Drawing the Wrong Conclusions

I don't often have to disagree with Christopher Hitchens but his latest piece attacking Bush's comparison of an Iraq withdrawal to the US pull-out from Vietnam is nothing short of preposterous. To begin with, here's what Bush actually said-

"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush told members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at their convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

"Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields,' " the president said.

It seems to me to be a clear enough point- the US pulled out of Vietnam and in the vacuum left behind, millions of people suffered. Hitchens begs to differ-

I cannot see how any self-respecting Republican can look at this record [factors leading up to and during the war] without wincing and moaning with shame or how any former friend of the Vietnamese can equate them with either a fascist dictatorship or a nihilistic Islamist death-squad campaign. And now Bush has joined forces with anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan in making the two struggles morally equivalent.

I must have missed the part where Bush compared the Vietnamese to the jihadists. Oh, wait, he didn't actually do that at all.

It is true that the collapse of the doomed American adventure in Indochina was followed by massive repression and reprisal, especially in Cambodia, and by the exile of huge numbers of talented Vietnamese. But even this grim total was small compared to the huge losses exacted by the war itself. In Iraq, the genocide, repression, aggression and cultural obliteration preceded the coalition's intervention and had been condemned by a small but impressive library of UN resolutions. Thus, the argument from 'bloodbath', either past or future, has to be completely detached from any consideration of the Vietnamese example.

Which to me seems to be completely misrepresenting Bush's point- when the Americans left Vietnam some 2 million people died in the Cambodian killing fields, several hundred thousand South Vietnamese were imprisoned in re-education camps without trial and over 100,000 died and others were tortured (and the camps, by the way, were a clear violation of international law and the peace agreement that led to the US pull-out- those UN resolutions that Hitchen's hails will mean nothing whatsoever and do nothing whatsoever to stop any mass slaughter in Iraq), and over a million boat people were forced to flee the persecution. The US pull-out led to these things happening and Bush's simple point is that another US pull-out will lead to another genocide, another round of retaliation against those who supported or work for the democratically elected Iraqi government, and will no doubt also result in another mass exodus as Iraqis flee from the slaughter. I don't think anyone can reasonably take Bush's statement as any comparison between what the Vietminh or the Baathists did during World War 2. And to declare that the genocide and repression took place before the war started is to vastly misunderstand the character and history of the jihadists who think nothing of committing mass murder against civilians- in fact, if there were a criticism of the Vietnam aftermath comparison it's that, as terrible as the communists were, they pale in comparison to the bloodthirsty jihadists and the violent and repressive sharia regime they strive to implement- there will be no re-education with them, only murder.