Free Republic

No sooner had President Bush issued an advance of his remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on the topic of Iraq and Vietnam than the big Democratic Party foghorns went into attack mode. The president, speaking at Kansas City, said, "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,' ‘reeducation camps,' and ‘killing fields.'" The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times got right on the blower to the liberal historian Robert Dallek, who, according to...

Thirty years ago Saigon fell. I was a company commander in the 2 nd Battalion, 508 th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82 nd Airborne Division. When our Vietnam veterans cursed the war, I remembered one of the greatest speeches I ever heard - the day the Vietnam peace was announced to my Winter Ranger class in ’73. The senior Ranger Sergeant cursed everything about the Vietnam War and everyone involved, friend or foe, in a poetic rant of imaginative, sincere, foul-mouthed hatred. He swore most passionately about the waste of his buddies’ lives. He blamed everyone and everything he knew to...

'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday. But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost...

The Vietnam Syndrome, AgainThe mistake Democrats make when they compare Iraq to Vietnam. One of the stupidest of the many pseudointellectual observations made by Henry Kissinger was his attempted coinage of "the Vietnam syndrome." This supposedly lamentable condition did not do what it was supposed to do: create flashbacks and panic attacks at the very thought of a land war in Asia as the successor power to French colonialism (Kissinger's great cause and the launch of his ugly, unelected career). Instead, it was allegedly responsible for critical "failures of will" when it came to destabilizing Angola or Chile. Speaking prematurely...