Last week, on 22 August, President Bush addressed the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in St. Louis. His message for the day was “How the Iraq War is Like the Vietnam War and the Lessons We Should Remember.”

This is a topic on which our illustrious President is well qualified to speak after spending his time during the Vietnam conflict occasionally showing up for duty at his Air National Guard unit in Texas and Alabama to guard the Gulf of Mexico against invasion by the North Vietnamese naval juggernaut of sanpans and woven bamboo boats. I can only guess his service must have been of the highest quality because I can find no reference to a successful invasion of the U.S. Gulf Coast region by the North Vietnamese.

I am given to understand, also, that Bush’s service in the military during the Vietnam conflict was filled with great personal pain and suffering. Reports show Bush spent time under the torture of a military dentist in January of 1973. Surely, the physical trauma he experienced was on par with his fellow countrymen who were, at the same time, having limbs blown off and faces eviscerated in the jungles of Vietnam. I hope they gave Bush special treatment and awarded him a Purple Heart in recognition of his pain and suffering.

Bush further proved his commitment to Vietnam when he arranged a photo-op and interview session in that country to strengthen U.S. support for the communist society that conquered the U.S. military machine.

Now, according to Bush in his speech in St. Louis, “€¦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.’”

It is true that many innocents in Vietnam paid the ultimate price. But the truth is not that we cannot afford to withdraw from Iraq because the same things will happen; the truth is that Bush and his war mongering cronies failed to learn the hard truth from Vietnam; namely, the moment we invaded Iraq we immediately condemned untold numbers of Iraqis to the same fate. In spite of our presence there, many innocent Iraqis have been raped, tortured and killed because they have chosen to help us. Keeping forces in Iraq will not keep Iraqis who have helped us safe.

And, unlike Vietnam, when we admitted thousand’s of Vietnamese who sought political refuge in an effort to help mitigate the dire fate which Bush waves as that awaiting Iraqi friendlies to justify continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, the Bush government has chosen to deny entrance into the U.S. to Iraqi citizens seeking to escape the holocaust we have wrought on their country. Instead, Bush is content to let those who can manage to get out of Iraq languish in the slums and refugee camps of Jordan and Syria.

As further justification for continuing to escalate the conflict in Iraq, Bush also raised the specter of the “killing fields” of Cambodia under Pol Pot, a comparison with Iraq which is not only faulty but also historically inaccurate. In an attempt to paint a tortured picture of the fate of Iraqi citizens following a U.S. withdrawal, Bush invoked, “In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution.”

The truth is that the Khmer Rouge slaughter was not caused by the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, but by the U.S. escalation of the war and intervention into Cambodia in the years prior to that time. The United States had been conducting a “secret war,” which was kept from the American people, since the 1960s, an action that placed innocent Cambodians on the receiving end of B-52 air strikes. In April 1970 President Richard Nixon authorized what he called an “incursion” of Cambodia on the pretext of destroying the headquarters for Vietnamese Communist military operations there, the so-called COSVN, or Central Office for South Vietnam.

A month earlier, however, in March 1970, the United States had facilitated the ouster of the Cambodian head-of-state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and replaced him with a weak but pliable politician named Lon Nol. At this time, the Khmer Rouge was a small splinter group of the far left, without much popular support or military power. But the U.S.-sponsored coup, and the subsequent invasion in April, proved to be a great blessing to the Khmer Rouge. With Sihanouk out of the way and Lon Nol, perceived as a “puppet” of Nixon, in office, there was no middle ground in Cambodia. As a result, the Khmer Rouge soared in influence and popularity by exploiting the heavy-handed American political and military intervention.

By the mid-1970s, as the U.S. air war against Cambodia continued, killing hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge was well-positioned as the anti-American and anti-Lon Nol alternative, and was able to swarm into Phnom Penh and establish a regime in April 1975. From here, they unleashed a genocidal wave of killings that lasted until the Vietnamese intervened and ousted the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in January 1979. Even after that ouster, however, the United States continued to work with the Khmer Rouge, supporting covert operations against the Vietnamese-supported new government in Phnom Penh and even, in the Ronald Reagan years, supporting the Khmer Rouge claim to Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations.

When Bush evokes images of the “killing fields” of Cambodia, he both shows his lack of scholarly abilities by getting the facts wrong and attempts to elicit emotional support for his war with a situation that is neither relevant to the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam nor has a parallel in the current conflict.

The unavoidable fate of the Iraqis, now, is that U.S. continuation of this war amid the daily deterioration of the country will only prolong the time it will take to rebuild Iraq and try to heal the hatred and fear that now engulfs it. The sooner the United States begins a timely withdrawal from Iraq, the sooner the Iraqis themselves can begin to sort out their problems, and, hopefully, find their own way to repair the destruction Bush has wrought.