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Bush Vietnam Speech: We Have Met the Enemy, and It Is You
Everyone has a take on the president's stunning Iraq-Vietnam analogy (message: things get better the longer we stay), but the VFW speech is a fascinating list of every other war rationale the Bush administration has tried and failed to make stick. There is the "the war in Iraq is all about fighting al Qaeda" line, with its easy conflation of insurgents and jihadists:
Like our enemies in the past, the terrorists who wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places seek to spread a political vision of their own -- a harsh plan for life that crushes freedom, tolerance, and dissent.
Like our enemies in the past, they kill Americans because we stand in their way of imposing this ideology across a vital region of the world.
And the "if you're not with us, you're with them" smear, reincarnated as "peaceniks lost Vietnam, and that's why the terrorists are winning" (at least when John McCain goes down this road, he has a shred of integrity):
There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that "the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today."
His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al Qaeda's chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents."
…Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility -- but the terrorists see it differently.
Read the whole thing for yourself, and let us know what else jumps out at you in the comments.
Now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty. Iraq the new Viet Nam, the issue Conservatives and Republicans have used to betray democracy and turn America into a Militaristic Plutocracy. According to the RIGHT, all our problems can be traced to the lefts cowardly retreat from Viet Nam. Millions of people died before, during and after the war, but those killed after America left, most concern the RIGHT. They say, "The Left is responsible for our humiliating defeat, and the loss of millions people killed in Cambodia."
Never mind the millions killed during the war.
Since when has the RIGHT been concerned about the deaths of a few million people? Aggression and militarism always appeal to some people, that's the way they conduct their own lives. Might makes right and they've got the money to prove it. Might does not make Right. The powerful oppressing the weak does not make Right. We all know that, but the Militaristic Plutocracy that rules America has a different point of view, and most of the wealth and power in America. And they use that wealth and power to dictate what we hear and see on TV. They have their tentacles into government, media and religion. That's called control.
Some Americans are unable to see they are being controlled, some welcome control as long as it suits their personality, but there are others who resent being controlled by people who don't care if our families starve to death. Both of our political parties have the used the bugaboo of socialism/communism and now terrorism to feed the Military Industrial Complex, owned by our Militaristic Plutocracy. That's how our stupid and corrupt economic system and government works, everything else is fluff.
Maybe we'll never be free of somebody's control, but shouldn't we at least try to understand that someone IS controlling us, and take just a moment to think for ourselves.
War is sometimes inevitable, but wars of aggression as our reason to be, is insane.
What we should have learned from Viet Nam is to question our leaders whenever they start beating the war drums. They don't represent the people, and they lie, lie, lie.
Of all the presidential candidates, Dennis Kucinich is the least favored by our Militaristic Plutocracy.
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I thought Joe Klein at Time had a good take on this:
"[The speech] represents a new demagogic low, even for [Bush].
"The notion that the non-nation of Iraq, a colonial contraption cobbled together from disparate provinces of the Ottoman Empire by the British in 1918, can in any way be compared to the deeply homogenous Asian countries of Japan, Korea and Vietnam is so foolish--and purposely misleading--as to defy logic. The idea that a half-baked, half-cocked western invader might suffer a different fate in a tribal Islamic patch of desert from an invaded superpower that devotes all of its resources...and has the support of a world-wide coalition against an eminently bombable Asian industrial island-state gets absolutely no shrift at all from George W. Bush....
"The Vietnam portion of the speech was particularly odious. For one thing, that terrible communist government that took power after we left is now our friend! Bush was just there, signing trade agreements and hoisting toasts. How embarrassing for him to slag our allies. We may have to do some splainin' now before the Vietnamese give us back Cam Ranh Bay as a naval port for use against the Chinese in our next needless war.
And Cambodia--the blame for the genocide there lies squarely with the country that destablized the rightful government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. That would be us.
