Remember your history, my children!

When President George W. Bush left office, the Iraq war was won.  All we needed to do was work out the details of our ongoing presence there.  It would have been nice to have had a kind of Rhine-Main Air Base Southeast, in the middle of the Arab picnic ground.  President Bush was looking to the big picture, to gradual education in freedom throughout the region.  Now the Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress are out of Iraq.  As of late 2013, not a single U.S. combat soldier is left in Iraq.  How long before Congress has given away all the gains?  This administration, and this Senate majority leadership, have a very different Big Picture in mind for Iraq policy, one that has more to do with personal political expediency than the spread of freedom.  Bad for us, bad for the people of Iraq, bad for the region.

The American thing is not just an idealism.

"The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie."
  -- J.A. Schumpeter

Because one of America's ideals is Truth, the real American speaks the truth, and the last thing he will do for the Truth is lie.

But because we do not have a continuity of ideals in Washington D.C., but seem rather to oscillate from American to Socialist on an irregular basis, the effect of the selling-out of our friends in and around Iraq is that America gets judged as just another idealism, and just as full of lies.  But American foreign policy failure is not the fault of the American ideal.  It isn't Eisenhower's fault or Nixon's fault or Reagan's fault or Bush's fault.  It's Democrats' fault.

Again.

Somebody besides me does remember the end of the Vietnam war.  Good old Bruce Herschensohn even wrote a book telling the truth about the Vietnam war: An American Amnesia: How the U.S. Congress Forced the Surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia (Beaufort Books, 2010). The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973; the Republic of (South) Vietnam surrendered to the communists on 30 April 1975 -- the picture of the "last helicopter out of Saigon" comes to mind.  Such a turnaround.  And all due to the Democrat-controlled 94th Congress pulling the plug on our friends.  Then came the Vietnamese boat people and all the rest.  At least the Democrats were able to turn the lie into something "everyone knows":  Nixon lost the war in Vietnam, it was a defeat for America.  No, we won the war.  Congress lost the peace.  It was a defeat for the people of Vietnam and freedom-loving people everywhere. 

The similarities to the scenario unfolding in Iraq are chilling.