Black Box Report

Please...make him stop...just make him stop:

Bush also tied anti-war forces in the Vietnam era to the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the aftermath of the US pull-out, and hinted at a parallel catastrophe in Iraq if US forces leave too soon.
........
"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," he said.

"Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of Americas 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,'" he said.

Iraq is like South Korea Northern Ireland Israel Revolutionary War-Era United States...Vietnam!

Granted, it's taken a while to come to this particular analogy, as Bush was against Vietnam comparisons before he was for them. But now the President has taken his...unique...interpretations of history to dizzying new heights.

Call it the Riddle of the Bush: When is Iraq like and not like Vietnam? Answer: when it suits Bush's analogy. Don't call it a quagmire like Vietnam, but if we leave things will get bad...like Vietnam. But as several people have pointed out, things are already bad:

It is possible that if we leave, hundreds of thousands will die and millions be displaced. That has already happened under our government's tender and expert care. There is no short-term prospect that it will stop happening. But I guess if you die while the US is around, you have the comfort of knowing we were trying.

And cold comfort that will be. As is the notion that anyone in their right mind thinks leaving Vietnam was a mistake:

Certifiably insane. That's the Republican model for winning in Iraq - Vietnam. You see, if we just stayed longer in Vietnam, fought longer in Vietnam, lost more American lives in Vietnam, everything would have ended okay.

Well, I'll bet we would've won if only we had the awesome talents of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rove, O'Reilly, Hume, Limbaugh, Ledeen and the rest of the Non-Fightin' Cons on the case. Sadly, they were all busy doing laundry, or something, during those years...

Historians would, and do, differ with Bush on the appropriateness of his analogy, or whether Vietnam ever being "winnable". But the irony of the infamously incurious president touting the lessons of history is not lost:

Going forty years on...virtually none of the predicted negative repercussions of our departure from Vietnam ever came to pass. Asia didn't go Communist. Our Asian allies didn't abandon us. Rather, the Vietnamese began to fall out with her Communist allies.

And as for invoking the specter of the killing fields, would it be too much to point out that those took place in Cambodia, after Nixon tried expanding the Vietnam war there? His own "surge" if you will:

It astounds me that this Administration is arrogant enough that they think they can, relying on the short memory of Americans, rewrite simple history as justification for their current actions regarding Iraq.

But wait....there's more.

This Worst Analogy Award is a two-fer. In addition to the Worst Historical Analogy, Bush also goes out of his way to fit in the Worst Literary Analogy Ever!

In his speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City today, President Bush summoned up the Alden Pyle CIA agent character of Graham Greene's classic Vietnam novel "The Quiet American" which is essentially a contemplation on the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

I'm not sure he really wanted to go there or why his speechwriters would take him there....
.......
Bush seemed to be seizing on Greene's idea of U.S. naivete on entering the war and trying to turn it around and apply it to those now calling for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

But Greene wrote his book about the way America bumbled into Vietnam, not how it left it.

By reminding people of Greene's book, Bush was inviting listeners to recall the mistakes his administration made in entering and prosecuting the Iraq War. Did he really want to do that?

I'd say might want to re-read the book, but it would appear as if he hasn't read it to begin with.

Credit where credit is due, though, Bush does get one point for his Vietnam comparison to Iraq:

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it,”

And THAT is how Iraq is like Vietnam.