Bush's Vietnam Comparison Has the Left in a Tizzy

President Bush evoked memories of the bloody aftermath of the U.S. pullout from Vietnam in a speech yesterday that has the lefties screaming:

President George Bush sought to buy more time for his Iraq "surge" strategy yesterday by making a risky comparison for the first time with the bloodshed and chaos that followed the US pullout from Vietnam.

Making it clear he will resist congressional pressure next month for an early withdrawal, he signalled that US troops, whom he hailed as the "greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known", will be in Iraq as long as he is president. He also said the consequences of leaving "without getting the job done would be devastating", and "the enemy would follow us home".

Mr Bush's speech came on the day that the US suffered one of its highest daily death tolls since the 2003 invasion, with 14 troops killed when a Black Hawk helicopter crashed.

In a speech to army veterans in Kansas City, Mr Bush invoked one of the US's biggest military disasters in support of keeping troops in Iraq: "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'."

The writer is clearly trying to minimize the effect of the president's speech with that third paragraph. The fact that there were 14 deaths on one day, all of which occurred in a single helicopter accident thought to be caused by mechanical failure, is irrelevant to the message in the president's speech. That accident, which killed the son of a family I know, could have happened anywhere where military helicopter operations are taking place and is not representative of some kind of terrible upsurge in Iraqi violence.


The speech was also misused by some of the local TV reporting I saw in which the anchor stated that Bush would not pull out "no matter what" before he left office. That's not what he said. He said he would resist an early pullout while he was still president, not any pullout.

The most comical response was from Sen. John F'ing Kerry who called the president's statements "ignorant". This is the same John Kerry whose efforts during the Vietnam War contributed to the early withdrawal of our forces and the resulting bloodbath, something which Kerry recently tried to deny had even happened. Scrappleface has a funny take on Kerry's response.

With more and more good news coming from the effort in Iraq September promises to be a difficult month for the antiwar crowd. They've taken to assaulting the prime minister of Iraq and his problems as the latest excuse to get of the war early. I guess since they couldn't convince enough members to overthrow Bush they'll have to settle for the overthrow of Maliki. Any scalp will do.