Mission Accomplished?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
We’ve asked this question in these columns before, but, with the withdrawal of the last combat brigade from Iraq in the news this week, we’re inclined to ask it again: When the 94th United States Congress betrayed Free Vietnam and cut off all funding for the war there, how many American combat troops were in the embattled Southeast Asian nation?
The answer, of which we were once reminded by Secretary of State Kissinger at an editorial dinner of the Sun, was zero. GIs with a combat role had long since departed Vietnam when Congress, disregarding pleas from Mr. Kissinger and President Ford, shut down the war, casting Indochina to the communists and into a generation of darkness and death.
So forgive us for striking a note of caution as the pictures move over the wires of American men and materiel coming out of Iraq. The government in Baghdad may be more democratic and pro-American than other Arab governments, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be betrayed in the halls of Congress. In 1974, when President Nixon resigned, there was but what we once called a “doughty little government in South Vietnam” that was prepared to fight for its freedom — against an army backed by the Communist empire — for another generation.
Yet the Congress, it turned out, proved unprepared to stake them. It voted in October 1974 to end foreign aid to Vietnam. When President Ford vetoed the measure, Congress, emboldened by the elections that expanded its Democratic majority, overrode the veto. In the spring, the 94th Congress blocked military appropriations for the South Vietnamese. It seems that for our Congress the problem was not, if it had ever been, the danger to our GIs. Vietnam, a country of 50 million individuals who had sided with America and yearned for freedom, was cast into the dark night of communist tyranny.
We don’t make any predictions about what the Congress is going to do now that President Obama has withdrawn the last combat brigade from a country where, during his campaign, he insisted we never should have fought a war. We simply offer a lesson from history. When the Congress talks about bringing our GIs home, our enemies are emboldened and trouble lies around the corner. The fact is that the cause of freedom is less secure when American GIs come home than when they venture abroad.
