Misusing History

For a positive legacy, he cited South Korea:"The defense strategy that refused to hand the South Koreans over to a totalitarian neighbor helped raise up an Asian Tiger that is a model for developing countries across the world, including the Middle East."

That statement might very well be true: it certainly would justify the war to liberate Kuwait. But it's hard to see what relevance it has to the war in Iraq--which was started, after all, by a US-led invasion.

Bush then turned to Vietnam."Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. Whatever your position in that debate, 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,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.'"

That statement is undeniably true--but, again, its relevance to Iraq is minimal. Is Bush suggesting that if the United States remained in Vietnam for a longer time, the end result would have changed? If so, for how long, and at what cost?

Politicians, of course, always use historical analogies when discussing their policies, foreign and domestic. But it would be hard to imagine a less appropriate use of history than that employed by Bush today.