Bush’s Strange Vietnam Visit

Posted on Nov 22, 2006

By Joe Conason

What may be remembered someday as one of the strangest moments of George W. Bush’s presidency took place last week in Vietnam, when he chose to mention the American defeat there in the same breath as our failing occupation of Iraq. That comparison is often made by his critics, and often elicits irritated rebuttals from the White House.

Yet now the president himself was explicitly drawing a connection between those misadventures—and drawing a lesson that could only dismay anyone who remembers what really happened during that war in which he so famously avoided serving.