"I love that the President's (or his speechwriter's) book-reading yielded a reference in the speech to Graham Greene's splendid The Quiet American, a novel whose hero is the young William Kristol...actually, no, the hero is a idealistic American intelligence officer named Alden Pyle, who causes great disasters in the name of a higher good. In other words, he's a premature neoconservative. I would hope that the President will re-read, or perhaps just read the book, as soon as possible because it is as good a description as there is about the futility of trying to forcibly impose western ways on an ancient culture."
http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/08/bushs_speech.html
Bush says it best himself. "In fact, the war machines would be brought down -- brought down by good folks who only months before had been students and farmers and bank clerks and factory hands. Others here have been inspired by their fathers and grandfathers and uncles and cousins. That generation taught the tyrants a telling lesson: There is no power like the power of freedom and no soldier as strong as a soldier who fights for a free future for his children. (Applause.) And when work on the battlefield was done, the victorious children of democracy would help our defeated enemies rebuild, and bring the taste of freedom to millions."
Guess what. Chinese could say that. Afghans could say it. Iraqis, Iranians, Africans, South Americans. George spoke for all the oppressed people in the world. He just didnt quite understand that his admin was riding the crest of the wave of their oppression, as well as ours. I'm in the music business, and it sucks right now. Why? Cause we don't supply arms or the energy to make and ship them. What was I thinking.
There was also a LA Times article that had a good quote from an expert:
""It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president," he said in a telephone interview.
""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.""
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-bushspeech
22aug22,1,7259923.story?coll=la-news-a_section&ctrack=1&cset=true
This is a waste of time. See the Maliki article (next).
Hmmm... It does not seem so long ago (longer than WWII I guess, but not that long ago) that we were being sold that there was no comparison between Viet Nam and the Central Front on the War on Tare. That any such comparisons were defeatist and "silly". Plus ca change...
I hope forewarned is forearmed. We can't stop conservatives from trying to blame war opponents for losing Iraq. We can't stop the hawks, chicken or otherwise, from believing it. However, much of the public bought this idea that the opponents lost the war after Vietnam and helped usher in the conservative era. I see no reason they won't believe it about Iraq if we're not ready to fight back or even, dare I say it, preemptively.
Jonathon Stein,
Kudos to you, sir for your always insightful posts. Keep on posting. 'We the people in order to form a more perfect union' all need you and rabblerowzer and so many others who post on this forum.
bobr900
rabblerowzer,
I too endorse Dennis Kucinich.
bobr900
But there's ownliest one fly in the ointment. As a Catholic, as is Kucinich, he will have to prove to me that he can stand up to the Pope, who is deeply involved in American politics and policy both foreign and domestic via his unwavering support for the Republican Party of death for profits and political power.
Sen. Kerry could not stand up to the Pope; he folded, when the Pope threatened to excommunicate him.
Something is terribly wrong with the present and the previous Pope who turned the Church into a Republican political organization. And done so despite the fact that Jesus, that liberal Jewish guy that so many of us love, specifically forbade the merging of church and state(do we all remember 'render unto caesar...) and our cherished, but now badly shredded US Constitution equally forbids the same merging.
So what I'm saying is that Dennis K. will have to prove somehow that he can stand up to the Pope or I will not vote for him or any future Catholic candidates.
What the Catholic Church did when it aligned itself with Hitler and the Nazi Party(Pope Pius XI and the Reichskonkordat of 1933 and Pope Pius XII) and the resultant HOLOCAUST is WAY FAR to similar to what is going on now, another holocaust in the ME.
The first Holocaust was totally unforgivable and the Church will never in a million years ever be able to make restitution for that abomination unto God and man.
So, Go Dennis, I think so far that he can stand up to the Pope and all the right wing Catholic Republicans who perpetrate their death agenda in the name of God. Somehow I just don't think God would approve.
And remember Scalia, (May 2000 speech) a staunch right wing Catholic Repub who called for the END of the rule of law and the END of democracy in the US. That, once again, sounds WAY FAR too much like Hitler(a catholic, born and raised as were half of his top advisors including Josef Mengele) and the Nazi Party then and it's current iteration, the present day Repub Party.
And no I'm not a dem, I am an Independant voter since the Vietnam war, nor am I a pacifist(but getting closer).
There is no such thing as a just war, as the Pope insists, but there are/can be a necessary war when one is directly attacked.
And no, 'THEY' did not attack us(Moslems) only bin Laden and the Saudis who support him attacked us. And yet bin Laden is still running loose. WHY? Especially when our Special Forces and CIA paramilitary had him cornered in Dec, 2001 and Bush refused to send some additional troops to seal off any possible escape routes.
