Giulani and the fabled Vietnam War "stab-in-the-back" (Updated)

Fred Kaplan in Slate (Rudy, the Anti-Statesman: Giuliani's loopy foreign-policy essay 08/16/07) critiques Rudi Giulani's new foreign policy article in Foreign Affairs. One of the items on which he comments is Giulani's embrace of the stab-in-the-back theory of the Vietnam War, which has long since become a stodgy article of faith for the Republican Party. Giulani's comment:

America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. ... Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire, and not only in Vietnam: numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker America.

Kaplan shoots this down in a good, brief comment:

Does he really believe this? What books have his advisers been giving him? The "South Vietnamese partners" were as corrupt and illegitimate as they come. The Khmer Rouge came to power amid a political vacuum that was spawned as much by Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia as by anything else. As for the "expansionist" Soviet Union, things didn't end very well for the Moscow Politburo. America, it is now widely agreed, was weakened by the Vietnam War, not by its termination. And, by the way, how about that "domino theory"? You'd think from his description that Southeast Asia has subsequently all gone Communist.

(Update: The invaluable Joe Conason also comments on Giulani's article in Giuliani's dangerous bluster Salon 08/17/07.

Tags: giulani, stab-in-the-back

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