Peace with "honor": Dick Cheney channels Dick Nixon [View All]

[scoopmeister]

http://www.attytood.com/2007/02/peace_with_honor_cheney_channe.html

Cheney:

"And I want you to know that the American people will not support a policy of retreat," he added. "We want to complete the mission, we want to get it done right, and we want to return with honor," said Cheney, who heads on Thursday for Australia to meet Prime Minister John Howard, another backer of Bush's Iraq policy.

If that reminds you of Nixon's "peace with honor" pledge from 1968, it should, and you should be very alarmed:

1) When Nixon gave that speech at the GOP convention, it had been 1,467 since the alleged incident in the Gulf of Tonkin that triggered the American escalation of the war. When he finally achieved his "peace with honor," it was another 1,633 days later, so more than half the fighting came after the "peace with honor" promise.

2) More importantly, from the start of 1969 through the end of the war, some 20,604 American soldiers died in pursuit of "peace with honor," more than one-third of the total (58,202) for the entire war.

3) In the end, "peace with honor" didn't look all that different than "peace" -- i.e., if Nixon had merely brought the troops home on Jan. 20, 1969. As we all know, Saigon still fell, in May of 1975.