James Taranto of Opinion Journal Online has a great piece today (subs req) entitled “It Didn’t Happen” and serves as a clear reminder that Democrats are ill prepared to defend America and Western Civilization from the Jihadist Threat we today face- not to mention a blithe disregard for the potential bloodbath that would ensue in Iraq if America were to precipitously withdraw troops as Murtha, Reid, Pelosi, and the NY Times Editorial Board have called for.
Obama last week in an interview with the AP had this to say of a proposed Iraq withdrawal:
“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Mr. Obama told the AP. “We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.”
Taranto correctly points out the inherent flaw in Obama’s convoluted “reasoning.”
Mr. Obama is engaging in sophistry. By his logic, if America lacks the capacity to intervene everywhere there is ethnic killing, it has no obligation to intervene anywhere — and perhaps an obligation to intervene nowhere. His reasoning elevates consistency into the cardinal virtue, making the perfect the enemy of the good. Further, he elides the distinction between an act of omission (refraining from intervention in Congo and Darfur) and an act of commission (withdrawing from Iraq). The implication is that although the U.S. has had a military presence in Iraq since 1991, the fate of Iraqis is not America’s problem.
Making a similar plea for withdrawal Senator “botched joke” Kerry (who served in Viet Nam by the way), had this to say:
We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia, and it didn’t happen,” he said recently.
Excuse me but is Senator Kerry smoking some of that tai stick that he may have picked up in that Christmas in Cambodia he so clearly remembers?
It “didn’t happen” Senator? And this guy was within about 150,000 votes of the Oval Office?
In case you have forgotten Senator Kerry, here is what “didn’t happen.”
In 1973, the U.S. withdrew its troops from Vietnam, as Mr. Kerry had urged. In December 1974, the Democratic Congress ended military aid to South Vietnam. In April 1975, Saigon fell. According to a 2001 investigation by the Orange County Register, Hanoi’s communist regime imprisoned a million Vietnamese without charge in “re-education” camps, where an estimated 165,000 perished. “Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed,” the Register reported. Laos and Cambodia also fell to communists in 1975. Time magazine reported in 1978 that some 40,000 Laotians had been imprisoned in re-education camps…The postwar horrors of Vietnam and Laos paled next to the “killing fields” of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge undertook an especially vicious revolution. During that regime’s 3½-year rule, at least a million Cambodians, and perhaps as many as two million, died from starvation, disease, overwork or murder. The Vietnamese invaders who toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979 were liberators, albeit only by comparison.
For a party that claims to represent the downtrodden and disadvantaged, Democrats display an unsettling and almost eerie apathy and disregard to the possibility of genocide in Iraq.
For politicians like Obama and Kerry who are often portrayed by the media as intelligent, they sure do have short memories.