Occupiers versus liberators, part II

Some of my commenters to my wee-small-hours post about Sen. Zell Miller's "occupiers versus liberators" line have been claiming "Gotcha!" — pointing to, for example, President Bush's description of our presence in Iraq, until the recent return of sovereignty, as an "occupation."  Word games of this sort bring out the rant subroutine in the Beldar programming.

Look, this is really simple.  Kerry knew damned well the difference between "liberator" and "occupier," and which term he associated with both German invaders and American troops in Vietnam.  Kerry thought America in Vietnam was like Germany in France.  Is that simple enough for you?  If not, let me boil it down a little more:

Kerry thought we were the bad guys.  There, that's the absolute nub.

Now, for those who want to pick a further fight over semantics with the crusty, less-bemused-than-usual trial lawyer who writes this blog: 

You occupy a country when your military forces have entered its territory, you've defeated its or any other hostile military forces, and you've displaced the existing regime.  Thus, we were indeed "occupying" Iraq until we returned its sovereignty because, yes indeed, we overthrew its previous government and defeated its military.  If we had gone home the day after accomplishing that, we'd have been solely conquerors, but neither occupiers nor effective liberators (since chaos and anarchy would have prevailed).

If you've deposed a despot and you use the military power you have as an occupier of a country to put political power back into the hands of its people through their democratically chosen representatives, then you're a liberator.  Hence:  In Germany and Japan after World War II, we were both liberators and, until we returned sovereignty to their peoples, occupiers.  Ditto Iraq and Afghanistan today.

By contrast, consider German forces in any of a dozen countries during World War II.  They were definitely occupiers and not liberators:  They'd deposed the existing democratic governments of those countries and defeated their military forces, and Germany's own military forces had seized possession of those countries' territory and maintained that hold through brutal force, and they'd set up military governments or Quisling puppets.  The people there weren't free, nor did they have a prospect of becoming free, nor a prospect of becoming self-governing, for as long as the Nazi occupation lasted.  And there was no natural end in sight for these Nazi occupations (other than through conquest by a different, superior military force). 

Garrett Morris will now shout this very loudly for the very, very hard of hearing:  Recapping our top story tonight — this is the kind of occupier Kerry thought we were in Vietnam — perpetrators of a perpetual occupation designed to destroy the liberty of a country's citizenry!

In Vietnam, our armed forces were there by invitation of that country's government.  Maybe that government was inept or riddled with corruption, and maybe it was far from being a classical liberal democracy like, say, Iowa.  But it was not the South Vietnamese government that was slaughtering tens of thousands outright, putting hundreds of thousands into "re-education camps," and creating millions of refugees; that didn't come until 1975, when the North Vietnamese became the bad-guy kind of occupiers. 

Indeed, in Vietnam we weren't ever occupiers, technically speaking.  We didn't get there by defeating the South Vietnamese military and deposing its government, we were there by invitation — as we were in the still-free parts of France in World War I and in South Korea.  We were defenders primarily, and liberators insofar as we recovered enemy-occupied territory for the regimes who'd invited us to help defend themselves from an external threat.

So, don't give me word games about "Bush said we're occupiers, blah blah blah."  Zell Miller knew exactly what he was saying when he spoke of "occupiers" last night, and everyone listening to him understood what he meant.  John Kerry knew exactly what he was writing when he spoke of "occupiers" in 1968-1969, and everyone reading his words understands exactly what he meant.  For once, Kerry didn't flip-flop or contradict himself:  He was very consistent in calling the American presence in Vietnam an "occupation" and the American military presence an "occupying army" — and in case you had any difficulty following him, he said, in so many words, that we were the bad-guy liberty-destroying type of occupiers, just like Germany. 

Zell Miller could — and probably should — have read from Brinkley's book to make his point about Democratic leaders who see our troops as occupiers instead of liberators.  Supplementing his point with factual backup was the simple point of my original post.  But only someone willfully obtuse can fail to understand "us bad, others good" — and if you pretend you can't follow that distinction, expect to be ranted at by your host.

Note well:  I genuinely don't know whether John Kerry also thinks our troops in Iraq or Afghanistan today are the bad-guy liberty-destroying type of occupiers.  If Kerry wants to rebut that argument, he can stand up and say he was wrong about our troops being that kind of occupiers in Vietnam then, and that he agrees our troops are "liberators" (and were only temporary, good-guy occupiers) in Iraq and Afghanistan now. 

But he won't do that, and he can't do that.  Whatever he really thinks of our troops today, saying that now would cost him his Angry-Left base who genuinely believe that our troops and their leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan — just exactly as Kerry did of our troops and their leaders in Vietnam — are the non-liberating bad-guy Nazi-scum kind of "occupiers."  You know — the blood-for-oil imperial-stormtrooper baby-killer kind of occupiers.  [Add additional slurs of your choice for our troops here, chosen at random from either Kerry's 1971 Fulbright Committee testimony or Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.]

Any questions?  Or am I "scaring the children," like Zell did?