Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld think we lost Vietnam because the press had free rein to report and made the people turn against it. Henry Kissinger said that the confidence of the American people was shaken. They just will not accept the fact that we lost because of bad political and military decisions made at the highest levels.

It never occurs to them that people turn against war when it dawns on them that their kids are dying for no reason other than stupidity and stubbornness by politicians.

Then of course, we have fools like Michael Ledeen who think that we impress the world with our military prowess by picking up a "small country and throwing it against a wall" every once in awhile. That the last time we did this, the names of 60,000 Americans ended up on the wall seems not to have occurred on them.

No no no no, Larry. We lost, but only because we left. If we had fought on, then we wouldn't have lost, see. Because once you leave, you lose. If you stay then you haven't lost. And if you haven't lost, well, then, you're winning.

See?

Viet Nam and Iraq are different. In Viet Nam, there were two wars going on at the same time. We were fighting a war against global communism and the Viet Namese were fighting a war against colonial occupation. Unfortunately, both took place in the same country. We never would have fought that war in the name of colonial occupation.

In Iraq, we are fighting a war against global terrorism. The Iraqis, the other hand, are fighting a war against colonial occupation. Unfortunately, both are taking place in the same country. We never would fight a war to perpetuate a colonial occupation.

See? They couldn't be more different.

So, what lesson are we to draw from all of this? Are you arguing that if we had stuck it out in Vietnam and spilled the blood of another 50,000 Americans and one million Vietnamese that things would be better today in Vietnam? Mr. President, that is bullshit.

Yes, this is exactly what he means.

This is why history matters. For decades, conservatives have been arguing that the Vietnam war could have been won if we had only had the will to continue.

See my discussion post on this from a couple weeks ago.

George Bush believes the "back-stab" theory the righties started using after Yalta to score cheap political points and because Stalin made them wet the bed.

Are you kidding me? The white house had the old flag of South Vietnam flying. Man, if I were the Vietnamese government, I'd have told the pilot of Airforce One to turn that bird around--unless he could find the a country called the Republic of Vietnam to land it in. In which case he was going to need a time machine.

Note added later: I'd love to have a screenshot of that WH page with the old yellow stripe flag--I couldn't find anything just now.

Not even cartoon characters come off as dumb as Bush-boy. His zeal for staying in Iraq is only matched by his zeal in avoiding harm during Vietnam. I believe the way our "hero" put it then was, he just didn't see the point of going to Vietnam. If he now sees the point, why not urge his twindaughters to do their part.

The White House web use of the old flag of Republic of Vietnam (i.e., flag of S. Vietnam that yellow w/ 3 red horizontal stripes) instead of the current flag (red with large yellow star, it had been the flag of N. Vietnam) may have been intentional? 

In 2005 NPR did a story

The California state Assembly considers a resolution that would formally recognize the flag of the former Republic of Vietnam in lieu of the current Vietnamese flag, as eight other states have done.

Experts say the trend could create tension amid warming relations between the United States and Vietnam....

The Vietnamese are very smart and would not have missed the accidental irony of Bush saying "If we had tried harder you wouldn't be in charge and hosting us."

They also know there was no chance of us outlasting them. We could not have tried harder.

Another way to lose hearts and minds. Bush could have said simply "You stood up for your country and you had the right to do so."

Is he saying, standing in Vietnam, that the U.S. should have stayed the course to win...over Vietnam?  Isn't that, well, sort of an undiplomatic speech to make, in Vietnam? 

Yes

and

Yes...

In Georgie's case stupid is as stupid does.  Run Georgie, run...

Yes I think that is right. If you read the whole transcript, I get the idea that Bush is just absent-mindedly spewing his Iraq talking points even where it isn't appropriate.

He wants to say, "Here we are after all these years, History has played out, and now we can be friends rather than enemies. This is a victory for both of us." Somehow this got transmuted to a version of "Stay the course."

As back then, we can simply declare victory and come home.

I think it's a viable position for presidential candidates in '08. We won the war in 3 wks, and we should have come home then, leaving behind soldiers to train the army and some planes to prevent massive conflagrations. Bush admin. made a mistake by not doing so, but that's what I'm going to do if elected.

