Bush compares Vietnam war to Iraq

President Bush has invoked the Vietnam war in defending his own personal and illegal war in Iraq. Of all possible defenses, this is the last one I saw coming. In addressing the members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Bush stated from part of his speech,

"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."

How in the world can Bush be suggesting that we never should have left Vietnam, and by doing so, is he legitimizing the cause and pursuit of that war? That would be no surprise, as both wars are examples of our imperialistic government overextending it's reach into foreign affairs. How hypocritical we are in our stances on freedom. Freedom for us through oppression of others. And it's not un-American to say that. It's the truth. I don't see how blindly following our leaders is patriotic, ignoring the bad that comes with the good. Look what Bush is saying. He is advocating the biggest military blunder in United States history, save for his present day travesty in Iraq, through Afghanistan. He even invokes 9/11 in this speech, despite the fact that the only link between 9/11 and Iraq is himself.

Had we stayed in Vietnam, we still could be fighting it today. That war could not have been won, as we had no business being there. The Vietnamese were fighting for their freedom, on their land, while we were the foreign invaders. If Bush wants to make comparisons, it is along these lines he is best suited. We have no right, especially as "defenders of freedom", to instill our imperial will over the weaker nations of the world. This is what got us to 9/11.

In the words of Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Dung, "With regard to the American war in Vietnam, everyone knows that we fought to defend our country and that this was a righteous war of the Vietnamese people, and we all know that the war caused tremendous suffering and losses to the Vietnamese people."

Ton Nu Thi Ninh, a former chairwoman of the National Assembly's committee on foreign affairs said, "The price we, the Vietnamese people on both sides, paid during the war was due to the fact that the Americans went into Vietnam in the first place,"

Those are the comparisons to make with Iraq.


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