Keith Olbermann on Bush's Tilted History

In the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, the overwhelming majority of Americans moved on. But not the right wingers and not, apparently, a realist or two. In the minds of George W. Bush and Henry Kissinger, the saga of Vietnam goes on. These two didn't learn a thing. Kissinger seems to be backing off some of his advice to the younger Bush about Iraq but he too never came to terms with the failure to correctly perceive a country trying to get rid of its occupiers and trying to end a thirty-year civil war.

The history of Vietnam in the last seventy-five years is complicated but not that complicated. The simple view is that the Vietnamese were never thrilled about being a French colony. In World War II, the Japanese took over and the Vietnamese were not thrilled about that. When the Japanese were kicked out, the French returned. Once again, the Vietnamese were not thrilled. When the French left, the Americans showed up on the doorstep and, to put it bluntly, not only failed to appreciate the situation, but chose the losing side of an ongoing civil war. I suppose it's just speculation but if we had never shown up, Vietnam might have gone capitalist twenty years sooner than it did.

Keith Olbermann had an excellent commentary Monday night; here's some excerpts courtesy of Truthout which carries the full transcript:

It is a shame and it is embarrassing to us all when President Bush travels 8,000 miles only to wind up avoiding reality again.

(snip)

Asked if there were lessons about Iraq to be found in our experience in Vietnam, Mr. Bush said that there were, and he immediately proved he had no clue what they were.

"One lesson is," he said, "that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while."

"We'll succeed," the president concluded, "unless we quit."

(snip)

the one over-arching lesson about Iraq that should've been written everywhere he looked in Vietnam went unseen.

"We'll succeed unless we quit"?

Mr. Bush, we did quit in Vietnam!

A decade later than we should have, 58,000 dead later than we should have, but we finally came to our senses.

The stable, burgeoning, vivid country you just saw there, is there because we finally had the good sense to declare victory and get out!

The domino theory was nonsense, sir.

Our departure from Vietnam emboldened no one.

Communism did not spread like a contagion around the world.

And most importantly - as President Reagan's assistant secretary of state, Lawrence Korb, said on this newscast Friday - we were only in a position to win the Cold War because we quit in Vietnam.

We went home. And instead it was the Russians who learned nothing from Vietnam, and who repeated every one of our mistakes when they went into Afghanistan. And alienated their own people, and killed their own children, and bankrupted their own economy and allowed us to win the Cold War.

We awakened so late, but we did awaken.

Somebody needs to give the president some smelling salts and waken him from the bubble he's been sleeping in. Meaningless buzz words this late in the day like 'victory' or 'winning' or 'success' ring hollow in Bush's delusional world. It's become absolutely clear that Bush has no idea whatsoever what it is he's trying to accomplish. It's time to end the fiasco. This is not how you impose democracy on another country. This is not how you engage in foreign policy. This is not how you run an American presidency.