What slays me is that they are proud of this speech. They think this will turn things around for them.
Glad you finally saw the light. And to avoid further confusion in the future, here's W laying out the corollary: See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. So, if he repeats it enough, it's true.
I'm genuinely curious if any other sitting President, besides Ford, obviously, has publicly questioned the withdrawal from Vietnam.
Well, I think the emperor truly has no clothes and is walking around like a fool but no one close to him is brave enough to tell him. It doesn't matter anymore, this presidency only has veto power and nothing else. It can only stop Congress from doing things, and interfere in investigations of his disasterous administration. Everyone is looking to 2008 and Bush is nothing more then a bad dream fading on the horizon.
Looks like the Vietnamese disagree with Bush. But then no matter how wrong he is, Bush can always count on his supporters who are always the only people by his side! http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070823/ap_on_re_as/vietnam_iraq_bush War analogy strikes nerve in Vietnam By BEN STOCKING, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 9 minutes ago HANOI, Vietnam - President Bush touched a nerve among Vietnamese when he invoked the Vietnam War in a speech warning that death and chaos will envelop Iraq if U.S. troops leave too quickly. ADVERTISEMENT People in Vietnam, where opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq is strong, said Thursday that Bush drew the wrong conclusions from the long, bloody Southeast Asian conflict. "Doesn't he realize that if the U.S. had stayed in Vietnam longer, they would have killed more people?" said Vu Huy Trieu of Hanoi, a veteran of the communist forces that fought American troops in Vietnam. "Nobody regrets that the Vietnam War wasn't prolonged except Bush." He said U.S. troops could never have prevailed here. "Does he think the U.S. could have won if they had stayed longer? No way," Trieu said. Vietnam's official government spokesman offered a more measured response when asked at a regular media briefing to comment on Bush's speech to American veterans Wednesday. "With regard to the American war in Vietnam, everyone knows that we fought to defend our country and that this was a righteous war of the Vietnamese people," Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung said. "And we all know that the war caused tremendous suffering and losses to the Vietnamese people." Dung said Vietnam hopes that the Iraq conflict will be resolved "very soon, in an orderly way, and that the Iraqi people will do their best to rebuild their country." Although Vietnam opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Dung stressed that ties between Hanoi and Washington have been growing closer since the former foes normalized relations in 1995, two decades after the war's end. In his remarks to U.S. veterans, Bush said a hasty retreat from Iraq would lead to terrible violence. "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's 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,'" Bush said. Many people in Vietnam said Bush's comparison was ill-considered. The only way to restore order in Iraq is for the United States to leave, said Trinh Xuan Thang, a university student. "Bush sent troops to invade Iraq and created all the problems there," Thang said. If the U.S. withdrew, he said, the violence might escalate in the short term but the situation would eventually stabilize. "Let the Iraqis determine their fate by themselves," Thang said. "They don't need American troops there." Ton Nu Thi Ninh, former chairwoman of the National Assembly's committee on foreign affairs, said Bush was unwise to stir up sensitive memories of the Vietnam War. "The price we, the Vietnamese people on both sides, paid during the war was due to the fact that the Americans went into Vietnam in the first place," Ninh said.
It's a desperate ploy to consolidate the remaining supporters who are delusional about the prospects of victory. He's alluding to the revisionist argument that Vietnam would've been won if the damn hippies and liberals didn't call the troops home.
