US historian: Iraq is comparable to Vietnam, but not in the Bush way

This video from the USA is called: Senator [Edward] Kennedy: “Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam”.

From Think Progress blog in the USA:

Historian: Bush’s ‘distortion’ of Vietnam ‘boggles my mind.’

In his speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars today, President Bush declared that the lesson of Vietnam is that we must not withdraw from Iraq. UCLA historian Robert Dallek, who has written about the comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam, says Bush is “twisting history” with his new analogy:

“It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president,” he said in a telephone interview.

“We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn’t work our will,” he said.

“What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion,” he continued. “We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.”

And only recently, Bush hated so much hearing the word ‘Vietnam’, so uncomfortable to him because of its truth, about his wars … Now, he brings it up himself; but it won’t help him.

See also here.

And here.

And here.

US plans to oust (like South Vietnamese puppet President Diem, whom they had murdered?) Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, elected under their occupation: here.

And here.

Bush, Churchill, and Chamberlain: here.