Somehow I don't think evoking the war you ran away from is the best course of action when trying to convince people that we need to "stay the course". ------------------ Bush draws Vietnam parallel in warning over Iraq withdrawal KANSAS CITY, United States (AFP) - US President George W. Bush in a speech on Wednesday will warn that a US withdrawal from Iraq could produce a catastrophe similar to what occurred in Southeast Asia after US forces left Vietnam. According to excerpts from Bush's address released in advance on Tuesday, the president charges that an early exit from Iraq would "pull the rug out" from under American troops just as their efforts are paying off. Bush's speech ties anti-war forces in the Vietnam era to the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the aftermath of the US pull-out, and hints at a parallel disaster in Iraq if US forces leave too soon. "Many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people," he said according to the advance transcript. "The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation, torture, or execution. "In Vietnam, former American allies, government workers, intellectuals, and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. "Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea," Bush said, pleading for patience with the US-led security crackdown in Iraq. Bush was scheduled to deliver his speech to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) group, which claims 2.3 million members, on Wednesday in Kansas City, Missouri. He also said that US withdrawal from Vietnam was a key element of the anti-US talk of Al-Qaeda leaders. "There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- Al-Qaeda," Bush said, pointing to speeches by Osama bin Laden and his number two Ayman al-Zawahiri in which they mention Vietnam in connection with US government weakness. "Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility, but the terrorists see things differently." Meanwhile, US troops in Iraq "are carrying out a surge that is helping bring former Sunni insurgents into the fight against Al-Qaeda, clearing the terrorists out of population centers, and giving families in liberated Iraqi cities their first look at decent and normal life." "As they take the initiative from the enemy, they have a question: Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they are gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq?" he asked. "My answer is clear: We will support our troops, we will support our commanders, and we will give them everything they need to succeed," said Bush, who linked the painful US defeat in Vietnam to the situation in Iraq. "Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," he acknowledged. "Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of AmericaÂs withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.'" The US president previously drew a parallel between Vietnam and Iraq in November during a visit to Vietnam. Bush had said that one lesson of the bloody US military defeat there a generation ago was that the United States must be patient in Iraq. "We'll succeed unless we quit," Bush said. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2007082...70822072354;_ylt=AqijE0TTrj3RFVy516mJKlis0NUE
wow, just wow. i can't believe this is the new talking point, obviously a few others on this site got the memo before bush. "Iraq, yeah we screwed up, but if we leave, it'll be worse" awesome slogan
Josh b**** slaps Jr's new talking points. -- Osama is My Shepherd I Shall Not Want According to advance reports, President Bush will tomorrow invoke the specter of Vietnam in defense of his failed Iraq policy. But isn't this quite possibly the worst argument for his Iraq policy? Going forty years on, it is not too much to say that virtually none of the predicted negative repercussions of our departure from Vietnam ever came to pass. Asia didn't go Communist. Our Asian allies didn't abandon us. Rather, the Vietnamese began to fall out with her Communist allies. With the Cold War over, in strategic terms at least, it's almost hard to remember what the whole fight was about. If anything, the clearest lesson of Vietnam would seem to be that there can be a vast hue and cry about the catastrophic effects of disengagement from a failed policy and it can turn out that none of them are true. Even more interesting is another argument President Bush is poised to make: namely, that Vietnam is more than just an analogy. He will argue that the terrorist threat we face today is in some measure the result of our withdrawal from Vietnam, as it emboldened the terrorists to attack us. I'm not sure I've ever seen a better example of President Bush's comically inept strategic thinking. Actually, lack of strategic thinking. I'm sure you've noticed how, as the president's policies go further and further down the drain, he more and more often cites the authority of Osama bin Laden as the rationale for his policies. In this case, we must stay in Iraq forever wasting money and lives and destroying our position in the world because if we don't we'll have proved Osama bin Laden right. It's like a very sad version of a sixty year old falling for that dingbat head fake ten year olds used to play when I was a kid in elementary school in which Kid A says he wants the football, Kid B says, 'Fine, but if you take the football, you're gay.' And then Kid A stalks off hopelessly bamboozled and unable to parry this paralyzing riddle. Apparently we have permanently ceded our foreign policy to the whim of Osama bin Laden's taunts. And finally there's more. The story of the 'boat people' is unquestionably tragic. And there's little doubt that there are many Iraqis who will pay either with their lives or nationality for aiding us in various ways during our occupation of the country. But to govern our policy on this basis is simply to buy into a classic sunk cost fallacy. A far better -- and really quite necessary -- policy would be to give asylum to a lot of these people rather than continuing to get more of them into the same position in advance of our inevitable departure. More concretely though, didn't the killing fields happen in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge rather than Vietnam? So doesn't that complicate the analogy a bit? And didn't that genocide actually come to an end when the Communist Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime? The Vietnamese Communists may have been no great shakes. But can we get through one of these boneheaded historical analogies while keeping at least some of the facts intact? Please? --Josh Marshall http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
so our arugment is that the same idiots who we will think kill each other when we leave, we can get them to work togethe while we're there. because this idiots just love foreign soldiers walking around their neighborhoods with machine guns telling them what to do.
