The remembrances of the Cambodian killing fields are, to many people, reduced to photos of neatly stacked bones and skulls for the records of posterity. For the survivors, it is much more. But, being yellow-skinned, and half-way around the world, it is too simple for the demagogues of the Party of Defeat to dismiss them outright, or even blame the deaths on the government of the US, as I noted several weeks ago:

What do you think about what happened to the three million Vietnamese and Cambodians who died after the U.S. troops left Vietnam?

Jane Fonda: It’s too bad that we caused it to happen by going in there in the first place.

source

Nor was this the first time the leftist elite managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Algeria in the late ’50s was embroiled in an insurgency (FLN) that was being soundly defeated by the French and loyalist Algerian military.

Led by Jean-Paul Sartre, a campaign of denunciation got under way in which French forces were accused of being the equivalent of Nazis–an especially freighted charge coming only a decade and a half after World War II and the German occupation of France. Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s companion, went so far as to say that the sight of a French army uniform had “the same effect on me that swastikas once did.” Although many of the antiwar agitators were communists or leftist fellow travelers, their petitions and demonstrations included enough authentic heroes of the Resistance and eminent liberals like Francois Mauriac to bestow upon the movement a credible public image. The constant message it conveyed was that the true authors of violence in Algeria were not the FLN at all but the French, and that only when the latter departed would Algerians be able to sort out their destiny for themselves.

The French military and political leadership was completely blindsided by the attack. No amount of justification of the selective use of torture, not even the cancellation of the original authorization, could halt the criticism or stem the loss of public support for the war. Even as the FLN took to setting off bombs in France itself, leftist Catholic priests continued to raise funds for it, while those like Albert Camus who harbored doubts about the wisdom of handing victory to the terrorists were derided and silenced. The consensus that had informed French politics as late as 1956–namely, that abandoning Algeria was “unthinkable and unmentionable”–fell apart.

Divisions over Algeria doomed France’s Fourth Republic. For its successor, the price of political survival was handing over Algeria to a totalitarian band that had lost the war on the battlefield but managed to win a stunning victory in France itself. The result was the massive flight of Algerian whites and, at home, a bloodbath as FLN terrorists put to death tens of thousands of Muslim Algerians who had been loyal to the French regime. Soldiers who had fought alongside the French were forced to swallow their medals before they were shot. source

As the democrats plot to not only betray the American military in Iraq, but also the hundreds of thousands of loyal Iraqis who have labored and fought along side the coalition, these all-too familiar consequences seem lost. And, just when you think they can’t get any lower, they hit bottom and keep digging.

Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zibigniew Brezinski, is rewriting the history of the fall of Viet Nam in his most recent attempt to prop up the Iranian dictatorship. Speaking at Duke University this week, Brezinski unveiled the THE BIG LIE:

Brzezinski said there’s no reason to think a bloodbath would necessarily follow a U.S. withdrawal (from Iraq).

“We expected that the U.S. leaving Vietnam would result in massive killings and genocide and so forth, and collapse of the dominoes in Southeast Asia,” he said. “It didn’t happen. How certain are we of the horror scenarios that have been mentioned in what will take place in Iraq?” source

I’ve thought for some time that the fellow travelers at moveon.org, and the marxists within the clintonistas, have made complete chumps out of the democrat party. Mainstream democrats are no more. They’ve been replaced by the opportunists and useful idiots who aid and abet the enemy, with the full knowledge and support of the MSM. At least the useful idiots like Fonda, have the emotional honesty to blame America. The complete and utter dishonesty of asshats like Brezinski threatens to balkanize the Republic.