Vietnam and Iraq: A Revelatory Analogy

Jonah Goldberg notes that the anti-American site Daily Kos has posted a September 1967 New York Times article on the high voter turnout in South Vietnam’s election that year. He wonders what message the Kossacks are trying to get across.

And the guy's point is. . . what, exactly? That we were right to abandon our Vietnamese allies? That we should do the same to Iraqis? That the left wing of his party hasn’t been moved by the democratic aspirations of those facing totalitarianism for four decades? Or maybe his point is to illustrate that the only foreign policy prism he and his kind can see through is Vietnam, even though the two conflicts have exactly nothing in common – save their ability to elicit incoherent rage and bad historical analogies from the left.

I see no reason to suspect confusion rather than malice. The point of this particular parallel is obvious: The South Vietnamese overwhelmingly backed democratic government against a totalitarian takeover, but their opinions didn’t matter. The international Left was able to cut off American aid and leave free Vietnam helpless in the face of foreign invasion. (In the last stages of the war, Congress banned even the sale of fuel and ammunition to the Saigon government.) The Kossacks believe and hope that the same sequence of events will occur again, that anti-war agitation will lead the U.S. to kick the legs out from under a fledgling democracy. The message for the leftist troops is, Don’t despair just because our buddies couldn’t disrupt this election; in the end, the evil principle of democracy will succumb.

Further reading: Noel Sheppard, “Was the Iraq Election like Vietnam 1967? Or America 1864?”