"There will be resolution after resolution, amendment after amendment . . . just like in the days of Vietnam.
The pressure will mount, the president will find he has no strategy, he
will have to change his strategy, and the vast majority of our troops
will be taken out of harm's way and come home."
That is the threat from Senator Schumer,
who said Democrats would be "relentless," according to a report by
Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers that was brought to our
attention Tuesday by James Taranto's Best of the Web Today on
Opinionjournal.com. The fateful — or fatal —series of votes against the
war in Vietnam came after the election of November 1974, when the
Democrats sharply expanded their control of the House of Representatives
and began moving against foreign and military aid to the free
government in the South, a government to which we were bound under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty. America had reached its peace agreement with the Vietnamese communists in 1973, but the regime in Hanoi
violated provision after provision. The votes in the 93rd and 94th
Congresses came in the face of an all-too-typical communist perfidy,
while a nation of tens of millions fought desperately to stave off a
communist conquest.
It is an astounding thing that, from a remove of but 32 years, one
of the leading figures in the Senate can boast of his plan to repeat
the betrayal of Vietnam. Those who were involved at the time, or those
who have been serious students of the period, just shake their heads in
amazement at the senator's arrogance. It is well to remember that when
the 94th United States Congress
took the step that doomed our ally, there were no American GIs fighting
in Vietnam. There was only the free government to which our country had
given its assurances and which had acted on our signal in a war in
which our own country had an interest. What happened in 1975 was not
about saving American lives. It was about saving the agenda of the left.
