There's something exhausting about Bush's dissembling and upside down bizarro logic.

It's like that with the right wing. They start out with a premise so self contradictory, free of all earthly bonds of fact and history, there's a way in which you simply can't respond.

Responding to it with 'logic' or 'historical fact' only gives the propagandist the sliver of legitimacy he doesn't even deserve.

As I grow older, I'm finding that without self delusional lies, 'white' lies and hey, out and out self serving whoppers, there could be no "conservatives."

The White House chefs were cooking up Canard Bigarde au Grand Chenier

There is one Vietnam/Iraq parallel that is instructive and revealing. An official consensus emerged many years ago that the US invasion of Vietnam was a 'mistake.' No less a participant than Robert McNamara signed off on this assessment. It was noteworthy at the time that this official consensus was not that the Vietnam invasion was wrong--oh, no--just a mistake.

As several commentators pointed out at the time, the 'mistake' characterization left the door open for future similar imperialist adventures--the US would just have to avoid the particular 'mistakes' that supposedly soured the Vietnam adventure. That's why the party line in the US avoided calling the invasion wrong--because to do so would forswear future invasions.

Closely hewing to this party line, the official critics of the Iraq invasion called it a mistake, and gave various elaborations about non-existent WMDs, lack of post-invasion planning, and so on and so forth. The invasion again was never wrong, just another mistake.

So that now all the official party line enunciators can argue about what the 'mistake' was--Bush has now suggested that the mistake in Vietnam was US withdrawal and so we shouldn't make this same mistake again in Iraq. The Democratic presidential candidates each have a different 'mistake' they are promoting.

Anything to avoid the essential point: these invasions were flat wrong; any momentary success they enjoy only augments the crime. If you try to rob a bank, and the robbery goes awry, the problem is not some 'mistake' in planning, or of having too few robbers in your gang, or shooting too many tellers. The problem is that you shouldn't rob banks.

So yes, Iraq is like Vietnam, and the lesson to be learned is that you don't invade other countries. This lesson can also be applied to Afghanistan.

Peter Miller

There is no doubt in my mind that  we could have "won" against Vietnam.   The questions were and are what would we have won and at what price?  Same with Iraq.

I was just reading Kevin Drum's post about The Weekly Standard and NRO jumping on Bush's latest bandwagon and got the feeling that a stage is being set for something.  Could it be that they are finally recognizing that Iraq is a lost cause and signalling how they plan to cover their tooshes?

The best comment at the time I read Kevin's post was from kidkostar:

Yeah, we could have won in Vietnam if only we didn't take the idea of using nukes on Vietcong camps off the table.

Or if we would have had the fighting heart of Dick Cheney on the battlefield. Shame he had other priorities.

Or if ace pilot George W. Bush hadn't gone AWOL.

Or if Rush Limbaugh could have got off his ass, but he had that boil.

Really, if we lost Vietnam, isn't it because the leading lights on the right couldn't be bothered to fight?

Posted by: kidkostar on August 23, 2007 at 12:36 PM

Spread the meme.:-)

Bush wants to link failure in Iraq to the withdrawal from Vietnam to expand and strengthen the stereotype of weak, pacifistic Democrats. His claim however that Vietnam encouraged and emboldened bin Laden is just unforgivable.

I think there are dozens of factors that lead to 9/11, but if Bush wants a proximate cause, I can think of a much more immediate one - Reagan's foreign policy.

First, Reagan's response to the Lebanese bombing of the barracks. Nothing could possibly be more cowardly. One bomb and he ran out of LEbanon with his tail between his legs. If it were not so tragic, it would provoke laughter, the great US army undone by one truck bomb and a cowardly stupid president. THAT is what told bin Laden that America doesn't have the stomach for casualties.

Seond, Reagan's selling arms to Iran in order to go around the Congress. It demonstrated that we had no moral center, that we would truck with anyone - no matter what they did to us. Take our people hostage and hold them for over a year...and we will sell you weapons.

Yes, Bush is the worst president ever, but he's got real competition if Reagan, an idiot buffoon whose only considered great because for the GOP its style over substance. They think he was tough because he talked tough, but when push came to shove in Lebanon, he folded like a dishtowel.

The VFW audience should have booed Bush off the stage. That they didn't means either they believe feeding the Military Industrial complex is "Supporting the Troops" or they have been sleepwalking for the last 6 years regarding how the Bush gang has been treating the GIs and Marines on the ground, especially in Iraq, and their families. Might I remind them too of Pat Tillman?

