The 'Genocide' Card

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:


The 'Genocide' Card
Submitted by Rick Perlstein on July 30, 2007 - 10:44am.


Increasingly, the preferred argument of the Forever Caucus is that if we leave Iraq there will be "genocide," as surely as dandelions follow a spring rain.


Here David Brooks shamefullly invents up a number ("10,000 Iraqi deaths a month...a tough moral issue"): http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/07/23/battle-of-the-beltway-woodward-confronts-brooks-for-making-up-st/

Here (at 5:50 in the video) John McCain says, "the Democrats want to set a date for withdrawal; there will be chaos in the region, and there will be genocide.": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzjSWc-gQ1s&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eatrios%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F

Jonah Goldberg says an impending genocicide will be history's indictment of liberals failings in Iraq!


The Forever Caucus underwrites their supposed moral righteousness with their understanding of Vietnam, of course. (The former POW McCain is so eager to exploit his supposed wisdom on the subject that in his campaign logo his name is rather shamefully spelled out in the same font as the names on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.) We left Vietnam, you see, and there was a genocide there: our fault. Preventable blood on our hands.

Like most everything conservatives claim to know about Vietnam, it's misleading in the extreme. It makes no sense as analysis on Vietnam. And it makes no sense as a lesson for Iraq.

It is true that tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed, and hundreds of thousands exiled to "re-education" camps, by a triumphant Communist government after Saigon fell in 1975. But by the early 1970s as the worst American bombing was raging, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were being killed, and millions being exiled from their homes—carnage that came to a dead stop once the war ended. As cruel as the Communist consolidation of power was, ending the war entailed an obvious net saving of lives, and if it were saving lives conservatives actually cared about—instead of scoring ideological points—this should be obvious.

That's the first point. The second: America's war aim—standing up an anti-Communist democratic government in Saigon absent an American military occupation—was impossible. President Nixon admitted this privately all the time, even while he was simultaneously publicly claiming he was negotiating to achieve exactly that. The point has finally become so obvious that now even conservatives are admit Nixon did this. Though conservatives still haven't broughout themselves to admit the more fundamental point: Nixon was right. Indeed, sickeningly, after more visits and better contacts in-country than any American politician, he had been saying we couldn't win in Vietnam privately since 1966, as Len Garment disarmingly acknowledged in his memoir. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/iraq_vietnam_genocide?tx=3

[damntexdem]

1. And North Vietnam put an end to Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia.

And Pol Pot came to power there only as a result of Nixon's spreading of the war into Cambodia.