Political Football

Edward Kennedy likes to label Iraq “George Bush’s Vietnam,” as he did last week when he introduced legislation to give Congress the final say on troop levels in Iraq.

Bush played no role in the fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia to the Communists in 1975, of course. But Kennedy did. He helped lead the congressional drive to cut off financial aid to the pro-American governments in Saigon and Phnom Penh, brushing aside President Gerald Ford’s warning that “the horror and the tragedy that we see on television” would only grow worse if America deserted its allies.

But Kennedy and the Democrats spurned Ford, and the result was unspeakable agony–Cambodia’s killing fields, Vietnam’s re-education camps, waves of “boat people” hurling themselves into the sea. Having seen the results of US abandonment in Indochina, how can Kennedy advocate the same policy in Iraq?

“If we cease to help our friends in Indochina,” Ford said, “we will . . . have been false to ourselves, to our word, and to our friends. No one should think for a moment that we can walk away from that without a deep sense of shame.” Ford, a decent man, couldn’t imagine deliberately abandoning a friend in dire straits. Kennedy, it seems, isn’t so inhibited.