Bush, Iraq and that Vietnam analogy
Updated on 23 August 2007
President Bush's comparison between Iraq and Vietnam receives a poor reception in the US press.
President Bush broke with convention yesterday when he mentioned Iraq and Vietnam in the same speech.
Addressing a veterans' convention, he said: "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawl was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people', 'reeducation camps' and 'killing fields'."
The reaction to the speech in the US national press has been predominantly critical. The Los Angeles Times says: "The president's Vietnam-Iraq analogy begins with a large kernel of truth, but goes astray."
And it goes on: "No serious Iraq expert believes US withdrawal would end the killing... Killing fields? Iraq's already got them... Boat people? Two million Iraqis have already fled the country"
'The obvious lesson of Vietnam is not that leaving a quagmire leads to disaster, but that staying only makes this worse.'Washington Post
The Washington Post acknowledges how unusual it is for President Bush to use Vietnam to justify his policies in Iraq, "given how strongly Vietnam is associated in the national consciousness with the concept of quagmire".
The newspaper suggests that leaving Iraq is not the perfect solution but is undoubtedly the lesser of two evils. "The obvious lesson of Vietnam is not that leaving a quagmire leads to disaster, but that staying only makes this worse. (And, oh yes, that we shouldn't get into them in the first place)."
Writing for the New York Times, Thom Shanker is perplexed by the Vietnam comparison: "The American withdrawl from Vietnam is widely remembered as an ignominious end to a misguided war - but one with few negative repercussions for the United States."
And Shanker quotes US foreign policy historian David C Hendrickson, who asserts that groups such as the Cambodia's Khmer Rouge could only have emerged in the context of the Vietnam war.
"'The Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam - this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same this has happened in the Middle East today.'"
'Does he (President Bush) think we should have stayed in Vietnam?'Stanley Karnow, USA Today
The Los Angeles Times quotes historian Robert Dallek, who says: "'It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president... We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam that we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 lives... And we couldn't work our will."
But the most glaring conclusion to draw from the president's speech is contained in a succinct observation by Stanley Karnow, quoted in USA Today. "Does he think we should have stayed in Vietnam?" the historian asks.
