Tom Hayden is still actively trying to cause America to lose

I thought I would give my readers the mixed benefit of some exposure to a leftist — I mean Progressive — article. AlterNet is a site run by hardcore leftists. For example its staff includes a publisher of Mother Jones magazine and writers who also write for the Nation and similar leftwing outlets.

Jane Fonda’s ex — Tom Hayden — wants to add Iraq to Vietnam in his list of wars he's helped cause America to lose. Noteworthy parts of his call to defeat the U.S. includes:

Instead of assuming that the Bush administration has an "exit strategy", the movement needs to force our government to exit. The strategy must be to deny the U.S. occupation funding, political standing, sufficient troops, and alliances necessary to their strategy for dominance.

Bush’s strategy is the reverse of Hayden’s: for the U.S. to win.

Note Hayden’s proposed strategy is exactly the same that the leftists used to undermine the Vietnam War.

Two, we need to build a Progressive Democratic movement which will pressure the Democrats to become an anti-war opposition party. The anti-war movement has done enough for the Democratic Party this year.

First note the phrase “Progressive Democratic movement”. “Progressive” is a codeword for leftists. I commented about that here and John Fonte analyzed progressivism in his essay Transnational Progressivism.

Second — I giggled when I read Hayden’s words — I don’t think that the Democratic Party can take any more of anti-war movement’s help. They caused the Kerry to lose his election (and Kerry helped.)

Strategists like Grover Norquist call the war "a drag on votes" and "threatening to the Bush coalition" that cost Bush six percentage points in the election.

You mean that Bush would have had a landslide if it weren’t for the war? COOL!

The movement will need to start opening another underground railroad to havens in Canada for those who refuse to serve, but for now even the most moderate grievances should be supported – for example, relief from the "back door draft" that is created by extending tours of duty.

Huh? The only citizens in the military are volunteers. If the didn’t want to serve they could have simply not joined.

The argument that the poor are “forced” to join due to a “terrible economy” is just a leftist myth. Steve Sailer, UPI National Correspondent, wrote:

Are soldiers the products of particularly poor families? In general, the enlisted ranks come from neither the top nor the bottom of society, but from working and middle class backgrounds. Very few enlistees appear to be the scions of the wealthy. (Some officers are from rich families, however; but a larger proportion of officers are the sons and daughters of officers.)

White enlistees tend to come from households somewhat lower in income than the general white population: $33,500 per year versus $44,400 for the average white, according to 1999 Defense Department statistics. Strikingly, black enlistees come from households above the black national average: $32,000 vs. $27,900.

In any case, Hayden’s premise is flawed by a couple of inconvenient facts:

• The war has been going on since 2001. Everybody to volunteers knows they are enlisting into a wartime military.


• The military is not a jobs program. It is a military. Warriors staff the military. Folks who just want a government paycheck should look for work with the postal service.

Hayden pretends that the underclass are too stupid to know what they’re doing.

…the Army National Guard is at 10 percent of its recruitment goal.

Huh? Where did Hayden get the idea that National Guard recruitment is only 10% of its goal? True, it was off by about 12% in August 31 2004 but that is not 90% off.

In fact retention is up in the Regular Army. Rowan Scarborough writes:

the Army brass say they are pleased at 100 percent-plus retention rates for enlisted active-duty soldiers, especially in its 10 active-combat divisions, which have seen some of the bloodiest combat in Iraq cities such as Najaf, Baghdad and Sammara. The goal of retaining 56,100 will be exceeded by about 800 soldiers.

On new recruits heading to basic training, the target of 77,000 was exceeded 10 days ago by a margin of 47 inductees.

"It goes completely against the conventional wisdom. But it's true," said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon. "We understand that we need to continue to show good leadership and focus resources to get citizens to enlist and to re-enlist. But we're doing it."

The National Guard’s problem is that it is ill suited for yearlong deployments. The National Guard was historically used for major wars that were a major spasm of violence that either didn’t seem interminable (e.g., Gulf War I) or were fights for national survival (e.g., WWII). The National Guard isn’t suitable for the multiyear swamp draining that we’re doing in the Middle East.

we need to defeat the U.S. strategy of "Iraqization.” … The problem for the White House is that if the Iraqi police and troops will not suppress and kill other Iraqis on behalf of the United States, the war effort will completely disintegrate.

