SOS to Jack Cafferty, Keith Olbermann, Votevets.org and The Daily Show

[librarycard]

Please, please, please rip apart Bush's VFW speech!! I have never heard so much BS in one sitting!! This cannot stand without the harshest possible rebuke!

I'll do my part, please do yours!

[dancingme]

1. Josh Marshall did a good job

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.

Even more interesting is another argument President Bush is poised to make: namely, that Vietnam is more than just an analogy. He will argue that the terrorist threat we face today is in some measure the result of our withdrawal from Vietnam, as it emboldened the terrorists to attack us.

And finally there's more.


"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,' " the president will say.


The story of the 'boat people' is unquestionably tragic. And there's little doubt that there are many Iraqis who will pay either with their lives or nationality for aiding us in various ways during our occupation of the country. But to govern our policy on this basis is simply to buy into a classic sunk cost fallacy. A far better -- and really quite necessary -- policy would be to give asylum to a lot of these people rather than continuing to get more of them into the same position in advance of our inevitable departure.

More concretely though, didn't the killing fields happen in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge rather than Vietnam? So doesn't that complicate the analogy a bit? And didn't that genocide actually come to an end when the Communist Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime? The Vietnamese Communists may have been no great shakes. But can we get through one of these boneheaded historical analogies while keeping at least some of the facts intact?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

[peacetalksforall]

3. The communism part of the reason was made into the entire reason and the real

reason was the same as the French before us - earth resources and geographical location. We can add that we were also committed to protecting Taiwan/Formosa - just as we are committed to protecting Israel.

EARTH RESOURCES FIRST, yes yes yes - rich in minerals.

[TahitiNut]

6. Don't forget that the Mekong Delta region was regarded as the most fertile in the world.

Chemicals changed that. :shrug:

[librarycard]

5. Thanks for this

[meegbear]

2. And what is your part?

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4. I write

letters in a pubilc forum, stating the obvious, w/a dose of sarcasm thrown in.