News that al Qaeda is flying its flag over Fallujah this week certainly takes me back — not to Iraq, but to Vietnam. I’ve been making this point for years now, but never as well as it was made in Megyn Kelly’s interview Tuesday with Rep. Duncan Hunter of California.
Hunter has unusual credibility in that he is both a congressman and a former officer of the Marines. He appeared in arms in the Battle of Fallujah in Iraq before returning home to run for Congress, where his father had long served before him.
“I know,” Kelly asked him, “that a lot of veterans who fought in Iraq to help secure these things are wondering tonight, ‘What did we fight for? What did we lose our comrades for, if now we leave and al Qaeda — al Qaeda — is flying its flag on top of these cities?’ ”
Hunter gave the exactly right answer: “We won in Iraq,” he said first. He then noted that his father, who had served in the Congress for more than a generation, wrote a book called “Victory in Iraq.” He reiterated the point, saying that by 2010, we’d won the war in Iraq. The question was whether we’d abandon what we’d won. “This president,” Hunter said, referring to Barack Obama, “left for purely political reasons.”
The catastrophe unfolding in Fallujah wouldn’t have happened, he suggested, had we left 10,000 or 20,000 troops there, like we have in every other war zone that we’ve been involved in — except Vietnam.
The fact is that we didn’t leave any troops. This is one of the key points about Vietnam: We won the war there, too, before we gave it away in Congress.
How many American combat troops were there when Congress voted to ended its backing for the free government of South Vietnam? Not 20,000, or 10,000, or even 5,000; the answer is zero. There were no American combat GIs in Vietnam when Congress betrayed our allies there and ended support. The vote wasn’t to bring our troops home. They were already home.
President Gerald Ford begged Congress not to betray Vietnam or the GIs who’d fought there. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger literally prowled the halls of Congress, pleading with the Democrats to stick with our ally.
But the anti-war movement, The New York Times and other liberal organs, and a future secretary of state named John Kerry — they all bayed for retreat. When the ammo was cut off, the only thing left for the doughty Vietnamese was to pull their army out of the Central Highlands and fall back to Saigon.
The Communists swept out of the jungles in divisions, pulling large missiles with trailer trucks and driving tanks into Saigon. This is how, in Indochina, a population the size of Eastern Europe’s was cast into the long, dark night of communism.
Kelly’s conversation with Duncan Hunter is a reminder that in the new generation some people understand all this. They understand the comparison, that the surge in Iraq gave us the chance to make sure that what happened in Vietnam doesn’t happen again in Iraq, or elsewhere in the Middle East.
President George W. Bush understood this down to the ground. Late in his presidency, he spoke about it to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “The tragedy of Vietnam,” he said, “is too large to be contained in one speech.” So he focused on the price of America’s withdrawal.
It was paid, he said, “by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’ ” He quoted Osama bin Laden as declaring that the American people must rise against their government today the way they did over Vietnam.
Bush also quoted a letter that bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, sent to al Qaeda’s chief of operations in Iraq. Zawahiri spoke of how, in the course of the US collapse in Vietnam, “They ran and left their agents.”
Said Bush: “Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility — but the terrorists see it differently.”
So the president the Left loves to hate has become a prophet in his own time, and we will see whether the blood of Vietnam of an earlier generation will be redeemed in Fallujah in ours.