Bush's Misleading Vietnam analogy strikes a nerve

Bush's misleading Vietnam analogy:
The President needs to look no further for killing fields and refugees
than modern-day Iraq, even without a withdrawal
Bush Iraq War analogy strikes a nerve in Vietnam

Maliki as Diem? Bush, Vietnam and 14 More GIs Dead

President Bush's Vietnam analogy is not inaccurate, just incomplete. Max Boot, Wall Street Journal

Dubya steals an analogy. John Podhoretz, New York Post
Dems dread hearing the V-word. Rosemary Righter, London Times
ush's Vietnam Blunder - Jim Hoagland, Washington Post

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. Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's "I
am not a crook" utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton's "I did
not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," in producing
unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting
president. It is not just that Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign
Wars convention on Wednesday drew on a shaky grasp of history,
spotlighted once again his own decision to sit out the Vietnam
conflict, and played straight into his critics' most emotive arguments
against him and the Republican Party. More important, Bush has called
attention to the elephant that will be sitting in the room when his
administration makes its politically vital report on Iraq to the nation
next month. For Americans, the most important comparison will be this
one: As Vietnam did, Iraq has become a failure even on its own terms --
whatever those terms are at any given moment.

Fruits of Retreat - John Podhoretz, New York Post

And
so the world of conventional wisdom is even now rearing in horror at
the mere thought of President Bush daring to compare the war in Iraq to
the war in Vietnam - or, rather, describing the consequences of losing
the war in Iraq by discussing the consequences of our loss in Vietnam
and asking the American people if they want to see that disastrous past
repeated as our inglorious future. You could almost feel the outrage
rising like steam heat from the left side of the blogosphere: Why,
doesn't that evil moron know that Vietnam is our analogy? Doesn't he
know no one should be permitted to mention Vietnam in any context other
than the one we use - as an example of an immoral, pointless and stupid
war, a quagmire from which the nation was saved not by heroes on the
battlefield abroad but by political opposition at home?

Maroons Rush In - Mackubin Thomas Owens, National Review

The
1972 Easter Offensive provided the proof that Vietnam could survive,
albeit with U.S. air and naval support, at least in the short term. The
Easter Offensive was the biggest North Vietnamese offensive push of the
war, greater in magnitude than either the 1968 Tet offensive or the
final assault of 1975. Despite inevitable failures on the part of some
units, all in all, the South Vietnamese fought well. Then, having
blunted the Communist thrust, they recaptured territory that had been
lost to Hanoi. Finally, so effective was the eleven-day "Christmas
bombing" campaign (LINEBACKER II) later that year that the British
counterinsurgency expert, Sir Robert Thompson exclaimed, "you had won
the war. It was over." Three years later, despite the heroic
performance of some ARVN units, South Vietnam collapsed against a much
weaker, cobbled-together PAVN offensive. What happened to cause this
reversal? First, the Nixon administration, in its rush to extricate the
country from Vietnam, forced South Vietnam to accept a ceasefire that
permitted North Vietnamese forces to remain in South Vietnam. Then in
an act that still shames the United States to this day, Congress cut
off military and economic assistance to South Vietnam. Finally,
President Nixon resigned over Watergate and his successor, constrained
by congressional action, defaulted on promises to respond with force to
North Vietnamese violations of the peace terms. Of course the
president’s reference to Vietnam did not have to do with operational
art or strategy but with the consequences of defeat: the abandonment of
allies to the tender mercies of Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists,
resulting in the death of millions in Cambodia and thousands in
Vietnam, the “boat people,” and re-education camps. This abandonment of
our Vietnamese allies was a massive moral failure on the part of the
United States. It is one we should not repeat in Iraq.

Why America's Pullout from Vietnam Worked – Michael Hirsh, Newsweek

Above
all, we have learned that Vietnam and Southeast Asia were never really
central fronts in the cold war (although Korea at the time of the
outbreak of war in 1950, when Beijing still kowtowed to Moscow and
before the Soviet Union and China split, might have fit that bill). The
decision to pull out had very little effect on the ultimate outcome.
America triumphed in the cold war because it had the right kind of
economy—an open one—compared to Moscow and Beijing, and its ideas about
freedom were more attractive to the states within the Soviet bloc than
their own failed ideas were. The president would like to make the
argument that Iraq is about the same struggle. It’s not, for several
important reasons. In contrast to the Soviet and Chinese communists, or
for that matter the fascists of the 1930s and '40s, Al Qaeda and its
ilk have no universalist program, no persuasive alternative ideology to
globalization and some brand of democracy. They are nihilists, and they
have failed to capture half the world’s attention as communism and
socialism once did. So, yes, while a U.S. pullout would no doubt
inspire a great deal of Al Qaeda propaganda about how they succeeded in
forcing the Americans to withdraw from Iraq as they forced the Soviets
to do in Afghanistan, the majority of the world’s elites won’t buy it.

Iraq, Vietnam and McGovernism - Washington Times editorial

The
media and the political left have taken umbrage at President Bush's
choice of a Vietnam analogy to illustrate the dangers of withdrawal
from Iraq. Then, as now, he said Wednesday at the national convention
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, "people argued the real
problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the
killing would end... 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.' " This has set off a firestorm. "Historians Question Bush's
Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq," read yesterday's New York
Times' "news analysis." The president's logic "should persuade few,"
opined the Los Angeles Times. Both newspapers downplayed the Korea and
Japan analogies which Mr. Bush also delivered at the convention. This
is more than a little convenient. The president spent much more speech
time on Korea and Japan than on Vietnam. Both Korea and Japan stand as
rebukes to people who once argued for the purported incompatibility
democracy and freedom among peoples who lacked a history thereof. Today
we hear it about Middle Eastern peoples instead of Asian ones. Mr.
Bush's point is that each was proven wrong in time and that he expects
the same to be true in Iraq.