The North Vietnamese Communists Weren’t So Bad...

It's interesting to see how debates on the Obama administration's foreign policy are playing out on the left.

As I noted the other day - and Jason at The Westen Experience has picked up - the left is spinning a triumphalist meme on the redeployment from Iraq. With public opinion finding a majority of Americans seeing the war as won, Democrats have shifted to the stance of progressive wise men.

A couple of posts I'm reading this morning got me thinking some more about this. One of these is NeoNeocon's post on Vietnam and the antiwar movement, "Advocating Defeat Without Consequences: “Ending” the War. This passage is key:

The Left ... has always blamed America’s actions during the Vietnam war—and especially the bombing of Cambodia—for the ascendance of the brutal Pol Pot regime and its later killing fields (see this article, especially pages 6-7, for an argument against that controversial theory, as well as an explanation of its journalistic origins). The Left has also consistently minimized the suffering of the people of South Vietnam when the North took over. To the Left, the Northern Vietnamese Communists weren’t so bad, and the Cambodian Communists (who even they have to admit were pretty nasty folk) would never have succeeded but for the actions of the US in fighting them and their North Vietnamese allies.

Not only does the Left whitewash the consequences of the American defeat in Vietnam. I’ll go even further and say that to the Left, the Vietnam pullout was actually a victory—for them. It’s something they had promoted for a long time, and they finally won. What’s more, except for the rare Vietnam revisionist historian, their version of history won; it has come to dominate the texts and the press. And so the Left neither wanted—nor needed—to look at the negative consequences of the defeat for others.

The second post I'm reading is Mark Harvey's, "Callin' All The Clans Together," which adds some profane outrage at the antiwar defeatism on both left and right:

Personally, I didn't bleed for this Nation, nor did I carry one of my best friends trying to get him to safety and medical attention as his blood ran down my back just to have some limp-wristed holier-than-thou "get along with the enemy" conservatives tell me that I am a goddamn fucking black helicopter republican. First off, I am not a republican. I am a pissed off DAVFW and if any of the above offends you, kiss my ass. By the way, my friend made it back to safety after his life left him. His last words to me were, "Hey man. Get your hand off my cod sack bitch." He died 5 minutes later. Fuck Obama.

I want to stress Mark mention of the "get along" conservatives, who are the very same "antiwar conservatives" who have made common cause with anti-Americans of the far left.