James Taranto rightly rips John Kerry's statement that in 1971 ""We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia [if the US left Vietnam], and it didn't happen." After all, a mere 1/3 of Vietnamese families had a relative placed in a "reeducation camp" after the Fall of Saigon; and only 1,000,000 Vietnamese were imprisioned without charges and without recourse to a court, lawyer, judicial process, etc.
And the Khmer Rouge's eradication of nearly 2,000,000 Cambodians in the mere 4 years that it controlled Cambodia before the Vietnamese overthrew Pol Pot . . . that must have been some parallel universe. Or perhaps the deaths were bloodless (starvation isn't as bloody as a beheading, after all) so in a Clintonian way, the "bloodbath" never occurred. For Kerry to take the Chomskyite view is simply disgraceful.
Then again, others in his party are just as bad. Barack Obama, a Presidential candidate, said genocide in Iraq would be preferable to continued US troop presence there. Evidently, the mass slaughter of Arabs is not worth any US assistance. Even worse is Obama's ignorance of international law -- if genocide occurs, the UN Charter allows the UN to dispatch armed forces to the area of genocide (see Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 9; UN Charter at Article 42). Guess whose troops could enforce that effectively?
Basically Kerry's a liar or fool, and Obama's an ignoramus.
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