Remedial History for Terminal Liberalism

Sir Anonymous from Qwest: Sorry for hitting the Publish button twice on Blogger and posting the same article twice, shame on me and I plead with you, Anonymous Webmaster, to pardon me and stop the abuse. Talk about missing the "Forest for the Trees"! Here is the "Lie" I wrote:

• From Foreign Affairs MELVIN R. LAIRD who was Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1973, Counselor to the President for Domestic Affairs from 1973 to 1974, and a member of the House of Representatives from 1952 to 1969. He currently serves as Senior Counselor for National and International Affairs at the Reader's Digest Association writes:

  Summary: During Richard Nixon's first term, when I served as secretary of defense, we withdrew most U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South's ability to defend itself. The result was a success -- until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now, but this time finish the job properly.

Let me telegraph it to my Anonymous Minutiae Minuteman from Qwest who claims I "Lie"... President Nixon signed the Paris Peace Accord on January 27, 1973. This technically 'Ending the War and was to Restore Peace in Vietnam'! However the War and the American Soldiers could not be beamed up to the Star Ship immediately so a winding down took place and America was no longer involved in "Offensive Actions". The fall of Saigon did not occurred until April 30, 1975 when Ford was the President. Per Melvin Laird and confirmed on Wikipedia the Democratically Controlled Congress welshed on America's promise to South Vietnam when Nixon was no longer President!

• In December 1974, the Democratic majority in Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, which cut off all military funding to the South Vietnamese government and made unenforceable the peace terms negotiated by Nixon. Nixon, threatened with impeachment because of Watergate, had resigned his office. Gerald R. Ford, Nixon's vice-president stepped in to finish his term. The new president vetoed the Foreign Assistance Act, but his veto was overridden by Congress.
  By 1975, the South Vietnamese Army stood alone against the well-organized, highly determined, and foreign-funded North Vietnamese. Within South Vietnam, there was increasing chaos. The withdrawal of the American military had compromised an economy that had thrived largely due to U.S. financial support and the presence of large numbers of U.S. troops.
  

From Wikipedia:
Because of this South Vietnam was perceived as doomed in the United States and on April 23, 1975 President Ford give a televised speech declaring the actual end of both the Vietnam War and of all U.S. aid to the Saigon regime. The helicopter evacuations continued day and night as North Vietnamese tanks breached the defenses on the outskirts of the city. In the early morning hours of 30 April, the last U.S. Marines evacuated the embassy roof by helicopter as civilians poured over the embassy perimeter and swarmed onto its grounds.

I never implied the Khmer Rouge was Vietnamese and everybody knows Pol Pot was Cambodian. The fall of South Vietnam one among other reasons that the Khmer Rouge gained its unimpeded strength and killed between 1.7 -3 million Cambodians.

Why are you so fixated on Vietnam? Because it is the Liberal Crowned Jewel of Political Activism. Too bad it ended the way it did with egg on the Face of the Democratic Party per many including Christofer
Hitchens the Hugh Hewitt Show last Week:

HH: Now I don't recall, I did not know what you wrote during Vietnam. Did you consider the same calculation in urging, if you did, in fact, as I suspect you did, American withdrawal from Vietnam and the area around Cambodia?
CH: Well, yes, it was one of the last ditch arguments, as it became, in fact, evident that the United States wasn’t going to be withdrawing from Vietnam, but was going to be pushed out, which is slightly different. I mean, it was going to happen anyway.
HH: The reason I ask is not to trap you
CH: They would say well, there'll be a bloodbath if we withdraw, bloodbath was the word. And the opposite of that was, it seemed persuasive at the time, well, there's a bloodbath already. Now in the case of Vietnam, I think that was a justifiable argument, and I think everyone who was in the anti-war movement has, or certainly should have, a twinge about what happened in Cambodia. Nobody thought it could get that bad.
HH: See, if I could keep you one more segment, what I want to come back and ask you, and this is actually intensely interesting to me, is how do you persuade a cut and run Democrat now, having been a get out of Vietnam and let the chips fall where they were anti-war protestor in the 70's, that that was then and this is now, and this is now is different? Fair question, Christopher Hitchens?
CH: Oh, yeah, very much so.
HH: But Mr. Hitchens, the key that I didn't hear answered is, once foreseeability of massacre attaches, regardless of how we ended up there
CH: Yes
HH: as it did in Vietnam in 1972, doesn’t moral culpability attach to those who are indifferent to those foreseeable slaughters? And doesn't that apply to the Cambodian holocaust?
CH: Well, I will not make this my own argument, but I’ll simply say that argument that I could anticipate being made, which is people would say well, how much worse could it get? All the things you're afraid of are already happening, and partly because of the bungling of the occupation, and the bad planning of it. And that's not a completely unfair point. There could come a point where everything we fear happens while we’re still there. And that is my personal fear. That’s what I wake up and go to sleep worrying about.
HH: Last question, because we’re almost out of time. Do you wake up and go to sleep ever worrying about your opposition to the Vietnam war and the holocaust that happened in Cambodia?
CH: Not to the first, no, because if it had been up to me, the war, which is what led to the bloodletting and the starvation and all the rest of it, would never have occurred in the first place. So for me, the Vietnam war was definitively over in 1954, when the French Army surrendered in Dien Bien Phu, and it was at that point that the United States should have recognized…
HH: And to the second?
CH: Ho Chi Minh's declaration of independence.
HH: And to the second?
CH: And to the second, well, this is what I would say now, what I hope I don't hear Democrats saying in the case of Iraq. If since we didn't ask for the war in the first place, don’t blame me if it all ends very badly, which it did in Vietnam, as it was absolutely bound to do. It wasn’t a just war, it wasn’t a necessary war, and it was fought with atrocious means.
HH: No culpability?
CH: None of these three things apply in the case of Iraq. It was a just intervention, and a necessary and overdue one, and on the whole, our forces have behaved with exemplary humanitarianism.

Again remember what I always say my detailed challenged Anonymous friend "we are not enemies!"
New Flash: A foiled plot to kidnap, torture and behead a British Muslim soldier was orchestrated by Al Qaeda, police sources have said. Officers suspect the mastermind ...
These are not one of the Muslims I fraternize with.....Please get your own Blog and leave mine alone. I'm in Graduate School while you seem to be studying bad Cliff Notes and I can no longer Tutor you cause I've got Lives and Minds to Save but I think you may need Aricept and are probably a lost cause...

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