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 Marching
to Yesterday’s Drums
Liberal denial…
[Gordon Cucullu] 10/7/05
Peace marches,
anti-war tirades, diatribes against the president, hand-painted
signs, banal slogans, and costumed demonstrators. Sounds familiar?
It does to those of us old enough to remember the anti-Vietnam
War hysteria of the late 1960s. But no, it’s just the
latest outburst from vocal, frustrated, blame America first
leftists. They are trying desperately to regain their power
from those days when they pushed the country into abandoning
an ally – admittedly a less than perfect one - to merciless
communist invaders. America shamefully withdrew support for
South Vietnam. It was a strange, convoluted ideological union
of Nixonian realpolitik and pro-communist appeasement. The
North Vietnamese immediately overran the country with massive
military forces. They instituted the classic communist political
control that resulted in hundreds of thousands of executions,
and in imprisonment and oppression for the surviving population.
So-called Boat People risked rape, robbery, torture, and murder
as they sailed the hostile waters of the South China Sea fleeing
communist oppressors.
Contributor
Gordon Cucullu
Former
Green Beret lieutenant colonel, Gordon Cucullu is now
an editorialist, author and a popular speaker. Born
into a military family, he lived and served for more
than thirteen years in East Asia, including eight years
in Korea. For his Special Forces service in Vietnam
he was awarded a Bronze Star, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry,
and the Presidential Unit Commendation. After separation
from the Army, he worked on Korea and East Asian affairs
at both the Pentagon and Department of State as well
as an executive for General Electric in Korea. His
first major non-fiction work, Separated
at Birth: How North Korea became the Evil Twin,
is based in large part on his extensive experience
in Korea and East Asia as a governmental insider and
businessman. [website]
[go to Cucullu index]
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Today, in
another bizarre marriage of ideologies that produce aberrant
offspring,
an element of the surviving realpolitik wing
(the “paleoconservatives”) still resist American
intervention in Iraq and the Middle East. They are joined but
overshadowed by the more vocal and considerably nastier hard
left anti-war leaders and the useful idiots who make up their
sign-carrying crowds. As has been extensively documented in David
Horowitz’s discoverthenetwork.org, a large percentage of
the people screaming for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq and
condemning George Bush and American intervention of any kind,
even for self-defense, have credentials dating back to the anti-war
days of the 1960s.
I was near Montpelier,
VT making some presentations to conservative audiences on foreign
policy and Islamofascist issues and was
unaware of the “peace” demonstrations until we drove
past one on the way to the airport. While parts of Vermont can
be a time warp, this was almost a caricature of a Sixties peacenik
demonstration, led by aging, overweight ex-hippies in costume.
Man, these people have aged. And not well, for the most part.
I suppose the mirror doesn’t do favors for most of us,
but they looked as Don Meredith used to say, like they’d
been “rode hard and put away wet.”
Interestingly, with
the exception of very young children in strollers there were
very few young people to be seen. Later,
on the flight leg from Washington Dulles to Jacksonville, my
accidental seat companion, who had come to DC to participate
in the march, told me that she guessed that fewer than 50% of
the peace demo crowd in DC had been young people. I expect that
absence of the draft in favor of the all-volunteer military – a
significant change from the conscription days of Vietnam – has
dampened the anti-war fervor among young people. At that time
we suspected that the issue was more personal safety than moral
outrage. Another strong probability is that young people are
different today. They are better informed, they have more faith
in God and country than their Boomer parents and grandparents
did. Just as youth rebelled against institutions in the 1960s,
youth is doing it again now. Hence despite hysterical rhetoric
from the left we continue to see soldiers re-enlist at record
rates, like the late Casey Sheehan. These soldiers love their
country, serve valiantly, and if necessary sacrifice their lives
for a mission they believe in. Their dedication and motivation
is incomprehensible to the loony left who look for conspiracy
or coercion to produce such an effect. When I mentioned the reenlistment
numbers my seat mate simply shook her head in denial. “That’s
not what I heard,” she said, in dismissive disbelief.
We briefly discussed her views about the war. She is a mid-level
professional who yearns strongly for the tranquility of peace
and abhors the necessarily ghastly aspects of war. Her analysis,
unfortunately, has gone no further. Though she expresses horror
at the number of casualties he is unable to place losses into
long-term perspective. History for many like her begins with
their first memories. References to earlier wars and the grievous
losses suffered in places like Normandy, Korea, and Iwo Jima
met with a blank stare. Forget mentioning Vietnam because that
sets off pre-programmed meltdown. Noting that prior to Rudy Guiliani
winning the mayoralty of New York the murder rate was about 2,500
annually made no impression. The loss of a single soldier, she
claimed, was not worth the gain.
