Op-ed: Like Vietnam, Iraq 'a failure on its own terms'
 "Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq," Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland begins his today's editorial.
In the piece, Hoagland argues President Bush was unwise to invoke a comparison to the Vietnam War in pushing for a continuation of the US occupation of Iraq.
"For Americans, the most important comparison will be this one: As Vietnam did, Iraq has become a failure even on its own terms -- whatever those terms are at any given moment," Hoagland writes in the most-read story on the Post's Web site Friday morning.
"Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's 'I am not a crook' utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,' in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting president," he writes.
Hoagland says Bush's invocation of the "indisputably horrific consequences" for the Vietnamese and Cambodians in 1975 misses the point that "US involvement in Indochina became untenable when that engagement itself became a threat to America's social fabric and national cohesion."
In search of someone to blame, self-interested politicians and bureaucrats in Washington have been pointing the finger at Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, "even though his deficiencies and close links to Iran and Syria were clearly visible when the administration helped install him in the job in 2006," Hoagland writes.
Such is life in Washington where CIA agents, congressional Republicans and State Department bureaucrats "now make their highest priority the protection of their own reputations, careers and institutions."
Hoagland argues the chances for a "national unity" government in Iraq are being "shredded" in the last year of Bush's presidency.
Josh Marshall, writing at Talking Points Memo, says America will go on no matter what happens in Iraq, our future is not tied to success of failure on ground there.
"Not so for the president. For him, this is it. He's not bigger than this. His entire legacy as president is bound up in Iraq," Marshall writes. "Which is another way of saying that his legacy is pretty clearly an irrecoverable shambles. That is why, as the folly of the enterprise becomes more clear, he must continually puff it up into more and more melodramatic and world-historical dimensions. A century long ideological struggle and the like."
Read the full Post editorial here.
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