Iraq and Vietnam

Iraq and Vietnam: "President Bush, one of the two most famous pro-Vietnam War members of his generation to avoid fighting in that war, has finally accepted what he previously rejected: that there are parallels between the war he ducked out of and his violent occupation of Iraq. (The other best-known famous pro-war war avoider is Vice President Dick “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service” Cheney.) Unfortunately, Bush has learned a far different lesson from Vietnam than many others have. “Whatever your position is on that debate [about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left], 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,’ ‘reeducation camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’” Others have already corrected Bush’s predictably bad history. The killing fields of Cambodia began long before the United States exited Vietnam; American carpet bombing starting in 1969 killed as many as three-quarters of a million people and created the opportunity for the murderous Khmer Rouge eventually to rule the country. Moreover, innocent Vietnamese were being slaughtered every day that the United States sustained the war."