‘Free Iraq’ Is Within Reach, Bush Declares
By JIM RUTENBERG, SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: August 23, 2007

KANSAS CITY, Mo., Aug. 22 — President Bush delivered a rousing defense of his Iraq policy on Wednesday, telling a group of veterans that “a free Iraq” is within reach and warning that if Americans succumb to “the allure of retreat,” they will witness death and suffering of the sort not seen since the Vietnam War.

“Then as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Mr. Bush declared in a 45-minute speech before a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention here. He added, “The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.”

In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.

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Gus: The point is that the probable next step in the war in Vietnam was the nuclear option... WWIII was at the door step of the planet... Should the US have pressed that red button, China and Russia would have had as well... That the US chose to pull out was the most noble and safest option for the entire world... whatever the reasons for the pull out. The consequences were less painful than total nuclear annihilation.

Presently following a stupid Bushit foreign policy, Russia has had to tighten its butt and decided to start 24-hours-seven-days-a-week crossing the world with fully armed bombers — something, by the way, that the US has been doing anyway since the end of the "cold war"...

In the speech, Mr. Bush sought to paint the conflict in Iraq in the broader context of American involvement in Asia. In one fell swoop, the president likened the Iraq war to earlier conflicts in Japan and Korea — which produced democratic allies of the United States — as well as to the war in Vietnam, asserting that the American pullout there 32 years ago led to tens of thousands of deaths in that country and Cambodia. “The question now before us,” he said, referring to Japan and Korea, “comes down to this: Will today’s generation of Americans resist the deceptive allure of retreat and do in the Middle East what veterans in this room did in Asia?”

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Gus: It takes a grand master of idiotgoguery to try to pull this one... the war in Iraq spells O-I-L...

Bush's Vietnam Blunder

By Jim Hoagland Friday, August 24, 2007; Page A15

 

Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq.

BAGHDAD, Aug. 23 — The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves.

Despite some evidence that the troop buildup has improved security in certain areas, sectarian violence continues and American-led operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of additional troops arrived, the studies show.

jeff sparrow writes …..  

The Vietnam Iraq comparison: Who will tell Lord Downer?

Now that the Decider has officially declared Iraq Vietnam, who will tell Alexander Downer?

"Well it's a completely separate scenario from Vietnam," explained Downer, a year or so ago.

"I mean, without going into the whole history of Vietnam, but I mean anybody who understands the history - how the country become divided, the colonial background to Vietnam will know that its circumstances were entirely different from modern day Iraq. It doesn't bear comparison really."

With their last hopes pinned on a Lyndon Johnson-style surge, you can see why Downer and co. have avoided the "V" word for so long. For the reality-based community, though, the comparison has long been unavoidable.

And it’s about more than just the daily butcher-bill (most recently coming in at 34 US soldiers dead in a single day). Politically, for instance, Washington’s relationship with Baghdad increasingly resembles its relationship with Saigon in the early 1960s.

"The Americans are maintaining substantial forces in the country and are pouring something like a million dollars a day into its coffers. In return they hope to see an effective war effort by a democratic and popular government."

It’s only the reference to millions (rather than billions) of dollars that identifies the above lines as from a 1963 Age piece about South Vietnam’s President Diem rather than a 2007 article about Iraq’s President Maliki. Shortly afterwards, Washington replaced Diem with a coup; Maliki seems understandably worried about a similar fate.

Within the US military, Vietnamisation has been taking place for a long time.

"When they originally get in country," explained one Marine, "[Americans] feel very friendly toward the Vietnamese and they like to toss candy at the kids. But as they become hardened to it and kind of embittered against the war, as you drive through the village you take the cans of C-rats and the cases and you peg ‘em at the kids; you try to belt them over the head."

Wanna see how the Youtube generation does it? But why is Bush suddenly making Vietnam comparisons?

Grasping the real meaning of W.’s speech requires a look at the First World War, one of the few conflicts it doesn’t mention. In the wake of defeat in that war, German militarists developed a theory that they’d been betrayed by the "November criminals" who signed the peace treaties. This "stab-in-the-back" thesis allowed those who launched the war to hand-pass responsibility for the debacle to the liberals who followed them.

Bush is now channelling not the Vietnam War itself but the revisionism the American Right has developed about that conflict in the years since it ended.
Historically, the Right-wing fantasy that week-kneed liberals prevented the army doing its job in Vietnam is obscene nonsense.

The US dropped 8 million tons of explosives on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, killing perhaps 3 million people. Yet, as early as 1971, the America army was in a state of complete disarray.

That year, the US Armed Forces Journal wrote:

By every conceivable indicator, our Army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Nonetheless, with the Republican ascendancy, stab-in-the-back rhetoric has moved from the wingnut blogs into the mainstream. Which is why, on his last throw of the dice, Bush is suddenly talking Vietnam.

Of course, in Germany, the real beneficiaries of the "November criminals" rhetoric were not the Right but the far-Right. Today’s version has the same dynamic – if you read it closely, Bush’s speech comes very close to claiming bin Laden is behind the peace movement. 

Blaming defeat in Iraq on the enemy within will not change the outcome but it will embolden the craziest elements of the Republican Party. Still, what does Bush care?

He’s not going to be around. Après moi, le deluge, as they say.

and gary rundle writes …..

The Vietnam Iraq comparison: Wading into the heart of it

Dubya's Vietnam/Iraq comparison was obviously intended as a way of avoiding discussion of an exit strategy - but of course it is an exit strategy, Karl Rove's last gift to his boss (Dick Cheney) in the manner which defined the Cheney-Rove era. Defend your weak spots by attacking as audaciously, as ridiculously as possible.

Your opponent's a war hero with three purple hearts, your candidate's a draft dodger? Attack the opponent's military record? Your enemies flogging you with a Vietnam comparison? Wade into the heart of it.

It isn't actually meant as a defence of the war per se, but as something so stunning that it makes what was received wisdom - Vietnam was a quagmire which drained the US to no useful purpose and cost millions of lives (millions plural when agent orange and crop disruption deaths are factored in) - into a debating point, and forces people using the Vietnam comparison to clarify that they have a fundamentally different view of what the conflict was.

The Khmer Rouge comparison is interesting, because of its utter obscenity - the place was a neutral and peaceful country until US bombers tore the guts out of it. Weirdly, part of Bush's speech was a springboard off an article written by Peter Rodman and William Shawcross arguing that the US should stay the bloody course in Iraq. Much was made of the fact that Shawcross wrote Sideshow, an excoriating view of how the Nixon-Kissinger policy made the Khmer Rouge's victory possible.

The systematic misconstruction of his position - that the US should stay in Iraq despite what it did in Indochina - is symptomatic of the deliberate wildcat strategy of this rhetorical smoke grenade.

So let's say it loud and proud - the victory of the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong was a great day for that country and the world, and had it come earlier - the subsequent political killings notwithstanding - millions would have survived or had less blighted lives, and the country would have begun the transition to full modernity and a degree of liberalisation all the quicker.

The US persistence in Iraq and its inevitable defeat is also good - two defeats at the hands of third world countries in thirty years will put the tap on US global power projection once and for all. Once is bad luck. Two is a series and thus indicative of a basic process.

Should they leave now it would be better for the Iraqi people, for US soldiers and many others. But by all means stay and waste blood and treasure if you wish. Who could not but agree that the policy has myriad benefits?