DailyKos.com makes a very good point about Bush's ludicrous statements concerning Viet Nam:
Embracing Vietnam
by mcjoan
Wed Aug 22, 2007 at 09:54:03 AM PDT
In the middle of Iraq's bloodiest summer yet, on a day that brings the news of the deaths of 14 U.S. soldiers and the deaths of at least 20 Iraqis in yet another attack on a police station, Bush goes Nixon on us. It's a strange tactic for selling the continued occupation of Iraq--evoking the second worst geopolitical and strategic blunder of modern times.
Said Bush today, "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of Americas 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.""
(Just an aside, for the sake of historical accuracy. As Josh points out: the killing fields were in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, not in Vietnam, and actually that genocide ended when the Communist Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. History is complicated.)
There certainly are parallels to Vietnam in this debacle--first, they're both debacles, or perhaps I should say quagmires. Both were started on the most specious of reasons (though, at least in Vietnam, there was an underlying ideological reason--one that proved to be wrongheaded, but there was at least arguably a threat behind the domino theory). And both have proven to be disasters at home--politically divisive, economically ruinous, and leaving a legacy of broken and demoralized veterans--veterans who deserve far more than they get from their government when they return home.
That's what the vast majority of American people are going to remember when they remember Vietnam. It's a strange way to market the latest quagmire.
