arguing that the U.S. withdrawal led to disaster there and emboldened American enemies around the globe. He even went so far as to argue that present-day terrorists like Osama bin Laden are inspired by the turning of American public opinion against the war in Vietnam.

The White House was so proud of this speech that Bush's new counselor, Ed Gillespie, took the unusual step of releasing extensive excerpts last night. Among them:

"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. 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.'

"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 - al-Qaeda. In an interview with a Pakistani paper after the 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden declared that 'the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. They must do the same today.' . . . . Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility - but the terrorists see things differently."

Bush's speech was a big hit at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City. But it's hard to imagine that it will go over nearly as well with a wider audience - not to mention with historians.

That's because the obvious lesson of Vietnam is not that leaving a quagmire leads to disaster, but that staying only makes things worse. (And oh yes: that we shouldn't get into them in the first place.)

The previews of today's speech allowed reporters and bloggers to get a head start on putting Bush's remarks in context.

James Gerstenzang and Maura Reynolds write in the Los Angeles Times: "Historian Robert Dallek, who has written about the comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam, accused Bush of twisting history. '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.'"

Gerstenzang and Reynolds also spoke to Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who "criticized Bush's speech, saying the president 'continues to play the American people for fools.'

"'The only relevant analogy of Vietnam to Iraq is this: In Iraq, just as we did in Vietnam, we are clinging to a central government that does not and will not enjoy the support of the people,' he said."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid issued a statement: "President Bush's attempt to compare the war in Iraq to past military conflicts in East Asia ignores the fundamental difference between the two. Our nation was misled by the Bush Administration in an effort to gain support for the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, leading to one of the worst foreign policy blunders in our history. While the President continues to stay-the-course with his failed strategy in Iraq, paid for by the taxpayers, American lives are being lost and there is still no political solution within the Iraqi government. It is time to change direction in Iraq, and Congress will again work to do so in the fall."

David Jackson and Matt Kelley write in USA Today: "Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow said Bush is reaching for historical analogies that don't track. 'Vietnam was not a bunch of sectarian groups fighting each other,' as in Iraq, Karnow said. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge toppled a U.S.-backed government.

"'Does he think we should have stayed in Vietnam?' Karnow asked."

Talking Points memo blogger Josh Marshall asks: "[I]sn't this quite possibly the worst argument for his Iraq policy? . . .

"[V]irtually none of the predicted negative repercussions of our departure from Vietnam ever came to pass.

"Asia didn't go Communist. Our Asian allies didn't abandon us. Rather, the Vietnamese began to fall out with her Communist allies. With the Cold War over, in strategic terms at least, it's almost hard to remember what the whole fight was about. If anything, the clearest lesson of Vietnam would seem to be that there can be a vast hue and cry about the catastrophic effects of disengagement from a failed policy and it can turn out that none of them are true."

After one of the few other times Bush used a Vietnam analogy - during his official visit to Vietnam last November - Robert Scheer wrote in The Nation: "The lesson of Vietnam is not to keep pouring lives and treasure down a dark and poisonous well, but to patiently use a pragmatic mix of diplomacy and trade with even our ideological competitors.

"The United States dropped more bombs on tiny Vietnam than it unloaded on all of Europe in World War II, only hardening Vietnamese nationalist resolve. Hundreds of thousands of troops, massive defoliation of the countryside, 'free fire zones,' South Vietnamese allies, bombing the harbors . . . none of it worked. Yet, never admitting that our blundering military presence fueled the native nationalist militancy we supposedly sought to eradicate, three US Presidents - two of them Democrats - lied themselves into believing victory was around some mythical corner.

"While difficult for inveterate hawks to admit, the victory for normalcy in Vietnam, celebrated by Bush last week, came about not despite the US withdrawal but because of it."

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Historians Question Bush's Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq

By Thom Shanker

The New York Times

Thursday 23 August 2007

Washingtion - The American withdrawal from Vietnam is widely remembered as an ignominious end to a misguided war - but one with few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.

Now, in urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, President Bush is challenging that historical memory.

