The 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon

I wrote yesterday about the Israeli raid on Entebbe, and the tendency for "blind spots" in historical education. Well, today's another sterling example of that phenomenon. 30 years ago, Saigon fell to the communist North Vietnamese, after the support that the United States had pledged for South Vietnam had been withdrawn.

For people who came of age in the 60s, they remember the debates over the war, whether we should have been there or not. I was born in 1963. I have memories of body counts on the news and in the papers, but had no conception at the time of what we were doing, why we were there. I've learned more as the years have passed, of course, and I still have no firm position as to whether or not the United States should have been fighting in Vietnam. I'm very sympathetic to the argument that we had no vested national interest at stake. But I'm also sympathetic to the argument that we were fighting evil, that communism was a great moral evil, and had to be fought whereever it was.

The position that I'm not now, and never have been, sympathetic to is the argument that there was nothing to fight for in southeast Asia. There was. I think it was summarized brilliantly by two former anti-war left-wing 60s radicals, Peter Collier and David Horowitz. I saw it originally in a piece in Insight magazine close to 20 years ago, and it stuck with me. "More people had been killed in the first two years of the Communist peace than in the thirteen years of America's war."

Whether it was the responsibility of America, or how the responsibility manifested itself, to fight for those people is debatable. The fact that there was something to fight for is not.