http://www.townhall.com/columnists/davidhorowitz/dh20041227.shtml
The McGovern syndrome: A surrender is not a peace
David Horowitz
December 27, 2004
On Christmas Day, former U.S. senator and Democratic 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.
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 McGovern campaign drew in the rank and file of the
anti-Vietnam Left, much like the anti-Cold War Henry Wallace Progressive
Party campaign of 1948 and the Howard Dean anti-Iraq campaign of 2004.
McGovern himself was a veteran of the Wallace campaign and, virtually all
the leaders of the anti-Iraq movement, including most of the Democratic
Party leaders who supported it, are veterans of the anti-Vietnam campaign.
I have lived this history as both spectator and actor. My parents were
Communists, and my first political march was a Communist Party May Day
parade in 1948 supporting the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace and the
Progressive Party against the Cold War - which meant against America's
effort to contain Communism and prevent Stalin's regime from expanding its
empire into Western Europe. Our chant was this: "One, two, three, four, we
don't want another war/Five, six, seven, eight, win with Wallace in '48."
This campaign was the seed of the antiwar movement of Vietnam, and thus of
the political Left's influence over the post-Vietnam foreign policy of the
Democratic Party. The Wallace campaign marked an exodus of the anti-American
Left from the Democratic Party; the movement that opposed America's war in
Vietnam marked its return.
As a post-graduate student at Berkeley in the early Sixties, I was one of
the organizers of the first demonstration against the war in Vietnam. It was
1962, and the organizers of this demonstration as of all the major
anti-Vietnam demonstrations (and those against the Iraq war as well) were a
Marxist and a leftist, respectively. 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 antiwar 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 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."[1]
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.
It is true that Vietnam eventually became a trading partner ("friend" is
another matter). But this was not true that it occurred "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.
During the battle over Vietnam policy thirty years ago, Nixon and supporters
of the war effort had warned the antiwar Left of the consequences that would
follow if their campaign was successful. If the United States were to
retreat from the field of battle, the Communists would engineer a
"bloodbath" of revenge and complete their revolutionary design. When
confronted by these warnings, George McGovern, John Kerry, and other
anti-Vietnam activists dismissed them out of hand. This was just an attempt
to justify an imperialist aggression, they assured the public. Time proved
the antiwar activists to be tragically, catastrophically wrong, although
they have never had the decency to admit it.
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.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2004.
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