Opaque Lucidity

Two More Thoughts On Yesterday

I was a little shocked when I read Peggy Noonan's column this morning. Noonan worked in the Reagan White House, so she's not exactly a lightweight conservative. Yet she expresses some reservations about the President's speech yesterday. Namely, she believes that he has thrown his weight behind the foreign policy moralists and abandoned the realist side of the coin that says we must pull our punches and realize that we can not, or should not, democratize the world.

It must be difficult to live as a journalist inside the Beltway and not become cynical. But I think Noonan is missing a few things in her analysis. While I will agree that the President's speech did seem overly optimistic on the surface, we must look at it compared to other inauguration speeches of our age. When JFK proclaimed that we would pay any price or bear any burden to insure the survival and success of liberty, he did not say American liberty. Like this President, he recognized that freedom is not given by governments, but is a right of all men for all times and places. Governments can either protect freedom or take it away; they can not erase it.

The terrorists in Iraq understand that a democratically-elected government spells the end of their way of life. In Syria and Iran and all the other Middle Eastern nations ruled by theocracies or monarchies or despots, a democracy in their midsts doubtless causes headaches. I think the President's speech was aimed squarely at those who fear freedom. It wasn't a threat of invasion, but a promise to promote democracy wherever it sprouts.

I think many pundits came away from the President's speech believeing that he wants to free the world. We can't do that, and we won't. But like the domino theory of communism, democracy has its own effect on neighboring states. We have started a fire in Iraq; the President just said that we're going to bring in more firewood.

As I watched the inaugural parade yesterday, I found myself reading the signs and listening to the chants of the the protesters. Their words were retreads of the Johnson-era "Hey, hey, LBJ..." stuff and their signs still accused the President of being a war criminal. My first thought was that each generation should have to come up with orignal anti-war slogans, but then I had a much more serious second thought, a lesson of history that the ne'er do wells holding signs will never understand.

The United States won the Vietnam War on the battlefield. After the Tet Offensive in 1968, both the Viet Cong and the NVA were decimated. But the other battle, the one taking place on college campuses and in newsrooms across this country, had a very different outcome. Over here, the left won the day. Public support for the war went away, leaving President Johnson and President Nixon after him only one choice: get us out of the war. In January, 1973, that's exactly what happened--the US signed a seperate peace treaty with the North Vietnamese.

Two years later, in April, 1975, North Vietnam completed its conquest of the South. The "brave" protesters who wanted us out of Vietnam got their wish. But the cost was steep: the communist government sent thousands to "re-education" camps and executed perhaps a million others. A million Cambodians suffered a similar fate. Thousands of families died in the Pacific while trying to escape the tyranny let loose by American abandonment. The awful lesson was that peace is not the absence of war, but instead is the absence of oppression.

Now, 30 years and a generation later, they still don't get it.

Posted by Matthew at January 21, 2005 09:33 AM