Leave to Pea-Brain Bush to learn exactly the wrong about Vietnam in relation to Iraq. Bush today compared Iraq to Vietnam (see CNN.COM story here). I doubt there any people left who would think for a second, "Oh thank goodness! Bush finally gets it!" Just in case there are, guess what, he doesn't.
Did Bush see the similarities between the manufactured Golf of Tonkin Incident and Colin Powell's trip to the UN with the mysterious little test tube of white powder? Nope.
Bush thinks that the lesson to learn from Vietnam is that we pulled out too soon!! He argues that our pull out from Vietnam had a price that was paid by millions of innocent South East Asians. Sure that version of events may play well in certain neighborhoods in Southern California (Vietnamese exiles) or South Florida (Cuban exiles) but it's pure idiocy.
As long as the US was involved in Vietnam civilian casualties were through the roof. Millions of Vietnamese in both the North and South died or disappeared during our involvement in that war. Only in Cambodia did the death toll spike after we left because of Pol Pot's killing fields. Of course, we supported Pol Pot during that period because he was fighting the Vietnamese communists so...
If we had pulled out in 1969, SE Asia would have had major problems. If we had pulled out in 1980 SE Asia would have had major problems. As it was, we pulled out in 1975. And when we did, South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos quickly fell to the communists in those countries. But it is likely that the same would have happened in 1969 or 1980. The are only two real differences that I can imagine resulting from a different pull out time.
One is how many Americans would have died. The second, is how long the region would have had to recover since our pull out. As it is, Vietnam is rapidly reforming, increasing its trade with the outside and becoming a China-like Communist regime in name only. Cambodia is beginning to put the Killing Fields tragedy behind them. These changes took time to happen and could only begin to happen once we pulled out.
By making this statement, Bush has shown (yet again) what an amazingly third rate intellect he really is.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Bush Implies We Never Should Have Left Vietnam
Posted by Raised By Republicans at 9:13 AM
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The man is a worse than a third rate intellect. He is in crazed denial.
He fails to see the irony in the statement, "Whatever your position in that debate, 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,' " the president said."
For starters, their agonies did more than enrich our vocab. Secondly, the death rate in Iraq on a daily basis like huge. Look at the graphis we put up earlier. I heard one expert say it is like a "9/1l" every day for Iraqis.
Impeachment and war crimes is what this man and his people deserve.
RBR is right. It won't matter when we pull out of Iraq. The region is going to implode regardless. And we armed shias in Iraq.We can't account for missing weapons in Iraq. Can you say internatioanl arms trade? Sounds like history repeating itself.
So now even Bush thinks Iraq is another Vietnam? Apparently he has been listening to the Right Wing's favorite bedtime fairytale--the lie that we lost Vietnam "at home." I pray the rest of America is not fooled and realizes the truth: if Iraq is like Vietnam, then the "war" to establish our puppet government over there is indeed lost and we must get out now.
One of the epiphanies I had in the 1990s looking at the "new" Southern GOP was that they weren't just making the same pro-states-rights arguments as segregationists put forward in the 1950s and 1960s. They were often the same damned people. Strom Thurmond was just the tip of the iceberg on that one.
Same with Bush and Iraq and Vietnam. Rumsfeld was there in 1974 demanding that the US stay in Vietnam. Cheney too. They are the same damned people.
Obama was right when he said that politics in the 1990s often seemed like petty revenge for what happened in the 1960s. That's still going on.
The danger is that this bedtime story gets spread to a new generation. That's part of why Iraq matters so much to the Democrats also. They protested Vietnam in the 1960s, and see forcing Bush to pull out of Iraq as the victory over Nixon they never got. History repeats itself when its participants do so deliberately.
It's just sad that a new generation of voters coming of age now, who scarcely even remember the Gulf War, have no idea that they are being manipulated by bitter old men trying to get revenge for the past. See Germany in WWII for additional details.
It is interesting that you mention Nixon. Carl Bernstein has written, "In a quarter century of political life in the Capital since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, perhaps two or three historic pieces of legislation had become law. Since the bipartisan consensus on Watergate and impeachment, far more energy had been expended on political and cultural warfare than on constructive civic engagement."
He goes on to say that the basic conversation in Washington,DC, which he calls a "baronial outcropping still clinging to a peculiarly American version of primogeniture"(that about sums it up), was no longer focusing on the substance of government, but on the "minutiae of political horse-trading." This focus is meant to keep your the eye off the ball. That is how the Patriot Act was passed, it is what helped to distract journalist into following whatever the White House said. It is what has marginalized substantive debate about anything.
And see the result.
Just to reinforce the statement made above, Obama said this evening on the Daily Show that, "So we're preparing and one of my staff said, 'The thing you've got to understand is, this isn't on the level.' And I think that really strikes to what people are frustrated with in politics, is that so much of what we talk about, so much of what we say, it's not true, people know it's not true, all the insiders understand that we're just game-playing - and in the meantime you've got these hugely serious problems, which are true."
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