Beldar on Goldberg and Beinart on whether Democrats have paid a political price for opposing the Vietnam War

NR/NRO's Jonah Goldberg takes issue with an op-ed in TIME in which TNR editor Peter Beinart argues that the new Democratic majority in Congress ought to "go for it" — meaning, here, Democratic party leaders continuing to act very aggressively, beyond what the Democratic Party's own center or center-right will support — in trying to end the Iraq War in very short order. As part of that argument, Mr. Beinart makes this assertion about the relevance of the political history and precedent from the controversy over the Vietnam War:

... Just before the Senate narrowly voted down a Democratic resolution calling for withdrawal in 2008, a G.O.P. staff member crowed that "the public won't go for it." Haven't the Democrats learned anything from Vietnam?

Actually, they have. Despite today's conventional wisdom, Democrats didn't suffer in the 1970s for opposing Vietnam. And they're even less likely to pay a political price for trying to end the war in Iraq.

Mr. Goldberg argues that by "going for it" in the manner suggested by Mr. Beinart, however, the Democratic leaders would do their party more damage than good:

[E]ven if you agree to his argument that Vietnam didn't hurt the Democrats in the 1970s (I think there's a debate to be had and — hey! — we just may have it)[, it] certainly hurt the Democrats in the 1980s. Reagan's popularity stemmed in large part from his ability to defeat the Vietnam syndrome. Clinton would never have been elected in 1992 with his Vietnam record if the Cold War hadn't been over, and even then it was a tough haul. The war on terror won't be over any time soon, so they can't rely on a political peace dividend the way Clinton did in 1992. And the Democrats seem to be working overtime to make their foreign policy stance as indecipherable as possible. Peter sees nuance. It's not clear to me average Americans will.

I'm not sure what I think about the ultimate issue they're debating, but on the specific issue of whether the Vietnam experience was, overall, something that hurt the Democrats, I find myself in disgusted agreement with Mr. Beinart — and in fact, I'd go farther than he does, and argue that the Democratic Party never paid a serious political price over Vietnam at any time.

Right now, though, I don't care much about whether either party pays a political price. Instead, I'm worried about the consequences for our nation, and the world, if in the current debate about Iraq, Americans fail to consider properly what happened as a result of the American abandonment of South Vietnam in 1973-1975. I'm worried about the price we'll all end up paying if we cannot overcome our national amnesia on that subject.

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To many, including probably to most of us who came into our (at least chronological) adulthood in the 1970s, there are good and handy reasons to remember that decade as if it embodied a consistent set of themes and events — the way most Americans now think of the 1950s, for example, as the "Eisenhower/'Happy Days' era." But the 1970s weren't at all homogeneous, and I think both Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Beinart err in so assuming. The 1970s actually break up into discrete and dissimilar chunks.

By January 1, 1970, there were indeed still very, very committed and defiantly radical anti-war Democrats raising hell over Vietnam. But Richard Nixon had just finished beating a Democratic centrist on war issues, Hubert Humphrey. And more to the point, Nixon was about to absolutely thrash the Democratic Party's next presidential nominee, George McGovern, whose candidacy is now remembered only for two things: He was the standard bearer for the radically anti-war hard-left in the Democratic Party, and he brought the Democratic Party to an electoral nadir exactly eight years after Lyndon Johnson had done the same thing to the Barry Goldwater-led Republicans. Throughout the first 3-1/2 years of the 1970s, the hard-core anti-war Democrats had almost completely lost traction on Vietnam — or rather, they'd been effectively outmaneuvered by Nixon's combination of successes in Vietnam (albeit controversial ones) that had permitted him to withdraw most American ground forces and his overall foreign policy success in skillfully exploiting the growing China/USSR rifts.

Mr. Beinart describes the subsequent turn-around in power, and then the effective ascendancy of the hard-core anti-war Democrats, thusly:

In 1973 the Senate voted to suspend funding for American military operations in Vietnam; the next year, Congress voted to cut off aid to the embattled government in Saigon. Some of today's commentators argue that those votes devastated the Democratic Party in the mid-1970s. But if so, the Democrats had a strange way of showing it. They won the 1974 midterm elections in a landslide. Two years later, Jimmy Carter grabbed the White House. To be sure, Watergate played a major role in those victories. But if the party's efforts to end the war weren't the primary reason for its success, they certainly didn't hurt.

Those are (mostly) the right dates. Mr. Beinart ought also have certainly included the Congressional vote in early 1975 that rejected Pres. Ford's frantic plea for financing and air support to prop up our South Vietnamese allies who, prior to 1974, had been holding their own against the North, but by early 1975 were being completely overrun in conventional military battles that American air power could have turned around without any re-commitment of American ground forces.

But Mr. Beinart just misremembers the sequence of events that led up to those Congressional votes on Vietnam in 1973-1975. The hard-core anti-war Democrats' efforts to "end the war" were not only not "the primary reason for [the party's] success," they were a politically negligible reason. Watergate and Nixon's resulting disgrace and resignation directly and damn-nearly exclusively caused not only the 1974 midterms that put the Democratic Party, still controlled by its hard-core anti-war faction, into a dominant ascendancy in Congress, but also hobbled the Republicans with an unelected incumbent whose incumbency permitted him to fend off a vastly more appealing candidate, Ronald Reagan, in 1976.

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Thus, Mr. Beinart has gotten his cause and effect confused. The actual cause of the power-shift, Watergate, had two effects relevant to this argument: It both facilitated the Congressional votes in which the hard-core anti-war Democrats finally got their way, and it also misdirected American attention from those anti-war (actually, anti-South Vietnamese ally) Congressional votes. As a result of Watergate, neither the anti-war Democrats, nor the Democratic Party as a whole, ever paid a serious political price at the polls for those votes.

