Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Dark Years After Vietnam

Brendan Miniter says Democrats have forgotten:

The Vietnamese call the two decades that followed the fall of Saigon in 1975 the "Dark Years." That period came to a close only after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire, when the regime in Hanoi, though still communist, began to liberalize. The U.S. didn't suffer for nearly as long--Jimmy Carter was a one-term president, after all--but the blow to American confidence was nonetheless severe. It wasn't until the first Gulf War in 1991 that the U.S. was willing to put hundreds of thousands of boots on foreign ground again to wage a large-scale military invasion. And in the years that followed, President Clinton again hesitated to use American troops on foreign soil after 18 soldiers were killed in the streets of Mogadishu. Mr. Clinton did wage war in Kosovo, but only from the skies. And as late as the invasion of Afghanistan in the weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks, serious people were still warning of "another Vietnam" in the far-flung mountains that had once swallowed up Soviet troops.

Liberals no longer want America involved in "foreign wars", even if the enemy comes here. Personally, I don't see where the Party which lost Vietnam, almost lost us the Cold War, and did very little against terrorism in the 90's has any right to question Republicans on National Security.