Another smart insight from Rick Perlstein from a while back about the Vietnam withdrawal and which echoes today, posted by a DKos commenter who wrote this:
Now I am against the Iraq war and have been that way since the beginning. But we also have to understand that conservatives are going to try and pin the failure of Iraq on us. We need to be aware of this and be ready to fight it. I am posting this so people can see how they did this with Viet Nam.
This story by Rick Perlstein is great. It examines the myth that congressional liberals voted to cut funds from American troops while they were still fighting in Viet Nam. It also is a good example of how the rightwing noise machine works.
Perlstein wrote this in 2007:
The fact that Hillary Clinton has to sprinkle any Iraq speech with irrelevancies about how she won’t leave American troops without armor is testament to the most perversely successful propaganda campaign in American history. And who’s the figure most responsible for the absurdity?
When Senator Hillary Clinton stepped up to the microphones Wednesday to introduce her new anti-surge bill, the language was so defensive you’d think she was proposing to outlaw Christmas–not to stop one of the most unpopular ideas a president has ever dared to propose. She framed her bill not as an effort to keep President Bush from adding more troops to Iraq (though a Newsweek poll suggests that only 23 percent of Americans support adding troops) but as a bill to add troops to Afghanistan. Most importantly, she made sure to emphasize, “I do not support cutting funding for American troops.” (She repeated that on the NewsHour the next evening: “Instead of cutting funding for American troops, which I do not support because still, to this day, we do not have all of the equipment, the armored Humvees, and the rest that our troops need… .”)
If Americans didn’t think so irrationally about war and the politics of ending it, more people might have thought to ask: Who had suggested she had? Who was she defending herself against? Why would the most cautious politician in the Senate commit anything so morally enormous as “cutting funding for American troops” as they faced a dangerous enemy on the battlefield?
It was one of those Faulknerian moments where the past is not dead–it’s not even past. In fact, no senator in history I’m aware of has ever proposed such a thing. It’s just that we think they did. There is a popular fantasy that liberals in Congress, somehow, at least metaphorically, abandoned American troops in Vietnam–and that, if liberals had their way, they’d do it again in Iraq. This notion was nurtured in the bosom of popular culture–as when Sylvester Stallone, in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), sent back to the jungles of Vietnam by his old commander, plaintively asks, “Sir, do we get to win this time?” But it survives even in elite discourse–as when Nixon’s former defense secretary, Melvin Laird, wrote–in a Foreign Affairs article called “iraq: learning the lessons of vietnam”–that “the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973.”
n 1970, during the Vietnam war, an amendment to the military procurement authorization act introduced by Republican Mark Hatfield and Democrat George McGovern proposed that, unless President Nixon sought and won a declaration of war from Congress, no money could be spent after the end of the year “for any purposes other than to pay costs relating to the withdrawal of all United States forces.” Of course, withdrawing forces is not cutting funding for them (in fact, it might have turned out to be more expensive in the short term), and Hatfield-McGovern never got more than 42 votes in the Senate–even though, in its second go-round in 1971, 73 percent of the public supported it.
The first time the Senate actually voted to suspend funding for American military activities in Vietnam was in the summer of 1973, two months after the last American combat brigades left, by the terms of a peace treaty Nixon negotiated. That amendment passed by a veto-proof majority–encompassing Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals–of 64 to 26.
Peace was not quite at hand in Vietnam. The corrupt, incompetent, and hardly legitimate South Vietnamese government in Saigon was fighting for its life against the advancing Communist forces from the North. Early in 1974, Nixon requested a support package for the South Vietnamese that included $474 million in emergency military aid. The Senate Armed Services Committee balked and approved about half. A liberal coup? Hardly. One of the critics was Senator Barry Goldwater. “We can scratch South Vietnam,” he said. “It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of North Vietnam.”
The House turned down the president’s emergency aid request 177 to 154; the majority included 50 Republicans. They were only, as I wrote in The New Republic (“The Unrealist,” November 6, 2006), honoring what Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger privately believed. They had gladly negotiated their peace deal under the assumption that South Vietnam would fall when the United States left. What would it have cost to keep South Vietnam in existence without an American military presence? The Pentagon, in 1973, estimated $1.4 billion even for an “austere program.” Nixon and Kissinger were glad for the $700 million South Vietnam eventually got (including a couple hundred million for military aid), because their intention was merely to prop up Saigon for a “decent interval” until the American public forgot about the problem. By 1974, Kissinger pointed out, “no one will give a damn.”
Apparently, they didn’t tell Gerald Ford. He addressed the nation in April of 1975, eight months after becoming president, and implored Congress for $722 million in military aid. The speech was overwhelmingly and universally unpopular–the kind of thing that made Ford seem such a joke to the nation at the time. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called it “blundering.” Seventy-eight percent of the public was against any further military aid; Republicans like James McClure of Idaho and Harry Bellmon of Oklahoma opposed the appropriation. Republican dove Mark Hatfield said, “I am appalled that a man would continue in such a bankrupt policy”–and Democratic hawk Scoop Jackson said, “I oppose it. I don’t know of any on the Democratic side who will support it.” The Senate vote against it was 61 to 32.
Leading up to the vote, however, Saint Gerald made extraordinary claims–saying that “just a relatively small additional commitment” to Vietnam (compared with the $150 billion already spent there) could “have met any military challenges.” With it, “this whole tragedy”–the imminent fall of Saigon–“could have been eliminated.”
So much for the Pentagon’s claim that $1.4 billion would be an “austere program.” So much for Nixon and Kissinger’s belief that “South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway.” Ford’s miraculous $722 million somehow became enshrined in public memory as the margin that assured American dishonor. As Laird put it in that Foreign Affairs essay, “[W]e grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory. … We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973.”
The public memory of congressional votes on Vietnam from 1970 through 1975 is almost hallucinogenically jumbled. Republican propagandists rely on the confusion. This slender reed of a myth–that congressional liberals are responsible for the fall of South Vietnam–conflates the failed 1970-1971 votes to end the war in South Vietnam, and the overwhelmingly popular (and, on Nixon and Kissinger’s terms, strategically irrelevant) vote to limit military aid to South Vietnam. It is but a short leap for a public less informed than Laird to reach the Rambo conclusion: that this was just the last in a comprehensive train of abuses–exclusively Democratic and liberal–that kept us from “winning” in Vietnam. And that, adding in the mythology about prisoners of war in Vietnam, American troops were, roughly speaking, “abandoned” there.”
It requires some filthy lies to sustain. But the fact that a sad old man is allowed to propound some of them in the foreign policy establishment’s journal of record shows how successful it remains. And the fact that the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to take it as second nature that she has to defend herself against them shows it, too. Stop it now. No responsible American politician has ever cut funding an American troop needed to fight while he or she was in the field. No responsible American politician ever would. Limiting the number of troops in the theater of operations is not cutting funding for American troops. Neither, of course, is withdrawing them “over the horizon.”
Something to keep in mind today, no?