When I see those vets on stage with Bush and fawning over him I want to throw something at the TV.

This, combined with the Ari ("no, I don't know the name of the soldier prominently featured in my commercial") Fleischer commercials, is the beginning of the product roll-out that will culminate in the anniversary of Sept. 11 and Petraeus' reading from the White House script. And my guess is that Al Qaeda is going to be heavily featured, and that there will be little to no mention of the benchmarks that are nowhere close to being met.

Product roll-out. Nothing more.

Bush is a pathological liar. I cannot imagine what could possibly compel anyone to take anything Bush pimps with any seriousness.

The president is a pathological liar.

The president and his fascist followers have decieved and manipulated the American population repeatedly and insistantly since taking office.

How many lies do we have to take?

How much flipflopflipping and shapeshifting of the policy de jour's will it take before Americans realize this president is not working in our best interests, and harbors absolutely zero concern for Americans, or America beyond the wanton profits gleaned by fascist cronies, cabals, coteries, klans, cliques, and oligarchs in or beholden to the Bush government?

The labrynthine web of lies pimped by the fascist warmongers, profiteers, and pathological liars in the Bush government is so convoluted, intertwining, and so ruthlessly distorted that it is all but impossible to decipher any solid policy, or ambtion, or end beyond the craven and bloodthirsty desire for profits and power.

The Vietnam comparisons then and now have always been flawed. There was a draft during Viet Nam.
We faced a far more equal and capable foe with massive well trained forces, air power, armor, and state of the art at the time anti-aircraft systems in Viet Nam. In Iraq we quickly snuffed out an old, decrepit, rusted, thoroughly defeated military with no air power. Now we are fighting insurgents using AK's, RPG's, and IED's.

Though both debacles were indeed wars of political choice, rather than strategic necessity, - the horrors and quantum waste of blood and treasure in Viet Nam eventually forced a tectonic shift in the streets of America wherein the people openly rebelled against the war in an epic concerted social movement that DEMANDED an end to an unjust, and unnecessary conflict.

American today (with the telling exception our warfighters, and their families) are still largely detached from the Iraq war, and view it as just another TV episodic. We do not care enough as a nation to take the deceptions, horrors, failures, wanton profiteering, and crimes of the Bush government's Iraq nightmare with any seriousness. We do not have the courage as a nation to recognize the immensity of deceptions and crimes in the Iraq horrorshow and demand an end.

No, - Iraq is not like Viet Nam.

Iraq is America's Palestine.

Our openended neverendingwar committments to Iraq will always be fruitless as long as we are viewed by the Iraqi people as an occupier.

No America should afford a single nanoparticle of respect, goodwill, goodfaith, or trust to anything pimped by anyone of the pathological liars in the Bush government.

The entire regime is a cabal of fascist warmongers, profiteers, and pathological liars, whose singular and exclusive interests are purely narcissitic and bent on advancing the insane and criminal designs and machinations of the fascist who profit wantonly from neverendingwar.

"Deliver us from evil!"

Whether you support the attack on Serbia or not (I did), you have to admit that there was great opposition, that most Republicans consistently tried to obstruct Clinton, and that it was no piece of cake politically. Thus it could hardly be seen as "setting the stage" for Bush's war.

Todd Gitlin

GWB has an archaic and unAmerican view of the world. GWB has just stated that the world would be a better place if only the US had stayed in Viet Nam. And the British, French and Dutch had stayed in control of Africa, India and Southeast Asia? The far right still does not "get it" when it comes to colonialism. The evils of de-colonization are attributed to the withdrawl of the colonial power, not the entry.

No country should understand anti-colonialism more than the USA. No citizens should be more sympathetic to a war against an occupying foreign power than the descendants of Americans who rose up against an occupying army. Go through the Declaration of Independence and ask yourself: how many of the listed grievances applied to Viet Nam then and Iraq now.

http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm

Actually you'd only be correct if it was the American Indians who rose up and defeated the pilgrims:-)

What happened in America was some of the colonists revolted against their orginal country and took over the colony for themselves. The analogy would be French settlers in Vietnam rebelling against France and creating a new country.

mcboo, 

Oh, we could have won.   We just wouldn't be us anymore.  It would have required a cold-bloodedness most of us don't have and don't want.   You must be a really good person not to be able to imagine what a victory in Vietnam would have looked like --defoliated and depopulated.

