Fifty years later, Vietnam still haunts the Democrats, and it seems now that it always will.
That was the reason they opposed the Gulf War in 1991, which ended successfully, and Iraq War in 2003, which went off the rails in 2005 and 2006. The surge, which Democrats opposed to a man, rescued that effort so well that by 2008, John McCain was running neck-and-neck in September with Barack Obama right before the financial collapse.
If anyone lost Iraq, it was the administration that followed. Obama pulled all American troops out at the end of 2011, to the wild displeasure of all the Republicans. Obama declared Iraq a success, and on the old Larry King program in February 2012, Joe Biden called it the greatest success of their administration. If Biden is his party’s nominee this year, the Republicans might want to dig those tapes out and play them repeatedly.
The Vietnam syndrome is also the reason the Democrats were unable to react appropriately to the welcome news of the death of Qassem Soleimani, killer of 600 Americans plus uncounted others, this month.
“Vietnam Syndrome in U.S. politics,” Wikipedia tells us, “is a term used to refer to public aversion to American overseas military involvements following the domestic controversy over the Vietnam War.” It generally causes an aversion to arms, even if defensive; an aversion to force, even if preemptive; and a perverse form of moral equivalence that equates a mistake made by the United States and/or its allies with an act of aggression and malice aforethought as made by its foes.
Jeane Kirkpatrick made this point in “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” an article that ran in the November 1979 issue of Commentary and caught the attention of candidate Ronald Reagan. He made her his ambassador to the United Nations when he won the election, from which perch she brought the crowd to its feet at the Republican convention four years later, claiming that the first instinct of the left under any conditions was to “blame America first.”
This was all true. But if the U.S. was guilty, then its opponents were innocent almost by definition, and thus the drive was on to make dead assassins seem cultured and sensitive and almost too good to be true.
“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48,” went the headline in the Washington Post when that rapist and killer met his demise last October. Bloomberg News added helpfully that Baghdadi “transformed himself from a little known teacher of Koranic recitation into the self-proclaimed ruler of an entity that covered swatches of Syria and Iraq.” A self-made man, vide Horatio Alger, and a prince and a scholar to boot!
At MSNBC, resident lunatic Christopher Matthews seemed near tears as he memorialized Soleimani, referring to him only as ‘general’ (as in “Eisenhower” or “Powell”) and comparing the mobs mourning his loss to the grief shown for Elvis Presley and Princess Diana.
There’s something odd about that — the late princess was trying to get rid of land mines, which is not quite the same line of work as Soleimani.
Vietnam should be far back in our mirrors. Instead, it is still on our minds.
