“There will be resolution after resolution, amendment after amendment . . . just like in the days of Vietnam. The pressure will mount, the president will find he has no strategy, he will have to change his strategy, and the vast majority of our troops will be taken out of harm’s way and come home.”

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That is the threat from Senator Schumer, who said Democrats would be “relentless,” according to a report by Margaret Talev of McClatchy Newspapers that was brought to our attention Tuesday by James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today on Opinionjournal.com. The fateful — or fatal —series of votes against the war in Vietnam came after the election of November 1974, when the Democrats sharply expanded their control of the House of Representatives and began moving against foreign and military aid to the free government in the South, a government to which we were bound under the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty. America had reached its peace agreement with the Vietnamese communists in 1973, but the regime in Hanoi violated provision after provision. The votes in the 93rd and 94th Congresses came in the face of an all-too-typical communist perfidy, while a nation of tens of millions fought desperately to stave off a communist conquest.

It is an astounding thing that, from a remove of but 32 years, one of the leading figures in the Senate can boast of his plan to repeat the betrayal of Vietnam. Those who were involved at the time, or those who have been serious students of the period, just shake their heads in amazement at the senator’s arrogance. It is well to remember that when the 94th United States Congress took the step that doomed our ally, there were no American GIs fighting in Vietnam. There was only the free government to which our country had given its assurances and which had acted on our signal in a war in which our own country had an interest. What happened in 1975 was not about saving American lives. It was about saving the agenda of the left.

Mr. Schumer was mostly out of the struggle against communism in Indochina. We do not say that Mr. Schumer is without patriotism or even his share of endearing qualities. But in the struggle to save the people of South Vietnam from falling into the long, dark night of communism, not a mote of honor attached to Mr. Schumer’s breast. This week, while the senator was citing Vietnam as the model for a relentless campaign in the Congress to force our retreat from Iraq, he made no mention at all of the hundreds of thousands who died in communist re-education camps, of the millions who died in the killing fields of Cambodia, of the hundreds of thousands of boat people, who, once Vietnam fell, took to the seas in rickety boats in a flight to freedom that inspired the world.

Mr. Taranto, in his post on Tuesday, noted a number of ironies about Mr. Schumer’s comments. Mr. Taranto observed that “anti-war ideologues” – including what Mr. Taranto called a significant number of elected Democrats – “viewed America’s defeat in Vietnam as a victory for them – the enemy of my country is my friend and all that.” But, Mr. Taranto went on, Mr. Schumer “is no antiwar ideologue,” having voted for the Iraq war. He reckoned that Mr. Schumer’s “eagerness for another Vietnam can be explained only as an act of political opportunism.” Yet he noted that it is hard to see “any way in which Democrats benefited politically from becoming the anti-Vietnam party.”

Senator McGovern, Mr. Taranto pointed out, won but a single state in 1972, and the party’s gains in 1974 and victory in 1976 owed more to Watergate than Vietnam. As we were reading that column, news was coming in of a new poll that disclosed Americans, as the New York Post reported, “still want to win the war in Iraq – and keep American troops there until the Baghdad government can take over.” The Post reported that “by 53 percent to 43 percent” Americans “also believe victory in Iraq over the insurgents is still possible.” And 57% of Americans support finishing the job in the Battle of Iraq. The contrast between these views and those of Mr. Schumer and the congressional Democrats just couldn’t be in sharper relief.

What New Yorkers can makeof it all is that this war is far from over. The Democrats may be full of themselves now, but the war debate has its own ebb and flow. People are only in the earliest stages of reasoning out what a retreat in Iraq would mean – for Iraq itself, for its neighbors, for Israel, and for America. The Democrats have only begun their “relentless” campaign to force a retreat, and many have only begun thinking it through. Mr. Schumer was young at the time of Vietnam, and he had no investment in the war. But one of the things we learned in the wake of Vietnam was that even some on the left came to have regrets about their betrayal of the cause of freedom in Southeast Asia – and the hard facts of history have a relentlessness of their own.