Vietnam Parallels Revisited

from ABC news: http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2583579

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18, 2006 — President Bush said in a one-on-one interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that a newspaper column comparing the current fighting in Iraq to the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, which was widely seen as the turning point in that war, might be accurate.

Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.
"He could be right," the president said.

The new Neocon Talking Point is now along the lines of : "Okay, we admit it- Yes, Iraq is like Vietnam. But you see, the Tet Offensive wasn't as bad as the Media made it out to be back then..." Now they are framing the Tet Offensive as some kind of missed oppurtunity. It's the old "We could have won in Vietnam, you know, uh if we would have stayed the course" argument. Which is absolute horseshit. We killed a million people, 58,000 Americans lost their lives and the American people said enough! and we left Vietnam.

And guess what? 30 years later we do business with their communist country just fine. In fact, probably a little too much business with them, as their cheap labor and manufacturing is now being used by U.S. Corporations instead of American labor. Yay Corporate Profits! The Economy is Booming! uh. not.

So, I don't know what kind of Vietnamese-American Utopia those "stay-the-coursers" desire... I mean if we had stayed to kill 2 million Vietnamese and let another 50,000 U.S. troops die in order to defeat North Vietnam would it be our 51st state now? What the hell do they imagine is worth all those lives?

And yes, I realize that Vietnam went to hell even worse when we left and a lot of people lost their lives. But at least it wasn't our troops killing them anymore. We were no longer dropping chemical weapons and carpetbombing the countryside. When we left the Vietnamese to run their own country, free of our "help" - they survived. And Hey! 30 years later- they don't hate us anymore. Even with heartbreaking stories like this as a result of our use of Agent Orange...
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/060724roco03

Once again, they try to sell the idea that the continued occupation of Iraq is worth something substantial. They tell us that more dead and maimed US soldiers are just a speedbump to stability. They tell us that more deaths of Iraqis at the hands of American troops is just collateral damage that Iraqis don't care about, because they are used to the violence.

They say if we leave then Iraq will become a hotbed of sectarian violence and fundamentalist sentiment. Well, it has already become that while we are there. Our presence has not prevented that from occurring. So, we are moving into a Tet Offensive stage, our troops are slowly picked off while they police a population that increasingly NOT ONLY HATES THEM- But that OUR TROOPS HATE as well.

The Iraqis will stand up when we leave. The Iraqi ministers are already talking about selling the oil contracts to countries OTHER than America- hence the talk that Bush will simply dismantle the "democracy" that he wrought and render Al-Maliki even more impotent than he currently is.. (Is that Possible?)

It is time to withdraw ALL U.S. Presence out of Iraq. It was a failure. All we can hope for now is that in years to come, with smart diplomacy and economic reparations to Iraq, they can forgive us for what we did to their country.

(as Vietnam has).