Bush using Vietnam

On Wednesday, President Bush dove directly into a topic that his administration has been avoided since the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. While critics have likened the war to the Vietnam Conflict, The President made his case for continued reconstruction of Iraq by using the wars aftermath as a cautionary tale. Then, as now, Bush said, "people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end." He then listed the tragedies that followed the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia -- the Khmer Rouge slaughter in Cambodia, the harsh communist rule in Vietnam. "The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.' " Likewise, he argued, innocents will pay if a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq empowers Al Qaeda”.

Do you buy the analogy? Is protecting Iraqi civilians reason enough to ask American troops to continue to sacrifice? Do we owe them that?