Yesterday, George W. Bush compared Iraq to the Vietnam War, warning "that withdrawing U.S. troops would lead to widespread death and suffering as it did in Southeast Asia three decades ago." That's a fascinating analysis, coming from someone who did everything he could - DADDY!!! - to avoid serving in Vietnam.Now, let's hear what someone who DID serve in Vietnam -- not to mention written arguably the greatest novel, "Fields of Fire," having to do with that conflict -- has to say. During the Q&A session following Jim Webb's speech at the National Press Club on March 22, Webb was asked "Is Iraq another Vietnam?" According to my notes at the time (I attended the event), here's what Webb had to say:
Webb does NOT believe that there are parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. Webb says that he "still strongly support[s] the Vietnam War," that the "logic was sustainable," that as late as 1972, a Harris survey indicated that 74% of the American people felt it was important that South Vietnam not fall to the Communists. In contrast, there is "no consensus" about Iraq, which has turned into a "huge strategic blunder." The troops themselves want to be out of Iraq.
So, who do you believe on this issue, George W. Bush or Jim Webb? That's not a difficult question to answer, is it?
P.S. By the way, check this out from a Bush press conference in 2004:
Q. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, April [2004] is turning into the deadliest month in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, and some people are comparing Iraq to Vietnam and talking about a quagmire. Polls show that support for your policy is declining and that fewer than half Americans now support it. What does that say to you and how do you answer the Vietnam comparison?THE PRESIDENT: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy.
Looks like Bush just sent the "wrong message to the enemy!" Ha.
Iraq - Christian vs. Muslim
Vietnam - elective war (police action)
Iraq - elective war (not a police action)
South Vietnam - corrupt US created puppet Gov. not supported by the people
Iraq - corrupt US created puppet Gov. not supported by the people
Vietnam - primary bad guy = communist insurgent
Iraq - primary bad guy = Islamic insurgent
Vietnam - war protestors said to be aiding and abetting the enemy
Iraq - war protestors said to be aiding and abetting the enemy
Vietnam - corrupt, paranoid and secretive Republican president
Iraq - corrupt, paranoid and secretive Republican president
Vietnam - capitulating, enabling Democratic leadership
Iraq - capitulating, enabling Democratic leadership
So it is plain to see that there is NO COMPARISON to be made. We're much to smart to repeat the same mistakes.
*(South Vietnamese were primarily Christian)
2. The vote on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was 416-0 in the House of Representatives, 88-2 in the Senate. In other words, it was pretty much unanimous, Democratic and Republican. So why do you solely blame a "capitulating, enabling Democratic leadership?"
3. As far as "corrupt, paranoid and secretive" Presidents are concerned, we've had a lot of them, I'm not sure what your point is exactly. Do you think that JFK and LBJ, who revved up the Vietnam War, were "corrupt, paranoid and secretive?"
4. "Elective war" describes almost every war we've fought in the 20th century, except for World War II. Was World War I an "elective war?" How about Korea? Desert Storm? Kosovo? What's your point exactly?
5. There's always a "primary bad guy." What are you attempting to prove by saying that in the case of Vietnam it was the communists and in the case of Iraq it's "Islamic insurgents?" You lost me there.
When we first started down this "Road to War" in 2002, many predicted that it would be "just like Vietnam". But BushCo scoffed at that and used the MSM to defame anyone who questioned his wisdom, intelect and motives.
Now, in 2007, after having proven many times over that Iraq was a mistake, BushCo says Iraq is comparable to Vietnam and the Dem's say it isn't. ????????? If you can't find some Orwellian humor in that...
As for the items 1-5
1.) When did Vietnam get going?
"Had FDR lived, US might have responded favorably to Ho Chi Minh's request for a helping hand towards independence and none of what we now know was about to begin would have happened."
"Eisenhower told members of his National Security Council on October '54, in defending the commitment to South Vietnam, "one-eyed men are king." Obviously, in his view, we were that one-eyed man.
Nixon was the emissary. The representative of the Eisenhower administration that carried the commitment of the US backing to the French.
2.) Gulf of Tonkin - Unanimous, Democratic and Republican -a ruse is a ruse is a ruse i.e. WMD
3.) if you can't draw parallels on this one... nothing I say is going to help.
4.) Elective War - Let's invade Canada!
