McGovern wants the new Democratic majority in Congress to force a U.S. withdrawal by June 2007. Such a precipitous “cut and run” policy has obviously given the aging activist a flashback to his July 14, 1972, speech accepting the Democratic nomination. In it, he called for an “immediate and complete withdrawal” from Vietnam, making that the central issue of the campaign. He then suffered a humiliating drubbing by a 61-38 percent margin, losing 49 states. As McGovern himself once put it, “I opened the doors of the Democratic Party, and 20 million people walked out.”On one point, however, he is correct. There are similarities on the left-wing of the Democratic Party from Vietnam, through the Central American wars of the 1980s, to Iraq today. McGovern is not the only reminder of this disgraceful history. Daniel Ortega, the former Sandinista dictator, was elected president of Nicaragua on November 5. In his victory speech, Ortega thanked his leftist “brothers” Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Castro praised Ortega, whose armed movement was one of several Castro (with Soviet backing) had supported in the 1980s, saying his election “fills our people with joy, at the same time filling the terrorist and genocidal government of the United States with opprobrium.” For his part, Ortega talked of the Iraq War and how the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress should force America to “pull its troops out of that country.”
Ortega knows the power of Congress to help foreign thugs like himself by constraining American actions. Starting in 1982, Democratic Rep. Edward Boland sponsored measures adopted by Congress to prohibit the Reagan administration from providing military support “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua,” then a Marxist junta led by Ortega. There were loopholes in the law, which the National Security Council exploited to continue aiding the anti-Communist Contra rebels. President Ronald Reagan called Ortega's regime “one of the world's principal refuges for international terrorists” and a “partner of Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Cuba.”