Apparently John Kerry Was Re-Educated, Too

John Kerry wants you to believe that there were no serious consequences to America's withdrawal from the war in Vietnam.  But of course there were.  For all the tragedy the Vietnam war brought, including over 58,000 dead American soldiers, its end was even more wrenching.  James Taranto calls John Kerry out:

'It Didn't Happen'
We suppose it was inevitable: Four and a half years after Congress authorized the liberation of Iraq, some observers are comparing the situation there to Vietnam, where America lost a war after its will faltered. It turns out at least one congressman actually served in Vietnam, so he ought to be particularly qualified to help us determine the lessons of that conflict for this one.

Meet John Kerry, junior senator from Massachusetts. Some say he looks French, others call him haughty. But everyone agrees on one thing: He served in Vietnam.

After returning from a tour of duty that lasted an astonishing four months, Kerry also became an antiwar activist. In 1971 Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Vietnamese were a simple people, too simple to care about freedom or oppression:

We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart.

Kerry's side prevailed. In 1973 the U.S. withdrew its troops from Vietnam, and in 1975 Congress, its Democratic majority expanded by the post-Watergate election of 1974, voted to cut off aid to the South Vietnamese government. That year Saigon fell to the communists.

What happened then? Not much, according to Kerry, quoted in the Chicago Tribune:

"We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia, and it didn't happen," Kerry said, dismissing the charge out of hand as he argued that the American presence only makes the situation worse every day.

In 2001, California's Orange County Register published an investigation of communist re-education camps in postwar Vietnam:

To corroborate the experiences of refugees now living in Orange County, the Register interviewed dozens of former inmates and their families, both in the United States and Vietnam; analyzed hundreds of pages of documents, including testimony from more than 800 individuals sent to jail; and interviewed Southeast Asian scholars. The review found:

• An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials.
• 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's re-education camps, according to published academic studies in the United States and Europe.
• Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed.
• Prisoners were incarcerated for as long as 17 years, according to the U.S. Department of State, with most terms ranging from three to 10 years.
• At least 150 re-education prisons were built after Saigon fell 26 years ago.
• One in three South Vietnamese families had a relative in a re-education camp.

According to John Kerry, "it didn't happen."

. . . .

Last week, as we noted, Kerry's colleague Barack Obama opined that genocide in Iraq would be preferable to America's continued presence there. But John Kerry has shown the way. If genocide, or some lesser horror, does occur in the wake of a U.S. retreat, Obama can simply assert: "It didn't happen."

Prominent Democratic officeholders are willing to deny or countenance crimes against humanity in order to justify a popular political position. Doesn't this shock the conscience of Democrats?

To review:  In war, there is no substitute for victory.

If we are at war with merciless enemies, as we were in Vietnam and as we are today in Iraq, and if we retreat from the battlefield short of victory, genocide is not just a possibility. It is virtually certain.

If you choose the retreat, you choose the bloodbath.

Update:  Gateway Pundit shows the faces of some of the Iraq genocide victims in waiting.

Comments

[Ted]

Sorry, but pulling out of Iraq will directly affect us!!! Terrorists will be encouraged, Israel will suffer greatly, Iran will see this as the will of Allah, Islamic sects will fight each other, the price of oil will never be stable...and I could go on and on!
We would also lose face with any nation that needs our help!
Ted