I wrote the following in an editorial called “Vietnam Syndrome” almost a year ago:

[I]t is impossible to actually relive the Vietnam War unless you were actually in that war and lived it a first time.  And one thing we know is that George W. Bush, whether he was with his National Guard unit in Texas, or whether he abandoned it for an Alabama chickenhawk’s political campaign, was not in Vietnam.  And so he will not ever be able to relive the Vietnam War.
 
But he sure has tried nonetheless, by invading Iraq, another war where American buffoons think they can bring their notions of government, right out of thin air, to a place where those notions have never organically existed.  That Bush has even attempted such a thing derives directly from the fact that he missed participating in the earlier attempt in Vietnam.  There is no better teacher than experience, and Bush never witnessed the hubris of trying to impose upon tens of millions of culturally different people a different culture by using 18 and 20 year old armed American males as tutors.  If he had actually personally witnessed such foolishness, then he would probably, and I emphasize probably, for with Bush you never know, not have repeated it.
 
The young Bush instead over the years sucked down the conservative party line that our hands were tied behind our backs in Vietnam, an easy line to adopt from the comfort of the so-called homeland.  Even though millions of Vietnamese lay shot, incinerated, and dead at the very untied hands of the US military, Bush was spoon fed such garbage in his Houston and Texas circles in which he grew up.  His father, who actually flew a fighter plane as a young man in WWII, declared that America had kicked the Vietnam syndrome with his own Gulf War.  And now we all watch his son try and kick his own Vietnam syndrome – a syndrome in which a cowardly young man talks a tough militaristic game, and later when put in power attempts to defeat the unconscious memories of his own earlier cowardice by unleashing a foolish war machine, ironically, yet again, from the safety of his home.
 
That’s what I wrote a year ago.  Extraordinarily, this week, there is now the new obscenity of George W. Bush, Vietnam draft dodger, literally invoking the Vietnam, Korean, and Second World Wars as history lessons for why we should continue to follow him into battle in Iraq.  Bush spoke to a group of veterans about the similarities to be noted between the war he declared and the war he dodged.  Among other distortions, he cites the enormous human cost incurred upon the US withdrawal from Vietnam.  The delusion and insanity, the mendacity and lies of the President and his sycophantic supporters apparently knows no bounds.  For the major similarity between Vietnam and Iraq is this: on both occasions, the United States, without anything approaching reasonable justification, set loose the dogs of war on poorer, smaller, nations and both directly and indirectly thereby caused the death, destruction, and dislocation of millions of innocent men, women, and children.  As for the submission and transformation of Japan into a US ally after World War II, Mr. Bush apparently has no recollection that this was accomplished with the utter, indiscriminate, and complete destruction of every single major Japanese population center, of innocent men, women, and children, including those that perished instantly in two American atomic bombings.  Given such a savage and callous enemy, the Japanese people had no choice but to submit to American political and economic designs, which remain in place to this day.  The destruction and dislocation of vast numbers of civilians was and is therefore the central fact of American war making in Asia.  All else, to paraphrase the great Jewish sage Hillel, is just commentary.
 
It is not a coincidence that utterly changing history – its facts, its reasonable and obvious conclusions and lessons – is one of the primary strategies that George Bush engages in when he addresses others.  For Bush understands that his policies stand no chance of acceptance in this country without utterly changing the rational context of understanding of a majority of Americans.  And so the most common charge against the Bush Administration – that it is a gang of liars – is not just an ad hominem attack.  It is a description of the most essential, vital element of this Administration’s hold on power.
 
For George Bush, the establishment of his conception of democratic capitalism in a region is worth the destruction and dislocation of vast uncounted numbers of a region’s innocents.  Bush’s culture of life is built on foundations of misery and despair, and the history lessons he imparts in his speeches are designed purely to obscure and ultimately banish that truth.  For though Bush and his ilk see themselves as angels of deliverance, but they are rather angels of death.
 
There is no need to listen to George Bush’s worthless and deceptive historical commentary, no need to any longer give him any benefit of doubt.  For Bush exists in a world of utter delusion, where our great country is at war in a self-conjured preposterous clash of civilizations against a relatively small group of religious zealots, where the real causes of conflict in this modern world – the careless, unconscious, and unsustainable usurpation of the scarce resources of others – registers not at all as an issue with him, where simplistic notions of liberty justify armed conflict, and where peace is believed to be delivered at the end of a weapon.
 
I am so tired of him.  And the central irony is that my own despair of him allows me only a mere taste of what his more helpless victims must be feeling.
 
I’m Leo Gold.  This is the New Capital Show.