To invoke Vietnam was a blunder to far.
01/09/07 21:31
'To invoke Vietnam was a blunder to far.' An article by Christopher Hitchens in last weeks Observer. This was refuted step by step in a blog called 'Jefferson Wall'.
Interestingly there's a whole website devoted to keeping a watch on Mr Hitchens.
The 'blunder' is to be found in a speech given by George W Bush to the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the USA. It was the comment about 'the price of American 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.'
There was a jumble of thoughts in no particular order that came from this invocation. Agent orange, carpet bombing of Cambodia that actually led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which killed many thousands of people. Agent orange particularly, which still has a devastating affect on people. Coming forward to Iraq, we deliberately starved a country for ten years, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Since the invasion, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, and another unkown thousands have been killed. It's the thousands of ordinary people killed and the millions displaced by their actions.
This was put much better than me in an article Marjorie Cohn, 'Turning Iraq into Vietnam'
Interestingly there's a whole website devoted to keeping a watch on Mr Hitchens.
The 'blunder' is to be found in a speech given by George W Bush to the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the USA. It was the comment about 'the price of American 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.'
There was a jumble of thoughts in no particular order that came from this invocation. Agent orange, carpet bombing of Cambodia that actually led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which killed many thousands of people. Agent orange particularly, which still has a devastating affect on people. Coming forward to Iraq, we deliberately starved a country for ten years, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Since the invasion, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, and another unkown thousands have been killed. It's the thousands of ordinary people killed and the millions displaced by their actions.
This was put much better than me in an article Marjorie Cohn, 'Turning Iraq into Vietnam'