It has the problem that everyone will say it won't work or isn't possible, which may be true but is sort of beside the point. It has the positive effect of actuallly sounding somewhat optimistic and/or hopeful, and not down on America, which voters hate. John Kerry actually tried a variation of this, but never made it fully convincing. It began, "The soldiers performed brilliantly..."

All Bush can do is spew talking points he's heard in the wingnut circles. And that's definitely one of them: if we had just followed Nixon's lead, and kept up the funding to the South Vietamese at previous levels forever, and then gone back in force when the North Vietnamese misbehaved, then we would have not lost, see? And that means, we would have won. I don't know how many troops would still have to be there to continue our streak of not losing, however. If only we Democrats had listened to Scoop Jackson, we wouldn't belong to the Mommy party, and Joe Lieberman would be President and Dictator of the United States of Bipartisanship.

Biden finally articulated an answer to that strawman-

We're getting out to keep your other son or your other daughter from being killed.

Alphonse ( Al ) Kada

Of course, Colin Powell didn't exactly cover himself with honor when he caved in to Bush and became the front man to sell Bush's Iraq invasion before the UN in 2/2003. He should have resigned and opposed this insanity.

Tom

Of course, how bright does that make the people who voted for him.

Tom

It would be something if Bush applied these words to the education system, social security or medicare.

Let's try them out:

1: "we need to STAY THE COURSE with social security because our seniors depend on it."

2: "we TEND TO WANT INSTANT SUCCESS from our schools but it takes years of hard work and INTELLIGENCE ON THE GROUND to get those results."

3: "we cannot play CUT AND RUN (link) when our vetrans come to the vetrans adminstration for health care."

4: "we know that only EVIL DOERS would take away our senior's medicare benefits so wer're going to deliver them because WE DON'T NEGOTIATE WITH THE TERRORISTS."

The tact and finesse of Borat.

 An "idiot savant" has one, normally useless, skill that he excels at beyond ordinary folks.   This particular idiot savant's skill seems to be getting people to vote for him.

Hoppy in Sacramento

As a victim/veteran of the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972), I agree wholeheartedly with those who found Deputy Dubya's comments in Hanoi both staggeringly stupid and hopelessly maladroit. It never ceases to amaze me how when he deliberately "lowers expectations" so as not to have to achieve anything that even then he manages to disappoint us when we expect nothing of him.

Having said that, though, it pains me even worse to have seen every Vietnam Veteran in Congress along with almost all the Republicans and about half of the Democrats let a known dyslexic chimpanzee make monkeys out of all of them. What a clueless collection of credulous lemmings! Now, they supposedly expect us to keep coughing up the blood and billions so they can continue stalling for time until some other sucker/successor to Dumbass Dubya comes along, say in January of 2009, to put himself/herself on the hook so that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Bush, et al, can slither off it.

Personally, I think Americans should offer every elected official who initiated or endorsed Vietnam II in Iraq a simple choice: Either commit ritual Seppuku (i.e., "Hara-kiri," meaning "belly-slitting," in the vulgar Japanese) or face a celebratory tar-and-feathering by an outraged mob of Americans who have had enough of indulging such rank, bloody incompetents. ...

Then, I woke up and began Groundhog Day -- meaning Vietnam Redux Deja Vu All Over Again in Iraq -- one more time until tomorrow.

Thirty years later, there are several things we CAN learn from the Vietnam War if we choose to do so:

1. We were on the verge of winning the war, but in retrospect, Ho Chi Minh openly acknowledged that he KNEW that if he and the Viet Cong were able to hold out just long enough, the minority of American protestors against the Vietnam War would srive to gain a large enough wedge in American society to force the government to surrender, he would win, even though we were so close to victory.

2. Though a minority of Americans were demanding a withdrawal of American troops without victory (34% in 1972 as compared to 62% of Americans that called for peace with victory!) the government gave into a belligerant LOUD minority who demanded we leave with our tail between our legs!

