http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=69743Sunday, August 26, 2007
By Kaleem Omar
It is not as if US President George W. Bush ever had a reputation for being a latter-day Einstein. But Bush’s speech on Wednesday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, Missouri, which used the Vietnam analogy to defend his Iraq policies, touched off a storm of commentary in America, suggesting that he has gone totally bananas in his attempt to defend the indefensible.
Reports on Bush’s speech ran on all three US television networks and hundreds of local US TV stations on Wednesday night and the front pages of Thursday morning’s major US newspapers.
The media spotlight remained solidly on Bush’s Vietnam analogy. Bush’s argument was that “withdrawing US troops” from Iraq “would lead to widespread death and suffering” as it did “in the case of Vietnam after the US pulled out.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that Bush’s aides said the speech’s focus “on the lessons of recent Asian history was Mr Bush’s idea, and couldn’t have been done without delving into Vietnam.”
The fact of the matter, however, is that Bush’s Vietnam analogy was an utter distortion of history. The widespread death and suffering in Vietnam was caused not by the withdrawal of US troops from the country (as claimed by Bush) but by the US’s 10-year bombing campaign against the country, in which 2.5 million Vietnamese were killed and countless others wounded.
The total tonnage of bombs dropped by the US on North Vietnam exceeded the total tonnage of bombs dropped by the Allied and Axis powers on each other during the whole of World War II. The US also dropped thousands of tons of the highly toxic chemical defoliant “Agent Orange” on Vietnam, laying waste to vast swathes of the countryside.
Secondly, Bush’s contention that withdrawing US troops from Iraq “would lead to widespread death and suffering” glossed over the fact that more than 600,000 Iraqis, most of them innocent civilians, have died to date as a result of US bombing, missile strikes and artillery shelling. Even the sectarian violence being seen in Iraq today is the direct result of the US’s occupation of the country.