Bush's "Vietnam" Speech

From CNN.com:

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (CNN) -- President Bush drew parallels between the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the potential costs of pulling out of Iraq in a speech Wednesday.

"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush told members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at their convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

"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 said.

The White House billed the speech, as it did next week's address to the American Legion, as an effort to "provide broader context" for the debate over the upcoming Iraq progress report by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad.

Well, it's the first time that I've seen this guy give any reasonable historical context to his reason for clinging to the war in Iraq. Apart from his comments on Vietnam, his allusions to the Korean War--and how our sacrifices there enabled South Korea to grow into a prospering Democracy--were particularly well taken.


I served 10 years on the Korean Peninsula when I was in the military, and the fruits of our sacrifices in the 1950s are plainly evident there today.

In 2007, we still have more than 30,000 troops in Korea. Some folks in American need to consider that inconvenient little fact before they rush us into headlong retreat and inevitable defeat in Iraq.