Iraq is like Vietnam. The American people were sold a bill of goods to get us into both wars, which were unwinnable in the first place.
I thought shrub said Iraq is not like Vietnam. http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=78686
Of course, in the real world (as opposed to the Bush dreamland), by staying in Iraq we fullfill Osama's strategy: How much is this war costing us again? <!-- include cost of war javascript; this runs the counter --> <script language="JavaScript" src="http://costofwar.com/costofwar.js"></script> <!-- the elements 'row' and 'alt' will be changed by the javascript to contain the correct numbers --> <div><b>Cost of the War in Iraq</b></div> <div id="raw">(JavaScript Error)</div> <div><a href="http://costofwar.com" target="_top">To see more details, click here.</a></div> <!-- this line triggers the counter to start --> <script language="JavaScript"> inc_totals_at_rate(1000); </script> This whole thing just makes me sick.
What I find interesting... particularly as a guy with a graduate degree in history and hanging around historians for a good chunk of my life is that both Bush and Rove fancy themselves students of history. Bush majored in it. Rove never graduated from college but reportedly reads a lot. However, it's clear neither one of them ever learned to think critically about the craft. Like with the intelligence on Iraq, they seem to twist and cherrypick history to fit into whatever political effort they're concerned with at the moment, or worse, to justify whatever actions they want to take.
Some excerpts: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/22/AR2007082201185_pf.html After some introductory remarks, we learn lessons from Japan, Korea, and Vietnam... And in conclusion: Oh, and he included a line for New Yorker who was questioning the authority of the troops to discuss Iraq:
Bush Lies About Al-Qaeda Captures in Iraq Some distortions are so massive and so deliberate as to constitute outright lies. See if you can spot the dishonesty in this line in President Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars' national convention today: That "and other extremists" line sure does a lot of work here. No order of battle for the insurgency is available, but all credible estimates peg al-Qaeda in Iraq as by far the smallest contingent. One rough assessment, cited byThe New York Times last month, put AQI at possessing perhaps 5,000 fighters. Yet Bush suggested this morning that the U.S. has captured as many as 12,000 members of AQI so far this year. Since the surge began, the U.S. has had between 17,000 and 23,000 Iraqis in custody each month, according to the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index (pdf). Last month, Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times reported that of the 19,000 detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq, only 135 were foreigners -- the most likely indicator of membership in al-Qaeda. Military and intelligence veterans of the Iraq war typically say that determining Iraqi membership in AQI is extraordinarily difficult, and not something that lends itself particularly well to flat, quantitative statements. No wonder the president picked the artful qualifier "and other extremists" to lard his presentation of who the U.S. is capturing in Iraq. It's impossible to disprove the statement, since it conceals precisely how many of the 1,500 monthly captures are in fact AQI. But an inability to disprove a statement doesn't ever make that statement true -- rather, that makes it gibberish. http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003972.php
We defeated the enemy that we declared an undeclared war on. And rather efficiently, too. When our military became the police force for the government that we set up is when they got out of their area of expertise. (Not that that wasn't a foregone conclusion.)
What so strange about Bush invoking Vietnam is that conventional wisdom would say that you'd never want to compare something to Vietnam if you wanted to get support for it. Bush's father on Iraq Invasion I: "This is not Vietnam". And it wasn't.
Jr forgets his own words -- In April 2004, he said: QUESTION: How do you answer the Vietnam comparison? BUSH: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy. http://thinkprogress.org/
No, he's still good. That particular comparison did not fit with the message, the plan, or the view, so it is "false." The ones today are the ones he likes, so they are "true." See, it's consistent if you look at it from Bush's view.
Ah... So the lying to get us into war, the quagmire, the destruction of an entire country doesn't compare with Vietnam. But leaving the job unfinished does. Got it!
