Viet Nam? Bush still doesn't get it

As Dan Froomkin writes in today's White House Watch, Bush's speech about Viet Nam may have pleased his hand-picked audience, but isn't likely to "go over nearly as well with a wider audience -- not to mention with historians":

That's because the obvious lesson of Vietnam is not that leaving a quagmire leads to disaster, but that staying only makes things worse. (And oh yes: that we shouldn't get into them in the first place.)

Joe Biden says:

"The only relevant analogy of Vietnam to Iraq is this: In Iraq, just as we did in Vietnam, we are clinging to a central government that does not and will not enjoy the support of the people."

One of my coworkers immediately pointed out the we basically created the environment that spawned the Khmer Rouge by destabilizing Cambodia. As Bert Chadick puts it:

The thing is, we didn't realize that Norodom Sihanouk had been balancing Cambodia on a political knife edge for a decade or more. When the prince went into exile, civil war broke out, and the rest is the most tragic result of our misreading a foreign situation prior to the current Iraqi horror show. Like the Saudi hijackers of 911's mythical attachment to Baghdad, the administration is now selling the Cambodian Killing Fields as an adjunct to our defeat in Viet Nam. Viet Nam was the country that invaded Cambodia and stopped the slaughter. They understood the local situation, we didn't.

And according to David Jackson and Matt Kelley in USA Today, that's not just Bert's, Sandy's, and my recollection:

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

In other words, the president's analogy is as crappy as the rest of his comprehension about the way this war - if not the world - works. Or doesn't, as the case may be.