3. Without any shoadow of a doubt, the U.S. withdrawal of troops in Southeast Asia DIRECTLY led to the HOLOCUAST of more than 3 MILLION people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. And it also led DIRECTLY to the imprisonment and "re-education" in concentration camps of more than 1 MILLION people in Vietnam and the forced emigration of over 600,000 "boat-people" from Vietnam to the U.S. and other nations thoughout the world to avoid mass murder under the communist victory over the U.S. military! This same kind of major holocaust is also a very real possibility if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq before a stable government is established.

Of course, many of the same people, such as John Kerry, who argued in the 1970's: "Who gives a rat's ass about what happens to the gooks in Vietnam?" still argue "Who the hell cares what happens to the ragheads in Iraq?" But I think we as a nation should have a better view of helping foreign nations like we did during World War Two. But, perhaps I am just a hopeless optimist?

I would never accuse you of any sort of Pollyanna "optimism," but "hopeless," probably comes close to the truth. You have offered nothing here but the standard, long-discredited canards, straw men, red herrings, and question begging fobbed off on a gullible American public by America's rabid right wing Republicans for over thirty years. Unfortunately for America, that drumbeat of delusional dogma became "conventional wisdom" (or "syndrome" -- a symptom of a disease) among those of my generation and later who never served in Vietnam and/or learned anything of value from either living through or reading about the experience. More than any other factor, this purposeful campaign to expunge our national memory of its true history accounts for Deputy Dubya Bush's reckless gamble and historic bungle in Iraq. His comments in Hanoi recently only underline the tragic success of this reactionary domestic disinformation campaign. That he would try and sell it to the Vietnamese, of all people, simply beggars the imagination. Your feeble attempt to try and further perpetuate this sloppy, solipsistic siren song despite mountains of empirical evidence debunking it, makes you not "optimistic" at all, but rather schizophrenic, in the Orwellian doublethinking, duckspeaking sense of that term.

I've seen every American president from Dwight Eisenhower to Dick Cheney, and I've never seen anyone try and impersonate a "national leader" (let alone "commander-in-chief") as feebly or as incompetently as George "Deputy Dubya" Bush. If someone hadn't flown him to Vietnam, he never would have known where to find the place on a map. Little does he seem to know that America's decades of terror bombing and widespread crop defoliation drove the Vietnamese (as well as Cambodian and Laotian) peasants off their land (General Westmoreland's "choice" for them to flee and live or stay and die); and by the time I left in January of 1972, after eighteen months in-country, we had completely devastated the Vietnamese economy, turned Saigon into the world's biggest whorehouse, and made servicing the Americans -- and living off their unsustainable aid programs -- the only way to earn any sort of living and survive. Feeding the hopelessly disinformed American public slogans about how all this widespread societal and economic dislocation had "almost," "really," "this time for sure," "at long last," gotten us "finally," after two decades of bloody blundering, "on the verge" of "winning" something no one in America had ever bothered to specify ... well ... that kind of endlessly recycled bullshit came to a crashing end when the American people grew so fed up with all the lies and squandered treasure that they drove Agnew and Nixon from office, cut off any further funding for the debacle, and freed America and Vietnam both to begin the long, long, long, process of trying to recover from it all. For Vietnam, of course, the recovery has taken far longer than it took us because they had sustained a level of physical damage and population trauma unimaginable to most Americans.

I could go on and on educating you about America's War on Vietnam (which lasted from 1954 to 1975), but I've not enough life left to waste in such a hopeless endeavor. Still, if you really would like to save yourself further embarassment discoursing about that which you do not know the first fact, I recommend reading only the following three books: (1) "Fire in the Lake: the Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam," by Frances Fitzgerald; (2) "The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam," by Barbara Tuchman; and (3) "The Best and the Brightest," by David Halberstam. If you can read and understand clear, purposeful English, those three classic sources ought to at least get you into the conversation with disgracing yourself more than you did in your posting above.

I would add to your book list The Wrong War by Jeffrey Record (Naval Institute Press). Record thoroughly debunks the whole military-stabbed-in-the-back by hippies & the press argument with meticulous historical research.

Ronnie Raygun was the first to successfully begin to undermine "Vietnam Syndrome" by winning the 1980 election while stating the ludicrous notion that Vietnam was a noble cause (he even tried to co-opt "Born in the USA" for his campaign until Springteen blew the whistle on that). Reagan enabled morons like W to con enough people into believing his idiotic invasion of Iraq would "work" (whatever that means).

