Will Iraq be a Repetition of Vietnam?

Know your history or you will be condemned to repeat it. For those of you who are too young to remember the way the Democrats saw to it that we abandoned Vietnam to the communists in spite of the fact that we won the war on the ground are seeing nothing new with today's cries for leaving Iraq even though we are winning the war on the ground. Arthur Herman in his "Democrats and the Killing Field" in the Wall Street Journal, reminds us of those horrible events and what it meant for the people we were "saving" and other countries that were taken over by brutal dictatorships because they found out America was a paper tiger.

"Most people have never heard of Operation Frequent Wind, which ended on April 30, 1975, 33 years ago. But every American has seen pictures of it: the Marine helicopters evacuating the last U.S. personnel from the embassy in Saigon, hours before communist tanks rolled into the city. Thousands of desperate Vietnamese gathered at the embassy gate and begged to be taken with them. Others committed suicide."

...Actually, the U.S. had won the war in Vietnam on the battlefield, just as the surge has done today in Iraq. Over Easter 1972, South Vietnamese forces, backed by U.S. airpower, crushed the last communist offensive, killing nearly 100,000 North Vietnamese troops.

Because we left too early, Vietnamese were slaughtered after they were "liberated and the new communist regime "ordered somewhere between one- third to one-half of South Vietnam's population to pass through its "re-education" camps"...

"That number does not include the thousands of "boat people" who tried to flee the totalitarian nightmare of communist Vietnam, and perished at sea."

In Cambodia at least 1.5 million innocent Cambodians were "butchered or starved to death in the Khmer Rouge's killing fields and re-education camps..."

This pullout by the United States ushered in the most atrocious take over of various countries by the Marxist-Leninist thugs.

"Marxist-Leninist regimes emerged not only in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but in Ethiopia and Guinea Bissau (1974), Madagascar, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Angola (1975), Afghanistan (1978), and Grenada and Nicaragua (1979). Soviet troops were welcomed in Fidel Castro's Cuba for the first time since the 1962 missile crisis. Cuban troops traveled freely to Africa to prop up Marxist regimes there."

"In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeini was able to establish his brutal theocratic rule over Iran, confident that America, having learned "the lessons of Vietnam," would never intervene."

We are winning not only the war in Iraq but the hearts and minds of most of the people. Now is not the time to quit but to get the job done and finished properly. Democrats should read the history of Vietnam and realize that because of them we lost that war and the world suffered because of that.