Same song, second verse . . .

During the run-up to the Iraq debacle anyone opposed to the invasion was labeled un-American and unpatriotic. After five years of failed foreign policy, tens of thousands killed or wounded and a projected cost of more than a trillion dollars the rhetoric hasn’t changed. While addressing the Knesset in Israel Bush said that anyone who would negotiate with Iran was an appeaser like those who capitulated to Hitler in World War II.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Considering that this administration has no knowledge of history it isn’t likely any of them have learned anything from it. What, exactly, did Neville Chamberlain do in 1938 to earn him the title of appeaser? He signed the Munich Agreement that ceded a large part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. That’s a little more than opening a dialog, don’t you agree? Diplomacy is not appeasement, negotiation is not capitulation and to equate the government of Iran to, in Mr. Bush’s words, “terrorists and radicals” is not helpful at a time when so much of the Middle East is in turmoil.

Bush went on to say, “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided,'“ by innuendo alluding to Democrats. Once again, if Bush knew anything about history he’d know the senator in question was a Republican. Moreover, Bush should be careful making allusions to those who collaborated with Nazis. According to the British newspaper, the Guardian, a certain Senator Prescott Bush held interest in Brown Brothers Harriman, a company that did extensive business with the Hitler Regime during WWII right up until the company and it’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

McSameasBush immediately picked up on the President’s outlandish comments and has labeled Senator Obama a terrorist sympathizer and appeaser for considering opening a dialog with Syria and Iran. Perhaps Senator McSame should consider where he would be today if not for the “appeasers” who negotiated with the government of North Vietnam and signed the Paris Peace Accord in 1973 securing the release of American POWs including himself. But then, the Senator is on record as believing that we could have won in Vietnam if we had just stayed a little longer and tried a little harder. Stayed longer, tried harder? We spent ten years in Vietnam, lost 58,000 men and women, dropped 500 pounds of high explosive for every man, woman and child in that tiny country and killed three million Vietnamese. We left the forests so full of shrapnel that trees couldn’t be harvested and poisoned the water and land with Agent Orange. I hesitate to think what trying a little harder might look like.

John McCain, wrong about Vietnam, wrong about Iraq and wrong for America.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar Prescott Bush

http://www.aiipowmia.com/sea/ppa1973.html Paris Peace Accords