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Monday, December 27, 2004

McGovern Calling for an American Surrender in Iraq

On Christmas Day former Senator and former presidential candidate George McGovern wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times (and probably many other papers) calling for an American surrender in Iraq.

David Horowitz: George McGovern has not been in the headlines for three decades and his name consequently may be unfamiliar to many. But no one has had a greater or more baleful impact on the Democratic Party and its electoral fortunes than this progressive product of the South Dakota plains.

The leftward slide of the Democratic Party, which has made it an uncertain trumpet in matters of war and peace, may be said to have begun with the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972, whose slogan was “American come home,” as though America was the problem and not the aggression of the Communist bloc.

The organizers of the movement against the war in Vietnam were activists who thought the Communists were liberating Vietnam in the same way Michael Moore thinks Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is liberating Iraq.

In 1968, Tom Hayden and the anti-war left incited a riot at the Democratic Party convention which effectively ended the presidential hopes of the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey, who was Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President was a supporter of the war. This paved the way for George McGovern’s failed presidential run against the war in 1972.

The following year, President Nixon signed a truce in Vietnam and withdrew American troops. His goal was “peace with honor,” which meant denying a Communist victory in South Vietnam. The truce was an uneasy one depending on a credible American threat to resume hostilities if the Communists violated the truce.

Three years earlier, Nixon had signaled an end to the draft and the massive national anti-war 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 and Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.

They 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.

Within three years the Communist victors had slaughtered two and a half million peasants in the Indo-Chinese 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 anti-war activists like myself.

Along with leading Democrats like party chairman Terry McAuliffe, George McGovern called for an American retreat from Iraq even before a government could be established to deny the country 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.”

It is true that Vietnam eventually became a trading partner (“friend” is another matter). But this was not “once we left and quit bombing its people.” Before that took place, a Republican President confronted the Soviet Union in Europe and Afghanistan and forced the collapse of the Soviet empire.

It was only then, after the Cold War enemy and support of the Vietnamese Communists had been defeated that they accommodated themselves to co-existence with the United States.

The “blame America first” mentality so manifest in this McGovern statement is endemic to the appeasement mentality that the progressive Senator so typifies: “Iraq has been nestled along the Tigris and Euphrates for 6,000 years. It will be there 6,000 more whether we stay or leave, as earlier conquerors learned.”

In McGovern’s Alice-in-Wonderland universe, Iraq did not invade two countries, use chemical weapons on its Kurdish population, attempt to assassinate a U.S. president, spend tens of billions of dollars on banned weapons programs, aid and abet Islamic terrorists bent on destroying the West, and defy 17 UN resolutions to disarm itself, open its borders to UN inspectors, and adhere to the terms of the UN truce it had signed when its aggression in Kuwait was thwarted.

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 as well. The jihadists will slaughter our friends, our allies, and all of the Iraqis who are struggling for their freedom.

To McGovern we are conquerors, which makes the Zarqawi terrorists “liberators,” or as Michael Moore would prefer, “patriots.” The left that wants America to throw in the towel in Iraq is hyper-sensitive 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 such standard, and a politics of surrender is not a politics of peace.

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