5.) Did the Vietcong exist before we created them?
Evidently we haven't learned anything - despite McNamara having laid out the lessons he learned. We blindly jump into a war in another country without really understanding what the dynamics were.
While the movie may sound kind of dry, it is actually quite riveting and won an Academy Award.
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident reportedly began with an attack by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats on the Maddox, a U.S. destroyer, in the Gulf of Tonkin on 2 August 1964. Two days later, that vessel and another U.S. destroyer (the Turner Joy) in the area both reported themselves under renewed attack, although North Vietnam subsequently insisted that it hadn't attacked - and no attack is now believed to have occurred on the 4th of August.
By 1967 the rationale for what had become a costly US involvement was receiving close scrutiny. With opposition to the war mounting, a movement to repeal the resolution - which war critics decried as having given the Johnson administration a "blank check" - began to gather steam.
In 1970 the administration began to shift its stance. It asserted that its conduct of operations in southeast Asia was based not on the resolution but was a constitutional exercise of the President's authority, as commander in chief of US military forces, to take necessary steps to protect American troops as they were gradually withdrawn (the U.S. had begun withdrawing its forces from Vietnam in 1969 under a policy known as "Vietnamization").
To those members of Congress who did not consider the resolution to be imprudent, the administration's position now made it seem meaningless. Rescinding it ceased to be controversial, and a provision to repeal it was attached to a bill that Nixon signed in January 1971. Seeking to assert limits on presidential authority to engage US forces without a formal declaration of war, Congress passed in 1973, over Nixon's veto, the War Powers Resolution, which is still in effect. It describes certain requirements for the President to consult with Congress in regard to decisions that engage US forces in hostilities or imminent hostilities."
Sounding familiar?
You ask a question: "Is it to fight terror, to create an ally in Middle East, to safe-keep oil, to build a democracy I mean you tell me?"
I ask: If you don't know why the US is in Iraq, then what is your basis for supporting it? Seriously.
Actually, what I was trying to say was that both wars were started on a lie, Gulf of Tonkin and Weapons of Mass Destruction. Bush's speech yesterday is so political and full of lies and deceit that after reading it again in order to comment on it, I threw up my hands in disgust and quit.
I don't have the slightest idea what will happen in Iraq if we leave and apparently those wiser than myself can't seem to agree on what will occur either. So what we've been given is that 1) if we leave all hell might be released or 2) we stay and add considerable more troops and be satisfied to be there, as Petraeus has indicated, for possibly another decade. Sounds similar to a Hobson's Choice.
This idiot of a President and our weak Congress has gotten us into a hellish war that has destroyed Iraq and its people and put undue horror on American soldiers and their families and I haven't even begun to describe the national security mess that isn't being addressed by having wasted our resources in Iraq.
Interestingly, the so-called mass media continues to propagate the fiction that the invasion of Iraq commenced on March 20, 2003. US, British and Jordanian special forces began operating inside western and southern Iraq and attacking Iraq facilities and killing Iraqis at least a year earlier. And US special ops units - both military and CIA paramilitary - have been based in Kurdish Iraq since Gulf War One in 1991 and were also active in attacks inside Baathist controlled northern Iraq well before March 20, 2003. The CIA presence in Iraqi Kurdistan goes back decades.
There is a lesson here as we weigh the words of our soldiers - it takes a nation, a capable leader, a just cause, AND war fighters. We should always expect our soldiers to believe in themselves, their comrades, and the cause they fight and die for. But we should not expect them to recognize the forces that shape their battlefield. That judgment is the task of their leadership, and it had best be good. Vietnam and Iraq show how bad leadership betrays all of us, especially those who sacrifice the most - our soldiers.
These arguments of how alike or unalike they are can be a timewaster. In both cases, our leaders led us to war on a lie.
The "Thornton Affair" - One of the main triggers for the Mexican-American War.
World War I: Can anyone explain to me why the hell that war started? The "triple entente" vs. the "triple alliance?" The assassination of an obscure archduke? What the hell?
Grenada
Vietnam
Iraq
etc., etc.
I know there's a lot of re-looking at history : NATO-Yugoslavia War, Spanish American War, Nicaragua War, etc. but the Mexican provocation of 1846 was an attack on the US.
Mexico's problem has always been dictators like Santa Ana.
