Oblivious to irony, Bush compares Iraq to Vietnam
The White House has spent the last four years denying the quagmire in Iraq is in any way comparable to the quagmire we faced in Vietnam. That's suddenly changed. Bush gave a muddy, ham-handed speech in which he tried to make the case that pulling out of Iraq would lead to something like the killing fields of Cambodia:
"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush added. "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.' "
Of course, the Goober In Chief is displaying his typical lack of historical understanding:
The New York Times also talked to [Robert] Dallek, who pointed out that the slaughters of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia “was a consequence of our having gone into Cambodia and destabilized that country.”
Also:
USA Today located Stanley Karnow, one of the leading scholars on the Vietnam war. “Vietnam was not a bunch of sectarian groups fighting each other,” as in Iraq. “Does he think we should have stayed in Vietnam?”
Of course that's what he thinks. The right wing in this country has preached the Dolchstosslegende for thirty years now, that the failure of the US to "win" in Vietnam was due to the war's opponents at home, and not due to a failure of leadership and planning among the war's architects in Washington or inside the war zone, or due to the sheer fact that American will cannot always be enforced at gunpoint. That slander against opponents of the war was hogwash then, and it's hogwash now.
It's also darkly hilarious that the comparison to Vietnam is being made by a man who spent those war years stoned and AWOL in Alabama.