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.
