Bush gave a speech. Flowers everywhere. God it was touching! If one ignored the actions and concentrated on the pretty words it would have been great. George Bush would be great. Cheney would be marginal.

Too bad Conservatives can't read history. Or understand anything except money. We wouldn't need so many speeches, so many tears, so many little flags salving greedy consciences.

We would all have to agree that the war in Vietnam was a waste of human life and treasury, caused untold grief and was to no avail at all. Good people on both sides died. Lots of them. And the outcome? The same as if it had never happened. That is clearly obvious to everyone. The communist hordes did not take over SE Asia, all that happened was that Vietnam became Vietnamese. It didn't prevent Cambodia or Laos from becoming slaughterhouses. Nothing was accomplished at all. Period.

UNLESS - lessons for the future could be learned from it. However, because Conservatives don't learn, especially from history, we are doing the same damned thing again. Here's a quote from a book I just finished reading.

"When Special Forces and other advisors became involved they were more realistic about the approach to guerrilla warfare. In 1962 the Special Warfare Division published the "Counter-Insurgency Operations Handbook", which included pseudo-operations among its tactical methods. However, these were to operate as 'hunter-killer' groups to 'hunt down and destroy elements of local guerrilla terrorist armed bands' rather than long-term information gathering. Besides the tactics and structure proposed were never accepted by the Army as a whole since it did not coincide with the 'Army Concept'. Instead, the Army relied upon cordon and search type operations and the application of overwhelming firepower."

And we all know how well that worked. Bush and Conservatives are effectively spitting on the graves of Vietnam casualties by ignoring the lessons for which they died. It's exactly the same as if FDR had had troops charging into machine guns the way they fought WWI.

And the toadies say this is "the plan". So more folks are dying without the lesson being learned. The Conservative way, the way of the True Believer.

Arf