The Left Loses the Vietnam War

Robert Tracinski, RCP on the new scholarship on the Vietnam War, drawing from archives in Hanoi and Moscow, which posits that American defeat was not inevitable, and one of the greatest mistakes was to agree to the overthrow of Diem in 1963. And this:

Whatever the failures of American strategy in Vietnam, there is no doubt that the anti-war left pushed for American failure and accomplished it by persistent and vigorous legislation. And that is the crucial issue. If the architects of the Vietnam War in the Johnson administration can be criticized (as Moyar does) for not doing enough to win the war, the later anti-war left actively pursued American defeat and humiliation as their goal. They didn't merely want us to withdraw; they wanted us to lose, and they did whatever was necessary to make sure that happened.

So instead of being a story of the failure of imperialist, war-mongering Republicans, the Vietnam War was the story of two separate failures by Democrats. The Democrats who started the war held back from using the force necessary to win it--and the Democrats who ended the war deliberately knocked all of the remaining props out from under the South Vietnamese government to ensure the defeat of an American ally.

As Democrat Jimmy Carter cut and ran from the world, Afghanistan became abandoned and war-torn under the heavy boot of the USSR, spawning jihadists, and Iran toppled into the Terror State it remains today. One more time, the swan song of the careless left: We are on Freedom's Watch.

Previous posts: Freedom Muffled at MSNBC, We are going to get hit again, With his pet camel