Posted By Adam Robertson

August 25, 2007

In a new attempt to back his case for keeping U.S. occupation forces in Iraq, President George W. Bush twisted history by drawing a parallel between the bloody wars the United States fought in East Asia to the current conflict in Iraq. 

Three weeks before the release of a key September assessment of the progress in Iraq, President Bush is sending a strong message that the U.S. will not leave the war-torn country during his presidential term, which ends in January 2009. In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American president said that Vietnam was a war worth fighting, just like the one in Iraq. He also likened the “terrorists” in Iraq to the imperial Japanese army and the communist forces in Korea and Vietnam.

President Bush also warned that a hasty withdrawal from Iraq would lead to the same bloodbath that took place in Southeast Asia after the U.S. defeat and retreat from Vietnam in 1973. He argued that the U.S. rapid withdrawal from Vietnam was to blame for millions of deaths in that country and the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge communist regime in neighboring Cambodia, where more than 1.7 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge's reign from 1975 to 1979. 

A similar catastrophe may befall the Middle East if the 162,000 U.S. troops pull out from Iraq, he warned, adding that there in an added danger in the case of Iraq, where al-Qaeda would be strengthened after any U.S. withdrawal.

"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush told a group of American war veterans in Kansas City, Missouri. 

"Whatever your position in that debate, 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.'"

According to an editorial on BBC, Bush’s use of the word "citizens" to describe the Vietnamese and the Cambodians dignifies the war as well as them (though it was not a word used by U.S. troops much) and also implies that other "citizens" (including Americans) will suffer too if the U.S. left Iraq.

It’s also interesting to note that Bush didn’t mention the suffering and death if the Americans had stayed in Vietnam! More than half a million U.S. soldiers fought for South Vietnam against the communist North during the peak of the war, which left more than 58,000 of them dead before Washington's humiliating pullout. In Iraq, at least 3,700 U.S. troops, and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since the 2003 invasion. 

Analysts say Bush’s use of Vietnam to back Iraq War is not wise. His speech re-opened a debate over whether his claims are reality or exaggeration? 

According to the BBC, Vietnam might appeal to the veterans who fought there, and to the new generation that didn’t experience the divisions it caused in the U.S. society. It will also appeal to American patriotism, and thus throw critics of the Iraq war onto the defensive. 

But this is tricky, as for many Americans, Vietnam has always been a failure and any comparison with it evokes that failure. 

The Americans tried all possible strategies to win the Vietnam war. President Kennedy sent thousands of military "advisers". President Johnson escalated the war into a massive commitment. "Search and destroy" sweeps, attacks on North Vietnamese supply lines and the North itself, the herding of villagers into encampments, napalm bombing -- everything considered by the Americans as within the limits of acceptable warfare at that time was tried. 

But American public support collapsed, their troops withdrew and they handed the war over to the South Vietnamese army. That, too, failed. 

Many historians believe that Bush used Vietnam and “cherry-picked” history to support his case for staying the course in Iraq. 

"My understanding of the history of the Vietnam war and the lessons of that differs rather dramatically from Mr Bush's," Robert Hathaway, an Asian expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, told AFP. 

Despite the U.S. military involvement and its heavy casualties in Vietnam, Washington was still unable to create popular support in the south for a government that was widely considered to be corrupt, Mr Hathaway said. South Vietnam collapsed in 1975 not because American forces had withdrawn, but because the South Vietnamese and their army simply did not care enough about their government to fight in its defense, he argued. 

"So one of the lessons, at least for me, is the American tragedy in Vietnam is that military force by an outside power -- a power that many people in Vietnam viewed as an occupying force -- was not sufficient to create the political conditions for genuinely popular government in South Vietnam nor the political will to fight for that government," Mr Hathaway said.

"Another lesson of Vietnam is that combination of great power and good intentions is not necessarily sufficient for America to impose its will on others," he added.

Steven Simon of the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, agreed, saying that Bush "emphasized the violence in the wake of American withdrawal from Vietnam. But this happened because the United States left too late, not too early.” 

"It was the expansion of the war that opened the door to Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. The longer you stay the worse it gets," he said. 

Bush’s remarks also triggered criticism from senior Democratic lawmakers, who challenged his grasp of historical facts. The president’s 2004 rival for the White House, Senator John Kerry, said it was "not surprising that he (Bush) would oversimplify the differences and overlook the tragic similarities.”

"If the president wants to heed the lessons of Vietnam, he should change course and change course now," said Kerry.

Historian Robert Dallek, who had compared the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, also accused Bush of twisting history. "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 told the Los Angeles Times. 

"What is Bush suggesting? That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion," he continued. 

It’s clear that the Iraq War will not be won in arguments over Vietnam. The fact that President Bush is making these arguments only shows how determined he is to stay in Iraq. 

But, as Mr Dallek says, the disaster in Iraq "is the consequence of going in, not getting out." 

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