Bush Cites Vietnam In Warning On Iraq

By MICHAEL A. FLETCHER The Washington Post

Published: Aug 23, 2007

KANSAS - CITY, Mo. - President Bush defended his ongoing military commitment in Iraq by linking the conflict there to the Vietnam War, arguing Wednesday that withdrawing U.S. troops would lead to widespread death and suffering as it did in Southeast Asia three decades ago.

"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,'" Bush told a receptive audience at a Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention.

The speech marked the beginning of an intense White House initiative to shape the debate on Capitol Hill in September, when the president's troop buildup will undergo an intense re-evaluation.

President Bush is right on the factual record, historians say, but many of them quarreled with his drawing analogies from the causes of that turmoil to predict what might happen in Iraq should the United States withdraw.

"It is undoubtedly true that America's failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia," said David Hendrickson, a specialist at Colorado College on the history of American foreign policy.

"But there are a couple of further points that need weighing," he said. "One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam. This dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred."

The record of death and dislocation after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam ranks high among the tragedies of the past century, with an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians, about one-fifth of the population, dying under the Pol Pot regime, and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese and other Indochinese becoming refugees.

Estimates of the number of Vietnamese who were sent to prison camps after the war have ranged widely, from 50,000 to 400,000 or more, and some accounts say that tens of thousands perished, a figure that Bush cited in his speech.

In his speech, the president did not offer a judgment on what, if anything, might have brought victory in Vietnam or whether the war itself was a mistake. Instead, he sought to underscore the dangers of a hasty withdrawal from Iraq.

But the American withdrawal from Vietnam hardly was abrupt. The withdrawal began in 1968, after the Tet Offensive, which was a military defeat for the communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese sponsors. It also illustrated the vulnerability of the United States and its South Vietnamese allies.

Although American commanders asked for several hundred thousand reinforcements after Tet, President Johnson turned them down.

President Nixon began a process of "Vietnamization" in which responsibility for security gradually was handed over to local military and police forces, similar to Bush's long-term strategy for Iraq today.

"It was not a precipitous withdrawal. It was a very deliberate disengagement," said Andrew J. Bacevich, a platoon leader in Vietnam who today is professor of international relations at Boston University.

DEVELOPMENTS

•Fourteen U.S. soldiers died Wednesday when their helicopter crashed in northern Iraq, the military said, citing mechanical failure. The UH-60 Black Hawk, which crashed overnight while on an operation with a second helicopter, was from the 25th Infantry Division's combat aviation brigade, which is based in Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.

•A suicide truck bombing against a police station in the northern oil hub of Beiji claimed at least 45 lives - 25 policemen and 20 civilians - amid a series of deadly attacks north of the capital.

A wire report

Information from The New York Times was used in this report.