ninme

I’m feeling slightly better about the depressing need to continue making this argument when we should have been able to move onto other things by now since the President’s speech tonight.

Opinion Journal - The Defeatist Caucus: Some on Capitol Hill seem to yearn for a repeat of Vietnam. BY BRENDAN MINITER

In the end, South Vietnam was abandoned and conquered, and it descended into poverty and oppression. Some, not content to their fate in the re-education camps, took to the high seas, and many ended up in the U.S. But the oppression hasn’t ended for those left behind. Dissidents, Buddhist monks and others are routinely pulled off the streets and out of their homes and tossed into prison. Some of the continuing human rights abuses were chronicled last week in congressional hearings.

If this was it, then maybe we could accept a defeat once in a while. But walking away from the overarching moral struggle proved disastrous across the world. After Congress shut off funding to the Republic of Vietnam, U.S. influence receded in the face of communist insurgency, and South Vietnam quickly fell in 1975. The emboldened Soviets were then free to press their interests in Africa, South America and, yes, the Middle East. The shah of Iran fell just a few years after Saigon. Radical Islamic terrorism got a big push from the Soviets.

Sigh.

Btw, if I understand my history correctly, Radical Islamic terrorism didn’t just get a big push from the Soviets, it was practically formed by the Soviets, along with a lot of nasty rumours about Israel and the US in order to turn the Middle East against us in the Cold War.