Deja Dien Bien Phu all over again

Josh Marshall notes:
Ever wonder why it seems like we are enduring a repeat of the Nixon Administration? Now we know. From Bob Woodward's new book, via War and Piece:

A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush's Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
"Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter and I sit down with him." (Scooter is I. Lewis Libby, then Cheney's chief of staff.)

The president met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs...

OK, so we have to stay in Iraq not just because Bush can't admit that his attempt to retrieve the family honor (hah) in Iraq is a failure but because Kissinger is still trying to prove that he shouldn't have been a failure in Vietnam - the delusions of two f*****n lunatics. In the case of Vietnam, it is clear that our loss was mostly the world's gain. Vietnam's transition to a modern state hasn't been painless and isn't over, but they are the effective check to Chinese power in Indochina that a post colonial sock-puppet state never would have been. Unfortunately, 50,000 Americans and two million Vietnames died for our confusions there, more than half of them as a direct result of Kissinger's policies. Another couple of million died in Cambodia as a side effect.

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