From today's WaPo Bush's Vietnam Blunder By Jim Hoagland Friday, August 24, 2007; Page A15 Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq. Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting president. It is not just that Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Wednesday drew on a shaky grasp of history, spotlighted once again his own decision to sit out the Vietnam conflict, and played straight into his critics' most emotive arguments against him and the Republican Party. More important, Bush has called attention to the elephant that will be sitting in the room when his administration makes its politically vital report on Iraq to the nation next month. For Americans, the most important comparison will be this one: As Vietnam did, Iraq has become a failure even on its own terms -- whatever those terms are at any given moment. That is, the administration has constantly shifted its goals in Iraq to avoid accepting failure and blame -- only to see the new goals drift beyond reach each time. Liberation of Iraqis became occupation by Americans, democracy became an unattainable centralized "national unity" government and this year's military surge has become a device for achieving political reconciliation among people who do not want to reconcile. Bush's appeal to Americans to turn away from "the allure of retreat" centered on the indisputably horrific consequences for the people of Vietnam and Cambodia of defeat in 1975. But his analogy also summons the historical reality that U.S. involvement in Indochina became untenable when that engagement itself became a threat to America's social fabric and national cohesion -- and then to the very institutions that had responsibility for the war, the U.S. military and intelligence services, as well as the presidency and Congress. Iraq fortunately has not produced anything like the scale of casualties and domestic conflict that Vietnam visited on the United States. The two conflicts also differ greatly in their potential regional consequences. Bush had done well until now to steer away from such analogies. But his words invite examination of the mounting damage that Bush's approaches to the war in Iraq and to national security in general are doing to U.S. institutions in an American society that has significantly changed since 1975. Some military commanders, CIA agents in Iraq, Republican members of Congress, State Department diplomats and others now make their highest priority the protection of their own reputations, careers and institutions -- the three blend seamlessly into a single overriding ambition in Washington -- for the post-Bush era, which thus draws closer, in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The need to protect the White House, the Pentagon and both major political parties from greater Iraq fallout explains much of the blame being dumped on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at this late date -- even though his deficiencies and close links to Iran and Syria were clearly visible when the administration helped install him in the job in 2006. As he has been throughout the Iraq experience, Bush is condemned to play the cards he dealt himself. The prime minister's chances of producing the "national unity" government that Bush demanded but that Maliki himself never seemed to believe in are now being shredded by the maneuvering for position in the twilight months of the Bush presidency. The U.S. military is helping Sunni tribes organize into armed militias that will owe their loyalty beyond the tribe to American commanders rather than to Maliki's government. Similarly, the CIA has molded an Iraq intelligence service that draws no public funds from the Iraqi government and presumably is paid for by Langley. The agency's reluctance to act against Kurdish rebels operating against Iran and Turkey may also be part of a separate vision of the agency's future role in Iraq. Such maneuvering is ultimately self-defeating, as was Bush's desperate bid this week to mobilize on his side the old resentments and fears of the political battles fought over Vietnam. Bush's speech fits Talleyrand's definition of something worse than a crime: It was a blunder. Vietnam and Iraq are totally different situations. But U.S. institutions and their leaders will still follow the Washington laws of self-preservation when campaigns abroad begin to threaten their survival. jimhoagland@washpost.com http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/23/AR2007082301835.html
more from Andrew Sullivan... Kristol and History 23 Aug 2007 06:55 pm A reader writes: What strikes me about Kristol's rhetoric of late, and Bush's Vietnam analogy, is how this War's supporters --more so then it's critics--have "given up". Chait is right, Kristol is smart, he knows how this will all end. He too, like us, has watched the moments of promise, of crumbling statues, of elections, disintegrate in chaos. He no longer has any interest in finding a way of out Iraq, instead he's preparing for a way out of "Iraq Syndrome". When Kristol says: "They sense that history is progressing away from them" It is actually a much deeper and profound thought then you give him credit for. We have to remember that this has always been about "History" to the Neo-Cons. They were going to be the triumphant liberators of Iraq, upon whom books and movies would be based, they were going to knock the "greatest generation" off their pedestal through the sheer magnanimity of their glorious re-shaping of the world. But what Kristol, Perle, Bush et al. are now left with is a harsh reality, where to be effective they would have to engage in the relativism of picking lesser evils and there's nothing glorious about that. So instead, they've just skipped a few pages in the history books, to where we all wonder "who's to blame". That's what Bush was doing yesterday. Building an alibi. Blame the detractors for the negative externalities of my war and then get off the hook for blowing it. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/
this speech was a major 'hail mary' from team bush; republicans must cringe when they hear things like this because bush will have the party so hated by the majority of citizens in the US that they won't stand a chance in 2008./
This is what you get when your Daddy's "friends" help you avoid military service in a theater of combat. Had his ass wound up over in the Mekong Delta getting shot at like mine, he wouldn't have made this dumbass comparison. But then, he'd have known exactly what it means to send young men off to die in combat for bull**** reasons.
Bush has made a pretty severe blunder here in the battle for PR - if anything, his comments will only further erode support for the war since I think the vast majority of people look back and don't regret withdrawing from Vietnam, and now he's opened the can of worms for comparing Iraq to Vietnam, which only suggests that we are in fact in a quagmire. Of course, I think most people have come to that conclusion already. Despite the promising work that Patreaus has done this year, it appears that the long-term outcome is bleak after looking through the NIE assessment. It's too bad, would have liked to see a different outcome, and perhaps we could have cleaned things up but with only a few weeks left, it doesn't seem likely that the results will be there. I think we should give a few more months before committing to a withdrawal, but it's clear we need to start planning for a partition or some other way to come to a resolution of the crisis.
