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“A desperate bid to justify Iraq occupation by U.S.”

Friday, 24 August 2007

Bush desperately trying to justify Iraq!

Hasan Suroor

LONDON: U.S. President George W. Bush’s statement that the “consequences” of a hasty withdrawal from Iraq could prove to be as “costly” as what happened in Vietnam after Americans pulled out has been greeted here with derision and described as a “desperate” bid to justify continued U.S. occupation of Iraq.

“Killing fields”

President Bush was also accused of getting his history wrong when he attributed the term “killing fields” to the situation in Vietnam after the American withdrawal. Commentators reminded him that the term referred not to Vietnam but to Khmer Rouge’s bloody agrarian “revolution” in Cambodia.

One newspaper suggested that the expression could be more appropriately applied to the ongoing civil war in Iraq. “Bush invokes Vietnam to justify staying in killing fields of Iraq,” ran a headline in The Times which cal led President Bush’s attempt to compare Iraq with Vietnam as “imprudent”.

“It is a desperate move for President Bush to invoke Vietnam as justification for staying longer in Iraq,” argued its foreign affairs analyst Bronwen Maddox.

In a speech in Kansas City on Wednesday, President Bush sought to justify his administration’s decision to stay put in Iraq by harking back to Vietnam.

“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’,” he said addressing a convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“Redeem” Vietnam war

The BBC said that President Bush was trying to “redeem” the Vietnam war, one of the most painful episodes in contemporary American history. Introducing Vietnam into the debate on the presence of American troops in Iraq was “fraught with difficulties”, it said pointing out that Vietnam was a “failure” and any comparison with it evoked “failure”.

“His speech re-opens an old issue over President Bush. Are his claims reality or exaggeration? ,” noted its world affairs analyst Paul Reynolds echoing the withering media reaction to the U.S. President’s remarks.

Source: The Hindu

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