Text 24713, 94 rader
Skriven 2006-11-09 08:48:09 av Sean Dennis (1:18/200.0)
Ärende: Stuck in the '60s
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Hello, All.

I subscribe to US News and World Report (thanks to my mother-in-law, it's been
a perennial Christmas present for about two years now :).  There was an
excellent opinion piece in there that I thought said some good points, so I
found the online version and am posting it here.

As a veteran, I agree with the overall tone and points of this too.

===Cut===
From:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/061105/13barone.htm

Stuck in the '60s

By Michael Barone

Posted Sunday, November 5, 2006

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your
homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you
get stuck in Iraq." Those two sentences, spoken by John Kerry last week, tell a
lot about the mind-set of many-not all, but many-Democrats who supported him
for president in 2004 and who, as this is written, are looking forward to
Democratic victories this week. One thing they tell us is that Kerry's mind-set
is still back in the Vietnam era. Today the statement is literally untrue: No
one is "stuck in Iraq" unless he or she volunteers, and the educational and
economic levels of our military personnel are higher than those of civilians in
the same age cohort. Kerry was evidently thinking back to the late 1960s, when
there was a military draft and a college dropout could find himself drafted and
"stuck" in Vietnam.

Kerry's explanation for his bizarre refusal to apologize for two days and then
his grudging off-camera apology was that he was trying to make a joke about the
stupidity of George W. Bush (even though Kerry's grades at Yale were slightly
lower than Bush's). But his words were not wholly out of line with previous
statements by him and other Democrats characterizing American troops as
perpetrators rather than heroes. There was Kerry's 1971 "Genghis Khan"
testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as his
December 2005 statement that troops were "terrorizing" women and children. Sen.
Dick Durbin likened American service members to Nazi storm troopers and the
Khmer Rouge, and Sen. Edward Kennedy suggested that Abu Ghraib under our "new
management" was comparable to Saddam Hussein's regime of torture and murder.
Behind all these statements is an unspoken assumption that American service
members are incompetent and vicious.

It's unusual in American history for a conflict to be seen by a substantial
part of the political class through the lens of an earlier war. Yet many
Democrats view Iraq through the lens of Vietnam-or their version of it. Now, as
then, they want to see American withdrawal even if that means defeat. Yet Iraq
is plainly not Vietnam. There were more than 20 times as many American deaths
in Vietnam as there have been in Iraq. And withdrawal from Iraq would be vastly
more dangerous than withdrawal from Vietnam turned out to be.

To be sure, our withdrawal from Vietnam was bad for the Vietnamese. There was,
contrary to Kerry's prediction at the time, a bloodbath, and the Vietnamese
lived under a cruel communist dictatorship. But the dominoes did not fall
beyond Indochina because, unnoticed by war backers and opponents, other East
Asian states-South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore,
Indonesia-were launching a free-market economic boom. The Vietnam War gave them
time to get started. These countries had rule of law and in time developed
democracies.

Purple fingers. Iraq is not in such a good neighborhood. Nearby are Iran, the
leading supporter of international terrorism, busy developing nuclear weapons;
Syria, headquarters of many terrorist groups; and Saudi Arabia, where
petrodollars are used to disseminate totalitarian Wahhabism around the world.
Premature withdrawal from Iraq would give terrorists more space and time to
plan and prepare attacks on us beyond Iraq, and a visible defeat for the United
States would exhilarate the followers of Osama bin Laden and other
Islamofascist terrorists. It would leave unprotected the brave Iraqis who
risked death to vote in three elections and held up their purple fingers in
triumph.

About all this John Kerry, to judge from his changing positions on Iraq,
doesn't seem to much care. Rather, he and his ilk seem bent, as they did in the
1970s, on establishing who our heroes should and should not be. They should not
be members of the American military, who are portrayed as depraved or
incompetent. They should be the antiwar protesters, the professors and
intellectuals, the sophisticated elites who know better than ordinary Americans
and the servicemen and women what's in the world's best interest. They should
be people who believe that fighting those who want to destroy us only makes
them madder and that withdrawal will assuage their grievances so they will
leave us alone. It turned out that withdrawing from Vietnam did not cause us
irretrievable damage. But will we be so lucky if we leave Iraq too soon?
===Cut===
 
Later,
Sean

// sean@outpostbbs.net | Blog: http://meseems.wordpress.com | ICQ: 19965647

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