Friday, May 27, 2005

Nixon, Vietnam and the legacy of the Democratic Party

To my Democrat friends:

I just happened to read this article tonight by Marvin Olasky after talking to a friend on a similar matter. Olasky, a repentant Vietnam War protester, wrote it after a recent visit to West Point. Olasky gets to the heart of the matter in this paragraph:

Here at this majestic site on a cliff above the Hudson, it seems that people should measure up to at least this part of the Cadet Prayer: "Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong." I did not: I chose a wrong not only easier but vile. So did the United States in its post-Watergate twitching, as we suddenly withheld arms from our Southeast Asian allies and were thus complicit in the creation of killing fields.


It seems to underscore the theory that Watergate was the weapon used against Nixon (although he fashioned it himself), but that the real reason the Left went after him was because he was a successful anti-Socialist, having extricated our troops from Vietnam with honor in such a way that the Republic of Vietnam could survive. Once he was weakened and out of the way, Congress abandoned our allies and weakened us around the world. Given the serious fallout of that Congressional action (death and misery to the Vietnamese and Cambodians in the vacuum left by American military forces, and an extreme poverty that exists to this day), Nixon's Watergate crime seems like stubbing his toe in comparison. Nixon covered up -- and who died as a result?

In fact, I recall that Nixon explained in his famous interviews with David Frost, just why the US needed to defend South Vietnam: because they were our ally as signators to the SEATO treaty. Nixon even said, "The easiest thing for me to have done was to say, 'This is Kennedy & Johnson's war'. But it was not Kennedy & Johnson's war -- it was America's war". But when we showed that we would not stand with them by continuing to supply arms to hold the Communists of the North at bay, we signaled to the world that pressure from the American Left could fatally weaken public support for defending Liberty abroad. That's why there's a plaque honoring John Kerry hanging in Hanoi today. So much for the legacy of Wilson, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and JFK, eh?

And the sad part is, the Left continues to do this today, attacking the liberation of tens of millions of people in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon from thugs like the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and Syria's Bashar Assad (there's even a nascent democracy movement in Egypt and Cuba!). If the Left disparages successes such as these, what hope is there for the enslaved peoples of Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe and North Korea?

I'm not asking you to abandon your party -- far from it! I'm asking you to educate yourself and convince your fellow Democrats to wake up to the perverse pro-Socialist policies of Kerry, (Teddy) Kennedy, Dodd and Carter, and go back to defending Liberty. In the words of Democratic icon JFK,

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge—and more.


What has happened to that pledge? Who in your party continues to support that pledge?