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    we have met the enemy......, 2007-08-22 12:32:03 | Main | eight days in iraq..., 2007-08-22 22:41:39

    no parallel:

    November 2003:

    You asked me if there's parallel [to Vietnam]. I said it's a different situation.

    November 2006:

    Q Mr. President, you mentioned the prospect that your successor would be dealing with the war. You'll be making your first trip to Vietnam in roughly a week. Some people are still -- are looking at the war as another Vietnam War. Are they wrong to do so? And if so, why?

    THE PRESIDENT: I think they are. I think they are. [I can list three differences here at this podium right off the back of my hand.] So I don't think it is a parallel.

    Now:

    Finally, there's Vietnam. This is a complex and painful subject for many Americans. The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I'm going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.

    ... [Cambodia this, evil peaceniks that] ...

    Whatever your position is on 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."

    You might recall that one significant component of "the killing" did in fact end: Ours. Well, almost.

    But as the President likes to say, "there are many differences between the two conflicts". For example we haven't yet backed a coup in a neighboring country by a weak, unpopular regime which immediately invites us to dramatically escalate our ongoing carpet bombing of its country turning a third of its territory into a moonscape so generously planted with cluster bomblets that the locals can't drill for oil without risking disfigurement and death. This weakened government, ever more unpopular with the people living in their moonscape conversions, is toppled by them in a bloody revolution, and this new government - let's call them the Lunar Reds - the Lunar Reds have not immediately been extended the hand of American support and friendship, something they would recieve through another decade of bloody atrocities after being swept from power by the Iraqi invasion of 2023.

    So what's the President planning to do before we withdraw from Iraq?


:: posted by buermann @ 2007-08-22 20:44:25 CST | link





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