Press Corps to Bush re Hanoi: Iraq = Vietnam, Get It?
It’s been a great couple of weeks for the White House Press Corps. Last week, Bush’s big Thumpin’ … this week – can you believe this? – President Iraq is off to Vietnam. It’s a feast rich with delicious irony. Let’s check in with the AP’s Terence Hunt:
By TERENCE HUNT
AP White House Correspondent
SINGAPORE (AP) – Hurt by election losses back home, President Bush tried to exert his authority on the world stage Thursday by warning a nuclear-armed North Korea against peddling its weapons and vowing the United States would not retreat into isolationism.
The president then headed for Vietnam and Hanoi, the wartime capital of the once-divided country, in a visit that promised to stir inevitable comparisons between the unpopular war raging in Iraq and the divisive war fought and lost in Vietnam more than three decades ago.
Not to quibble, but that war was lost in the United States, not Vietnam, a rather touchy Iraq comparison that is not promised or stirred in this article and pretty much … er … unevitable. But otherwise, those are salient points, Hunt. The promised comparisons are in fact inevitable. We, the reading customers of the Associated Press, are relying on you to stir them.
We look to the Press Corps to start filing stories about Vietnam’s lively economy and how great everything is – despite the way our Yankee Imperialist pique has held this totalitarian regime back. That, and the ongoing burdens of a 30-year-old war that promise, inevitably, to be our fault. It might be fun to weigh American war crime slams against references to Commie ugliness. Journalistic decorum after all will require a nod to the elephant in the room.
In the stirring of inevitable, promised Iraq comparisons, we should expect not to hear that bolting from Iraq will produce the same bloodbath and upheaval that exiting Southeast Asia did. In fact, expect not to hear about that bloodbath at all. Or, that an Iraq abandonment inevitably promises to stir future wars, the way the international emasculation of our abandonment of Vietnam stirred the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. And we all know what came out of Afghanistan after that.
Those comparisons are neither promised nor inevitable in the coming coverage from Hanoi. In fact, in just about any major U.S. newspaper’s own reporting, or that the AP will provide to hundreds of papers, those comparisons are unlikely. The promised, inevitable comparisons to be stirred will follow a different subtext:
Bad, cowardly, war-dodging and not particularly bright American humbly tries to make good for meaningless and unpopular mass murder and destruction in Vietnam 40 years ago, while committing meaningless and unpopular mass murder and destruction today in Iraq.
But you didn’t have to wait till Bush and the Press Corps link up in Hanoi. Farther down last night’s AP story, the promised comparisons are inevitably stirred! It looks like the scribblers got a shot an Condoleezza Rice on the plane. Inevitable stirring of comparisons, as promised:
Bush’s visit to the one-time wartime capital of Hanoi brought inevitable comparisons between Iraq and the divisive war fought and lost in Vietnam more than three decades ago. Like Vietnam, the United States faces a determined insurgency in Iraq; both wars have demonstrated the limits of U.S. power.
“Historic parallels of that kind are, I think, not very helpful and I don’t think they happen to be right,” Rice told reporters on the way to Vietnam. “This is a different set of circumstances with different stakes for the United States in a different kind of war.”
See with what fairness and balance the comments of the United States Secretary of State are included, even though Iraq = Vietnam clearly does not compute, and she would appear to be suggesting that the “determined insurgency” of Vietnam bears no resemblance whatsoever to that of Iraq. She might be refering to the utterly divergent manpower, weaponry, infrastructure, supply lines, sponsors, environment, tactics or ideology. Hard to say which. There is a point of comparison where Iraq and Vietnam in fact do converge, a point Condi failed to make or which was perhaps not included by Hunt. That would be the strategy our Middle Eastern enemies learned from the North Vietnamese Army. That the limit of U.S. military power is the political will of its people and its politicians.
The White House Press Corps has been having a great couple of weeks. The big Thumpin’ followed by a week of globetrotting, with all kinds of great Bushwhacking opportunities. “Mission Accomplished” in Vietnam! You can’t make this kind of thing up!
But the pressurized air at 30,000 feet must be getting to them, or maybe its just getting out of Washington for a couple of days.
They don’t seem to have noticed that the president may not be quite so “hurt by election losses at home” anymore. At home since they left, the hurtin’ is all on House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, Murtha-less, spanked by her own party on the heals of victory. That came the day after Gen. John Abizaid told Congress he wants more troops in Iraq. Bush always said he’d give his give the commanders on the ground what they ask for. Does the Democratic Congress plan to argue with that? That’ll be interesting.
Bush, who headed to Hanoi to drum up business and get several American citizens out of Commie stir, must be thinking: “It’ll be good to get home.”
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Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:21 pm Comments (0) on Thursday, November 16, 2006
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