Common Sense

As Bruce Fein says in Wednesday’s Slate, we can’t just take impeachment off the table.

Not when our brilliant commander-in-chief believes that we should have staid in Vietnam and uses that analogy to keep us in Iraq.

The president said US involvements in Vietnam and in other places in Asia was not popular during that time and critics called them futile exercises, but they eventually led to lasting peace. He said that after three decades, now there is a legitimate debate about how the US got into the Vietnam War and how it eventually left the place.

“Whatever your position in that debate, 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 added.

What he didn’t say was that there would have been no Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and no killing fields if we hadn’t gone there in the first place. And the “domino theory” that the whole excercise for which we lost more than 58,000 American soldiers turned out to be bogus.

And so was our other reason for our involvement: The Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Such an astutute observer of history, Bush managed to lie us into another war that was not necessary and he’s turned history on its head to try and justify sinking in the quicksand even further.

The “unmistable legacy” of Vietnam is that far too many brave Americans died for no reason why jackasses like our president, vice president and outgoing Karl Rove stayed here and didn’t die. And they didn’t learn a thing with all those student deferments. Karl Rove didn’t even earn a degree.

“As long as I am commander-in-chief we will fight to win,” Bush said to resounding applause from the war veterans, “I’m confident that we will prevail.”

While we’re on the subject, what does that mean anyway? What is ‘victory?’ A stable Iraq? That is literally an impossibility for at least the next decade. A pro-Western democracy? Not as long as the Sunnis refuse to even participate and the Maliki government allies itself with the theocratic Iranian mullahs.

The best “win” we can hope for is a fast pullout and very few more casualties on the American side. As long as we’re there, there will be al-Qaida linked terrorists and sectarian violence and mass casualties and a collapsing government.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say a “win” for President Bush is that things don’t explode before the next guy (or woman) takes the oath of office.