Ever since it became clear that the Iraq War would not be a glorious crusade but rather an intractable quagmire, it has been compared to the Vietnam War. Both conflicts were rooted in blind ideology, launched based on lies, and kept going long after everyone knew they could not be won by military means.
President Bush never went to Vietnam and never fought alongside those who did - John Kerry, for one. Rather, he was safely posted to a "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard, well known for keeping sons of the state's rich and powerful out of harm's way. (And he didn't even show up for all of his deployment to boot.) But that didn't stop him from drawing his own parallels between the wars, as he did today in a Kansas City speech to the VFW convention.
"There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam," he told the assembled veterans, "and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that 'the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today...' Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility -- but the terrorists see it differently."
Astoundingly, Bush seems to be arguing that we were attacked on 9/11 because we withdrew from Vietnam twenty-six years earlier. Not only that, he falls back on the Rambo excuse, that we lost Vietnam because we didn't see it through and weren't "allowed to win." In his little world, we could have won the war if only we had the gumption to drop more bombs, kill more people, and devastate the entire region even more than we actually did.
Not surprisingly, his conclusions are strikingly different from those reached by people who actually know something about the war.
"What is Bush suggesting?" asked historian Robert Dallek. "That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion. We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out."
And just to show that the only President we've got really don't know much about history, he also said that "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 'killing fields.'"
Um...George? The Khmer Rouge's killing fields were in Cambodia, not Vietnam. And they were overthrown by the very same Vietnamese you were out bashing today.
It's truly unbelievable that Bush would use one useless war to try and justify our continued involvement in another useless war. Once again, he gets an F in basic American history. Can't we flunk this guy out already?
President Bush never went to Vietnam and never fought alongside those who did - John Kerry, for one. Rather, he was safely posted to a "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard, well known for keeping sons of the state's rich and powerful out of harm's way. (And he didn't even show up for all of his deployment to boot.) But that didn't stop him from drawing his own parallels between the wars, as he did today in a Kansas City speech to the VFW convention.
"There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam," he told the assembled veterans, "and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that 'the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today...' Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility -- but the terrorists see it differently."
Astoundingly, Bush seems to be arguing that we were attacked on 9/11 because we withdrew from Vietnam twenty-six years earlier. Not only that, he falls back on the Rambo excuse, that we lost Vietnam because we didn't see it through and weren't "allowed to win." In his little world, we could have won the war if only we had the gumption to drop more bombs, kill more people, and devastate the entire region even more than we actually did.
Not surprisingly, his conclusions are strikingly different from those reached by people who actually know something about the war.
"What is Bush suggesting?" asked historian Robert Dallek. "That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion. We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out."
And just to show that the only President we've got really don't know much about history, he also said that "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 'killing fields.'"
Um...George? The Khmer Rouge's killing fields were in Cambodia, not Vietnam. And they were overthrown by the very same Vietnamese you were out bashing today.
It's truly unbelievable that Bush would use one useless war to try and justify our continued involvement in another useless war. Once again, he gets an F in basic American history. Can't we flunk this guy out already?
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