What the Military Knows about Vietnam---And What Civilians Don't

President Bush using Vietnam as a positive analogy for Iraq seems to have ruffled all the right feathers among the left wing peacocks.

Mark Steyn sets them straight:

But if you lived in Damascus and Moscow and Havana, the Vietnam war was about America: American credibility, American purpose, American will. For our enemies today, it still is. Osama bin Laden made a bet – that, notwithstanding the T-shirt slogan, "These Colors Do Run": They ran from Vietnam, and they ran from the helicopters in the desert, and from Lebanon and Somalia – and they will run from Iraq and Afghanistan, because that is the nature of a soft, plump ersatz-superpower that coils up in the fetal position if you prick its toe. Even Republicans like Sen. John Warner seem peculiarly anxious to confirm the bin Laden characterization.

Depending on which Americans you ask, "Vietnam" can mean entirely different things. To the New York Times and the people it goes to dinner parties with, it had "few negative repercussions."

And it's hardly surprising its journalists should think like that when Times publisher Pinch Sulzberger, in a commencement address last year that's almost a parody of parochial boomer narcissism, was still bragging and preening about his generation's role in ending the war. Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (which is apparently some sort of elite institution for which people pay big money to receive instruction from authoritative scholars such as professor Nye), told NPR last week: "After we got out of Vietnam, the people who took over were the North Vietnamese. And that was a government which preserved order" – if by "preserved order," you mean "drove a vast human tide to take to the oceans on small rickety rafts and flee for their lives."

But, if you're not a self-absorbed poseur like Sulzberger, "Vietnam" is not a "tragedy" but a betrayal. The final image of the drama – the U.S. helicopters lifting off from the Embassy roof with desperate locals clinging to the undercarriage – is an image not just of defeat but of the shabby sell-outs necessary to accomplish it.

At least in Indochina, those who got it so horribly wrong – the Kerrys and Fondas and all the rest – could claim they had no idea of what would follow.

To do it all over again in the full knowledge of what followed would turn an aberration into a pattern of behavior. And as the Sirik Mataks of Baghdad face the choice between staying and dying or exile and embittered evenings in the new Iraqi émigré restaurants of London and Los Angeles, who will be America's allies in the years ahead?

Professor Bernard Lewis' dictum would be self-evident: "America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend."

And for those who have woken up to the fact that Uncle Walter and the rest of the lefty lie machine have corrupted history as they've corrupted journalism, Robert Kaplan has an excellent article in The Atlantic Monthly offering several great books you can read to set the record straight, mainly written by the men who were there and thus carrying moral authority greater than any conferred by the media czars upon Cindy Sheehan back when she was attacking Bush for them.