What Does Surrender Look Like?

Both Democrat presidential candidates have pledged to pull our troops out of Iraq the moment they get into the White House. They think this is what the American people want, though I would argue it's only what the far Left-wing fringe wants - normal Americans want the troops home, but not if it means surrendering. So, if the Dems get their way and pull out of Iraq, what does that surrender look like?

Arthur Herman at the Wall Street Journal gives us the answer with this perspective piece about the last time this sort of scenario happened. Excerpts:

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.

Those scenes are a chilling reminder of what happens when a great power decides to cut and run. Two of the three presidential candidates are proposing to do just that in Iraq. We need to remember what happened the last time we gave up on an unpopular foreign policy, not only in humanitarian terms but in terms of American power and prestige.

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.

The North was forced to sign peace accords in Paris recognizing the Republic of South Vietnam. The last 2,500 U.S. support troops went home. What they left was a fragile but sustainable peace, and an elected government in Saigon that was growing stronger every month.

But with 160,000 North Vietnamese soldiers still in South Vietnam, keeping the South free was going to require continued U.S. help, especially air support and military equipment if the North ever attacked again.

Democrats and American public opinion, however, had had enough. Much like Iraq today, the vast majority of South Vietnam had been pacified. Its government was taking on difficult but essential political changes, including land reform. The Democratic-controlled Congress, however, did not want to hear about success. They assumed failure in Vietnam would complete their rout of the hated Richard Nixon, who was already out of office thanks to Watergate, and position them for victory in the 1976 presidential election.

Meanwhile, the American public had been conditioned by the media to see Vietnam as a failed policy, and taught that America had gotten itself in the middle of a "civil war" which the Vietnamese had to sort out themselves. Once the last American troops left Vietnam, public opinion would never tolerate re-entry into a war widely seen as a blunder and endless quagmire.

After we pulled out, the media breathed a sigh of relief. For example, the [New York] Times's columnist Anthony Lewis asked, "what future could possibly be more terrible than the reality" of a war that had cost so much in lives and treasure?

Sadly, the world was going to find out soon, and in brutal fashion.

At least 65,000 Vietnamese were murdered or shot after "liberation" – the equivalent in terms of Vietnam's population at the time, of killing three-quarters of a million people in today's U.S. The new communist regime ordered somewhere between one- third to one-half of South Vietnam's population to pass through its "re-education" camps, where perhaps as many as 250,000 died of disease, starvation, or were worked to death (the last inmates were not released until 1986).

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

Cambodia's fate was even worse. At least one and a half million innocent Cambodians were butchered or starved to death in the Khmer Rouge's killing fields and re-education camps, put to death by a fanatical regime that believed that anyone who wore eyeglasses must have "bourgeois intellectual tendencies" and be shot.

But that wasn't all. There was a major hit to American prestige and power, with opportunist regimes rushing to fill the vacuum of power:

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're still dealing with the problems of Iran today, and it has never been more precarious.

History has not been kind to American actions (our leaders, not our military) during that time. For example, "Winston Churchill said of the appeasement of Hitler at Munich, in 1975 Americans were 'weighed in the balance and found wanting.'"

Now, here's the key thing we need to take from this column. The situation in Iraq has some striking resemblances. We have seen incredible success on the ground in the military sense. The fledgling Iraqi government is working hard to get things off the ground, but without a U.S. military presence there, they are likely to fold. There are evil, destructive regimes -- Iran, Syria, Al Qaeda, Hamas -- waiting to rush in and fill a power vacuum.

Herman's conclusion is absolutely correct:

"We have a responsibility to the Iraqis – and to the memory of those we left behind – not to let that happen again."

Elections have consequences. One of the most obvious in this particular election is who gains control of the military. Either Democrat -- though Hillary has admittedly talked significantly tougher than Obama has -- will immediately surrender all the gains, both military and political, we have made in Iraq. The sacrifice of our troops will have been in vain, and American prestige and influence will suffer a hit from which we may never recover.

A simple history lesson shows us what happened the last time American politicians engineered a political defeat out of a military victory. Are we really prepared to elect another American politician who would do precisely the same thing again?

There's my two cents.