A short history lesson for the cut and run crowd

I used to argue with people who said that Iraq was Bush's Vietnam.

With the recent call by Congressman Murtha to immediately withdraw, followed up by Earl Blumenauer's piece in the Oregonian calling for us to get National Guard troops out right away, I'm starting to see some eerie parallels. I'm thinking Iraq is indeed just like Vietnam, but not in the way the left means.

The whole point of our presence in Vietnam was to prevent the North Vietnam communists from taking over South Vietnam, and to keep the Pol-Pot led Khmer Rouge from taking over the Cambodian government led by Lon Nol.

The anti-war left in American hated the war, because we were preventing the spread of their ideology. Jane Fonda and her husband, former radical turned congressman Tom Hayden, organized an "Indo-China Peace Campaign" to try and lobby Congress to cut off aid to Cambodia and South Vietnam. They even took a camera crew to certain parts of "liberated" South Vietnam to make a propaganda film showing how if the communists took over they would create a utopian agrarian society based on justice and equality.

Nixon negotiated a truce with North Vietnam and we pulled our troops out in 1973, but U.S. aid to Cambodia and South Vietnam continued. Nixon hoped that with the aid, the governments of Cambodia and South Vietnam could be preserved.

But he resigned in disgrace shortly thereafter, and in the next election, Republicans got hammered. A bunch of anti-war lefties were swept into Congress, and in their first act of the 1975 session, they rescinded all aid to both South Vietnam and Cambodia.

Republicans at the time warned that if we end our involvement, there would be a bloodbath. John Kerry argued that Republicans were just trying to "stir up anti-communist hysteria."

Within days, communists had overrun Saigon, executing tens of thousands of Vietnamese, and more than a million fled. The Pol-Pot led Khmer Rouge swarmed into Phnom Penh, which led to the slaughter of about two million souls in the "Killing Fields."

You'd think the left would learn. But the same basic story played out in China and Russia before Vietnam, and there too, the political left in the U.S. didn't see them as a threat.

Now they want us out of Iraq. People like me say if we leave there will be a bloodbath, as Sunni's and Baathists take back what they think is theirs. The left has no credible response, but people like Earl Blumenauer want us out anyway.

I've never seen Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, John Kerry, John Dallums, Bella Azbug, David Bonior, or any one of the prominent anti-war crowd from the Vietnam era ever admit that they succeeded in enabling the slaughter of millions of Indo-Chinese.

And if the left succeeds in getting us out of Iraq prematurely, and the inevitable happens there, don't expect Early Blumenauer to apologize for the carnage.

Hey - I guess I'd be reluctant to admit it if the ideology I spent my life spreading had resulted in the mass murder of more than 100 million people in a single century.