Like the secular left, the Religious Left cannot analyze any
U.S. foreign involvement without peering through the inevitable
prism of its own Vietnam experiences.
National Council of Churches chief Bob Edgar frequently boasts
that, as a then young Democratic congressman, he voted against
emergency U.S. aid for besieged South Vietnam in 1975. Naturally,
he portrays his intense opposition to the Iraq War as a natural
continuation of his anti-Vietnam War activism.
Similarly, the general secretary of the nearly 300,000 member
Reformed Churches in America is walking down an anti-war memory
lane. “The showdown between Congress and the president this month
around the funding for the Iraq war isn’t the first of its kind.
We’ve been here before, and we need not walk blindly down
rhetorical dead ends,”
wrote the Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson for Jim Wallis’s
Sojourners website.
Granberg-Michaelson, like Bob Edgar, fought for U.S. withdrawal
from Vietnam from Capitol Hill, where he was then Senator Mark
Hatfield’s “chief legislative strategist” on Vietnam. Hatfield, a
liberal Republican, joined Senator George McGovern, starting in
1970, in proposing a mandated withdrawal of U.S. troops from
Vietnam. As the reverend recalls, the proposal never got majority
support in the Senate and, if even it had passed Congress, it would
have been vetoed by President Nixon. But the McGovern-Hatfield
proposal helped mobilize public opinion against U.S. efforts to
save South Vietnam. The Reformed Church chief wants to repeat that
success with opposition to the Iraq War.
For persons of a certain generation, fighting the U.S. role in
Vietnam recalls the halcyon days of youth and liberation. Reviving
and reliving those golden memories is, for the now middle-aged
baby-boomer activists, understandably invigorating. But then, as
now, the reflexive opponents of the war were myopic and simplistic;
they assumed that utopia began when the U.S. was defeated and
withdrew.
Just as the anti-war opponents of 40 years go were indifferent
to the human rights record of communist North Vietnam and its
insurgent allies throughout Southeast Asia, so too are today’s
anti-war opponents indifferent to the likely human rights result of
a premature U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Likewise, the Religious Left
opponents were never concerned about atrocities under Saddam
Hussein. The Reverend Bob Edgar, in 2002, led an ecumenical church
delegation to Baghdad to meet with Saddam’s officials, but only to
prevent a U.S. invasion, not to advocate on behalf of Saddam’s
victims.
Edgar’s church council, along with the rest of the Religious
Left, never expressed much remorse over the genocide, repression,
and refugee crisis precipitated by the U.S. withdrawal and
consequent communist victory in Southeast Asia. Indeed, the
National Council of Churches’ relief arm, Church World Service, has
continuously worked cozily, and uncritically, with Vietnam’s
communist overlords across the decades.
Likewise, it can be safely assumed that if Iraq’s brief
experiment with democratic government were to collapse into
Islamist dictatorship in the wake of U.S. withdrawal, the Religious
Left’s interest in the Iraqi people will quickly end. Islamist
governments, along with Marxist regimes, are almost never the
target of the Religious Left’s supposed humanitarian concerns.
Rev. Granberg-Michaelson recalled that the McGovern-Hatfield
demand for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam got up to 42 votes in the
U.S. Senate. And then later, under the name of Senator Lawton
Chiles, the demand for withdrawal received 49 votes. “But all these
congressional actions created a political environment that limited
Nixon’s options,” Granberg-Michaelson wrote. “He began withdrawing
troops and finally negotiated an end to the war.” Unmentioned by
the reverend is how North Vietnam’s communist negotiators at the
secret Paris peace talks were inspired to stall and procrastinate,
thanks to the anti-war U.S. congressional efforts to achieve
politically for North Vietnam what it could not achieve
militarily.
In a typically sunny and grossly truncated version of history,
Granberg-Michaelson casually observed about the 1975 communist
victory in Vietnam: “Despite their [war supporters’] dire
predictions of outcomes, today U.S. companies are racing to catch
up with other corporations heavily investing in Vietnam’s economy.”
Yes, thirty years later, free enterprise is taking root in still
communist-governed Vietnam. But this follows at least 1.7 million
killed by the communist genocide in Cambodia in the immediate
aftermath of the war, along with tens of thousands murdered by the
victorious communists in Laos and in reunified Vietnam. There were
also the concentration camps, hundreds of thousands of fleeing
refugees, thousands of whom drowned at sea, and decades of
totalitarian oppression, where free speech and rule of law were
extinguished by nightmarish police states.
Today, only Cambodia is free of communist governance, while Laos
and Vietnam still suffer under one-party rule. Vietnam now allows
some private ownership of property, even as it still forbids any
political opposition. Most scandalously, the Religious Left
champions of communist victory in Southeast Asia have almost never
uttered a word about communist suppression of religion after 1975.
Although there have been some recent improvements for religious
liberty, both the Vietnamese and Laotian communist regimes still
restrict religious expression.
“In retrospect, we see now that successful congressional action
could have ended the Vietnam War sooner, saving thousands of lives
and achieving the same outcome,” Wesley Granberg-Michaelson
concluded. “U.S. troops will be withdrawn, at some date, from Iraq.
The question is when, and how. Congress can and should use its
constitutional power to influence that outcome.”
In fact, the number of Southeast Asian murdered by their new
communist rulers in the two years following communist victories in
the mid-1970’s exceeded the total number of combat deaths during
the 30 years of preceding war. But that almost never audibly
disturbed the Religious Left opponents of the Vietnam War, any more
than the atrocities of any future anti-U.S. regime in Iraq would
ever ignite the Religious Left’s interest.
