Iraq is no more like Vietnam than the Iraq Occupation is part of the "War on Terror" ... or even remotely connected to the events of 9-11-01 !!!

On the other hand, the sad events that took place on April 29, 1975 that were captured so poignantly in this photo by Hubert Van Es ...



Certainly give rise to cartoons such as the one below by Carlos Latuff ...



[For the record, Carlos Latuff is an artist and activist based in Brazil. He can be contacted at latuff@uninet.com.br. He's also a brilliant cartoonist--as you might guess by the most recent cartoon above--and his brilliance certainly scores deeper than my concerns over the current "results" of the surge, doesn't it?]

The point, however, is deadly serious. George W. Bush has truly played the "fear card" one time (actually several times) too often. His speech yesterday warned us not to make the mistakes of Vietnam all over again. The Cold War was a seriously nervous matter and, at the outset, Vietnam indeed seemed to be very much a part of that Global threat. In time, we saw Vietnam for what it was (a quagmire and not at all related to our fears of the nuclear missiles in Soviet Union silos and bombers) and we ultimately got out at great cost to both us (50,000-plus dead) and Vietnam (countless). In the case of Iraq, we knew full well from the outset that it was in no way related to the 9-11 attacks and now we even know that the White House was well aware that Saddam Hussein was not only an enemy of Osama bin Laden, but didn't posses nuclear weapons either. The name of the game is, and always has been, P-O-W-E-R !!! [a.k.a. O-I-L !!!]

Interestingly, the Soviet Union collapsed of its own dead weight and Vietnam is now a trading partner of the U.S. even though we ultimately saw that our slogging on with the conflict there would only cost us more returning body bags and more suffering for the Vietnamese people. Even while I was there in 1969-70, it was evident to me that we weren't wanted there by most of the Vietnamese, although I (admittedly) believed that China was ready to step in and colonize Vietnam if we left. [I was wrong, of course.]

Whether we can survive the foreign policies of Messieurs Bush and Cheney until either of the two possibilities that I laid out in the previous posting occur in 2008/2009 is a really scary exercise in angst. [My sister in Maryland recently taught me to pronounce the word, "angst," so I had to use it.]

And oh yes, Mr. Bush -- the "killing fields" and "boat people" that you mentioned in your scare tactics yesterday would never have happened were it not for secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia that no one knew of until years after the war was ended. I thought I had every security clearance on God's green earth and yet didn't know about those bombing campaigns until I read about them in newspapers and in Time magazine years later.