| The Iraq invasion is starting to reveal its many similarities with the Vietnam war. |
| Watergate was embarrassing because of it's stupidity. What's going on right now is embarrassing because of its inhumanity.
Source: John Dean - former White House legal advisor - NOW on PBS - 11/18/05 A President from Texas. President insists he's winning the war. Insists press is getting it wrong. American soldiers dying in large numbers. Soldiers don't understand local customs. Soldiers can't tell friend from enemy. No Front lines. Initial reasons for war are highly questionable. Dissenters are called unpatriotic. You can win all the battles and still lose the war. The strategy of changing culture through military might. The domino theory (and a sort of "reverse" domino theory.) Source: paraphrased from David Maraniss appearance on Al Franken Show on Air America - 9/29/04 [G]rowing public opposition to the Vietnam War pushed President Nixon to pull the plug on that conflict. But he was wrong to imply that being guided by voters to set firm deadlines for withdrawing from a foreign quagmire was a bad thing for either side. An estimated 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American deaths later, Vietnam is run by the same Communist Party that was our enemy back then, but it now seems to matter not at all. We are perfectly happy to see them open their cheap labor markets to the West. Source: "Even Bush's GOP Allies Are Breaking Ranks " by Robert Scheer - The Nation - 6/22/05 Johnson claimed that a U.S. ship was fired upon in the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify the initial invasion of Vietnam. It now appears that this claim may have been a mistake and that the ship was never fired upon at all. The reason that Bush gave for the Iraq invasion (spelled out in detail during Colin Powell's speech to the UN Security Council before the invasion) was that Iraq harbored a vast stockpile of "weapons of mass destruction" that posed an immediate threat to the United States. It now appears that those weapons never existed. One of Bush's main rationales for continuing the military occupation of Iraq is that admitting the whole thing was a mistake and pulling the troops out would imply that the 600+ soldiers that have died there have "died in vein." Johnson used that same rationalization to justify the continuation and even escalation of the war in Vietnam. The Vietnam war and the Iraq invasion both sharply and deeply divided the American public. In 1968, the Vietnam war was a principal reason LBJ did not run for re-election. It became the primary issue in the election and prompted the entry of first Eugene McCarthy and later Robert Kennedy. It was a major issue again in Nixon's re-election in 1972. In 2004, the Iraq invasion may well be the primary issue of the campaign. In Vietnam and again in Iraq, the "happy talk" espoused by administration and military officials seems to contradict what we see with our own eyes in news reports and footage. The goal of the war in Vietnam became increasingly murky as it dragged on. In a Monty Python sketch, comedian John Clease referred to a "war to keep China Brittish." Bush consistently insists that we must "win the war" in Iraq. What exactly constitutes a "win?" How will we know this thing is over? |
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