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No he didn’t. Unfortunately, yes he did. I heard it with my own ears. CNN had the advance of Bush’s speech.
Unfortunately, he can’t even get the history right on Vietnam.
“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.
Does Bush not know he’s talking about Cambodia’s “killing fields”? I could start, but Josh
Marshall has already done a teaching post on this one.
More concretely though, didn’t the killing fields happen in Cambodia under
the Khmer Rouge rather than Vietnam? So doesn’t that complicate the analogy
a bit? And didn’t that genocide actually come to an end when the Communist
Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime? The Vietnamese
Communists may have been no great shakes. But can we get through one of these
boneheaded historical analogies while keeping at least some of the facts intact?
In addition, we screwed up Vietnam because the strategy fell apart. What are
we doing in Iraq that is leading us towards “victory”? Never mind that in both countries we could never out stay the citizens.
How many Iraqi refugees and middle class professionals of that country are now in Jordan and beyond?
Bush bringing up Vietnam to make his case for staying in Iraq is just laughable.
We left Vietnam and look what happened? They fought it out and came out the other end just fine. Never mind the other lesson. You don’t
go into countries to fight when the danger is not directly pointed at you, because
it’s impossible to get out, but get out you will.
But we did learn a couple of things thing today. Bush hearts Maliki. Unfortunately, nobody in Iraq trusts him. That Maliki is tied to Iran, according to Michael Ware and others, doesn’t help. At this point Maliki’s got to feel like the only virgin at the prom. Everyone’s fighting over him. Oh, and we learned one other thing today, Mr. Bush isn’t going anywhere in Iraq. The Decider is staying the course.
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