Varifrank takes Howard Dean (and, in fact, anyone else who thinks that pulling out of Iraq before the Iraqis can defend themselves is a good idea) to task for treating our abandonment of our Vietnamese allies as though it was a good thing:

And of course after we left Vietnam, sweet little chocolates fell from the sky and happiness reigned throughout the land and a rainbow filled the sky for all to see…

Actually, what happened was this:

As a result of the Democratic Party dominated US Congress abandoning the government of South Vietnam and its monetary requirements for self-defense, the free people of South Vietnam were subjugated under the tyrannical genocidal rule of an invading Communist regime. As a result, many millions of people in Cambodia, Laos, and especially Vietnam became refugees. Refugee camps opened throughout the South Pacific, and were populated in the hundreds of thousands by those who had survived the journey. Before a person could make it the refugee camp, they had to endure survival at sea and predatory pirates, who raped and killed hundred of thousands of people who were fleeing from the Communist Vietnamese regime. It has been estimated that for every person who arrived, 3 were killed in the effort. In nieghboring Cambodia, the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, (once part of the Communist Party of Vietnam) murdered 6 millions of people in the wholesale destruction of ctities and towns at a level and procifiency not seen since Nazi Germany. In Vietnam, the new communist government sent many people who did not flee and supported the old government in the South to “re-education camps”, and others to “new economic zones” or what we would refer to as concentration and forced labor camps . The genocidal and fratracidal warfare waged by the Communist government of Vietnam resulted in millions of Vietnamese who risked and often lost everything in order to leave, but the process was not limited to just the former US allies in South Vietnam. In 1979, Vietnam was at war with the People’s Republic of China. During this war, ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam became scapegoats to the government of Vietnam and were directly targeted by the regime. As a result, thousands of Chinese became refugees using the same routes of departure previously used by the Vietnamese themselves.

Millions of people were butchered in this genocide; millions more flee as refugees, millions incarcerated in forced labor camps. All this; because of the selfish actions of the US Congress of 1975. And yet, Howard and the Democrats want to use this as a moment of pride.

This is something I’ve never understood. I don’t claim to be a scholar of history. I can’t say for certain that we should have been in Vietnam in the first place, but the fact is that we were there. To abandon those who’d come to depend on us strikes me as sheer cowardice, and every time we’ve done so (see: Vietnam, or the original Gulf War), it is a black mark on our country.

John Kerry asked, in 1971, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” I think that’s a fundamentally dishonest question. The honest question is, how do you tell a man’s family that he died because the government made a mistake; a mistake that they’d rather run away from than try to fix? Telling someone’s family that he died because you made a mistake that you intend to make right is one thing. Telling someone’s family that he died for a mistake that you don’t even care enough about to try to fix is abominable.

If you believe that our liberation of Iraq is a mistake, that’s fine. Maybe you think Iraq was better off under Saddam than it can ever be under a democratically elected government. Or, maybe, you don’t care whether the Iraqis are better off, you only care about Americans, and you think Americans were better off before we went into Iraq. If you want to argue those points, that’s fine, but they have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not we should pull out of Iraq now.

There are two important questions that determine whether or not we can pull out of Iraq:

1. Will the Iraqis be better off if we aren’t there?
2. Will we be better off if our troops aren’t involved in Iraq?

(The answer to both questions is no. As much as I respect the Iraqi people, there is no evidence that they’re quite ready to defend themselves just yet. We certainly won’t be made better off by abandoning the Iraqis to the elements, and if you really believe that appeasement will stop the Islamic extremists from committing violent terrorist acts anywhere they possibly can, I’ve a bridge to sell you in San Francisco.)

Note that neither of those questions asks about the world as it would’ve been if we hadn’t sent troops into Iraq, because we don’t live in that world. Anyone who supports pulling out of Iraq seems to think that as soon as we pull out, the world will retcon itself to a time when we’d never sent troops into Iraq, and that’s simply not true. We can’t make the world better by magically removing the decisions we made in the past — we can only make the world better by making decisions in the world as it is today.

There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.

-Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers)