Torture of Duty II: Small Error, Smaller Twinge of Conscience

I wanted to find these numbers regarding the aftermath of the withdrawal fromVietnam, and reading Hugh Hewitt’s blog just now, there they were (the links are mostly Hugh’s also, I added one for Pol Pot):

”…there were at least 160,000 South Vietnamese who fled by boat --not 2,000 or 3,000-- and more than 500,000 southeast Asians became refugees. Between two and three million were murdered by Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia, and hundreds of thousands went into prison camps, and the regime's human rights record remains terrible.”

I wanted to juxtapose them with this:

”As a man who fought in the war, I know this policy has no chance of bringing peace if it arms people of another country and tells them to go on fighting. It would be criminal if the fighting continued and if large numbers of South Vietnamese tried to stand up for something they can’t. [It] would place all of their lives on our conscience, along with all the others.
--Tour of Duty, p13, quoting Kerry’s testimony before the U.S. Senate.

Kerry is answering, here, a question regarding his opinion on the policy of Vietnamization. He’s already stated that the United States should pull out of Vietnam, now he’s adding that we should withdraw all support to South Vietnam in their effort to prevent communist takeover. In his estimation, all we can accomplish is more deaths. He believes the course that will save lives it to pull out and stop support.

So what I am saying is that yes, there will be some recrimination but far, far less than the 200,000 a year who are murdered by the United States of America.

As Zell Miller, Democratic Senator from Georgia, said in his speech of last night, “And, no pair has been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.” Both were wrong on this issue. Orders of magnitude more died and were displaced than the numbers predicted by Kerry:

Mr. Kerry: Well, I think if we were to replace the Thieu-Ky-Khiem regime and offer these men sanctuary somewhere, which I think this Government has an obligation to do since we created that government and supported it all along. I think there would not be any problems. The number two man at the Saigon talks to Ambassador Lam was asked by the Concerned Laymen, who visited with them in Paris last month, how long they felt they could survive if the United States would pull out and his answer was 1 week. So I think clearly we do have to face his question. But I think, having done what we have done to that country, we have an obligation to offer sanctuary to the perhaps 2,000, 3,000 people who might face, and obviously they would, we understand that, might face political assassination or something else. But my feeling is that those 3,000 who may have to leave that country-

Compare Kerry’s estimate to the number of Vietnamese boat people alone: 3000 versus 160,000. Hundreds of thousands more went into “re-education camps.”

My question is, doesn’t Kerry feel a twinge of conscience at the results of his error? He has never even admitted error, much less begged forgiveness for contributing to this huge human pain and suffering.

Were this the only error, it might be downplayed. But he was on the wrong side all the way through the Cold War. His speeches regarding the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua placed him again on the side of communists, but this time better sense prevailed. We did not pull out. Nicaragua has held free elections since that time.

I noted before in my first comments on Brinkley’s book the irony of that first quote by George Washington:

Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.

Kerry’s behavior suggests he has failed dismally in his labors to keep his conscience alive. Conscience is a sort of quiet internal self judgment. His conscience appears to mirror perfectly his judgment as applied to the outer world: Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and still wrong.

Posted by dan at September 2, 2004 09:54 PM