Why Can't They Say Thank You?

It is less the venality of the Washington Post and its sisters in the legacy media of the United States that creates and propogates this nonsense as it is the boudless stupidity of the general readership that allows it.

In 1974, a weary Congress cut off funds for Cambodia and South Vietnam, leading to the swift fall of both allies.

I won't be the first to say the following: Cambodia wasn't an ally, but a target, and the Khemer Rouge whose murderation Michael Gerson exquisitely regrets was in its gory success a product of American bombs before "Congress cut off funds for Cambodia." (And really, quel euphemism. Did we have to wrap our funds in explosives and drop them from high altitude?) But the even more pertinent point is that there was no South Vietnam. There was never a South Vietnam. There was only Vietnam, and the rest of it was the fever dreams of American and Soviet cartographers, spies and counterspies, attachés and station agents, French cynics and American optimists. Here was a people that once lived for ONE THOUSAND YEARS under the domination of Chinese empires, and yet we imagined the geopolitical expediencies of a brief epoch to be more meaningful than this collective cultural identity? Millions--literally, millions--of Vietnamese were killed in the pursuit of this fantasy. Yet there remains a large portion of America that's still convinced Vietnam represented at worst a mistake or a failure of patience.