The Daily Background

From the Department of Re-writing History:

[In a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Wednesday] Mr. Bush also links withdrawal from Vietnam to the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, and asserts that the American pullout caused pain and suffering for millions, saying, “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.’ “

Those assertions are already being criticized by Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, and at least one historian, Robert Dallek, a biographer of presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Both said Mr. Bush was ignoring fundamental differences between the conflicts. Citing Cambodia in particular, Mr. Dallek said in an interview that the mayhem under the Khmer Rouge “was a consequence of our having gone into Cambodia and destabilized that country.”

The Khmer Rouge used Nixon’s then-secret bombing of Cambodia to justify taking scared Cambodians out of their cities and moving them to the country side and forcing them to work as farmers there, so they would supposedly be safer from US bombs.

It astounds me that this Administration is arrogant enough that they think they can, relying on the short memory of Americans, rewrite simple history as justification for their current actions regarding Iraq (why they say we must not withdraw). Perhaps it should be depressing that we’re at a point where they, judging the public to be ignorant enough, actually think they can get away with saying such misleading things and expect to get away with it.

Of course, what Bush’s metaphor fails to recognize is that Nixon never expected the Khmer Rouge would come to power. His predictions (chiefly that if the US withdrew from Vietnam, the whole region would become communist because of the “domino theory”) were just as flawed back then as Bush’s predictions are now (if the US withdraws from Iraq, the whole middle east will explode in chaos).

Update: USA Today talks to another historian who sets Bush straight:

Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow said Bush is reaching for historical analogies that don’t track. He said, “Vietnam was not a bunch of sectarian groups fighting each other,” as in Iraq. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge toppled a U.S.-backed government.

“Does he think we should have stayed in Vietnam?” Karnow asked.

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