In reminding Americans that the pullout in 1975 was followed by years of bloody upheaval in Southeast Asia, Mr. Bush argued in a speech on Wednesday that Vietnam's lessons provide a reason for persevering in Iraq, rather than for leaving any time soon. Mr. Bush in essence accused his war critics of amnesia over the exodus of Vietnamese "boat people" refugees and the mass killings in Cambodia that upended the lives of millions of people.

President Bush is right on the factual record, according to historians. But many of them also quarreled with his drawing analogies from the causes of that turmoil to predict what might happen in Iraq should the United States withdraw.

"It is undoubtedly true that America's failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia," said David C. Hendrickson, a specialist on the history of American foreign policy at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

"But there are a couple of further points that need weighing," he added. "One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam - this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred."

The record of death and dislocation after the American withdrawal from Vietnam ranks high among the tragedies of the last century, with an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians, about one-fifth of the population, dying under the rule of Pol Pot, and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese and other Indochinese becoming refugees. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese who were sent to prison camps after the war have ranged widely, from 50,000 to more than 400,000, and some accounts have said that tens of thousands perished, a figure that Mr. Bush cited in his speech, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Mr. Bush did not offer a judgment on what, if anything, might have brought victory in Vietnam or whether the war itself was a mistake. Instead, he sought to underscore the dangers of a hasty withdrawal from Iraq.

But the American drawdown from Vietnam was hardly abrupt, and it lasted much longer than many people remember. The withdrawal actually began in 1968, after the Tet offensive, which was a military defeat for the Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese sponsors. But it also illustrated the vulnerability of the United States and its South Vietnamese allies.

Although American commanders asked for several hundred thousand reinforcements after Tet, President Johnson turned them down. President Nixon began a process of "Vietnamization" in which responsibility for security was gradually handed to local military and police forces - similar to Mr. Bush's long-term strategy for Iraq today.

American air power was used to help sustain South Vietnam's struggling government, but by the time of the famous photograph of Americans being lifted off a roof in Saigon in 1975, few American combat forces were left in Vietnam. "It was not a precipitous withdrawal, it was a very deliberate disengagement," said Andrew J. Bacevich, a platoon leader in Vietnam who is now a professor of international relations at Boston University.

Vietnam today is a unified and stable nation whose Communist government poses little threat to its neighbors and is developing healthy ties with the United States. Mr. Bush visited Vietnam last November; a return visit to the White House this summer by Nguyen Minh Triet was the first visit by a Vietnamese head of state since the war.

"The Vietnam comparison should invite us to think harder about how to minimize the consequences of our military failure," Mr. Bacevich added. "If one is really concerned about the Iraqi people, and the fate that may be awaiting them as this war winds down, then we ought to get serious about opening our doors, and to welcoming to the United States those Iraqis who have supported us and have put themselves and their families in danger."

To that end, some members of Congress and human rights groups have urged the Bush administration to drop the limits on Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States.

Mr. Bush also sought to inspire renewed support for his Iraq strategy by recalling the years of national sacrifice during World War II, and the commitment required to rebuild two of history's most aggressive and lawless adversaries, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, into reliable and responsible allies.

But historians note that Germany and Japan were homogenous nation-states with clear national identities and no internal feuding among factions or sects, in stark contrast to Iraq today.

The comparison of Iraq to Germany and Japan "is fanciful," said Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He noted that the American and allied militaries had eliminated the governments of Japan and Germany, and any lingering opposition, and assembled occupation forces that were, proportionally, more than three times as large as the current American presence of more than 160,000 troops in Iraq.

"That's the kind of troop level you need to control the situation," Mr. Simon said. "The occupation of Germany and Japan lasted for years - and not a single American solider was killed by insurgents."

Senior American military officers speaking privately also say that the essential elements that brought victory in World War II - a total commitment by the American people and the government, and a staggering economic commitment to rebuild defeated adversaries - do not exist for the Iraq war. The wars in Korea and Vietnam also involved considerable national sacrifice, including tax increases and conscription.

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