The Minneapolis Star Tribune (possibly the worst paper in the country) has tossed an editorial into its journalistic waste bin that covers Bush’s recent trip to Asia and in particular the stop in Vietnam.
In it they cite a passage of Bush’s speech while in country that they claim shows he hasn’t learned the lessons from America’s involvement in Southeast Asia in the sixties and seventies. This is the para of the speech they take issue with:
“My first reaction is history has a long march to it, and societies change and relationships can constantly be altered to the good,” Bush said. The lesson for Iraq, he said, is that, “It’s just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful and that is an ideology of freedom to overcome an ideology of hate.” Then he added, “We’ll succeed, unless we quit.”
In the opinion of the Tribune’s editorial staff Bush has “totally turned the history of the Vietnam War on its head,” and not surprisingly also note that Bush failed to “pay attention to even the history of a conflict he lived through (and failed to serve in).”
Boldface mine, notice they couldn’t help themselves to yet another helping of “chickenhawk” draft dodger nonsense. What follows is where the “crack editorial staff” thinks Bush has gone wrong and twisted history to suit his own needs:
In a nutshell, Vietnam succeeded after and arguably because we quit. American-Vietnam relations warmed only after Clinton got Americans to accept, grudgingly at the time (and Republicans were the biggest grudgers), that we needed to move on from the defeat we’d suffered in Indochina.
It bears mentioning, too, that China’s decision in the late 1970s, shortly after the United States called it quits in Vietnam, to put aside the centralized and doomed economic policies of communism had quite a lot to do with Vietnam’s success; it emulated the policies of its gigantic neighbor to the north.
If there’s a lesson in Vietnam for American policy in Iraq, it’s that the United States must be able to recognize the lost cause staring it in the face, deal with it and move on.
To these partisan hacks Vietnam has reached it’s present economic success only because the U.S. cut and run. They conveniently overlook the fact millions died as a result of that strategy. They overlook, or more likely refuse to accept, the South Vietnamese forces were actually winning the war as a result of a change in strategy and leadership on the ground in Vietnam from the time of the Tet Offensive until the [Dim]ocrats pulled the plug on funding Vietnamese forces.
None of that matters because, well… because it was Clinton (who also “failed to serve” and “didn’t inhale” his way through the war) and his diplomatic prowess that led to Vietnam’s transition to a reasonably stable democracy.
I would agree China’s slow change to a more capitalistic economy has fueled a quicker pace of change in Vietnam as it has in other sections of South Asia. But isn’t that part of the strategy Bush envisioned for Iraq. An Iraq not centered on providing more goods and services to all Iraqis and not give preference to his Sunni brothers? A vision of putting “aside the centralized and doomed economic policies of” tribal feudalism?
I guess the Star Tribune editorial staff missed that part. As they have so many other things during Bush’s six years in office.
The Tribune ends with this: “In Vietnam, the battle was left for the Vietnamese to sort out, and they did. The “bad guys” won; Bush shared toasts with them last weekend. The world did not go to hell in a handbasket of falling Communist dominoes.”
No the hell was in Cambodia and Vietnam as the “bad guys” did in fact win and murdered millions. Those shaking hands and toasting Bush last week aren’t the “bad guys” they are those that took over for them and are trying to straighten out the mess left behind by peacniks, media types like Cronkite declaring wars lost and and other leftist moonbats of many stripes.
It’s very plain to see the Tribune wishes the same for Iraq. They hope for al-Sadr, his closest ally Iran’s AlmadenJihadist and al-Qaeda to win. Not the vast majority of Iraqi’s who need and want a stable properous country to live in.
UPDATE: As if on cue MSNBC’s Countdown show featuring Herr OlberFool chimes right in with the same idiotic reasoning as the Star Tribune.
OlberFool” “The domino theory was nonsense, sir. Our departure from Vietnam emboldened no one.”
Well except the previously noted massacre in Cambodia when millions were offered at communisms sacrificial platter. Plus a few hundred thousand in Laos.
OlberFool: “Communism did not spread like a contagion around the world.”
Post 1975 and the U.S. pullout from Vietnam saw Communism spread to Angola, Mozambique, and by the end of the Carter Administration, the Soivet Union was in Afghanistan. Communist insurgencies were threatening Malaya (suppressed by the Brits), Indonesia, and the Philippines in the decade of the sixties. In the ’70s, there were Marxist movements all over Central and South America, and the Maoist Sendero Luminso (Shining Path) in Peru.
That smells like a contagion to me, but not OlberFool.
Star Tribune, Media, Iraq, Clinton, Politics, Cranial Cavity
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