Originally Posted By: the G-man
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jafabian said:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, on Monday launched a withering election-year attack on President Bush's domestic agenda and again blasted him over his handling of Iraq.

"Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam," Kennedy declared in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a think tank.


The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby makes an excellent point about Kennedy's claim:

  • Edward Kennedy likes to label Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam," as he did last week when he introduced legislation to give Congress the final say on troop levels in Iraq.

    Bush played no role in the fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia to the Communists in 1975, of course. But Kennedy did. He helped lead the congressional drive to cut off financial aid to the pro-American governments in Saigon and Phnom Penh, brushing aside President Gerald Ford's warning that "the horror and the tragedy that we see on television" would only grow worse if America deserted its allies.

    But Kennedy and the Democrats spurned Ford, and the result was unspeakable agony--Cambodia's killing fields, Vietnam's re-education camps, waves of "boat people" hurling themselves into the sea. Having seen the results of US abandonment in Indochina, how can Kennedy advocate the same policy in Iraq?

    Ford, a decent man, couldn't imagine deliberately abandoning a friend in dire straits. Kennedy, it seems, isn't so inhibited.


So maybe Iraq is Kennedy's second Vietnam?


I was thinking that Ted Kennedy was a part of the Vietnam War since way further back than that. Back to when it officially began, with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kennedy

Kennedy was a sitting Senator since November 1962.


And of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution

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It was opposed in the Senate only by Senators Wayne Morse (D-OR) and Ernest Gruening (D-AK). Senator Gruening objected to "sending our American boys into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is steadily being escalated". (Tonkin Gulf debate 1964)


...only two Senators are listed as having opposed it. And neither is Kennedy.

Several Senators are listed as having vocally regretted their vote later. But Kennedy is not listed among them either.


So it seems a fair assesment that this was Ted Kennedy's second Vietnam.