This is just so horribly wrong:
As he awaits a crucial progress report on Iraq, President Bush will try to put a twist on comparisons of the war to Vietnam by invoking the historical lessons of that conflict to argue against pulling out.
On Wednesday in Kansas City, Missouri, Bush will tell members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that “then, as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” according to speech excerpts released Tuesday by the White House.
“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left,” Bush will say.
“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 will say.
The guy who didn’t serve in Vietnam now says that a whole bunch of people who weren’t him should have stayed there. And his argument is so flawed that it is hard to know where to begin parsing it.
I am not aware of anyone sensible suggesting that the violence in Iraq will stop if there is a withdrawal – the consensus among those who want a withdrawal is that the presence of foreign troops is doing little to curb the civil war and is attracting more violence from insurgents.
He shows no capacity to entertain possible outcomes if there was no withdrawal from Iraq – what did happen wouldn’t have occurred, but does that mean nobody would have died? Of course not. So how many more American, Australian, New Zealand, and other soldiers would have died? And would they have prevailed over the North Vietnamese? Bush’s statement assumes it is so. But an alternative is that the same result might have come 2, 5, 10, or 20 years later. Sometimes, you just can’t prevent bad things from happening, especially when it is not your country.
And then comes the suggestion that today’s threat is directly related to withdrawal from Vietnam:
The president will also make the argument that withdrawing from Vietnam emboldened today’s terrorists by compromising U.S. credibility, citing a quote from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden that the American people would rise against the Iraq war the same way they rose against the war in Vietnam, according to the excerpts.
So, now we have to stay because Osama called us chicken? bin Laden observed that Americans are not keen on supporting wars that can’t be won – he might be evil, but in this case he’s correct.
I worry about how much more damage this man can do to the world in his remaining 18 months. When the only mistake he can concede about Vietnam is that the war was abandoned, I do not see how he can be considered competent to make decisions about military operations or foreign policy.
If you are as troubled as me after the preview of Bush’s speech, read some rational analysis of foreign policy doctrine from John Quiggin (with a repost and more discussion at John’s own blog).
