The Bloody Hands of the Anti-War Left

David Horowitz takes on George McGovern's silly letter to the editor that appeared in the LA Times on Christmas Day. In his letter, McGovern calls for the immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Horowitz has an impressive personal story to tell on the topic of anti-war leaders and the consequences of those activities. His parents were communists and he was one of the early anti-war leaders of the Vietnam war.

Three years earlier, Nixon had signaled an end to the draft, and the massive national antiwar demonstrations had drawn to a halt. But a vanguard of activists continued the war against America’s support for the anti-Communist war effort in Vietnam. Among them were John Kerry, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. They held a war crimes tribunal, condemning America’s role in Vietnam, and conducted a campaign to persuade the Democrats in Congress to cut all aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia, thus opening the door for a Communist conquest. When Nixon was forced to resign after Watergate, the Democratic congress cut the aid as their first legislative act. They did this in January 1975. In April, the Cambodian and South Vietnamese regimes fell.

The events that followed this retreat in Indochina have been all but forgotten by the Left, which has never learned the lessons of Vietnam, but instead has invoked the retreat itself as an inspiration and guide for its political opposition to the war in Iraq. Along with leading Democrats like Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe, George McGovern called for an American retreat from Iraq even before a government could be established to assure the country will not fall prey to the Saddamist remnants and Islamic terrorists: “I did not want any Americans to risk their lives in Iraq. We should bring home those who are there.” Explained McGovern: “Once we left Vietnam and quit bombing its people they became friends and trading partners.”

Actually, that is not what happened. Four months after the Democrats cut off aid to Cambodia and Vietnam in January 1975, both regimes fell to the Communist armies. Within three years the Communist victors had slaughtered two-and-a-half million peasants in the Indochinese peninsula, paving the way for their socialist paradise. The blood of those victims is on the hands of the Americans who forced this withdrawal:  John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and George McGovern – and antiwar activists like myself.

Here's his brilliant conclusion on withdrawing from Iraq:

If the United States were to leave the battlefield in Iraq now, before the peace is secured (and thus repeat the earlier retreat), there would be a bloodbath along the Tigris and Euphrates. The jihadists will slaughter our friends, our allies, and all of the Iraqis who are struggling for freedom. Given the nature of the terrorist war we are in, this bloodbath would also flow into the streets of Washington and New York and potentially every American city. The jihadists have sworn to kill us all. People who think America is invulnerable, that America can just leave the field of this battle and there will be peace, do not begin to understand the world we confront.

Or if they understand it, they have tilted their allegiance to the other side. McGovern’s phrase “as earlier conquerors learned,” speaks volumes about the perverse moral calculus of the progressive Left. To McGovern we are conquerors, which makes the al-Zarqawi terrorists “liberators,” or as Michael Moore would prefer, “patriots.” The Left that wants America to throw in the towel in Iraq is hypersensitive to questions about its loyalties but at the same time can casually refer to our presence in Iraq as an “invasion and occupation.” It wants to use the language of morality, but it only wants the standard to apply in one direction. There is no one-dimensional standard, and a politics of surrender is not a politics of peace.

People living in fantasy worlds is a very dangerous thing. I am so glad that I've always been a Republican. Never, ever once flirted with the idea of being a liberal or 'progressive'. What is so frightening is how dreadfully serious many Americans took the candidacy of John Kerry. What an absolute joke.

To be soooo blind.....