And that's where Mr. Goldberg also begins to get it wrong, or at least to go off in another direction. Yes, Reagan's election in 1980 marked another tectonic shift in American politics. Yes, his eager embrace of an American return to vigorous prosecution of the Cold War and his promise to turn around the shocking decline of the American military both generated substantial political support for him; some portion of the famous "Reagan Democrats" crossed over for those reasons. But my own strong recollection is that many, and probably most, of the Reagan Democrats were motivated by disgust with 20% interest rates, stagflation, gas lines, and American impotence in the Iranian hostage affair. Essentially none of those Reagan Democrats were motivated by guilt over, or disagreement with, the 1973-1975 Congressional votes on the Vietnam War as such.

In other words, in 1980 the Democratic Party and its incumbent president certainly did pay a price — both for domestic incompetency and malaise and for flabby military and foreign policy. But except for a few of us who were already part of Reagan's base anyway, pre-April 1975 Congressional votes over the Vietnam War just weren't on anyone's radar screen anymore.

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Maybe when Mr. Beinart was discussing the Democrat Party's opposition in the 1970s to "the Vietnam War," he was indeed really intending to address something broader than those Congressional votes. Whether that was Mr. Beinart's intent or not, Mr. Goldberg certainly presumes that it was the Democratic Party's anti-war policies in the first half of the 1970s which created a broader change in American public opinion and self-assessment, the "Vietnam War Syndrome," that became a reflexive form of American self-paralysis. Mr. Goldberg then argues that the cure for that syndrome somehow exacted a political price eventually paid by Democrats in 1980 and after. (I'm a bit confused by his reference to Clinton's Vietnam draft dodging, but I interpret that to mean that the Democratic Party would have paid an even higher price for its anti-war past as late as 1992, but for the intervening end of the Cold War.)

But the history of American involvement with Vietnam, from the 1950s through 1975, is an incredibly relevant topic that should indeed affect current discussions over Iraq in many, many ways — including the military, foreign policy, and domestic political spheres. The anti-war votes in 1973 through 1975 that did indeed "end the war" are more directly relevant for those discussions about Iraq, I submit, than broader and fuzzier history on the "Vietnam War Syndrome," its cure by Reagan, the resulting end of the Cold War, the first Gulf War, and so forth.

What Mr. Goldberg says after re-defining Mr. Beinart's premise, in other words, may be true. It's just not what's important now, though.

Instead, for purposes of the current debate over Iraq, what's important about the history of American involvement in Vietnam, and especially the American abandonment of South Vietnam, is the blank spot in the American consciousness that continues to leave most Americans (most of whom now have come of age after 1975) serenely ignorant of what I believe to have been the single most shameful event in 20th Century American history. Millions of people died in Southeast Asia as the direct result of those votes by the anti-war Congress in 1973-1975. Almost none of the dead were Americans, though, and the American public was still distracted by Watergate and thoroughly exhausted by bitter arguments over Vietnam that by then dated back more than a decade. And as a result, for most Americans, those horrifying and eminently preventable events simply didn't happen.

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That's what I mean when I say that the Democratic Party never paid a price for its opposition to the Vietnam war.

When we're talking now about cutting and running from Iraq, with a risk of regional and world consequences that may well dwarf the bloodbaths in Southeast Asia after March 1975, we must, as a nation, manage to see and to appreciate — and to remember with appropriate horror and regret and, yes, shame — the blood of those millions that will forever stain American history.

Note well: I am not arguing that the piles of corpses in Cambodia's killing fields and the drowned Vietnamese boat people were intended by the Democratic Party as an institution. It wasn't the Democrats from the "Watergate Class of '74" who herded families into reeducation camps and tiger cages. Our guilt and shame ought be as enablers of madmen; our guilt and shame ought to be for failing to prevent that which we could and should, as a nation, have foreseen that the madmen would do. And in discussing the current alternatives regarding Iraq, for example, I do not think that it's particularly productive, nor even very precise, to talk about the Democratic Party's collective historical responsibility, as an institution, for the consequences of those 1973-1975 Congressional votes.

But without slapping party labels around, it is altogether appropriate — it is essential, it is a moral imperative at the risk of our collective and individual souls — that Americans finally grasp and then come to grips with what happened in Vietnam and Southeast Asia in the last half of the 1970s as a direct result of the anti-war, cut-and-run, and cut-off-the-funds politicians of either party who forced this country to abandon our allies there. The lessons here need to be learned by our nation, not just by one or the other of its political parties. In that regard, I'll appropriate Sen. McCain's comment: It's not political parties who win or lose wars; it's entire nations who win or lose wars, and it's nations who bear the consequences.

Since the Vietnam War, our military forces have learned how to conduct themselves in a way that minimizes collateral casualties among innocent civilians. Most Americans now are justly proud of our military for that (and many other things, too). But many millions of innocent civilians are once again at risk of becoming collateral casualties — not of American bombs or tanks, but of gutless and short-sighted American politicians, unless they too can manage to learn the lessons of the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

What mostly suppresses my optimism now is not doubt about whether the Iraq War is winnable, nor my concerns for whether a free Iraq can grow to independent viability. What suppresses my optimism has little to do with the Green Zone in Baghdad, but everything to do with the Capital Dome in Washington. What suppresses my optimism is my fear that anti-war American politicians will doom us to repeat a past that most Americans don't even remember ever having happened.