became clear that this was not happening. And the horrors of the reeducation camps and the killing fields in Cambodia showed that the pro-war folks were right when they said that the enemies we faced over there were evil.

And I began to see that many of the other antiwar folks were not willing to reexamine things in the light of later knowledge. Some were simply unable to question what had been such a defining moment in their lives, and I can sympathize with them. It isn't easy to conclude you were fooled about something in which you believed passionately.

As a result, I have been particularly harsh towards those who did the fooling. I am willing to forgive the leaders of the antiwar movement who have seen the error of their ways, like David Horowitz and Peter Collier. I am willing to forgive Mark Rudd of SDS, who apparently is a math teacher in New Mexico and thoroughly embarrassed by his past radicalism. But those who continue to dupe others, like Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Todd Gitlin, and John Kerry? Un-uh. They've got to be opposed with everything we've got. This was a big part of why I started the Kerry Haters blog. I now knew Kerry was a scuzzball, and I was determined that everybody else should learn it.

Kerry Haters is now defunct (archives here), but Pat and others like him are still carrying the torch. Allowing the radical left to hijack Iraq would be even a bigger crime than they way they hijacked Vietnam--because we know what happened to the Vietnamese people as a result.

Show Comments »