August 23, 2007

BUSH: Vietnam ... Really!?!

Reaction to Pres. Bush's 8/22 speech on Iraq drew predictable reactions from the predictable quarters. The netroots focussed on Bush's Vietnam analogy:

• Talking Points Memo: "But isn't this quite possibly the worst argument for his Iraq policy? Going forty years on, it is not too much to say that virtually none of the predicted negative repercussions of our departure from Vietnam ever came to pass."
• Matthew Yglesias: "I think I (and others) have actually been too easy on Bush's unhinged analogies speech yesterday. He'd like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America's collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets. Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands."
• The Left Coaster's Steve Soto: "As for Vietnam, if your claim is that they will follow us home if we leave Iraq too early, and are equating that to Vietnam, when exactly did the Viet Cong land in San Francisco? I think we all missed that, and you apparently gained some valuable insights into history that escaped the rest of us."

Conservatives also seemed to enjoy the Vietnam redux - especially the body count blasts from the past. Townhall's Hugh Hewitt highlights "1,500 Terrorists Killed Or Captured In Iraq Each Month Since January" and asks "Will 10,000 Terrorists Killed Or Captured In Iraq In 2007 Lead The MSM News Tonight ... Almost certainly not."

RedState's Haystack blogs: "In one of President Bush's positively BEST foreign policy speeches since the September 11 attacks brought us to this hell we find ourselves in now, we were reminded via clear, detailed, and somber analogy, of the gravity of our situation in the war against Radical Islam."

Posted by Conn Carroll at August 23, 2007 12:52 PM