A Quote by David Means
Vietnam and Iraq are part of the same national trauma and delusion; we folded the war up when Reagan became president and unpacked it with Bush.
Related Quotes
9/11 was a genuine trauma, and President George W. Bush rallied the country. I think the Iraq war was ill-considered, but there - it was done in the wake of a national trauma. And that the errors made under such circumstances are different than errors made in the cold.
It was a tough press conference for President Bush. He spent the first ten minutes trying to pronounce Fallujah. ... Bush insisted that Iraq is not Vietnam. Of course not, he avoided Vietnam.
Have you ever had any anger about President Bush - who spent his time during the Vietnam War in the National Guard - running, in effect, a campaign that does its best to diminish your service in Vietnam? You have to be at least irritated by that, or have you been?
I couldn't be happier that President Bush has stood up for having served in the National Guard, because I can finally put an end to all those who questioned my motives for enlisting in the Army Reserve at the height of the Vietnam War.
Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush - just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.
President Bush's war on Iraq is viewed broadly in Islamic communities as an attack on Islam, and thus the President has alienated a large part of one fifth of the world's population.
Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush (and, in their image, Tony Blair) bitterly annoyed their antagonists because they were - at least until the Iraq war caught up with Blair and Bush - Teflon. David Cameron is in this model.
I think the Bush Administration had basically inherited a policy toward Iraq from the Reagan/Bush Administration that saw Iraq as a kind of fire wall against Iranian fundamentalism. And as it developed over the 1980s, it became a real political run-a-muck... even though the Iraqis were known to be harboring Palestinian terrorists.
When George Bush Senior [George HW Bush] was getting his alliance together to go into Iraq - to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait - he rang me up. I was very close to George Bush Senior; I got to know him well as Vice President to Ronald Reagan. And George rang me up and said, "Oh, Bob," he said, "I'm having trouble with Brian [Mulroney]." He said, "He's got a big wheat trade with Iraq, and he doesn't want to upset that." I said, "You leave it with me."
They said that President Bush's war in Iraq has cost the former Spanish Prime Minister his job. So President Bush isn't losing American jobs anymore, he's branching out to other countries.
As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness, in part because the epochal upheavals of war provide the opportunity for transformative change of the kind Bush hoped to achieve. In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness.
Iraq began destroying those missiles they don't have over the weekend. See, President Bush may be the smartest military president in history. First, he gets Iraq to destroy all of their own weapons. Then he declares war.
President Bush had an opportunity tonight to say, 'Look ... things aren't going very well in Iraq and we did make some miscalculations and misjudgments there,' but he is so stubbornly arrogant - he just sticks with that same formula that he has in talking about the war on Iraq that just defies the reality that we all see on the ground.
I think what history will show is that one of the most tragic results of the war in Iraq will be that although Sharon, the Likudites, the Neoconservatives in our country, President Bush and the Democratic party thought the war in Iraq and destroying Saddam would benefit Israeli security, we're seeing absolutely that the war in Iraq has probably put Israeli security in a more tenuous condition than it's been in since the founding of the Israeli state.
You don't have to be Dave Halberstam to see that the American role in both conflicts [the Iraq war and the Vietnam conflict] is characterized by arrogance, ignorance and self-delusion at the highest levels of government.
Kerry is saying that Bush never showed up for his national guard duty ... and now Bush is on the attack. He's accusing John Kerry of ducking time in the national guard by hiding out in the jungles of Vietnam.
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