If we stay there will be trouble If we go it will be double In history there has never been an easy solution to civil war. With lethality at new unheard of levels this one promises to be the mother of all civil wars. Lot's of people are going to die, it can't be stopped until the futility becomes unassailable. Iraq will become partitioned and ethnically cleansed. I'd just as soon step out and let the Muslim factions focus on each other. Saddam and The Ayatollahs were a lot less trouble when they were sending masses of cannon fodder at each other. People in general are so stupid, with all the money we have spent on Iraq and Israel we could have just moved the whole populations to nice condos in Boca.
what the hell dude? you spent the better part of 35 pages telling people who were saying the exact same things you are here that they are "committed to failure" and are "liberals" who are so clouded by their hatred of bush that they cannot admit that things are going well in iraq. first you say that you think the war is a failure and that you havent changed your mind, than you say you think its going well and accuse anyone who says otherwise of being "committed to failure" and now you flip-flop again and say that it is a quagmire. which is it? why? if the war is a failure and a quagmire why should we wait a few more months?
[rquoter] Transcript: Democratic Response to Bush's Radio Address Former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga.: My fellow Americans, this is Max Cleland, former U.S. senator from Georgia. This week, President Bush gave a speech comparing the ongoing war in Iraq to the Vietnam War. He used this analogy in his latest plea to the American people for yet more time to continue his war. I know something about the Vietnam War. I know something about the price that was paid for continuing that war long after it was clear we could not succeed. I know something about years of war failing to produce a stable, secure and democratic country. I know something about enemy attacks increasing and taking an ever higher toll on our troops. Fifty-eight thousand young Americans were killed in Vietnam; 350,000 were wounded. I was one of them. There are similarities between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam. One of the lessons to be learned from Vietnam is that the commitment of American military strength alone cannot solve another country's political weakness. This should be a somber warning to us all to responsibly end the war in Iraq and the additional loss of precious American lives. Congress has required the president to issue a report soon on the state of the war. This assessment gives him yet another opportunity to do the right thing and change course in Iraq. Unfortunately, it appears he will continue to argue that, if the American people and the U.S. Congress will just be patient, things will work out. He is likely to say that, given more time, victory is just around the corner. He is likely to argue that there is light at the end of the tunnel. But like political leaders during the Vietnam era, this president has a "credibility gap." The majority of Americans see a profound difference between President Bush's optimistic rhetoric and the grim reality which lies beneath. Our history in Vietnam and the facts on the ground in Iraq today prove the American people are right. How do I know? Because I've seen this movie before. I know how it ends. I know that all the P.R. in the world didn't change the truth on the ground in Vietnam and won't change the truth on the ground today in Iraq. What is this truth? The truth is that more than 3,700 Americans have already lost their lives, more than 20,000 have been wounded, and nearly $500 billion in American taxpayer funds have been expended. The truth is that, despite this enormous sacrifice, we find ourselves mired in a civil war with no end in sight and Iraqis unable or unwilling to make the political decisions necessary to end this conflict. And the truth is President Bush's decision to go to war and stay at war has actually encouraged thousands of new recruits for Al Qaida in Iraq and around the world, has made the Middle East and other parts of the globe less safe, has alienated the Muslim world and allowed Al Qaida — the enemy that attacked this nation six years ago — a chance to rebuild and restore its terror network. These are the facts. But the facts will not stop the president and his fellow Republicans from trying once again to sell the American people a bill of goods on the Iraq war. The failures in Iraq are not the fault of our troops or their courage in battle. They have done everything asked of them and more. The conflict in Iraq is an Iraqi political problem, not a U.S. military problem. We can't continue to sacrifice American lives, deplete our treasury and weaken our national security. We can't expect our soldiers to continue to risk their lives, especially when the Iraqi leaders themselves show no interest in achieving a peaceful political solution. President Bush's report to Congress will attempt to show that his escalation has produced improved security in certain parts of Iraq. But it will ignore the stark truth in Iraq: that his overall strategy to buy time for Iraqis to make the needed political decisions has failed and, just like Vietnam, we are enmeshed now in an open-ended war for which our troops and our country will pay the price for decades to come. That's why we must act now. This fall, Democrats in Congress will continue to stand with our troops and with the American people to remember the lessons of history and end the Iraq war. [/rquoter] source
