The Iraq Syndrome

From IBD:
Posted 6/9/2006

War On Terror: Those who equate Haditha with My Lai, and Iraq with Vietnam, would do well to remember the last time we gave peace a chance. For millions of innocents, it was the peace of the grave.

Typical of the media mind-set on Iraq was a May 31 editorial by the Los Angeles Times titled "What Happened at the Iraqi My Lai?" It demonstrated not only that the left is still mired waist deep in the Big Muddy, but also that it engages in an almost obscene form of moral equivalence.

The Times liberally quoted Rep. John Murtha, ending with the observation that "when the U.S. condones the deliberate murder of civilians it becomes, as Murtha said, no better than the enemy."

No better than the jihadists who planned 9-11 or sawed off Nicholas Berg's head? Deliberate murder? Did we miss the trial?

If this sounds familiar, go back and reread John Kerry's infamous post-Vietnam testimony. The then-vet-turned-activist described our forces in that war as the heirs of Genghis Khan, who destroyed Vietnam in order to save it, who raped and pillaged, and who earned the left's most famous epithet — "baby killers."

If there's anyone who condones the deliberate murder of civilians, it is not the U.S. government but the anti-war left and its unindicted co-conspirators in the media. Thanks largely to their efforts, we abandoned Vietnam and ushered in an era of mass carnage, boat people and reeducation camps that resulted in more death after the war than during it.

After Saigon's "liberation," summary executions of tens of thousands of South Vietnamese began. Hundreds of thousands more were forced into re-education camps as a million boat people fled on anything that would float. Countless thousands perished in the South China Sea.

And let's not forget the killing fields of Cambodia, where 3 million were slaughtered, a stark reminder of what happens in the absence of both democracy and U.S. power. Angst over My Lai helped make it happen; angst over Haditha could make it happen again.

As David Horowitz, who helped organize the first campus demonstrations against the war at UC Berkeley in 1962, has written: "Every testimony by North Vietnamese generals in the postwar years has affirmed that they knew they could not defeat the United States on the battlefield, and they counted on the division of our people at home to win the war for them."

A 6,000-word letter dated July 8, 2005, from Osama bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, shows our enemies hope history will repeat. "(W)e are in a battle," Zawahiri wrote, "and more than half this battle is in the media."

Iraq is like Vietnam, where U.S. forces never lose a battle on the ground, but where defeat can come at the hands of a loony left, a biased media and a shortsighted Congress. Whether it's an immediate withdrawal or one with a date certain, it would be a signal to the enemy to set their alarm clocks and wait us out till we cut and run.

That's what we did after the bombing of our barracks in Beirut in 1983, and Osama bin Laden was emboldened by the weakness he inferred.

A premature withdrawal would be a death sentence for all who cooperated in building an Iraqi democracy. It could also be a death sentence for Americans — victims of the next 9-11, planned, financed and armed in a jihadist Iraq.

It would be the killing fields all over again.