You'll Never Guess Who Was Also Involved in the 1975 Debacle in Saigon

(AP Photo/File)

I wrote earlier about how the debacle in Afghanistan may have been intentional because Joe Biden previously said he thought we should just pull out and didn’t need to be concerned about the allies we left behind. “F*** that,” he reportedly said in 2010. “We don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.” So it appeared it was always his intent to just pull out, no matter the cost.

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That was pretty horrible to read — that indeed he was looking at Vietnam actions as a model of what he could get away with.

But that isn’t all. He blamed Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. But that wasn’t who was responsible. Guess who was involved in 1975, too? You guessed it — Joseph R. Biden and the Congressional Democrats.

From The Atlantic:

In the spring of 1975, as North Vietnamese divisions approached Saigon, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese with connections to the U.S.—soldiers, officials, spies, interpreters, drivers, bar girls, cooks—begged their American friends and colleagues to help them find a way out. But the embassy in Saigon and the Ford administration in Washington were slow to face the gravity of the situation and reluctant to prepare an evacuation for fear of panicking the population into chaos. In mid-April, President Gerald Ford finally realized that the government of South Vietnam might fall, and he asked Congress for $300 million in emergency aid, including money to evacuate the remaining 2,500 Americans and their dependents along with up to 175,000 South Vietnamese.

But Congress, led by Senate Democrats, had no interest in throwing away more money on a lost war that Americans wanted to forget. The prospect of sending U.S. troops to help evacuate Vietnamese along with Americans was a nonstarter. Some of the most strenuous objections came from the 32-year-old first-term senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden.

“I feel put upon in being presented an all-or-nothing number,” Biden said at a rare White House meeting between the president and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 14. “I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”

Ford countered: “We opened our door to the Hungarians. I am not saying the situation is identical, but our tradition is to welcome the oppressed. I don’t think these people should be treated any differently from any other people—the Hungarians, Cubans, Jews from the Soviet Union.”

Biden and other Democrats were unmoved. In a Senate speech on April 23, Biden argued that the president lacked the authority to rescue any Vietnamese. “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals” other than diplomats of third countries, Biden said. “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” The U.S. should leave the task of protecting them to “the organizations that are available” and “diplomatic channels,” he added. A week later, North Vietnamese tanks entered the grounds of the presidential palace in Saigon just hours after the last helicopter carried the last Americans out of Vietnam.

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Here he is at the funeral of Sen. George McGovern in 2012, saying that he was right about Vietnam.

So, not only was Joe Biden involved in this debacle in Afghanistan, he was involved in the Saigon debacle as well. He didn’t have any moral compass then and he doesn’t have any moral compass on it now. All those folks who helped us are just to be tossed aside. All he had taken away from it by 2012 was that “he was right” when he was so manifestly wrong.

This is the guy we have in the White House right now. May God help us all.

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