In an interview yesterday with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, President George W. Bush accepted a comparison between the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the current fighting in Iraq. After Stephanopoulos mentioned a Wednesday Thomas Friedman column equating the infamous series of attacks in Vietnam to the pre-election surge of violence in Iraq, the president responded: “He could be right. There is a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.” Continuing to speak of the comparison, Bush discussed al Qaeda in Iraq, arguing, “They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort and will cause government to withdraw.”
As usual, the mere mention of Iraq and Vietnam in the same sentence was sufficient to ignite a feeding frenzy. At the left-leaning Think Progress, one blogger’s sense of outrage helped blur his sense of accuracy in discussing the president’s statements.
“President Bush is right to finally admit that violence in Iraq has reached a tipping point, and that the U.S. is not winning the war as he has claimed,” pontificates Think Progress. “But the current violence is not a propaganda campaign by Iraqis to impact the U.S. elections, as he suggests. It is a civil war, one that he has repeatedly failed to acknowledge and has no plan to address.”
Responding to the response, some pundits immediately took Think Progress to task for some shaky interpretation abilities.
“I am coming to the conclusion that we should leave Iraq sooner than later, but there’s little doubt in my mind that in so doing, we’ll hand the enemy a huge propaganda victory,” suggests Andrew Olmsted dot com. “But rather than engaging what the president did say, and more importantly, what he has said in the past, Think Progress claims he said something he didn’t, undermining their credibility.”
Elsewhere in the ‘sphere, centrist commentator the Moderate Voice discussed another segment of the interview in which Bush reiterated his equation of withdrawal with surrender.
“George Stephanopoulos can question Bush all he wants on this issue, but 1+1 is and will always be 2,” notes the Moderate Voice’s Michael van der Galien. “Setting a date to withdraw, withdraw if victory has not been achieved … that is surrender. There is no other way of saying it. Well, there are of course other ways of saying it, but that does not make Bush’s words any less true.”
Recollecting the notorious battle that helped turn the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War, many right-wing bloggers found the president’s comparison quite apt.
Writes Big Lizards: “In other words, the president correctly understands that the only sense in which the enemy in Iraq is ‘winning’ is in the propaganda that they inspire and provoke among the persistently anti-American news media … as represented in this case by one George Robert Snuffleupagus, late communications director for President Bill Clinton — now the victorious strongman of what used to be This Week With David Brinkley.”
Other conservatives continued the tirade against “Snuffleupagus.”
“Not surprisingly to me but shocking to many, the president obviously knows more history than his interviewer,” Tigerhawk observes. “When President Bush ‘accepts’ the analogy of the surge in violence in Iraq to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, he is not ‘accepting’ that Iraq is an unwinnable struggle against a noble enemy. He is saying that victory or defeat in Iraq will not be a function of the amount of violence that the enemy is able to do during any given period, but our will to keep fighting notwithstanding that violence.”
Middle East expert Juan Cole, however, found the Iraq-Vietnam analogy noteworthy for an entirely different reason.
Writes Cole: “What is delicious is that the general American public does not hold the view of the Vietnam War popular among far-right politicians like Bush, and so no one but the true believers will catch his drift here. In fact, most Americans will assume that Bush has admitted that we are in an unwinnable quagmire in Iraq, just as in Vietnam. And the Iraq=Vietnam identification is likely to stick. Of all his misstatements and malapropisms over the years, any one of which would have robbed most people of credibility or made them a laughingstock, it is ironic that this miscalculation, uttered coolly and with no stutter, may have been his biggest gaffe of all.”
Andrew Bielak was a CJR intern.