The Pathetic Peace Protes
BARNES, FRED
The Pathetic Peace Protesters Vietnam was serious; this is farce. BY FRED BARNES THE PROTESTS against an American-led war with Iraq seem frivolous, mindless, even stupid. Many of the protesters...
...Some hard-core leftists, however, find him quite acceptable on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend...
...That left the poor and less educated to be drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam...
...Five issues, I believe, separate antiVietnam protesters from their antiIraq counterparts...
...There's a good way to point up the shortcomings of today's antiwar crowd: Compare their cause with that of anti-Vietnam war protesters a generation ago...
...It's democratic and responsive (not to protesters, though) and fairly popular, but protesters think it's not worth fighting for...
...This leads protesters like Garofalo to say they "support" American soldiers...
...Some protesters idolized Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, and praised the Vietcong...
...Draft exemptions were easily obtained by young men who were in college and grad school or married...
...That was true in the Vietnam days...
...CORRUPT REGIME...
...Democracy is now riding history's wave...
...She knows the Arab street...
...WINNABLE WAR...
...AMERICA'S ENEMY IS NOT BAD...
...That way they'd confront the folks who actually cause civilian casualties in Iraq...
...But those marching against war today appear to know zero about Iraq, oil, saddam, or what America's intentions might truly be...
...Only history didn't turn out as they expected...
...If they had any knowledge of who's a threat to the life and limb of average Iraqis, they'd turn their shields in the direction of Saddam and his subordinates...
...She thinks she knows President Bush's mind, insisting he doesn't care if Saddam disarms...
...The protesters aren't...
...This last group is the closest to today's protesters, who are oblivious to Saddam's crimes against humanity...
...Later, when the war was over and the North Vietnamese had set up reeducation camps and prompted an armada of boat people, I changed my mind completely about that war...
...demonstrators...
...And she knows AEI...
...I talked to American military men who advised the South Vietnamese army and they figured it was too corrupt to win...
...It was a class thing...
...Protesters, critics, reporters, and some military officers believed the war was unwinnable...
...But agitating to spare Saddam a war that would depose him doesn't put one on history's good side...
...Many conservatives joined liberals in deeming it not worth fighting for...
...This was a major concern in Vietnam...
...Many of the protesters come off as know-nothings...
...With Iraq, the opposite is the case...
...Listen, for example, to the thoughts of comic and actress Janeane Garofalo on Fox News Sunday...
...So why fight it...
...I participated in several demonstrations in the 1960s, once marching on the pentagon with my wife and perhaps 50,000 other Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...And on none of these issues does the anti-Iraq side come out looking like an adult...
...A final point...
...RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY...
...They pay lip service to the notion that he's a cruel dictator and an international bad guy, but do nothing about it...
...Practically everyone believes the war is winnable and probably in a hurry...
...The best protesters can come up with is the possibility of civilian casualties...
...THE AMERICAN MILITARY IS UNFAIRLY CONSTITUTED...
...The war was wrong, period...
...True, there are always civilian deaths in war, but the United States is now famous for minimizing them (Iraq in 1991, Afghanistan, Panama...
...Why sacrifice the lives of young American men...
...Now we have an all-volunteer Army famous for its diversity...
...There's bound to be a special place in the Hall of Ignorance for the human shields who've rushed to Iraq to protect its citizens against American troops...
...The South Vietnamese government was indeed corrupt, though more in the beginning than later in the war...
...The moral element is almost completely absent from their campaign against military intervention to depose saddam Hussein...
...They have as much distaste for Americans as they do for Saddam," she said...
...I now believe that Vietnam—South Vietnam anyway— could have been spared a Communist takeover, except noisy dissent in America made the political cost of waging the war too high...
...Nonetheless, there was a seriousness to the antiwar protests against American involvement in Vietnam...
...people who opposed the war knew a lot about it, about Vietnam, and about the politics of war here at home...
...The messages on their placards are often crude, uninformed, and selfish...
...9/11 has been a way to reinvig-orate the plan that the right-wingers and the ideologues and people like the people at the American Enterprise Institute and...
...Countries fell (Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola) to communism...
...And Garofalo is one of the better informed protesters...
...The protesters raised arguments that were worthy of debate, some of them difficult to refute even today...
...Others didn't know anything about either and didn't think it made any difference...
...Communists and leftists were sure they were on the winning side of history in the late 1960s and through the 1970s...
...To oppose the war in Vietnam was to be on the right side of history...
...Dictatorships and repressive regimes are falling all over the globe (Eastern Europe, Russia, Afghanistan...
...Yes, they were obsessive and a lot of what they knew was wrong...
...As for the anti-Iraq war protesters, their corrupt regime is the Bush administration...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 25