PS Bright, Shining Lie is a good read also.

Tom

FDR got along with Ho. When he died Truman came in and decided Ho was a "dirty Commie" and we had to oppose him (and help the French who were recolonizing Vietnam). So "Give 'em hell" Harry's ignorance gave us the hell of the Vietnam Wars (versus France first and the US second).

Tom

Of course, many of the same people, ... who argued in the 1970's: "Who gives a rat's ass about what happens to the gooks in Vietnam?" still argue "Who the hell cares what happens to the ragheads in Iraq?"

When the cost to demonstrate that we care is hundreds and thousands of American lives I strongly agree with  these sentiments. I believe it is wrong for American citizens to die for another country to achieve democracy.  No one but Americans fought our Revolutionary War. As it should be for all other countries fighting for their own democracy.  I do not want my son or daughter dying in the mudswamps of Vietnam or the desert sands of the ME to insure THEIR democracy.Piss on that!!

If that means we are leaving with 'our tail between our legs' So be it!!

At least our tail and legs are intact and not left in their mudswamp or desert. 

Absolutely!!!!

If we needed another confirmation that the concept of honor has completely died when it comes to at least one of the political parties, the sell-out of Colin Powell was it.

Bushco delenda est

At first I suspected that post was a clever Colbertish riff and then I realized...he really means it.

You can't educate people like that, fans of Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill "Worst Person in the World" O'Reilly and others who don't believe in reality.

I love the Stuart's take on Beck's comments to Ellison, which I saw on Media Matters:

Finally, a guy who's saying what people who aren't thinking are thinking.

Is it possible for Deputy Dubya (I love that!) to descend any further into a Wonderland frame of mind?

Bushco delenda est

It has been my opinion since my Army service in the late 60's (not in Viet Nam) that had Ho Chi Minh called himself a populist agrarian socialist rather than a Communist after WW II we would have happily allied ourselves with him against Mao and China and the whole damned war could have been avoided. The label "Communist" attracted the ire of American capitalists, Republicans and John Birchers.

Ideology seems to trump facts when making decisions about going to war. [Stopping wars is another case. See Kosovo and Rwanda.]

An idiot savant Pied Piper maybe?  Leading the march of the lemmings to the sea...

His particular useless skill is to continually run head first into a wall without a helmet.  I always think of Georgie (and maybe his ancestors?) now whenever I see this scene, lol.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g&search=Monty%20Python

There is no doubt that Truman like most Democrats and most Americans was adamantly anti-Communist. However, it was Eisenhower who sent the first advisors to Vietnam and John Foster Dulles who refused to shake Ho's hand at an international conference.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

That's an oilpatch concept. You haven't failed to find oil until you quit looking.

Of course, the company will quit looking when it runs out of money because of unsuccessful dry holes. In other words, the company President did not fail until he was forced to quit because his investors pulled the plug. In his mind, he would have succeeded in the next try but the investors bailed out on him. His failure was not his fault!

And we have a classically unsuccessful oil patch CEO as the U.S. President.

I'll leave the politics to pulling the plug on his money to you.

I say again - If Ho Chi Minh had called himself a Vietnamese Agrarian Socialist reformer instead of a "Communist", the Vietnamese war would never have been fought.

We were afraid that the Chinese Communists would spread throughout Southeast Asia. Ho was another Communist, and the Indonesians and Malaysians were fighting Communist insurrections in the 1950's.

Uncle Ho would never have accepted Chinese domination. But he used the wrong damned label to describe himself.

Wow ! George can finally say " Hey ..I went to Viet Nam, what about you?"

Admiral de Grasse's fleet (French) arrived at the Chesapeake Bay. De Grasse defeated Admiral Thomas Graves' fleet in the Battle of the Chesapeake and won control of the bay. Cornwallis was now stranded....On September 28, Washington and Rochambeau, along with Lafayette's troops and 3,000 of de Grasse's men, arrived at Yorktown. In all, there were approximately 17,000 men converging on Cornwallis' camp.

link

Of course what divine law gave the US the right to tell other people how to describe themselves - or we'll kill them.

