President Bush has raised the hackles of the American Left with a major foreign policy speech that is to draw comparisons between a premature pull-out from Iraq and the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.<\/p>\n
The speech, to an audience of military veterans, has not actually been delivered but the White House has released extracts in advance \u201d\u201c and its arguments have not gone down well with Mr Bush’s political opponents.<\/p>\n
“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left,” Mr Bush will tell the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, many of whom fought in Indo-China, later today.<\/p>\n
“Whatever your position in that debate, 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.'”<\/p>\n