Bush on the lesson of Vietnam: We Left Too Early
The president's "new defense" of the war in Iraq? Pretty much the same as his old defense of the war in Iraq: The war in Iraq is part of a larger war on terrorism, and that war is a lot like World War II, the Korean War and some other wars in which we've fought.
Oh, and it turns out that the war in Iraq is also a lot like Vietnam -- and not just because members of the Bush family have found a way not to fight in it. Actually, the president didn't say today that the war in Iraq is like Vietnam -- he's sort of done that before -- but he did suggest that we should take heed of the lessons of Vietnam as we think about our next steps in Iraq.
"Then, as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence, and that if we would just withdraw the killing would end... The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be... 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.'"
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