The Asian Example

No sooner had President Bush issued an advance of his remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on the topic of Iraq and Vietnam than the big Democratic Party foghorns went into attack mode. The president, speaking at Kansas City, said, "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,' ‘reeducation camps,' and ‘killing fields.'" The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times got right on the blower to the liberal historian Robert Dallek, who, according to the report in the Los Angeles paper, "accused" Mr. Bush of "twisting history." Quoth Mr. Dallek: "It just boggles the mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president."

"We were in Vietnam for 10 years," Mr. Dallek said. "We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn't work our will." Mr. Dallek, however, has taken a shallow view of Vietnam. There is a competing school of thought that comprehends that we could, and did, work our will on the battlefield, only to fail in the Congress, where the Democratic Party panicked and cut off all aid to free Vietnam — more than a year after the last combat GI had been withdrawn from Vietnam. In other words, the decision of the 93rd and 94th Congresses to abandon free Vietnam had nothing to do with the 58,700 American lives. It was a betrayal of their sacrifice.

The truth is that Mr. Bush is way ahead of his critics. The president was talking about a much bigger picture than Vietnam — the example of post-World War II Asia as a historic success for freedom and democracy among those countries that placed their bets on the America and the ideals for which we stand. Mr. Bush sought to remind the Congress, the intelligentsia, and our military men and women that the current war isn't the first time America has been bedeviled by doubt. Asia reminds that perseverance and principle won out, creating a continent where democracy has taken root, free markets are delivering unimagined wealth and spreading it broadly, and old enemies are coming together.

Mr. Bush argued that while there are "many differences between the wars we fought in the Far East and the war on terror we are fighting today," there is one important similarity — "at their core they're ideological struggles." He said, "The militarists of Japan and the Communists in Korea and Vietnam were driven by a merciless vision for the proper ordering of humanity. ... Like our enemies in the past, the terrorists who wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places seek to spread a political vision of their own — a harsh plan for life that crushes freedom, tolerance, and dissent. Like our enemies in the past, they kill Americans because we stand in their way of imposing this ideology across a vital region of the world."

The president pointed out that,"then as now" critics argued "that some people were simply not fit for freedom." He quoted a former American ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, who would serve as President Truman's state undersecretary, as telling Truman flatly that "democracy in Japan would never work." He offered a paean to perseverance in Korea, where democracy did falter before reasserting itself. Had we not stuck with it, Mr. Bush said, "the Soviets and Chinese communists would have learned the lesson that aggression pays."

In respect of Vietnam, the president, after acknowledging that it is, as he put it, "a complex and painful subject for many Americans," addressed the argument, made by so many, that "the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end." He quoted one antiwar senator, J. William Fulbright, as saying: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?" One just winces to hear that American leaders talked that way, particularly in light of the killings that took place in Indochina after the American retreat.

Mr. Bush quoted Osama bin Laden as calling on Americans, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, to rise against their government as they did during Vietnam. He quoted a letter, sent by Mr. bin Laden's deputy to Al Qaeda's operations chief in Iraq about "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents." Mr. Bush quoted the deputy as returning to the theme later, declaring that the Americans "know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet." Said Mr. Bush: "Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility — but the terrorists see it differently."

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The president knows what he is doing here. He has put together a brain trust whose names are little written about but who are experienced in Asia and the Cold War. The political landscape his remarks illuminate is dangerous for the Democrats. If Senator Clinton tries to run against his formulation, people are going to start talking again about how her husband spent the Vietnam War years dodging the draft, protesting against our GIs, and visiting Moscow. In the coming election the Republicans will be facing a Democratic machine headed by a New York Times that only a few years ago said the Vietnam war "then, as now, seemed to lack any rationale except the wrecking of as many lives as possible on both sides." The big picture that Mr. Bush sketched is the polar opposite of that view, reminding us that there was, as the president put it, a "triumph" of freedom in Asia that has yielded "peace for generations," an example that can give us all "confidence that the hard work we are doing in the Middle East can have the same results ... if we show the same perseverance and the same sense of purpose."