Ahhh… now we are getting to the left’s fundamental agenda: to cause us to lose in Iraq. They will try to sabotage Iraqization. Be on the lookout for news articles where Leftists — or their functionaries in the Democratic Party — are doing whatever they can to wreck our efforts to develop Iraqi security forces.

Pressure for funding cuts and for an early American troop withdrawal will expose the emptiness of the promise of "Iraqization." In Vietnam, the end quickly came when South Vietnamese troops were expected to defend their country.

I was just thinking about Vietnam when Hayden repeated the leftist's myth that the Vietnamese were unwilling to fight the North Vietnamese. I’ve already refuted this myth:

By 1975, the year of North Vietnam’s victory over South Vietnam, the U.S. had withdrawn from South Vietnam. The U.S. was still an ally of South Vietnam and was committed by treaty to provide both supplies and support—including air power—to help South Vietnam to defend itself from North Vietnamese aggression.

In August 1973 US Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment which prohibited US naval forces from sailing on the seas surrounding, US ground forces from operating on the land of, and US air forces from flying in the air over, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Case–Church was in effect an unconditional guarantee, by the US Congress to the North Vietnamese communists, that the United States would no longer oppose their efforts to conquer South Vietnam. This act effectively nullified the Paris Peace Agreements. The communists had won on the floors of the US Congress what they couldn’t win in either negotiations or on the battlefield.

Senator Edward Kennedy—true to form—was unsatisfied with merely selling-out our ally to the North Vietnamese. Senator Kennedy further compromised our ally’s ability to defend itself by forcing the U.S. to welch on critical military support promised to South Vietnam by passing a $266 million cut in supplemental spending for Vietnam.

North Vietnam, on the other hand, was well supplied and financed by two of the U.S.’ superpower enemies: the USSR and Mainland China. In 1975 North Vietnam assaulted South Vietnam; not with a guerilla army but with a conventional army. The North Vietnamese army, which was made up of seventeen conventional divisions and supported by a host of regular army logistical support units, overran South Vietnam. This totally conventional force (armed, equipped, trained and supplied by Red China and the Soviet Union), spearheaded by 700 Soviet tanks—burning Soviet fuel and firing Soviet ammunition—launched a cross border, frontal attack on South Vietnam and conquered it in the same manner as Hitler conquered most of Europe in WW II.

The South Vietnamese had only 352 US supplied tanks and—due to US Congressional action— South Vietnam was critically short of fuel, ammunition and spare parts.

O’Reilly’s assertion that the South Vietnams didn’t fight is false: South Vietnam’s 18th division destroyed three North Vietnamese divisions before being overrun by six North Vietnamese divisions later. The 18th division fought effectively in spite of the handicaps imposed by congressional Democrats.

South Vietnam fell. The Case-Church Amendment, which prohibited the U.S. from supporting South Vietnam while doing nothing to discourage the USSR and China from supporting North Vietnam, sealed its fate.

The irony is that this Warsaw pact style army was exactly the type of army that the U.S. trained, equipped and organized to defeat. The only thing that prevented the U.S. army from saving South Vietnam from communist aggression—and inflicting yet another crushing defeat on North Vietnam—were the congressional democrats led by Ted Kennedy.

Hayden and other leftist Democrats engineered this lost; and he’s trying to do it again.

In short: pinch the funding arteries, push the Democrats to become an opposition party, ally with anti-war Republicans, support dissenting soldiers, make "Iraqization" more difficult, and build a peace coalition against the war coalition. If the politicians are too frightened or ideologically incapable of implementing an exit strategy, the only alternative is for the people to pull the plug.

Yup, this just reinforces my previous point. Hayden is trying to cause us to lose in Iraq by using the same techniques that were effective in Vietnam.

The nice thing about leftists is that they never change their agenda; they always want the U.S. to lose.

Hat tip to Glen