We suppose it was inevitable: Four and a half years after Congress
authorized
the liberation of Iraq, some observers are comparing the situation there
to
Vietnam, where America lost a war after its will faltered. It turns out at
least one congressman actually served in Vietnam, so he ought to be
particularly qualified to help us determine the lessons of that conflict
for
this one.
Meet John Kerry, junior senator from Massachusetts. Some say he looks
French,
others call him haughty. But everyone agrees on one thing: He served in
Vietnam.
After returning from a tour of duty that lasted an astoni****ng four
months,
Kerry also became an antiwar activist. In 1971 Kerry testified before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Vietnamese were a simple
people,
too simple to care about freedom or oppression:
We found most people didn't even know the difference
between communism and democracy. They only wanted to
work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them
and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing
their country apart.
Kerry's side prevailed. In 1973 the U.S. withdrew its troops from Vietnam,
and
in 1975 Congress, its Democratic majority expanded by the post-Watergate
election of 1974, voted to cut off aid to the South Vietnamese government.
That year Saigon fell to the communists.
What happened then? Not much, according to Kerry, quoted in the Chicago
Tribune:
"We heard that argument over and over again about the
bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia,
and it didn't happen," Kerry said, dismissing the charge
out of hand as he argued that the American presence only
makes the situation worse every day.
In 2001, California's Orange County Register published an investigation of
communist re-education camps in postwar Vietnam:
To corroborate the experiences of refugees now living in Orange
County, the Register interviewed dozens of former inmates and
their families, both in the United States and Vietnam; analyzed
hundreds of pages of documents, including testimony from more
than 800 individuals sent to jail; and interviewed Southeast
Asian scholars. The review found:
* An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal
charges or trials.
* 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's
re-education camps, according to published academic studies
in the United States and Europe.
* Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled
in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo
canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous
chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives
being killed.
* Prisoners were incarcerated for as long as 17 years, according to
the U.S. Department of State, with most terms ranging from three
to 10 years.
* At least 150 re-education prisons were built after Saigon fell 26
years ago.
* One in three South Vietnamese families had a relative in a
re-education camp.
According to John Kerry, "it didn't happen."
Things were even worse in Cambodia, as the Christian Science Monitor
re****ted
in 2005:
When the Khmer Rouge victoriously entered Phnom Penh 30
years ago, many people greeted the rebels with a cautious optimism,
weary from five years of civil war that had torn apart their
lives and killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. . . .
During the nearly four years following that day--April 17,
1975--Cambodia was radically transformed. . . .
Everyday freedoms were abolished. Buddhism and other forms of
religious wor****p were banned. Money, markets, and media
disappeared. Travel, public gatherings, and communication were
restricted. Contact with the outside world vanished. And the
state set out to control what people ate and did each day,
whom they married, how they spoke, what they thought, and who
would live and die. "To keep you is no gain," the Khmer Rouge
warned, "To destroy you is no loss."
In the end, more than 1.7 million of Cambodia's 8 million
inhabitants perished from disease, starvation, overwork, or
outright execution in a notorious genocide.
But don't worry. According to John Kerry, "it didn't happen."
Last week, Kerry's colleague Barack Obama opined that genocide in Iraq
would
be preferable to America's continued presence there. But John Kerry has
shown
the way. If genocide, or some lesser horror, does occur in the wake of a
U.S.
retreat, Obama can simply assert: "It didn't happen."
Prominent Democratic officeholders are willing to deny or countenance
crimes
against humanity in order to justify a popular political position. Doesn't
this shock the conscience of Democrats?
--
"You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you
do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do
well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." JFKerry
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