I like answering the new Vietnam arguments by saying we shouldn't have gone in there, either. There would have been zero "bloodbath", at least on our hands.

We accomplished zero except dead people in both Vietnam and Iraq. Unfortunately, the repercussions of Iraq will be more fraught with risk than Vietnam.

Having spent his stateside “military service” in and AWOL from the “Champagne Corp” unit of the Texas Air National Guard, it is understandable (but not excusable) that George W. Bush now thinks the primary lesson to glean from Vietnam is that U.S. soldiers have to keep killing and dying for a lost cause to prevent more killing and dying after they leave.

In fact the key lessons to learn from Vietnam (and Iraq) are that U.S. presidents should never start wars based on lies, especially against countries that aren’t threatening us.

Until the next American president acknowledges these truths, and until the “neocon” perpetrators of the Iraqi fiasco are tried and imprisoned, it is probably unrealistic to expect that any ally (particularly from “Old” Europe) will help any U.S. administration extricate our country from this costly and predicted debacle, or enthusiastically cooperate in our efforts to reduce the international threat of anti-American terrorism.

Furthermore, until Americans stop voting for candidates and parties that believe war is a legitimate instrument of foreign policy, it is reasonable to expect that we will continue to be a favorite terrorist target, and our middle class standard of living (health, education, welfare, etc.) will continue to slip further behind the standards set by the best post-imperial “Western” societies.

Dave Goldsmith
Baltimore County Green Party Coordinator

Yeah right. We could have won, if only someone would have tied up Ho Chi Minh, carried him to the White House Lawn, poured gasoline over him and set him on fire. That would have done the trick.

We could have won if only, instead of killing 10% of the Vietnamese population, we'd killed 15%, or 20%, or 30%, or 90%. Yeah, but just stop and think how flipping difficult it was to kill the first 10%. We dropped almost 7.5 MILLION TONS of explosives, 1000 lbs of explosive for every man, woman and child. We intended to bomb them back to the stone age. Would 1100 lbs of explosives for every man, woman and child have made a difference? 1500 lbs? 3000 lbs? The war cost America trillions in todays dollars. What if we doubled that? Tripled that. The war almost broke America as it was, we spent years paying for it. American incomes peaked in 1973, they've been falling ever since. Coincidence, or is it the fallout from a ruinous war. Double the impact. We'd have lost.

We could have won if only we'd sent our tanks marching north and pushed the North Vietnamese right into China... as long as China didn't push back, as they did in Korea. But that wasn't going to happen, and everyone knew it. The odds were, cross some line and the red armies would pour over, and there were a lot more of them than there were of us. So we'd have lost.

We could have won if only we'd nuked the Vietcong, and nuked Laos, and nuked Cambodia, and nuked the NVA and nuked North Vietnam. But then, you know how it goes... once the nukes started going up, the Russians would get into the act and it would turn into a food fight, like in Animal House, except that these mashed potatoes were radioactive. So we'd have lost.

Yeah I agree with you Valdron. There was no win to be had then just as there is no win to be had now. And it appears that we are going to end up doing now what we did then which was to invade in order to stop something from occurring and in reality accelerate and guarantee that it did.

You pointing out the financial backlash we felt (and still feel) is another important point to all of the saber rattling that we Americans seem to just love so much. How many games of Monopoly do we need to buy in order to have enough money to pay for it all? In fact a friend of mine recently said to me that the Vietnam war was very likely the initial domino that eventually led to the fall of the most recent domino which could end up falling on several million more American homes by years end. Not exactly what they had in mind with the whole Domino Theory thing...or is it?

With all due respect gradioc, the costly, bloody, noendinsight, horrorshow, and excuse of wanton profiteering Iraq has absolutely NOTHING to do with "...lost patience with diplomacy."

Rather, the Iraq debacle was, is, and always will be singularly and exclusively focused on maruading the 4th largest oil reserves on the planet, and profiteering wantonly from warmaking, intelligence gather, and socalled reconstruction. The sooner America recognizes, and accept this terrible and ghoulish reality, - to sooner Americans can begin the arduous process of righting the terrible wrongs of the fascist warmongers, profiteers, and pathological liars in the Bush government.

