Bush’s Vietnam-Iraq analogy irks Democrats « Thread Started

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Bush’s Vietnam-Iraq analogy irks Democrats « Thread Started on Aug 27, 2007, 11:56pm » --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Bush’s Vietnam-Iraq analogy irks Democrats Olivier Knox read at source> http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/w ... 7034KANSAS CITY — US President George Bush has drawn heavy flak from the Democrats with his warning that a hasty withdrawal from Iraq would trigger a bloodbath similar to that in southeast Asia after the US retreat from Vietnam. Bush, in an effort to turn on its head the analogy by critics who liken the Iraq war to the Vietnam quagmire, said there was now a legitimate debate in the US about how the superpower was drawn into the Vietnam war, and its damaging exit. “Whatever your position is on that debate (of US intervention), 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, such as ‘boat people’, ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields’,” he said.Bush’s remarks to US veterans of 20th-century conflicts in Asia were pounced on by senior Democrats, who challenged the president’s grasp of historical fact.Bush’s 2004 rival for the White House, senator John Kerry, said it was “not surprising that he (Bush) would oversimplify the differences and overlook the tragic similarities. If the president wants to heed the lessons of Vietnam, he should change course and change course now,” said Kerry.Senator Edward Kennedy also criticised Bush’s speech, in which the president drew broad parallels between the global war on terrorism and conflicts in Asia, and likened Japan’s 1941 strike on the US Pearl Harbor base to the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda .“The president is drawing the wrong lesson from history,” he said.