Early on we had to
go through a predictable litany of “Bush
lied; soldiers died.” Then I requested that we shelve personal
attacks for a moment and look at other aspects of the issue.
As is the case with much of the rank and file of these demonstrations,
emphasis is on feelings and emotions, not clear analytical thinking.
When asked directly if Iraq was better off with our without Saddam
Hussein she reluctantly agreed that “without” was
preferable, but that it “could have been done in a better
way.” She was clueless as to what such a course might have
been but is convinced that “war is not the answer.” Results,
it seems, are not as important as “how we got into it.” It
was clearly in her mind a “quagmire.” She would not
back off this point.
I mentioned that in
a conference call with General Casey a few days previously
he said how stunningly different reality on the
ground in Iraq was from media coverage in the States. I got a
headshake in return. With this woman and her fellows we know
that the MSM has succeeded in getting its message across. When
pressed, definition of a quagmire eluded her. It seemed as if
she was simply impatient for an end to it all. America’s
fast food preoccupation translated into foreign policy, I suppose.
As far as elections, constitutions, and freedom, these optimistic
developments were suspect in her eyes because they were “imposed
by America” on reluctant Iraqis. Besides, I was told, there
might be civil war in the future. Would not a precipitous withdrawal
of US presence and support trigger such a civil war, I queried?
The concept flummoxed her.
This was a nice, reasonably
well educated woman who I am convinced is well-meaning if terribly
misguided. I also suggest that she
represents a more activist wing of a large portion of the American
people. These are ordinary people whose support for the war tends
to blow in the wind, largely influenced by the incessant anti-war
propaganda barrage they endure from conventional media, principally
television. In an amusing aside, my companion superciliously
told me, when I happened to mention that I am on Fox News occasionally, “I
never watch Fox.” Turns out she gets her news from “McNeil-Lehrer.” When
I asked had not McNeil long ago retired, she replied that she
still calls it by its original name out of nostalgia. At that
point further conversation became clearly uncomfortable and irrelevant.
We spent the rest of the brief voyage discussing non-controversial
trivia.
Sure, these people
are swamped in propaganda. But what of the contrary view? Other
than electronic media such as Front Page
Magazine, talk radio, and the Internet where is the official
response? I have to lay a lot of this problem – lack of
informed communication - on what I have consistently criticized
as the Bush administration’s poor track record on public
diplomacy. The American public is not being told what it already
knows: that this is in fact a war against fundamentalist, fanatic
Moslems who have an ideological proclivity if not a requirement
to kill us, for example. Instead we get pabulum about Islam being
a religion of peace. We eschew any element of sensibility in
our defenses. For example, while being told on the one hand that “air
travel is safer,” we see blatant security flaws by an unwillingness
to profile a potential terrorist. TSA screeners get kudos for
searching grannies and fired for searching Moslems. After an
elaborate kabuki of a 911 Commission all we see are boxes re-arranged
on organizational charts. Meanwhile desperate military officers
tell of Able Danger intelligence reporting being suppressed,
ignored, or denied.
Moreover, there is what seems almost an obsession in this administration
to excuse, rationalize, or ignore transgressions made by former
President William Clinton. Once or twice might be excused but
the Bush administration not only covers up for the Clinton administration
but actually promotes the man, giving him a dignity as an ex-president
that he neither earned nor deserves. It is puzzling to the extreme,
especially when outstretched Republican hands come back severely
bitten by those they try to feed. Worse, this policy of blanket
excuse is at odds with our national security on a number of levels.
By excusing or refusing to investigate previous failures or mistakes
we risk repeating them. By not fixing what is broken we allow
further penetration by our enemies through our admittedly porous
defenses. Moreover, by pretending that the previous administration
was efficient, well intentioned, and effective, we thwart our
efforts to win the war and encourage airhead peaceniks to greater
excesses.
Sometimes one has to wonder if anyone in this country other
than the brave few who are fighting for us and those of us who
support them unequivocally, understand that we are a nation at
war. We still have time to straighten ourselves out; but not
much of it. tRO
Curious
about North Korea? Learn more in Gordon’s
best-selling book Separated
at Birth: How North Korea became the Evil Twin became
the Evil Twin, Lyons Press available at bookstores now.
copyright
Gordon Cucullu 2005
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