Tom

Rick says: "I see that as exactly the same basis for the two wars."

So does Bush, which is why we are there fighting.

Larry,

It appears the one ignoring history is you. Let's just take a tour of your comments:

"The United States fled the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, to escape the invading North Vietnamese Army."

Question #1: What army is there to escape from in Iraq?

Answer: None, we defeated the Iraqi army. All that is left is an unorganized melting pot of insurgents and terrorists, numbering at most 50,000. Compare that to the millions of the North Vietnamese Army still left when we pulled out.

"We shed precious blood and treasure in Vietnam and then we abandoned the South Vietnamese to the North. Politicians in that day issued dire warnings that our retreat from Vietnam would lead to the communist takeover of Southeast Asia. That never happened."

Question #2: What sort of government does Vietnam have currently?

Answer: A communist one-party state. Even 30 years later, THIRTY, much of Southeast Asia is still communist, especially China and Vietnam. Only recently have they begun using some capitalism for its economics benefits, while retaining the communist state.

Implication: There is more democracy in Iraq than there has ever been in Vietnam since the war, even after only three years in Iraq. Again, we have already accomplished far more in Iraq in three years than we ever did in Vietnam.

"You have either forgotten or never learned that the deaths of 57,000 Americans in Vietnam achieved nothing other than inflicting sorrow and suffering on their surviving family members."

Question #3: Taking the answers from 1 and 2 into consideration, have the nearly 3,000 lives lost by us in Iraq achieved more or less than the 57,000 Americans who died in Vietnam?

Answer: More.

Implication: Where our actions in Vietnam were in vain, even after 12 years, our actions in Iraq have already produced big changes and have given us and them many accomplishments.

In conclusion, I might ask that Mr. Johnson read some about Vietnam himself, since he seems to have completely forgotten what we accomplished there, and being able to compare that to what we have accomplished so far in Iraq.

We were never going to win Vietnam - it was an unfeasible operation, mostly due to the sheer size of the North Vietnamese force and the terrain in which we had to fight, not to mention the support the North Vietnamese got from the communist bloc.

Where is that in Iraq? Do the insurgents in Iraq have support from huge powers? Nope. Do the insurgents in Iraq have millions in their ranks? Nope.

This is exactly why there is a belief that this war can be won, where Vietnam failed: because they are entirely different wars who have completely different amounts of achievement. Thus using the exit strategy finally employed in Vietnam in Iraq would be ignoring virtually everything about each of the wars.

Tom

Not to quibble with you since I think you are more right than not I check the PBS Vietnam Website as well as a couple of other websites. Truman set money and military aid to the French in Vietnam. He clearly wanted the French to defeat the Communist nationalist Ho. It was after Dien Ben Phu and the final French defeat that Eisenhower started to seriously introduce American military advisors. This was a two party multi-presidential mess.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

As some comments show, we are still far from consensus on what the lesson of Vietnam is.

Perhaps Seixon and others in his corner will agree that in a democracy people will lose heart to continue prosecuting a strategic war when they don't buy the strategy. What remains contentious is whether the strategy needs the protection of controlled publicity (i.e. supressing depressing news). Nixon was correct that anti-war demonstrations were undercutting our deterrent posture, but is it also true that we can maintain a fiction as a public posture?

The parallel now would be whether it is appropriate to complain about the current war's failings or slow progress. I would argue yes, of course. Especially since war is not economic pressure or trade restrictions, it's things blowing up in your face, we have every right to be unwilling to allow our leaders to play war games without interference.

One unavoidable parallel between Vietnam and Iraq is the feeble friendly government. A dictatorship can be installed--a democracy must grow from roots. Vietnam never had a democracy, only a Catholic elite in charge. Iraq will have to hash out its intenal differences or fragment. We can't choose their future.

It is true that communism did not go away in SE Asia, but it didn't go any further. There never was much of a global communism, there isn't really global terrorism, either, only temporary alliances of convenience. Discounting the Warsaw Pact as puppets, the only true global alliance was among democracies.