The political value of honor

I think it was somewhere early in the Democratic presidential debates last night that CNN had to re-shuffle the chairs for the next segment, and Anderson Cooper started off his coverage with some line about this exercise in ‘political marketing’. You instantly knew what he meant if you’d just seen the stand-up routine of the candidates, all trying to sell themselves with every question they talked around but usually didn’t answer.

This one I listened to, for a little while, and I was really interested in who might emerge as ‘presidential’, who made the most sense and showed the most character and offered the best leadership in that party. But it was largely bluster, especially about the Iraq war. I don’t want to hear political fighting about fighting a war. I want to hear serious analysis, this far into it.

Here’s some serious analysis by WFB at National Review Online.

While it is true that no historical event exactly replicates another, it is certainly the case that what happened in Vietnam in 1972-1975 bears very closely on the current situation in Iraq.

To truncate the story drastically, what happened back then was the result of the correlation of four strategic factors.

1) Hanoi’s resolution to conquer the south….2) The withdrawal by the United States, ending in March 1973, of a combative military presence. Only a few hundred U.S. advisors were left in South Vietnam. 3) The growing stability of the South Vietnamese government, which was assumed competent to carry out the terms of the Paris agreements of 1973. These agreements had been negotiated in dozens and dozens of meetings between Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger. The agreements called for the removal of U.S. forces, the cessation of North Vietnamese offensives, and recognition of the Saigon government as the ruling political entity in the south. And 4) the progressive disunity of the United States government. Here we had the anti-war movement as a continuing force. But that movement attained dominance pari passu with the weakening of President Nixon.

This sounds terribly familiar.

The parallels in the current situation are plain, beginning with the nature of the United States’ participation. What we have right now is a progressively immobilized executive and a dissenting legislature, leading — inevitably — to an impotent military.

The question immediately posed is: Do we feel responsibility for what happens in the period ahead? …

If the parallels hold, i.e., if the result of failure in the Middle East is equivalent to the result of failure in Indochina, then we would expect to see the collapse of the Maliki government in Baghdad, some kind of bloody vengeance against Iraqis who had supported that government, and a people subjugated by a regime that sits on one percent the world’s supply of oil and is unlikely to proceed indifferent to the march, by Iraq’s eastern neighbor, to becoming a nuclear power.

Are the presidential candidates seriously addressing that sober reality and discussing its responsibility? I’m not hearing it.

Dr. Kissinger has said that the use of the American fleet to contain the invasion of 1975 could have saved the day. What could save the day in Iraq? Nothing short of public revulsion channeled toward those Democrats who are measuring these days the political value of honor. In the election ahead, all the world will be looking over our shoulders, including the ghosts of Vietnam.

And listening, too. I heard the Democratic candidates on that stage say that America has lost the moral high ground. I was astonished the debate has devolved to that shameful rhetoric. They may think it has political value, but it surely lacks honor.