Opposition to the warIn the United States, most Whigs in the North and South opposed the war; most Democrats supported it. Joshua Giddings led a group of dissenters in Washington D.C. He called the war with Mexico "an aggressive, unholy, and unjust war," and voted against supplying soldiers and weapons for the war. He said:
"In the murder of Mexicans upon their own soil, or in robbing them of their country, I can take no part either now or here-after. The guilt of these crimes must rest on others. I will not participate in them."
Fellow Whig, Congressman Abraham Lincoln, contested the causes for the war and demanded to know the exact spot on which Thornton had been attacked and U.S. blood shed. "Show me the spot," he demanded. Whig leader Robert Toombs of Georgia declared:
"This war is a nondescript.... We charge the President with usurping the war-making power... with seizing a country... which had been for centuries, and was then in the possession of the Mexicans.... Let us put a check upon this lust of dominion. We had territory enough, Heaven knew."[4]
Northern abolitionists attacked the war as an attempt by slave-owners -- frequently referred to as "the Slave Power" - to expand the grip of slavery and thus assure their continued influence in the federal government. Acting on his convictions, Henry David Thoreau was jailed for his refusal to pay taxes to support the war, and penned his famous essay, Civil Disobedience.
Former President John Quincy Adams also expressed his belief that the war was fundamentally an effort to expand slavery. In response to such concerns, Democratic Congressman David Wilmot introduced the Wilmot Proviso, which aimed to prohibit slavery in any new territory acquired from Mexico. Wilmot's proposal did not pass Congress, but it spurred further hostility between the factions.
I think I'll go with Lincoln, Quincy Adams, and Thoreau on this one.
From Wikipedia :
On April 24, 1846, a 2,000-strong Mexican cavalry detachment attacked a 63-man U.S. patrol that was sent into the contested territory north of the Rio Grande and south of the Nueces River. The Mexican cavalry succeeded in routing the patrol, killing 11 U.S. soldiers in what later became known as the Thornton Affair after the slain U.S. officer who was in command. A few survivors returned to Fort Brown.
The border was set at the Rio Grande by the Houston-Santa Ana treaty. Mexicans tried to deny this treaty.
The causus belli was an attack on the US just like Pearl Harbor and 9-11. Lincoln's whining was the equivalent of later day statements like "The CIA flew the planes into the World Trade Center" or "Roosevelt knew beforehand about the Japanese attack".
As for the sparks in Europe, I recall a remark made by a dying Otto von Bismark (German chancellor from 1871 to 1890): "the world will go to war over some damn fool thing in the Balkans". Famous. Last. Words.
And the rest, as they say, is history...
Or this?
Or, best of all, this?
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, April [2004] is turning into the deadliest month in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, and some people are comparing Iraq to Vietnam and talking about a quagmire. Polls show that support for your policy is declining and that fewer than half Americans now support it. What does that say to you and how do you answer the Vietnam comparison?THE PRESIDENT: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy.
Looks like Bush just sent the "wrong message to the enemy!"
I almost got in a fight at the outset of the conflict with some snot-nosed GWU college republican supporting the war in front of Union Station. I basically stooped down and attached his manhood by ridiculing the wus for appearing healthy enough to serve, but instead choosing to be a cheerleader while other fight. In general, I am very disappointed with college apathy on the subject of the war which is attributable to the last of a draft. As a society we should be ashamed.
Yet, the entire comparison is off-base, and to compare Iraq with Vietnam only concedes that we have learned nothing from our history in Indo-China.
While there was a genuine logic to our mess in Vietnam (maligned albeit), we have never been given a plausible reason for the Iraqi mess (and for this Bush & Co. deserve to be impeached).
Why do we continue to let the administration get away with making a the connection of Iraq with 9-11?
Without a draft, only about a tenth of 1% of Americans are directly involved in this conflict. We've been asked to sacrifice NOTHING other than our reputation around the world.
We've been asked to sacrifice our right to privacy, habeas corpus, and due process. I'd say we've sacrificed much of our birthright. And we've done it with barely a whimper, or rather with a trembling fear-filled whimper.
Iraq's civil war was started, aggravated, and expanded by U.S. involvement.
Civil wars have always been concluded in only one way. One side wins and takes charge of the country. Our continued involvement in Iraq will, like Vietnam, delay but fail to change the result of their civil war.