Wednesday, August 22, 2007

No more Vietnams

President Bush today in a speech, using historical parallels to explain why we must stay in Iraq:
"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush said. "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.'"

Indeed. In fact, in 2001 the Orange County Register investigated the aftermath of the war in Vietnam (some details here) and found that after 1975, over 1 million Vietnamese were held without charge in supposed "re-education" camps, and an estimated 165,000 of them died. That can't happen again.