Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, wants the USA to withdraw from Iraq:
“I’ve seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, ‘just another year, just stay the course, we’ll have a victory.’ Well, we didn’t have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening.”
In 1975 the US Congress cut off military aid to South Vietnam, which was soon overwhelmed and conquered by the North Vietnamese army. Communist forces rolled through Cambodia and Laos. The communists killed millions of people. Is this scenario — our abandonment of an ally followed by mass-murder and tyranny — also one that Dean wishes to avoid? It would be nice if someone asked him.
You know what’s funny? That pre-W, Republicans were always referred to as the party that didn’t want to nation-build, that didn’t want to stick around and fix things after the military was done. The type of party that would just run into a country, topple the leader, and then say, hey, it’s up to them now, leaving that country in serious peril.
Yet look who’s the nation-builder now, the dreamer, the guy wanting to change the world. Switch party affiliations and I wonder how all these outraged elected officials would be reacting.
However, it was a Democratic congress that cut off funding to S. Vietnam there Jimmy D. Did they just become Republicans in 1975? In 1945, Democrats werenn’t isolationists either. Why are they now?
Don’t forget that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan took place shortly after we threw Vietnam to the wolves. Weakness invites aggression, and I doubt the Soviets would have invaded Afghanistan if we hadn’t show weakness in Vietnam.
Without the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, would there have been a Taliban, Al Qaeda, or 9/11? We’ll never know now.