Bush got the Vietnam analogy wrong. It was the USA going into
Vietnam that led to the consequences, not the USA withdrawal.
Directly the same with Iraq.
I read Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" in 1957 I think. The
USA was already operating covertly in Vietnam then, as Greene
described, and by then, or certainly by early 1958 had military
personnel openly in that country.
Gene Coyle
On Aug 25, 2007, at 10:27 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
I was curious to examine the speech George W. Bush gave to the
Veterans of Foreign War convention last week since it compared Iraq
with Vietnam. Three years ago I gave an interview to BBC in Ireland
on exactly the same question. While there are obvious differences
between the NLF and the decentralized and often nihilistic Iraqi
insurgency, I hoped that the occupation of Iraq would end the same
way, with Americans dangling from helicopters flying out of the
Green Zone.
The speech itself is remarkable for literary references that seem
utterly remote from George W. Bush’s experience, including one made
to the radical journalist I.F. Stone who published a newsweekly
throughout the 50s and 60s that I subscribed to. Bush took
exception to Stone’s “Hidden History of the Korean War.”
After the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel in 1950,
President Harry Truman came to the defense of the South — and found
himself attacked from all sides. From the left, I.F. Stone wrote a
book suggesting that the South Koreans were the real aggressors and
that we had entered the war on a false pretext.
Bush also singled out Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” a novel
that was set in Vietnam in the 1950s and that in its own way was
critical of American colonialism. This is another book that I have
read and which led me to the conclusions at odds with Bush, who
referred to it in the following terms:
After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene
argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that
if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese
people…The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions
would be.
My first reaction to these references was to assume that Bush was
simply reading a speech written by one of his aides, since I doubt
that his reads much outside of the Washington Times and Tom Clancy
novels. I simply can’t imagine George W. Bush ever opening up I.F.
Stone’s history of the Korean War. But I can imagine somebody like
Christopher Hitchens, David Horowitz or Paul Berman writing such a
speech. These ideological converts to American imperialism would
have first-hand experience with I.F. Stone or Graham Greene, who
were required reading for radical intellectuals in the 1960s.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/08/25/george-w-bushs-
history-lesson-to-the-vfw/
