Chickenhawk Bush Has the Gall to Lecture Americans on Vietnam
Posted by Jon Ponder | Aug. 22, 2007
When you hear the sound bites from George W. Bush’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars today in which he compares his botched war in Iraq to the Vietnam war, think about what he was doing while thousands of U.S. soldiers were wounded and killed in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
Bush is in effect saying that Vietnam could have been won if only we’d stayed there longer — that winning would have only required a few tens of thousand more lives lost — other than his own, of course.
As is well known, Bush’s elite status entitled him to a cushy berth in a “champagne unit” of the Texas Air National Guard. Associates from that era remember young Bush as being preoccupied with doing drugs, driving drunk and chasing women. There are rumors he seriously damaged a fighter jet while taxiing it on a runway while hungover. And there is strong circumstantial evidence he was discharged less than honorably after failing to show up for a series of Pentagon-mandated drug tests.
With that in mind, here is how Bush today, rewriting and politicizing the war he sat out:
The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end…
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: “What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never heard of?” A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: “It’s difficult to imagine,” he said, “how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: “Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life.”
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There’s no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on 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.”
There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that “the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.”
BUSH FLIP-FLOP ALERT
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In effect, Bush is saying that Vietnam would have turned out better if only we’d stayed longer. But how much longer, Mr. Bush? Over 50,000 U.S. troops died in Vietnam. How many more lives — other than your own, of course — were worth sacrificing for a lost cause?
Unsurprisingly, Bush takes no responsibility for the fact that it was his decision, and his alone, to invade Iraq, or that it is his fault that our options there today range from awful to horrendous.
Bush wants to share the blame for this misbegotten war, particularly with Democratic senators who voted for the authorization that he demanded. But this is his war, and the horrors that may come after we leave Iraq, whenever it happens, were set in motion by George W. Bush when he decided to drive the United States into another Vietnam-like quagmire.
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