Now We Know What Bush Was Spending All That Time in The National Guard Doing!

He was studying Vietnam!

President Bush plans to argue today that a hasty "retreat" from Iraq would lead to the kinds of bloodbaths that followed U.S. withdrawals from Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s.

In a speech he is to deliver here at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention, Bush will also say that the recent increase of U.S. troops is producing military progress in the war-racked country.

"Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they are gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq?" Bush says in prepared remarks released by the White House late Tuesday.

Here's what the actual quote was: 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."

Actually, that is eminently mistakable! First of all, no reasonable historian believes that the reaction to an unwinnable war in Vietnam was to stay longer.

"We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn't work our will," he said.

"What is Bush suggesting? That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion," he continued. "We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out."

Second of all, he uses "killing fields" cavalierly, when they didn't exist in Vietnam but in Cambodia. And here this is wingnut historical error like no other. In fact, Cambodian genocide was a direct result of our own aggression in that country.

Bush's invocation of the Cambodian genocide, however, is both predictable and disgusting. Rather than simply wallowing in counter-factual satisfactions (e.g., what if FDR hadn't simply "given away" a region of Europe his nation didn't actually control?) it actually inverts history by pretending that the killing fields were a consequence of American weakness rather than an effect of American aggression. The history on this is pretty unambiguous. Without four years of American and South Vietnamese bombardment of eastern Cambodia, and without the illegal invasion of the country in 1970, the preconditions for the ascent of the Khmer Rouge would not have existed. More importantly, as the Khmer became embroiled in a xenophobic campaign against ethnic Vietnamese and sought -- improbably -- to regain lands lost to Vietnam centuries before, the United States had little to say in the way of official complaint against Pol Pot's regime. Indeed, the "reasonable" position set forth by Kissinger (under Ford) and Brzezinski (under Carter) held that Pol Pot -- though detestable -- was at least useful so long as he threatened the Communists in Vietnam. And when the Khmer Rouge was deposed by a Vietnamese invasion and replaced by a Vietnamese puppet states, both Carter and Reagan continued to insist that the Khmer Rouge be acknowledged as the legitimate government of Cambodia.

Allow me to put it even more simply: to the extent that the United States abetted the Cambodian genocide, those contributions were made not by people who called for an end to the war in Vietnam but instead by those who insisted that the war be expanded into another nation; that the war could be brought under control with a massive, short-term escalation; and that domestic opposition to the war was irresponsible and meretricious.

In other words, the only historical parallel to Cambodia would be us attacking Iran and destabilizing that country, leading perhaps to another ethnic genocide. Not to mention the fact that 1.7 million Vietnamese died while we were there, suggesting that the cause of mass death was not us leaving, but us going in.

Bush also lied about the capture of "al Qaeda leaders" in Iraq, but that's familiar. Using Vietnam to BOLSTER support for staying stuck in an endless occupation is just lunacy. Most of the Democratic candidates have come out to trash this muddled logic. But this is one of those zombie wingnut lies that will never die. When we do leave the disaster of Iraq with our goals unfulfilled, these guys will claim that our troops were stabbed in the back.