Surrender to whom?

George McGovern didn't use the word "withdrawal", or anything of the kind, he called for surrender. To whom? Him? To the People's Council of Officially Self-Appointed Victims?

They call for "Surrender" because that's all they have in their vocabulary. They've wasted a lifetime inventing non-existent straw-men to enrage gullible high-school and college age people to take power? A veteran of the culture wars, David Horowitz explains:

"On Christmas Day, former U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times (and probably many other papers) calling for an American surrender in Iraq.
George McGovern has not been in the headlines for three decades, and his name consequently may be unfamiliar to many. But no one has had a greater or more baleful impact on the Democratic Party and its electoral fortunes than this progressive product of the South Dakota plains.

"As a post-graduate student at Berkeley in the early Sixties, I was one of the organizers of the first demonstration against the war in Vietnam. It was 1962, and the organizers of this demonstration as of all the major anti-Vietnam demonstrations (and those against the Iraq war as well) were a Marxist and a leftist, respectively. The organizers of the movement against the war in Vietnam were activists who thought the Communists were liberating Vietnam in the same way Michael Moore thinks Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is liberating Iraq.

"The events that followed this retreat in Indochina have been all but forgotten by the Left, which has never learned the lessons of Vietnam, but instead has invoked the retreat itself as an inspiration and guide for its political opposition to the war in Iraq. Along with leading Democrats like Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe, George McGovern called for an American retreat from Iraq even before a government could be established...

Actually, that is not what happened. Four months after the Democrats cut off aid to Cambodia and Vietnam in January 1975, both regimes fell to the Communist armies. Within three years the Communist victors had slaughtered two-and-a-half million peasants in the Indochinese peninsula, paving the way for their socialist paradise. The blood of those victims is on the hands of the Americans who forced this withdrawal: John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and George McGovern – and antiwar activists like myself.

"It is true that Vietnam eventually became a trading partner (“friend” is another matter). But this was not true that it occurred “once we left and quit bombing its people.”

[Emphases mine]

Their goal is as limited as their view of the world. They don't care what happens in the world as long as their country, the U.S. "loses" in some way, or is at least denegrated. It nothing more than their personal problems projected onto others. Can anyone rationally say that anyone would benefit from both nothing changing Iraq AND the U.S. "losing" something... anything, really, as long as they get can enjoy a pyrrhic victory. At the same time they demand more from the state, but still they hate it. This view of their neither progresses, evolves, or changes. Drowned in rapidly solidifying rarebit, it makes it's adherents more violent, and make deeply illiberal allies. In reality they're just mad that they didn't think of it themselves, and resort to old fashioned Jew bating.

Horowitz escaped the sickness, but many are still wearing their red diapers well into maturity.