Bush’s Vietnam analogy suggests that he has gone totally bananas

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=69743

Sunday, August 26, 2007
By Kaleem Omar

It is not as if US President George W. Bush ever had a reputation for being a latter-day Einstein. But Bush’s speech on Wednesday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, Missouri, which used the Vietnam analogy to defend his Iraq policies, touched off a storm of commentary in America, suggesting that he has gone totally bananas in his attempt to defend the indefensible.

Reports on Bush’s speech ran on all three US television networks and hundreds of local US TV stations on Wednesday night and the front pages of Thursday morning’s major US newspapers.

The media spotlight remained solidly on Bush’s Vietnam analogy. Bush’s argument was that “withdrawing US troops” from Iraq “would lead to widespread death and suffering” as it did “in the case of Vietnam after the US pulled out.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Bush’s aides said the speech’s focus “on the lessons of recent Asian history was Mr Bush’s idea, and couldn’t have been done without delving into Vietnam.”

The fact of the matter, however, is that Bush’s Vietnam analogy was an utter distortion of history. The widespread death and suffering in Vietnam was caused not by the withdrawal of US troops from the country (as claimed by Bush) but by the US’s 10-year bombing campaign against the country, in which 2.5 million Vietnamese were killed and countless others wounded.

The total tonnage of bombs dropped by the US on North Vietnam exceeded the total tonnage of bombs dropped by the Allied and Axis powers on each other during the whole of World War II. The US also dropped thousands of tons of the highly toxic chemical defoliant “Agent Orange” on Vietnam, laying waste to vast swathes of the countryside.

Secondly, Bush’s contention that withdrawing US troops from Iraq “would lead to widespread death and suffering” glossed over the fact that more than 600,000 Iraqis, most of them innocent civilians, have died to date as a result of US bombing, missile strikes and artillery shelling. Even the sectarian violence being seen in Iraq today is the direct result of the US’s occupation of the country.

The idea that America should have killed another million or two peasants in North Vietnam to prevent a bloodbath is morally indefensible and a mistake. It would not have brought peace or victory, but only more bloodletting. In Vietnam, surging to win (then it was called escalation) was tried again and again for 12 years (1959-70). Each time, the pro-war extremists thought it was the path to victory.

http://zfacts.com/p/672.html

Edit: Junior didn't invent this bewildering sentiment. It is harbored by some, including a number of vets who served in Vietnam, who wish we would have stayed there to this day - losing more thousands of our solders, killing more millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians, and bankrupting our treasury - all in pursuit of a 'victory' in a war with a goal that was never defined.

The Delayer is right about one thing: Iraq is just like Vietnam, but with sand.

I wondered how an American news outlet could have called Bush "totally bananas" and the Iraq occupation "indefensible." We're not allowed to hear such things in the popular media in this country, no matter how true they might be.

Look at all the American Investments in South Vietnam that disappeared!!!! That was TERRIBLE. What is one to two million lives compared to the lOST OF CORPORATE AMERICA INVESTMENT!!!! The US could have prevented that lost of Corporate investment with just one or two million more lives. It is that type of suffering that the US MUST prevent in Iraq. What would Corporate America do if its ability to buy Iraqi oil cheaply disappear just to save thousand (if not millions) of lives? The losses to Corporate America would be to great, just to spare one to two million human lives.

<Sarcasm is off>

But the lost to Corporate America may be the HUGE BLOODBATH Bush is worried about, and worried about during Vietnam.