"Deliver us from evil!"

It's an unfortunate accident that in this particular post Schanberg is represented by a comment that made him appear to be an apologist for the post war regimes in Indo China. Just after crossing the border from Cambodia he provided one of the earliest reports on the horrible nature of the Khymer Rouge . Useful because at the time some on the left were understandably suspicious that the first such reports were
just more misinformation from the defenders of the War.

Tony, I'm trying hard to make myself believe that no President of the United States would go to war just to increase the profits of the oil companies. But it has become clear that that is the only reason we have not given up on this miserable adventure. The US troops will stay in place only until the Iraqi legislature approves the oil law now pending, which gives the US companies sweetheart deals that would make a Texas state senator puke.

We could have "made a desert and called it peace" -- i.e., exterminated the brutes, but that would have made a mockery of our profession that we were "saving" the people from Communist tyranny.

The Democrats need to impeach Bush by the end of this year. It would give the only, although slim, chance of stopping the Götterdämmerung of the Bush/Cheney regime. The disastrous conclusion of events which would be war with Iran. Military commanders might use the impeachment as reason to ignore his orders to bomb Iran, see consortium news piece linked below.

But initiating the impeachment process appears to be the only way to launch a shot across the bow of this particular ship of state. For it is captained by a president with a psychological makeup likely to lead to new misadventures likely to end in a ship wreck ....This makes it a monumental challenge—as urgent as it is difficult—not only to get him to stop the carnage in the Middle East, but also to prevent him from undertaking a new, perhaps even more disastrous adventure—

link Dangers of a Cornered Bush

"governments which will provide medical services"

"governments which are honest enough to refrain from robbing and exploiting"

Miloševi? deserved to be crushed . . . .

The metonym, last or first refuge of the euphemist, rears its head.

Actually, what got "crushed" were the sixteen people killed in the NATO air strike on Radio Television of Serbia (including one hairdresser -- I know, you thought the hairdresser was some gay guy but it was actually a young woman).

It's okay, though; the air strike was carried out in satisfaction of the goals of Nobel Anvil.

An example of that supposedly bloodthirsty stuff?

Susan Sontag - "Why Are We In Kosovo?" (1999)

Bloodthirsty, that's more than a little bit over top language, I think.

I myself have quite an isolationist bent, however, when you have long time treaties like NATO and you finally step in after ignoring a really bad situation for years and years, and after denying the strong lobbying by your Vice-President (Gore) for many months, and you get your opponent from the presidential race to help you (Dole) and it's done in support of allies, and you do it in a very cautious manner emphasizing minimal loss of life, well, I just wouldn't call that bloodthirsty.

The Indictment charges Slobodan Milosevic on the basis of individual criminal responsibility (Article 7(1) of the Statute) and superior criminal responsibility (Article 7(3) thereof) with:

nine counts of grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (Article 2 thereof - wilful killing; unlawful confinement; torture; wilfully causing great suffering; unlawful deportation or transfer; extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly),
13 counts of violations of the laws or customs of war (Article 3 thereof - murder; torture; cruel treatment; wanton destruction of villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity; destruction or wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to education or religion; plunder of public or private property; attacks on civilians; destruction or wilful damage done to historic monuments and institutions dedicated to education or religion; unlawful attacks on civilian objects), and
10 counts of crimes against humanity (Article 5 thereof - persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds; extermination; murder; imprisonment; torture; inhumane acts; deportation; inhumane acts (forcible transfers)).

I don't remember which charges brought a conviction. Doesn't sound like Slobo was someone to get on the wrong side of.

We could have destroyed Viet Nam more completely, but we could not have "won," regardless. Could we have ever won the hearts and minds of all of the people of Viet Nam? I can't believe we're even discussing Bush's desperate grasps at justifications for extending his Iraq calamity.

Yes, ideology means little to the poor trying to survive, but in Viet Nam, we had an enemy: It was us and our puppet government against the "despicable commie reds" who were going to domino onto our shores eventually, just like the Islamo-fascist hordes. We could still be there and it would not have changed anything on our end.

We lit the powder keg there under a false premise, so the outcome was inevitable: destruction for the Vietnamese, but no victory for the U.S. Our justifications in Iraq are even worse. Who are we fighting in Iraq? Those we came to liberate? Who is our enemy? What is our goal? What is victory- and who is it victory for?