The war in Iraq and the road from Vietnam, repaved

BEING RESPONSIBLE for teaching a college course on the Vietnam War, I consider President Bush's analogies between Vietnam and Iraq not careless, but consciously manipulative of people with little background on the Vietnam War.

The United States did not leave Vietnam out of the goodness of its collective heart, but because of a powerful enemy, a corrupt and repressive puppet South Vietnamese government, and a strong antiwar movement at home.

Bush criticizes North Vietnamese "reeducation camps," conveniently ignoring South Vietnam's large and deadly prison system. He talks of "boat people" as though they were mostly disaffected Vietnamese, ignoring the fact that many were ethnic Chinese caught in a postwar power struggle and a wave of discrimination. He denounces the Khmer Rouge's horrible "killing fields" in Cambodia, ignoring the fact that the US government's illegal bombing and the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk contributed significantly to the Khmer Rouge's rise. And he conveniently forgets that it was the very North Vietnamese he is vilifying who (for a variety of reasons) overthrew the Khmer Rouge, thus stopping the killing fields and prompting the US government to support the Khmer Rouge.

A presentation such as Bush's in my class would rate a failing grade and/or a recommendation that the writer try his hand at fiction.

RICHARD LEVY
Brookline

The writer is a professor of political science at Salem State College.

YOUR AUG. 24 editorial "Back to Vietnam" criticized Bush for warning that Americans should not conclude the war in Iraq with the abruptness that Americans ended their involvement in Vietnam. Although I do not support Bush politically, I find the editorial troubling for suggesting that we should read history so selectively that we leave more fighting to be done later. Do you prefer that Americans only fight neat wars in which troops can be home for dinner after a brief tour of the moral high ground, such as the first Gulf War, in 1991, which failed to remove Saddam Hussein? Mr. Bush wrongly believed that American troops would fight a similarly neat war in Iraq in 2003.

But the fact that Americans left Vietnam in such disarray in 1975 was a main factor in the Soviet decision to push its own "evil regime" southward into Afghanistan in 1979. We're still fighting a war to free that country from the effects of our foregoing indolence.

More history and less rhetoric would make for better analysis, especially with American troops still in the field.

TIMOTHY F. MELIA
Andover