That's quite a fantasyworld you live in. Wow. This is delusion close to mental illness. Reality is not so terrible that you have to shut down so thoroughly. A psychiatrist can help.

dave

I love the way you Lefties carefully marshall facts and evidence, and employ reason and logic to make a thoughtful case.

John,

You (and Hugh Hewitt) may be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. At least that’s how I would describe trying to impose some kind of rationality onto the modern liberal mind.

Perhaps they are not conscious of being complicit in genocide? That is more than an understatement. In fact, they think they are the only ones innocent of complicity!

I remember watching “The Killing Fields” in a movie theatre when it first came out. I am quoting from memory a movie I haven’t seen in over twenty years, but there is a scene where the Sam Waterston character (he plays Sidney Schanberg) is being interviewed after some of the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge have come to light. He is asked if he perhaps underestimated the…. (I forget what exactly – the ruthlessness of the Khmer Rouge, the consequences of the withdrawal of U.S. forces, something like that.) He fires back with, “What was underestimated was the effect that two years of carpet bombing would have on a country and its people!” In other words, it was America’s fault! And of course to the leftist mind that means Nixon and Kissinger’s fault.

The most notorious of the leftist Khmer Rouge apologists is Noam Chomsky. First he denied the atrocities even happened. Then he moved on to claiming that while atrocities were committed they were being exaggerated by American propaganda. When the extent of the atrocities could no longer be denied he finally settled on, “Of course they happened – and it’s America’s fault.”

I would like to think that somewhere deep in the psyche of the Left there is some guilt over what occurred in the aftermath of our withdrawal from Vietnam, but I’m afraid it’s just wishful thinking.

You raise the interesting question of whether the "conscience" has an existence on its own, or whether it's just the accumulation of what one has been taught.

But either way, in this case I'll stick to my "guilty conscience" suspicions. Chomsy's denial of what was never really in question is very peculiar! (I look forward to the afterlife, and that rascal doing some hard time! [Not exactly charitable, there--ed. You're right, but oh, the temptation!])

I can't imagine most of them feeling any guilt at all. Look at how the sacrifice of South Vietnam to Communist oppression is still lauded among the chatterati. Mr. Plaiss comes closer, I think, in that there is an inexhaustible well of rationalization that makes everything America's (but not the liberals therein) fault. Just look at how when some Caliphascists blow up a bunch of college students, that is counted as people killed by America.

Can I have some of what you're smoking?

Let's look at the record, as reviewed by Rick Perlstein in TNR: "The Legend of the Fall."

The public memory of congressional votes on Vietnam from 1970 through 1975 is almost hallucinogenically jumbled. Republican propagandists rely on the confusion. This slender reed of a myth--that congressional liberals are responsible for the fall of South Vietnam--conflates the failed 1970-1971 votes to end the war in South Vietnam, and the overwhelmingly popular (and, on Nixon and Kissinger's terms, strategically irrelevant) vote to limit military aid to South Vietnam. It is but a short leap for a public less informed than Laird to reach the Rambo conclusion: that this was just the last in a comprehensive train of abuses--exclusively Democratic and liberal--that kept us from "winning" in Vietnam. And that, adding in the mythology about prisoners of war in Vietnam, American troops were, roughly speaking, "abandoned" there."

It requires some filthy lies [my emphasis] to sustain. But the fact that a sad old man [Melvin Laird] is allowed to propound some of them in the foreign policy establishment's journal of record shows how successful it remains. And the fact that the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to take it as second nature that she has to defend herself against them shows it, too. Stop it now. No responsible American politician has ever cut funding an American troop needed to fight while he or she was in the field. No responsible American politician ever would. Limiting the number of troops in the theater of operations is not cutting funding for American troops. Neither, of course, is withdrawing them "over the horizon." Nothing's getting stabbed in the back here except reason.

And for details (since it's behind a subscription wall:

Early in 1974, Nixon requested a support package for the South Vietnamese that included $474 million in emergency military aid. The Senate Armed Services Committee balked and approved about half. A liberal coup? Hardly. One of the critics was Senator Barry Goldwater. "We can scratch South Vietnam," he said. "It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of North Vietnam." The House turned down the president's emergency aid request 177 to 154; the majority included 50 Republicans. They were only, as I wrote in The New Republic ("The Unrealist," November 6, 2006), honoring what Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger privately believed. They had gladly negotiated their peace deal under the assumption that South Vietnam would fall when the United States left. What would it have cost to keep South Vietnam in existence without an American military presence? The Pentagon, in 1973, estimated $1.4 billion even for an "austere program." Nixon and Kissinger were glad for the $700 million South Vietnam eventually got (including a couple hundred million for military aid), because their intention was merely to prop up Saigon for a "decent interval" until the American public forgot about the problem. By 1974, Kissinger pointed out, "no one will give a damn."

