In 1969 a brilliant law student stood in a park in Chicago and gave a speech about Vietnam.  Her friends burned flags and hurled obscenities at the U.S. Military.  The United States fell prey to this Marxist propaganda, and millions of our fellow human beings were slaughtered or enslaved when we abandoned the Vietnamese people.

Forty years later, a brilliant lawyer from Chicago, now our President, stood before the U.S. Military and gave the same speech about Vietnam.  He did outline his plan for the War in Afghanistan, but Obama’s most important message for our soldiers at West Point was an echo from the park, from the Days of Rage: 

“There are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of forty-three nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our actions. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad based popular insurgency. And, most importantly, American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists plotting along its borders. To abandon this area now would significantly limit our ability to keep the pressure on Al Qaida and create an unacceptable risk of added attacks on our homeland and allies.”

These four simple statements contain the myths that led America to betray her fundamental opposition to the Revolutionary ideology that was at the heart of the Vietnam War. 

“Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of forty-three nations that recognized the legitimacy of our actions.”

The President believes that our War to halt the spread of Chinese-backed Communism in Vietnam was not supported by the world.  Free countries not already influenced by pro-socialist propaganda recognized the dire necessity of the War. The statement reveals Obama’s detestation of an independent and non-contingent America.  He implies that our military decisions are not justified unless the global community bestows its blessing on them.  The world must check and balance the “often arrogant Superpower.”   Obama wishes to instill in Americans the sense that they have no right to act independently.  This perpetuates what David Horowitz refers to as our “national self-doubting,” that followed the Vietnam War.

“Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad based popular insurgency.”

The mothers who begged U.S. helicopter pilots to take their babies to America, three million Vietnamese “Boat People” who fled to the sea with nothing, and two million victims whose bones bake in the sun of Pol Pot’s killing fields, all these cry out against Obama’s perversion of historical truth.  The people we told to take responsibility for their own country were ground beneath the heel of the President’s non-existent “popular insurgency.”

“American people were viciously attacked in Afghanistan …to abandon now would create an unacceptable risk of added attacks on our homeland.”

It is true that no American buildings fell at the hands of Vietnamese terrorists on American soil.  The President is wrong, however, that we were not viciously attacked.  The essential War of our times, the war between the global gulag and liberty is first a war of ideas.  The enemy that overran Vietnam had indeed attacked America by spreading its subversive ideology.  The Anti-War movement led by Bernadine Dohrn, the student in the park, was proof of that insipid intellectual corruption  within American educational institutions. Communism is an ideal.  The implantation of this ideal in the hearts and minds of a nation is the first and most significant attack we suffered by those who invaded Vietnam.

 Surrounded by American Flags, the President hurled no obscenities at our soldiers. Yet, with four short statements, he profoundly insulted the valiant predecessors of those to whom he spoke.  He declared that the War they died for in Vietnam was illegitimate because America stood alone, immoral because unprovoked, and useless because the threat it pretended to avert was nothing but a phantom.    We cannot be surprised by his condemnation of any war on the Revolution, given his own affinity for devotees of Mao.  But, for Bernadine, hearing the President deliver her own Day of Rage speech in “the belly of the beast,”  was something  even she could hardly have had the audacity to hope for.