Somewhat of a shameless plug, since Dr. Buzzanco (or "Buzz", as he's affectionately referred to) is a close acquaintance of mine. He's a prominent Vietnam historian/scholar and an authority in the field, not to mention just an all-around great guy. On wrong side of history: Bush's Vietnam analogy incorrect However, U.S. is making the same errors in Iraq By ROBERT BUZZANCO http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/5079389.html In his continuing attempts to justify escalation of the war in Iraq, President Bush has resorted to historical analogy, warning that a hasty retreat from the Middle East would trigger a bloodbath as it did in Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1970s. Not only is the comparison faulty, it is historically inaccurate. "In Cambodia," Bush said, "the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution" and "in Vietnam, former allies of the United States, and government workers and 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 and defenders of the current war and Vietnam ignore crucial aspects of history, however. Vietnam by 1975 had been wracked by a brutal fratricidal war for over a quarter-century, and recriminations were unavoidable, and made inevitable by the nature of the U.S. intervention and occupation of the southern half of Vietnam. His analogy of Cambodia is more off-track. The Khmer Rouge slaughter was not caused by the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina in 1973, but by the U.S. escalation of the war and intervention into Cambodia in the years prior to that time. The United States had been conducting a "secret war" kept secret from the American people but not from the Cambodians on the receiving end of B-52 strikes since the later 1960s. In April 1970, then, Richard Nixon authorized what he called an "incursion" of Cambodia on the pretext of destroying the headquarters for Vietnamese Communist military operations there, the so-called COSVN, or Central Office for South Vietnam. A month earlier, however, in March 1970, the United States had facilitated the ouster of the Cambodian head-of-state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and replaced him with a weak but pliable politician named Lon Nol. At this time, the Khmer Rouge was a small splinter group of the far left, without much popular support or military power. But the U.S.-sponsored coup, and the subsequent invasion in April, proved to be a great blessing to the Khmer Rouge. With Sihanouk, who had tried to remain neutral in the larger Indochinese conflict and thus was not preventing either the Vietnamese Communists or the U.S. from operating in Cambodia, out of the way and Lon Nol, perceived as a "puppet" of Nixon, in office, there was no middle ground in Cambodia. As a result, the Khmer Rouge soared in influence and popularity by exploiting the heavy-handed American political and military intervention. By the mid-1970s, as the U.S. air war against Cambodia continued, killing hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge was well-positioned as the anti-American and anti-Lon Nol alternative, and so was able to swarm into Phnom Penh and establish a regime in April 1975, and then unleashing a genocidal wave of killings that lasted until the Vietnamese intervened and ousted the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in January 1979. Even after that ouster, however, the United States continued to work with the Khmer Rouge, supporting covert operations against the Vietnamese-supported new government in Phnom Penh and even, in the Ronald Reagan years, supporting the Khmer Rouge claim to Cambodia's seat at the United Nations. Now, as in the Vietnam era, the United States finds itself in a similarly intractable position. By intervening in a country that was not stable to begin with, putting a government into power that is derided as a U.S. client regime, heightening internal struggles, this time between Shiite and Sunni, taking sides in a civil war, causing massive destruction, and continuing to fight amid escalating bloodshed abroad and popular protest at home, the Bush administration is making many of the same errors that the Johnson and Nixon administrations did during the Vietnam War. While there does not appear to be a genocidal Khmer Rouge-type group lurking in the background and ready to cause incalculable terror, there is no question that the various armed groups that have emerged in Iraq since March 2003 are certain to persist and cause greater mayhem and death, perhaps throughout the entire Middle East. So Bush's analogy is not only incorrect, but exposes the perhaps unavoidable fate facing the United States in Iraq. Continuing this war amid the daily deterioration will only prolong the time it will take to rebuild Iraq and try to heal the hatred and fear that now engulfs it. The sooner the United States begins a timely withdrawal from Iraq, the sooner the Iraqis themselves can begin to sort out their problems, and hopefully prevent a repeat of the killing fields of Cambodia. Buzzanco is professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Houston. He is also author of "Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era and Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life." Readers may e-mail him at buzz@uh.edu.
Report: White House To Ask For $50 Billion More For Iraq President Bush is reportedly going to ask Congress for an additional $50 billion in spending for the Iraq War. The announcement will come soon after General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker give their testimony to Congress — based around the idea that Congress won't be able to turn down the request after they've heard good news from those two officials.