Apparently, they didn't tell Gerald Ford. He addressed the nation in April of 1975, eight months after becoming president, and implored Congress for $722 million in military aid. The speech was overwhelmingly and universally unpopular--the kind of thing that made Ford seem such a joke to the nation at the time. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called it "blundering." Seventy-eight percent of the public was against any further military aid; Republicans like James McClure of Idaho and Harry Bellmon of Oklahoma opposed the appropriation. Republican dove Mark Hatfield said, "I am appalled that a man would continue in such a bankrupt policy"--and Democratic hawk Scoop Jackson said, "I oppose it. I don't know of any on the Democratic side who will support it." The Senate vote against it was 61 to 32.

Leading up to the vote, however, Saint Gerald made extraordinary claims--saying that "just a relatively small additional commitment" to Vietnam (compared with the $150 billion already spent there) could "have met any military challenges." With it, "this whole tragedy"--the imminent fall of Saigon--"could have been eliminated."

So much for the Pentagon's claim that $1.4 billion would be an "austere program." So much for Nixon and Kissinger's belief that "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway." Ford's miraculous $722 million somehow became enshrined in public memory as the margin that assured American dishonor. As Laird put it in that Foreign Affairs essay, "[W]e grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory. ... We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973."

The right is so deep into what Robert Anton Wilson called "the reality tunnel" on this subject that there's no possibility of light at the end.

Is $1.4B the price we'd have had to pay to save the lives of millions of southeast Asians, the destruction of nations, and American strength and honor for a generation?

I'm sorry, I don't give a shit what party voted against that, they have blood on their hands. A pox on all of them. The very thought that, "oh, Republicans voted with the Democrats" is some kind of argument is repugnant.

Dave is just muddying pools.

There were people back then who were happy to see the tyrants win, and were ice-hearted about the victims. We know perfectly well who they were. (Hell, I went to Berkeley. I was there in the heart of darkness.) And the same nihilist bunch is around today, and we still know very well who they are.

Now they want the terrorists to win, and are STILL ice-hearted about the victims. No amount of song-and-dance will evade that ugly reality...

Gotta break some eggs, John, to make that omelet that nobody will eat because they've all gone vegan.

Gotta break some eggs, John, to make that omelet that nobody will eat because they've all gone vegan.

...now that's funny...

By 1975, there were so many resolutions; Cooper Church, Hughes, McGovern et al; that they formed
an unmistakable concensus; get out now, Mansfield
the Senate's preeminent East Asian expert (because
he had been a history teacher in the 40s) had even
authored one on withdrawal from Europe. Not long after; the Church committee; revealed every secret
of US foreign (and corporate policies) for the last 30 years. It was in this atmosphere and the
Rockefeller and JFK assassination investigations;
that the likes of Phillip Agee, chose to replicate
the East German Mader report, and disseminate the names of American covert officials; The first
victim of his 'crusade' Richard Welch, who had
once briefly encountered Agee, had served almost
his entire career in Latin America, had no contact with the Greek junta; who would serve
as a rationalization for his French educated
assassin Giotopolous of Nov 17. Giotopolous, had
been affiliated with the Tupamaros; who's development had overseen by Agee in the late
60s. Nevertheless through his DGI/KGB sponsored newsletter,Counterspy, which became the Covert
Action Information Bulletin; according to the
Mitrokhin files. One ofshoot of this was his collaboration with a young Sid Blumenthal on a conspiracy tome; called "Government by Gunplay" whose intro hinted at extreme polices like nationalization of American oil companies
and rumors of LAPD training for hunger riot control. In this milieu would rise Carter and
his IPS affiliated advisors who would pull the
extremely ill-advised "Halloween massacre which
according to former Richard Welch associate
Gust Avrakotos (who would later helm the Afghan
rebel supply pipelines); had the perverse affect of punishing the most culturally adept linguistic
proficient agents around the world; primarily first and second generation Americans like himself