Bush Ruminates on
Iraq and Vietnam.

Written by Ben Zipperer
to The New York Times,
November 18, 2006.

To the Editor:

Re David E. Sanger, Helene Cooper, “Bush Praises Vietnam's Rise” (news article, Nov 18, 2006):

Bush visited Vietnam and stated that “we’ll succeed [in Iraq], unless we quit” like the U.S. did thirty years ago—after killing about three million Vietnamese.

It would have been helpful had this article included a Vietnamese reaction to Bush's earnest reference.

Failing that, it would have been helpful to ask Americans how they might respond if Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Hawaii today and stated that Japan would have succeeded after Pearl Harbor, had they not quit before achieving victory.

—Ben Zipperer
—Washington, DC

EDITOR’S NOTE:
The article that Ben Zipperer refers to begins: “President Bush, visiting a country that forced the United States into a humiliating withdrawal three decades ago, declared Friday that Vietnam’s transition to a modern, growing economy gave him hope about what could be rebuilt from the ruins of Iraq. But he added that the lesson he drew from the bitter American experience here was that ‘we’ll succeed unless we quit.’”

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Putting America on Notice.

Written by Allen Hunter
to The New York Times,
May 17, 2007.

Letter to the Editor:

Your May 17th editorial [“Waiting for Thabo Mbeki”] calls on Mbeki to pressure Mugabe in South Africa’s neighbor Zimbabwe to “brake its headlong descent into tyranny, famine and...” etc. Right. He should do more.

Don’t you (we) then have the same responsibility to implore the United States’ neighbors and allies to do more to stop U.S. torture and “rendition,” abrogation of nuclear treaties and militarization of space, denial of global warming, killing of hundreds of thousands in Iraq, creating millions of exiles from Iraq, exporting its sexually repressive approach to AIDS, not caring for its own wounded soldiers, hiding their numbers by hiring mercenaries, rolling back black suffrage yet again, dissembling if not lying about all the above?

Alas, the list goes on.

—Allen Hunter
—New York City

EDITOR’S NOTE:
The term “rendition” refers to the U. S. government’s clandestine program of “extraordinary rendition,” which allows individuals suspected of terrorism to be secretly transferred from one country to another in order to have them interrogated in an environment that more friendly to the brutalization of captives.

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posted on a daily basis.