Front Page > Nation/Politics Page

Page 1 of 2 next » | Email | Print | Subscribe

Add To Insider Newsclips | Click-2-Listen

advertisement

Comparisons with Vietnam shadow Bush trip

By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 17, 2006

HANOI -- President Bush will focus on trade and worldwide crises like AIDS and bird flu during his eight-day trip to Southeast Asia, but the specter of the Vietnam War 30 years ago and comparisons to the U.S.-led war in Iraq have followed him to the Pacific Rim.
     The president has repeatedly rejected comparisons between the two wars, even as Democratic critics complain that Iraq has become a "quagmire" like Vietnam, which U.S. forces abandoned in 1973 after the deaths of 58,000 American troops.
    "I see differences, I really do," Mr. Bush insisted last week in a press conference. "I don't think it is a parallel."
     Other top administration officials also say there is no likeness between the two conflicts.
    "This was a different set of circumstances with different stakes for the United States and a different kind of war," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said this week in Germany. And National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley said before the president departed this week on his trip that the two wars are different.
     "I remember a debate about what would happen if the United States left Vietnam, and there were discussions about dominoes, some which fell, some of which didn't fall," he said. "But nobody, I think, felt that it would result in a clear and present danger to the territory of the United States."
     Still, Democrats charge that the Bush administration has not learned the lessons from the Vietnam War, and some party leaders have directly compared the two wars. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, has called the Iraq war a "seemingly intractable quagmire ... with no end in sight," and others complain that there has never been an exit strategy -- a lesson that should have been learned from Vietnam.
     There are, in some ways, comparisons worth noting. In nearly every speech he gives, the president insists that the war in Iraq is the central front in the war against terror and has warned that if the United States fails there, other nations in the Middle East could fall like dominoes.
    "The enemy understands the stakes of what a free society will mean to their ambitions to spread their dark vision throughout the Middle East and then the world," he said during a campaign event before the Nov. 7 elections.
     The construction mirrors the premise that led the United States into Vietnam in the 1960s: that Southeast nations near Vietnam would fall into communist hands if the United States failed in its effort to help South Vietnam fight the North.
     Critics say, however, that the "domino theory" proved false.
     "We thought the sky would fall in the '70s, too, and it didn't," said Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign-policy scholar at the Brookings Institution who is part of the independent, bipartisan Iraq Study Group. He also said there are several other parallels between the two wars, including an insurgency that has established "a self-sustaining momentum that is very hard to overcome" and a weak allied government.

Page 1 of 2 next » | Email | Print | Subscribe

Add To Insider Newsclips | Click-2-Listen

Front Page > Nation/Politics Page

Want to use this article? Click here for options! Copyright 2006 The Washington Times