To a certain extent, when the Vietnam-era draft ended people lost interest in news of Vietnam. There was a flurry of renewed attention when we finally left and then cut off most of the military aid years later, including the famous “helicopters on the roof” story. After that, every now and then some boat people would arrive and that would get a bit of coverage, too.
But for the most part we turned our backs on the suffering there. It’s not just that we weren’t intervening any more, it’s that most people simply weren’t aware of what was happening and of the role our abandonment played in it.
The left was rather happy about that because it got them off the hook, and they learned that they could repeat the process when they caused us to exit any war. In fact, none other that President Biden is reported to have explicitly cited this in 2010 when he wanted to get out of Afghanistan and the Obama administration wasn’t doing his bidding:
Holbrooke, who was the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2010, asked Biden whether the US had a moral obligation to remain in Afghanistan to protect people like that little girl.
“F— that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it,” Biden replied, according to Holbrooke’s diary, as cited by the Atlantic.
I would argue that it wasn’t Nixon and Kissinger; it was the Democrat-controlled Congress (with some Republicans voting along with them) that pulled the plug on the South Vietnamese. The Democrats didn’t pay any price for that, either. Au contraire. Carter was elected in 1976 and the Democrats continued to have huge Congressional majorities.
So it was not difficult to predict that, once the nasty and actually disastrous pullout occurred in Afghanistan, coverage would fade and we would not learn the details of what was happening in that country as a result. Perhaps a few stories here and there, but whatever horrors are presently being perpetrated there are not going to get major coverage from an MSM dedicated to supporting everything Democrat – although you know that there would be wall-to-wall coverage of atrocities if the pullout had happened with Trump at the helm.
As far as I can tell, only the right is reporting on things like this:
As the Taliban consolidates its hold on power, reports of executions and mass killings are coming in from all across Afghanistan. The Islamist militia beheaded two boys aged 9 and 10, the media reports on Wednesday said.
Taliban fighters are hunting down former Afghan government officials and security personnel. Besides targeting people connected to the deposed government, the Taliban death squads are murdering their family members — including minors, Jean Marie Thrower, a former U.S. Army officer working on getting stranded Americans out of Afghanistan, told the National Review.
The National Review reported the gruesome beheadings, citing Afghan Rescue Crew‘s (ARC) Jean Marie Thrower:
Even retired members of the Afghan army are marked for death by the Taliban. “We’ve got people who retired, ten, 15 years ago. They killed the Taliban, and the Taliban don’t forget,” Thrower says. “We have one guy who was just working on cars. He said, ‘I haven’t done this, I haven’t been in the resistance for 15 years, but they have my name and they’re calling me.’”
Thrower disputes the U.S. State Department’s characterization of about 100 Americans being left on the ground; she said that as of a few days ago, the figure her group had was closer to 1,000 — although she noted that every group making a rescue effort has its own list, potentially leading to overlap with one another in certain cases. The 1,000 figure may include U.S. green-card holders, too, which the State Department is putting in a separate category. (…)
She describes the case of an American child whose Afghan uncle was recently killed by the Taliban. “We have had people shot, beheaded. They’re taking the kids. If you’re on the run, and they find your family, they’ll hurt your family and put the word out in the neighborhood that ‘we’ve got your brother or son or daughter.’ They cut off the heads of two boys that were nine and ten.”
You might ask why we should care at this point; after all, awful things happen all over the world with great regularity. And while that is the case, it is also the case that these things were not happening in Afghanistan when we were there, and they are happening now as a direct result of our leaving in the obscenely stupid and/or purposely destructive manner in which we departed, and it’s happening to people who had helped us and whom we had promised to rescue if it ever came to that.
Biden and the rest knew it would happen and they did what they did anyway, and shrugged at it. And the Democrats and the MSM not only shrug right along, but praise the administration and Biden himself for what they did.
I’ve been thinking about this letter written during the time we were washing our hands of both Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1970s, and I’ve been trying to decide in what context to quote it. It may as well be here, although I may have occasion to quote it again:
The epitaph for the U.S. involvement in Indochina had been given earlier that month before the fall of Phnom Penh in neighboring Cambodia. Just days before his execution at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian statesman Sirak Mitak penned a final note to the U.S. ambassador refusing his offer of evacuation.
“I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You leave and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.
“But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we all are born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake in believing in you, the Americans.”
