Bush’s comments today to the Veterans of Foreign Wars association in Kansas City – that a rapid US withdrawal from Iraq would cause the same sort of bloodbath our withdrawal from Vietnam caused in 1975 – draws from the long-held belief among radical conservatives that America threw away a chance of victory in Vietnam by pulling out troops too early. For Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others who lived through (but, notably, did not fight in) Vietnam, America’s tragedy there was always a failure of nerve rather than a failure of wisdom.

But most Americans know the truth. Not only did we have no strategy once we got to Vietnam but we had no good reason to be in Vietnam in the first place. Tens of thousands of American lives and countless Vietnamese lives were lost because we wrongly assumed that communism in Southeast Asia was a contagion that would spread unless eradicated by force. Yet for the last four years we have heard the same words we heard from Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara forty years ago – that we are “winning” in Iraq, that we must “stay the course” there, that “leaving would be tantamount to defeat,” that “America’s credibility” is at stake, that a “pullout would be disastrous.” And today, seemingly without comprehending the close parallels between the bloodbath America caused by entering Vietnam more than four decades ago and the bloodbath he caused by entering Iraq, our president has the audacity to tell us that our withdrawal from Iraq would result in a bloodbath similar to that caused by our withdrawal from Vietnam. The apparent stupidity of this man – or his assumption of the stupidity of the American people – is unfathomable.