From a provocative piece by Peter Wehner:

In the wake of the victories by the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, many liberals simply ignored what followed their ascension to power. Progressives believed the leadership of these countries were comprised of enlightened agrarian reformers who would improve the everyday lives of people in both countries. What the South Vietnamese and the Cambodian people got instead was unimaginable brutality and horror — and what we heard from many on the left were excuses and indifference.

I was reminded of this in reading Max’s post, which quoted a tribal elder in Afghanistan, commenting on President Obama’s decision to withdraw more than 33,000 troops by next September. “This drawdown will embolden the morale of the Taliban, and actually it has already emboldened them,” the tribal elder said. The Taliban are saying to the elders not to support Americans or you will be killed, and now they say the Americans are leaving and your lives will not be spared.

Yet we have figures like the liberal evangelical Jim Wallis urging the United States exit immediately, without even a single reference to the hellish future that would face the people of Afghanistan if that were to happen. Wallis argued something similar in Iraq, urging the United States to withdraw rather than support President Bush’s surge strategy. If America had followed the counsel of Wallis, Iraq would have descended into civil war and mass death.

None of this is surprising for Wallis or those who shared his worldview. After all, in September 1979, Wallis wrote of the Vietnamese “boat people”: “Many of today’s refugees were inoculated with a taste for a Western lifestyle during the war years and are fleeing to support their consumer habit in other lands.” (See this profile on Wallis.) Wallis’ words were disgraceful, a slander of innocent people who were fleeing a repressive government. And in Cambodia we didn’t see the emergence of social justice (a favorite phrase of Wallis’); what we saw instead was forced labor, slavery, starvation and the extermination of roughly one-quarter of the Cambodian population.

I recall my cognitive dissonance: Why weren’t those on the left –who took great pride in advertising their compassion for the poor, the dispossessed, and the downtrodden and who took special pride in their multicultural sensitivities — the least bit horrified by what happened and their complicity in it? Didn’t the mass graves, the genocide, and the killing fields bother them? Why weren’t there more liberals like Joan Baez, who supported the North Vietnamese until she became horrified at its human-rights violations (she eventually published a full-page newspaper advertisement describing the horror that had descended on Vietnam). Conservatism might not be perfect, I thought at the time, but it could do a good deal better than this.