Bush Compares Iraq to Vietnam

Bush gave a speech today to a VFW group about Iraq comparing it to Vietnam.  He believes the US should not abandon Iraq the way it did Vietnam, a retreat that resulted in boat people, killing fields, and by my observation, a lot of Pho restaurants in the Twin Cities.

Bush should have told the VFW that the mistake was going into Iraq rather than wanting to leave once the mistake was made.  But he could have searched his own words and come up with that answer (from Think Progress):

War Bush’s ‘Lessons Of Vietnam’

Prior the Iraq war, George W. Bush claimed that he had learned some powerful lessons from the Vietnam war. Among those lessons were the fact that U.S. must be “slow to engage troops.” “We can never again ask the military to fight a political war,” Bush said, adding that “the cause must be just”:

A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear and the victory must be overwhelming. [Bush address to RNC convention, 8/4/00]

The Republican presidential front-runner also says he learned “the lesson of Vietnam.” “Our nation should be slow to engage troops. But when we do so, we must do so with ferocity. We must not go into a conflict unless we go in committed to win. We can never again ask the military to fight a political war,” Bush wrote. [AP, 11/15/99, reporting on Bush’s biography A Charge To Keep]

Forgetting entirely the lessons that he claimed to have learned from a war in which he did not serve, Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003 hastily, without just cause, and lacking a clear goal. For years, he maintained Iraq and Vietnam had no similarities. In April 2004, he said:

QUESTION: How do you answer the Vietnam comparison?

BUSH: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy.

Meanwhile, at least 15 more US soldiers died today in Iraq.

Comments

[DiAnne]

That is ridiculous because Vietnam waas a quagmire and Iraq is a quagmire.
That is the only similarity. People dying for nothing.

I heard Bush on the way home - he's trying to say that we left Vietnam too early.
He's blaming boat people and negative aftermath on leaving too soon.

We should never have gone to either place.

[Ally McRepuke]

As I've said elsewhere, I think of this "comparison" as a suck-up to the Vietnamese-American community. "The Republicans did their best to protect your freedoms, so you better thank them."

Same shit with invoking South Korea in that same speech.

No more kimchi and pho for me.

[kayakbiker]

Ally, you got it right about our Pho-president, but I ain't giving up my kimchi or pho --- I'm not going to let that bum limit my culinary treats.

I make my own kimchi, but pho is cheap and the salads that come with it here are sooo fresh -- I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.

[abbycat]

Anybody who is listening to and believing Bush at this point
is probably a fairly hopeless case from the get go.
Any person who left Vietnam didn't get a lick of help
from Bush and better be smart enough to know it

[not my president]

Amazing article ..

The Great Iraq Swindle
How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle

Diarist occams hatchet has written this diary about it & has pointed out what he thinks are the two most important paragraphs in the article:

Rolling Stone: an article that could end the war
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/8/25/163320/999

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.