But then so many Saudis are close friends of the Bush/oil empire/crime family. And that fact is just WAY FAR to convenient for me to just swallow as mere coincidence when our troops and the Iraqi and Afghani citizens are dying, and for what, pray tell.
Rethugs never accept responsibility for their actions, just as does their personal savior, the guy next door, oops I mean the guy in the WH.
Repubs and the religious right who enable them, including my religion but not me, the Catholic Church never accept blame for their death for profits and political power agenda and their agenda of dominion and domination over the lives of everyone who is not 'them'.
Their sin of rampant PRIDE and their total lack of any Humility is WAY FAR corrupt, as they all blithely go about destroying our democracy(Republic) and the lives of our troops and the Iraqi and Afghani people.
And don't forget the long ongoing deaths of so many women in Latin American countries which are not allowed abortions for any reason including the death of the mother/woman. Just Google up Jazmina Bojore and read, in horror, about the death of this 19yr old woman. And remember the pedophile priests, who are protected by the Catholic Church, starting right at the top, the Pope, who is ultimately responsible for this cover up. And then typical Republicans that he/they are continue to cover up for these criminals.
I have been radicalized and scandalized by my religion, AND my government.
These right wingers are so stupid/blind that they have stepped completely into the trap bin Laden set for them. Bin Laden and Rove and all the right wingers seem to be working hand-in-hand to fracture, divide and destroy our democracy. Bin Laden has succeeded and they have lost, but still they can't see that fact. They are blinded by their own self serving PRIDE.They are bereft of the virtue of HUMILITY.
Don't believe me, just watch EWTN, the Catholic cable channel as they rationalize their own hypocrisy. One does not kill for Jesus, He would never approve. They are condemned by their sin of PRIDE, placing oneself equal to God and acting upon those beliefs as if one were God.
And they should not bother to confess, just don't do it in the first place. That is the way I was raised, just say no, just don't do it. But their egregious self certitude and self righteousness consumes them and blinds their thinking into rampant hypocrisy. They need to learn a lot of HUMILITY but unfortunately more die everyday and will do continue to do so.
So much for right wing religions.
Ms Bauerlein, please explain the comment "at least when John McCain goes down this road, he has a shred of integrity".
ridiculous. unless of course you fall for the tripe demopublicrats have force fed the county for the last 6 years.... which is seems you have ;(
bobr900: So the ol' pope-meister is a Republican?
I didn't even know he was a US voter!
Any idea who he's favoring in the primaries & which state primary he votes in?
This is a Jewish lie that Pope Pius XII didn't do enough. The Rabbinical Bible, the Talmud, states that a Jew is only obligated to save a life of a brother Jew. A Jew should not put his life and family at risk to save an unclean non Jew. Pius XII was no fool. He was not going to endanger 150million Catholics for 6 million non Catholics. It is hypocritical for Jews to attack Pope Pius XII with such hate speech. Shame on them.
Oh my...
Has someone been frequenting Pastor Ted Pike's "Jewish Guilt" site again?
And who even brought up Pius XII in the first place?
Someone who wanted to go off on the Jews again? Hmmm?
I think that they were at Michael Savage.com
Ted Pike's site has this to say about itself:
"The NATIONAL PRAYER NETWORK is a pre-eminent source of information and discussion concerning Jewish guilt."
I've found chunks of that site's anti-Jew rhetoric posted here word for word, obviously cut & paste.
I really think that it comes from Jewwatch.com or Michael Savage.com. Concerning Jewish guilt, I got that from my mother, I don't need to go to a web site. I think that "ThePope" probably suffers too much from "Catholic guilt" that he could have received from a number of sources, such as Michael Savage.com.
Nah. The particular nonsense I noticed was in this discussion:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2007/08/5198_new_giuliani_f...
"Rachael H." lifted some B.S. from Ted Pike's site, about some alleged Israeli law that whacks Christians with a 5 year prison term for telling Jews about Jesus.
The text was verbatim from Ted's site, and Google only found the particular text on that one site.
THIS 'Pope', FWIW, isn't even Catholic, so he's unlikely to absorb 'Catholic Guilt' from anybody's site, let alone one like Savage's, which he's never visited.
bobr900 may be suffering from a case, though.