by Jack Cashill

Posted: December 12 2005
© WorldNetDaily.com

Two events of the past month have that eerie “déjà vu all over again” sense about them. One is the recent visit of Muhammad Ali to the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom award. The second is the now out-of-the-closet commitment of the Democratic Party leadership to lose a war needlessly.

"The idea that we're going to win this war is an ideal that unfortunately is just plain wrong," boasted Democratic National Committee Chairman, Howard Dean. Dean’s comments a week ago on a San Antonio radio station differ from his Democratic colleagues only in his relative lack of discretion.

In December 1974, the Democrats in Congress were busily conspiring to abandon Vietnam as much as they are now doing now with Iraq. In the same month, another congenial middle-of-the-road Republican president, Gerald Ford, was congratulating draft-resister Ali for reasons no more comprehendible than they are today.

Like President Bush, Ford put his imprimatur on the champ when he invited Ali to the White House. Ford did so as part of his effort to pull the nation together after a highly divisive ten years. The well-meaning president eagerly embraced Ali in the hopes of healing the divisions that Ali and his Nation of Islam cronies had helped create.

“Because of his principles,” Ford would later reminisce, “I firmly believe that as time goes on, Muhammad Ali will be remembered for more than just excellence in athletics.” By the end of 1974, the man in the White House proved no more capable of seeing through the Ali myth than the man on the street.

That same month that Ford and Ali made nice, a dovish U.S. Congress, confusing abandonment with peace, washed its hands forever of Indochina. In passing the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, Congress cut off all military funding to this beleaguered ally, just when South Vietnam needed it most. As Ali succinctly put the case, “ South Vietnam, you must do the best you can, because we’re through.”

This astonishing bit of legislation confirmed the wisdom of Le Duan, Ho Chi Minh’s successor. In October, the same month Ali beat George Foreman to regain the title, Le Duan had spoken to the North Vietnamese Politburo about the opportunity implicit in President Nixon’s August 1974 resignation. He argued that in Nixon’s absence there would be no public will in the United States to enforce the terms of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. He was more right than he knew.

Although the Tet offensive in January 1968 had been a military debacle for the Viet Cong, misreporting by the American media—the beginning of a pattern--led to a massive erosion in U.S. resolve. Soon after, the Americans began to disengage, and by August 1972, all U.S. ground forces had been withdrawn. The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973. From then on, whatever ground fighting there was took place between the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (ARVN). U.S. air power and military aid to the Republic guaranteed the peace—at least in the beginning.

By April 1973, however, the Watergate affair had already begun to paralyze the White House, and Congress took advantage of Nixon’s distractions to undercut the South. When Congress withheld all funding, the die was cast. Soon after, the NVA began its final assault. By January 3, 1975, its artillery was firing three thousand rounds a day. As NVA General Van Tien Dung told the Politburo conference a few days later, “To fully exploit this great opportunity we had to conduct large-scale annihilating battles to destroy and disintegrate the enemy on a large scale." From mid-March to early April 1975, while Ali trained for the Ron Lyle fight in Las Vegas, the armies of the South valiantly held off the Northern advance before collapsing in the face of major NVA reinforcements.

Meanwhile, the victorious forces of the Communist Khmer Rouge entered the Cambodian capital city of Phnom Penh. This was not supposed to happen. Antiwar activists had long greeted the phrase “falling dominoes” as something of a laugh line. There was nothing to laugh about in Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge gave the city’s two million-plus residents twenty-four hours to get out of town. As the Black Book of Communism reports, the Khmer Rouge intended “the most radical social transformation of all: the attempt to implement total Communism in one fell swoop,” and it began with the evacuation of the cities.

Once in the countryside, these “New People” were forced to wear blue clothes while everyone else wore black. Their unelected Communist masters singled them out for starvation and eventually extermination. Realistic estimates put the final liquidation toll at about two million, a quarter of the nation’s population. According to the Black Book, the Khmer Rouge “was indeed a member of the family,” meaning the Communist family. The Vietnamese Communists had exercised the single greatest influence on their development.

In Vietnam, two weeks after Phnom Penh fell, Saigon collapsed following a dramatic and demoralizing siege. When the last Marine pilots reluctantly lifted their helicopters off the embassy roof, they left behind not only thousands of our friends clamoring to flee, but our good faith as a nation. Ali’s new buddy in the White House reportedly played a round of golf while the American embassy was under siege. He, too, was something of a jock.

After Saigon fell, the new Stalinist regime in the South promptly sent scores of thousands of its citizens to concentration camps for “re-education” and hundreds of thousands more off to “new economic zones” to work the land. Additional persecution, especially against those of Chinese origin, led to the ethnic cleansing of an additional two million “boat people,” many of whom died in their attempt to flee.

The antiwar cohorts, now in control of virtually every major American institution save—barely—for the White House, chose not to notice. They would hold no one accountable for the horrific fate of Indochina, not Ali, and certainly not themselves. Although the South fell three years after American troops left the battle, they would chalk up a big “L” against the U.S. military, give themselves a “W” for wisdom, and glory in their own righteousness for years to come.

Unfortunately, al Qaeda knows this history better than we do.

Jack Cashill’s new book on Ali, Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King’s Dream, will be out in February.